NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 7786815" data-attributes="member: 6777737">Last time I did a ship-heavy campaign, I assumed that any ship intending to attack another (so pirate, privateer, or warship) would have a moderate contingent of marine soldiers. Other ships would have a small contingent. The standard method of attacking that everyone would expect would be grappling, where the attacking ship would maneuver to get close enough to throw lines with grappling hooks on them to pull the ships along side each other, at which point the attackers would invade and try to kill everyone on board. Really dedicated attack ships might employ ogres with grappling chains. The primary defense, then, is speed. You can't attack what you can't catch.Once two ships are grappled, there's a lot of danger. Anyone falling between the two ships is liable to get crushed. The ships themselves might rip each other apart if the seas are rough enough. There's essentially no control at all, too, as the sails become tangled and neither rudder is going to be strong enough to control both ships. Because of that, once grappling has begun and the crew has failed to cut the lines, basically everyone stops sailing and starts fighting.Other methods of attack would be fire arrows (for the sails), magic if a spellcaster were on board, and the odd catapult (loaded with solid shot or chain to rip up the rigging or alchemists fire) or a ballista (to pierce the hull) on dedicated warships. Warships designed for ramming would also exist, powered by galley slaves and equipped with large rams intended to break apart other ships.I ran a combat of five small, fast attacking pirate ships against two "lightly" defended large merchant vessels (I say "lightly" because the PCs were the defenses of one ship). I had two ships attack each merchant, with the last ship taking damage from the PCs before it could engage. The second ship had no PCs on it, so all I did was decide how many of each type of sailor there were (something like 18 marines vs 4 mercs and 25 odd crew) and rolled one attack for each each round spread out as evenly as possible (3 attacks against the mercs, the rest against the crew). Each "hit" took off one hit die, so if the marines were in breastplate with 3 HD then 3 hits would kill a marine. The mercs were 5 HD in chain mail, and the crew were 1 HD with no armor. (Yes, the marines were intended to win on the second ship.) It was close enough to real combat even if we skipped the benefits of higher ability scores.On board the PC's ship, I ran combat standard if any of the PCs were involved, but I used the accelerated combat with the 1 HD crew and just took 1/3 hp when the marines were hit by the crew. It went fast enough for me, but I have a lot of d20s.</blockquote>

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