D&D General Ships & spellcasters

[bedir than]

Another idea would be a 2nd or 3rd level version of Control Weather (much smaller range, area off effect).
In a magical world of sailing and piracy the wizards would craft this as a way to help the ships they are on when not in combat too

 

[Sorinth]

For regular run of the mill merchants it's simply too expensive to hire wizards/sorcerers, after all those in need of money can make plenty without leaving their tower which is much safer. Though crafting and selling Wands of Fireball is perhaps one of those money making ways.

I haven't really used them but Saltmarsh had rules for ship combat that I assume kind of work ok. For example the Sails of a ship have 100 HP, and the ship loses speed every 25 damage. So Fireball is useful but far from an instant win, and siege weapons are likely firing well before they enter fireball range.

Another thing to consider is it's a fantasy world so a flame-resistant material could be used instead of cloth for sails, and ships like a longboat have both sails and oars, so it might make sense to stow the sails when getting close to another ship.

And of course stealth can work, it's a fantasy world so submarines can easily exist, or sahuagin pirates riding dragon turtles or sea serpents, or ships that emit a fog layer around the ship with only the crows nest sticking up above making it hard to target as it makes it's approach, illusions, etc...

 

[MarkB]

Once again, I feel as though we're trying to make sense of a game that doesn't really make sense when you apply the rules to a living, breathing setting. But in the interest of playing along, in the real world, the owners of merchant vessels in the 17th and 18th centuries tried to cut down costs as much as possible by crewing their ships with the minimum number possible, so how much would it cost to crew the ship with one level 5 Wizard? I'm guessing it would be prohibitively expensive to put them on anything but the ships carrying the most expensive cargo. So it probably wouldn't be much of a problem.

Probably significantly more than the 2 gp per day for a skilled hireling, plus 300 gp for each casting of fireball.

 

[Voadam]

I do like the idea of a sea god church blessing figureheads so the ship itself has magic resistance.

Older editions had things like the permanent Druidic ironwood spell.

 

[Theory of Games]

Or - and this is gonna be kinda controversial - you could just ban spellcasters

I would (and have) banned casters when I wanted a more "swashbuckling" adventure like The Three Musketeers or Treasure Island.

Mages and Clerics can sit in the corner.

 

[Reynard]

In the immortal words of The Monster, "Fire bad!" The whole point of being a pirate is to board another ship and take their booty, sometimes even the whole ship, and it's hard to do that when everything is on fire. A lot of us land lubbers do not truly appreciate just how dangerous a shipboard fire is in the modern age let alone the age of wooden ships. Fire would only be used if your purpose was to destroy the enemy entirely rather than for plunder.

This is a good point. pirates would probably not employ fireball often, but anti-pirates would.

 

[Voadam]

In my Freeport D&D pirate game for the city history I had a group of casters known as the Cerulean Circle who specialized in being sea witch ship mages who gave an edge to Freeport ships (pirate, privateer, and mercantile), either enhancing them or accompanying them, and were a factor in making Freeport a naval power in the setting. It was vague what benefits and spellcasting traditions they were exactly, but they were a known thing and took the place of the Sea God temple as faction in ruling Freeport in my game. This group increased in numbers when the continental theocratic empire had an inquisition against arcane casters and a number fled to independent Freeport. The imperial navy could sometimes count on clerical magical support, but Freeport had more specialized nautical magic traditions. This was in 3e, but in 5e even just having a counterspell caster on board your ship is pretty good for stopping fireballs and therefore encouraging boarding actions.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I do like the idea of a sea god church blessing figureheads so the ship itself has magic resistance.

Older editions had things like the permanent Druidic ironwood spell.

You might go look at TSR Spelljammer for a variety of magic items (including a plethora of figureheads) that could be applicable to plain old wet-navy ships. The setting is, first and foremost, nautical adventures in space, and while the quirky physics involved will make many things useless (for ex, your average sailing ship isn't worried about running out of breathable air) there's still things that could be mined and adapted to whatever game you're playing.

There's also a selection of nautically-themed system-agnostic magic items and oddities on my blog over here. None of them will directly help you avoid getting your sails fireballed, but they might find other uses. Brine-apples could be particularly useful for a non-magical way to get around many of the more realistic issues with provisioning ships so you can focus on the adventuring stuff over accounting.

 

[CreamCloud0]

if spell focii weren't so omnipresent i would say that stocking and preserving enough material components on a voyage for a caster to be constantly prepared is both difficult, annoying and expensive,

 

[R_J_K75]

With the constant motion of the ship on the open sea, I'd at the very least make it more difficult to cast any spells with somatic components. The AD&D 2E book "Of Ships and the Sea" had a NWP called Sea Legs or something thereof, Spelljammer had similar rules for space. I'd impose penalties to someone who doesn't have the Sailor background. Even in a nautical seafaring campaign I;d think it would be unrealistic for everyone aboard a ship to be a career sailor. Not to mention it'd be hard to cast a spell when youre seasick.