Ship to ship combat

[RangerWickett]

Who here has played in games where ship combat, or any sort of vehicle combat, played a major role?

I've been enjoying a Rogue Trader game (space capitalism in the grimdark future) for the past year, and it has huge ships where each PC can take one action every 30 minutes to do stuff like rally the crew to load the weapons faster, or jam enemy communications, or lead a swarm of shuttles in a boarding action to sabotage the other ship's components.

I've only recently started having ship-to-ship encounters in my D&D games, and they play very differently because the players want to fight the enemy crew using D&D tactical rules, not sink the enemy ship with special ship combat rules. For ZEITGEIST I'm working on mechanics to cover both ends of the spectrum, but I'm curious what experiences other folks have had.

 

[adwyn]

Vehicle combats tend to be hard regardless of genre because the vehicle usually acts as a single NPC under the control of a single player.

Rogue Trader and FASA's old Star Treck are good examples of breaking the phenomenon, so look to see what you can do to give each player a meaningful job. A meaningful job doesn't mean just rolling for your weapon when your turn comes up, there needs to be some sort of decision making involved.

One way to do that is to treat each vessel as multiple targets; Crew, forward hull, mid hull, aft hull, masts, that sort of thing so any players who are manning ship board weapons can choose where they are targetting.

Likewise someone can command their own ship's response team to put out fires and repair holes. By having to allocate resources differently each turn to prevent further damage and maybe even repair some it becomes a traditional healer role.

 

[jedavis]

We had two instances of space combat in my Mongoose Traveller game last semester. In the first, the PCs were horribly outgunned; they had a far trader with one beam laser and 1g acceleration, and were being chased by a corsair with a plurality of pulse lasers and 3g acceleration... they managed to jump out of system right as it was closing, escaping with a scorched hull and a fused turret.

In the second, the PCs were trying to hijack a ship for its cargo. They tried some shenanigans in port, but failed, and ended up going after it in deep, uninhabited space. It turned out the merchant vessel was mounting equivalent armament to theirs in a pop-up turret, but they sabotaged the engines (they had an insider), got out of the firing arc of the turret, and subsequently plinked away at it until the crew jumped ship (they left a present in self-destructing form, though... fortunately, the PCs' explosives specialist disarmed it after they boarded but before it went off).

In both cases, we had a pretty good division of roles. There was a ton of skill overlap, but also more things to do than the party had people, so there was actually an interesting resource allocation problem. Against the corsair, the scout was piloting, the agent was astrogating furiously, the medic / engineer / merchant was engineering for extra speed, and I think the psion may have been manning the guns, actually... In the second case, the engineer was routing power and taping systems back together, the scout was flying, the agent was gunning I believe, and the psion's replacement (slain by automatic grenade launcher) was running sensors to boost the gunner's rolls (or occasionally penalize them...). Combat turns were actually very quick; it was pretty nice.

 

[Aeolius]

Not an RPG, but I still miss:

 

[Celebrim]

I played in a 1e AD&D campaign heavily influenced by the great age of sail, using modified rules from Dragon Magazine (after we'd discovered the original rules had never really been play tested and needed work). Eventually mass naval combat became something of a sub-game of the campaign.

 

[Steel_Wind]

I've played in several of them. My preference, by far, was Star Wars:Saga Edition.

The ship is the combatant. The ship's weapons and functions are controlled by the characters. The ship has the hit points, movement speed, weapon attack values, etc.. The characters modify the ships systems with their own skills (or lack of same). This works very well and "feels" right. It also gives each PC something to do during the combat so it does not all devolve into just one PC doing something. They PCs are ALL making rolls each round.

From a RPG perspective -- SW:Saga Edition is the best "base model" to use to add modifications to, imo. As 4E used SW:SE as its own base, you will find a lot of the assumptions between the systems will work for you. They will work well for Pathfinder, too.

Now, going a little deeper into your line of thinking, if I may be so bold - you appear to be thinking along the lines of rules for naval warfare in the Age of Sail -- or at least -- Sail and Sandals (slaves at some oars, too).

If you are inclined to have ranged combat between vessels via spells, cannon or large weapons, inevitably, facing is going to come into your consideration in terms of how fast the ship can move, turn and so forth.

You will wonder whether hexes make more sense than squares and if that will make it too "wargamey".

Hexes are not superior for simulating Sail and Sandals/Age of Sail. They are, in fact, inferior and more limiting than squares.

Steal a page from an innovative design which appears in an old SPI magazine game. It is called Fighting Sail.

Fighting Sail used squares, not hexes, in a SPI wargame! This was nearly heretical at the time, until Joe Balkoski seized upon the idea that the square, if you use the diagonal points in the corners to represent a separate / facing direction, gives you eight points to work with, not four. Eight is MUCH better than the six directions that hexes provide as it then allows you to match the 8 primary points of the compass (NSEW + NE, SE, SW, NW) using a square grid. This little touch adds greatly to the "naval" feel of the game.

For minis, please remember that there are a BOAT LOAD of simple ship minis from the Pirates of the Spanish Main constructible strategy game that can be picked up for a ridiculously small amount of money. A few dollars of this on eBay and any gamer will have more ship minis then they can EVER use. Touch up the edges of the white plastic card by quickly running a brown or black Sharpie along each edge and they look much better than the shots below. I've tried this "Sharpie trick" I borrowed from papercraft modeling and it is FRIKKIN AWESOME.

End Result: (1) Assume PotSM minis; (2) 8 points of the compass for movement directions on a square grid battlemat; (3) PCs to modify ship's abilities when fighting the ship-as-a-ship and you are GOLDEN.

When the matter progresses to the point where ships are alongside and its time for a boarding action -- you revert back to the default combat rules of the game (or you switch to a mass combat system if there are a LOT of combatants). Either way -- that should not prove any sort of a problem for you.

 

[Ahzad]

I have played in a lot of Spelljammer ship to ship combats. We always had a blast playing those combats.

 

[jonesy]

You will wonder whether hexes make more sense than squares and if that will make it too "wargamey".

I say bah! to both hexes and squares. I loved GW's Man O' War, and it didn't need no lines anywhere. And it still had facing, distances, wind direction, currents, and everything else you needed without being bogged down by the rules.

Too bad the game got cancelled. It was really turning into something special. Now what remains is just a promising game with horrendously unbalanced fleets. And the full rules are scattered across old issues of White Dwarf.

 

[Celebrim]

I say bah! to both hexes and squares.

This. Positioning in Naval warfare is simply too important to leave to a grid. There are subtle differences between how ship rigged and fore-and-aft rigged ships perform relative to the direction of the wind that you just can't capture on a grid. The eight points of the compass are likewise meaningless. What you really care about is whether you can go 8 degrees closer to the wind, and whether you get a speed bonus for a beam reach or for running free.

Come to think of it, I'm not nearly familiar enough with rules for ship to ship sailing combat myself. My knowledge based on writing and rewriting rules based on experiencing the failures of other systems.

So, does anyone know a system where?

1) There is no grid.
2) Armor provides damage resistance; the weight of shot is compared against the thickness of the ship's armor.

 

[RangerWickett]

I'm sure it's possible to make a game sufficiently complex to represent the actualities of naval combat, but I personally would just want something that captures the feel of maneuvering without requiring, y'know, hours of work to get two ships close enough to trade fire.

Using Star Wars Saga as an inspiration, what sorts of things can crew do on a sailing ship? Trim sails, navigate, watch your opponents' actions, yell at the crew, shoot cannons? How would you handle stuff like shooting arrows, casting spells, etc.?