[Skull & Bones] Naval Combat

[Captain Boff]

Okay so last night me and some friends who were planning to run a skull and bones campaign decided to get together and run some naval combats just to familiarize ourselves with the rules (we've used them before but always in extremely close range encounters).

So each person (5 of us) statted up a vessel. Me and my friend alex played the part of the spanish convoy he used a Galleon and I used a 3rd rate. My other friends had a flotilla of dutch privateers consisting of a sloop, brigantine, and a corvette. We started by using the sighting rules and due to bad rolls and etc. we only spotted each other at about 6 miles. there was a NE wind so me and my friend alex kept our bearing N simply so we'd actually be heading in the general direction of the enemy. The wind speed allowed us to travel at 5 knots so we were making about 5 feet per round. The dutch privateers came directly at us bearing SW and travelling at 45 ft. per round ... we just skipped most of the travel calculations because we were headign towards each other and we placed our vessels on our battlemat which is 46 inches long (or 4600 feet using the suggested scale) so we calculated speed each round measuring it in physical distance using a ruler and marked off our new positions using markers and chips. After a few rounds we found that this was just outright insane and was not working very well using 6 second rounds ... despite the problems we foresaw we decided to use 1-minute rounds and it worked very well we engaged each-others ships and the spanish decimated the dutch fleet.

I'm not really providing too mcuh information, but i'm just sort of asking if anyone could provide a step-by-step example of some skull & bones ship combat from the time of sighting till the end .. our experience was very clunky and lengthy - so i just think we must of been doing things wrong and would like to see how a skull and bones naval engagement is supposed to work ...

 

[Piratecat]

This could go in the d20 forum, but it's more about ship combat than anything else. Rel does a GREAT job with ship-to-ship combat; I'll ask him to swing by!

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Hmmm, somewhere there is a long write up that I did about Corsair! the stand alone ship combat system taken from S&B.

Here it is, it was in an e-mail. The write-up ignores many of the rounds that were only manuever, since you get about ten rounds of movement for every time a cannon can fire. Rolling your fire cuts down on this, since while any one cannon is not going to be firing it is possible that at least one or two guns bearing will have a chance.

I will modify it a bit to be easier to read, since a cut and paste from an e-mail looks like dung....

> Yeah, I also like Skull & Bones and have
> Corsair! - I won a free copy, which made me feel all warm
> and tingly inside...
>
> The last time I played in a sea battle it went...
> poorly for the other side, they managed to get
> themselves caught between an island and the
> wind, where to manuever they would have had to go
> against the wind. I proceeded to destroy their ships
> each in its turn, and they could not even run. (This is
> called 'being hung in irons' and spelled the end for
> more than one ship, or even fleet.) I approached
> line abreast ( | | | ),then changed to line astern
> ( - - - ) for battle, raking the ships while they were
> confined. (Raking means firing from the prow or
> the stern, so the ship cannot return a broadside.)
>
> It was not pretty. I was simply better at
> guaging the wind and how much room I needed to maneuver.
> Then again I used to play Wooden Ships & Iron Men a
> good deal, so I had a better grasp of what to
> expect, plus they were hampered by being a commitee. My
> ships were the Dauntless (Class 4), the Challenger
> (Frigate) and the Rake Hell (Brigantine). Of them only the
> Dauntless took any damage. (He managed to fire his
> sternchasers as we passed by to our final position.) They
> didn't bother to name their ships...
>
> It was a good deal of fun, but I should have
> suggested that we start over once their fleet was caught
> by the wind. (All I needed to do was stay put and
> hammer them.) They had been trying to use the island
> as a sheild against my fleet, but I cut wide then
> came round while he brought himself too close by.
> The island had a head, a big chunk that stuck out
> near the end of one side, he thought that he could use
> it to shield two sides of his ship, and since he
> seemed to know what he was doing the others followed
> him...
>
> I scorned the shielding of the island, went to
> three quarters sail while he maintained battle sails
> (1/4 sails). Then once I got into position I dropped
> anchor and maintained position, giving them three
> broadsides a turn... A ship of the line gets to roll a lot
> of dice for a broadside... They almost panicked
> when they saw what I was rolling.
>
> And the whole time I maintained persona as the
> captain of the Dauntless speaking to his officers and
> their replies - adding the fear of insanity to my opponent's
> burdens... 'Mr. Jones! Reduce sail and drop
> anchor!' - 'Aye and aye sir! ' 'Prepare broadsides
> starboard Mr. Anthers!' - 'Aye! (All right you sons of
> mothers! Run out the guns!)' 'Fire at will Mr. Anthers!'
> *Boom! Boo Boom! Boo Boo Boom!*
>
> The first time a friend and I tried out the
> rules we had one ship each... I got behind him, where
> his sternchasers could fire at me, then proceeded
> to yaw, alternating fire from my port and starboard
> batteries.

> It was closer, but he took a lot more damage
> than I did, which is why he wanted cover for the
> return engagement. But his ship survived, he raised
> sail and fled the battle, battered, bloody, but with his
> colors flying.
>
> If you want to introduce your players to the
> ship battles system then I would recommend having
> them play one of the fleets in a battle that they witness
> for the first encounter rather than dumping them
> and their ship into an immediate sink or swim battle. If
> they are pirates they may feel justified in pursuing
> the near crippled survivor of the engagement. (That
> was the original idea for both of the trial battles
> that I ran... instead they learned to avoid my fleets
> altogether...)

Maybe not a lot of help, I seem to remember it having more detail than it in fact has...

The Auld Grump

 

[Rel]

This could go in the d20 forum, but it's more about ship combat than anything else. Rel does a GREAT job with ship-to-ship combat; I'll ask him to swing by!

Remarkable timing.

Just today I have had some ideas rambling around in my head concerning this issue and what better place to vomit them forth than here in this thread. Sorry in advace for the hijack, Captain Boff.

First up, Skull & Bones was one of the only books I was considering picking up at GenCon last week and...it's out of print! BUT, they are doing another printing within the next couple months so it'll be available again. That said, the naval combat as described above sounds horribly tedious and not what I had in mind.

Historically I've needed some means of handling ship to ship battles for my Sky Galleons of Mars games that I've run as one-shots at the NC Game Days and GenCon the last couple years. The rules I developed for that are designed for use between a very small number of ships (maybe 4 at most) with a small number of guns on each (plus, they FLY!). It is also designed to be heavy on the fun and a bit light on the realism when it comes to things like weapon reload times and repairing your ship during battle. If those rules are something folks here would be interested in seeing then I'll happily repost them.

However, I find myself in a small bind. Because those rules were designed with d20 in mind (d20 Modern to be exact) and I'm getting ready to run a one-shot and then a campaign that are NOT d20 but instead Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Furthermore, the exact genre of game that I'm about to run is going to be a Pirates of the Caribbean game where I want ships with a dozen or so cannons blasting broadsides at each other back and forth across the battlemat until they crash together and characters start hacking away at each other with cutlasses like civilized people.

So, I've set about trying to cobble together a new set of rules that will address the two main issues of ship to ship battles (prior to boarding where it's all just fun melee stuff that we're used to) in a way that is fun, relatively easy and with just a hint of realism. Those two main issues are maneuvering and shooting.

I'm going to deal with the shooting part right now and talk about the maneuvering tomorrow, chiefly because I have only the vaguest of ideas as to how I intend to address the ship movement part. So anyway, two ships are squared off at each other and ready to start with the shooting...

(Mind you, this is all for Warhammer FRP, which is % based but I think the main ideas are applicable to d20 type games)

A standard sailing ship is going to have X amount of cannons on it. And in most cases half this number will be mounted on each side of the ship. And these guns are muzzle loaded with no rifling of any kind so they are not horribly accurate. So your best bet is to fire the lot of them at once and hope that some of them hit the other ship.

First up, the guy doing the shooting (or at least yelling the word "Fire!") is going to be best off if he knows what he's doing. In d20 I'd call this a Proficiency in Shipboard Weaponry (at least that's what I called it in d20 Modern). In Warhammer this is Specialist Weapon Group: Cannons. If the guy has that then he can fire at his full skill. If not then he's taking the standard penalty for lack of proficiency.

When it comes time to fire, I'm thinking that what I want to be critical is how many guns do you have and how many are you shooting. So the mechanic I'm proposing is that you fire your gun and for each additional gun fired, you're extending your effective range AND accuracy (because more cannon balls in the air means more chance that one of them hits). So if you're using a battlemat with 1" squares on it, and if each square is equal to 100 feet then you roll normally to hit at a range equal to the number of cannons you're firing. So if your ship has 12 guns on it and there are six on the port broadside then you can fire normally out to 600 feet.

Furthermore, I'm thinking that you get to add +1 or +5% (system dependant) to your chances of hitting for each ADDITIONAL cannon you fire. So if you fired six guns off your port broadside then your effective "short range" is 600 feet AND you fire at +5 or +25% to hit because you shot five extra guns in addition to the first. If you miss then you miss. But if you HIT...

That's when I'm thinking you roll a "fistfull of dice" (rolling a fistful of dice is fun!). We already know that your first shot hit. How many of the other five shots hit? In d20 my inclination would to be to roll an additional number of d20's and WITHOUT ADDING THE EXTRA CANNON BONUS, however many still hit is how many shots hit. I won't be using this thing with d20 so that's not terribly well thought out. What I'm going to do with Warhammer is to roll a d10 for each additional cannon and probably say that at short range, each 8+ is a hit. If I was going to map this exactly to the d20 method I just cited, it would be a fistfull of percentile rolls against your base Intelligence score, unmodified by the bonus for additional cannons fired.

So what this boils down to is that on a small ship, you're firing probably no more than one shot per turn because you want to fire the guns all together to maximize the effective range as well as your chance that at least one shot hit the target. On bigger ships with lots of guns, you might have 2 or 3 or more gunnery crews firing on the same turn. OR, those big ships might just blast away at very long range trying to knock your sloop out of the water before you can close in and board them.

After the cannonball hits, something happens called "damage". I have no idea how Skull & Bones handles this since I can't get the bloody book yet. As for me, I'm probably going to have some kind of very rudimentary Hit Location Chart (like the one already in WFRP for ship battles) that specifies whether the shot hit the Crew, Hull, Cargo, Rigging or whatever. But I simply MUST have some kind of critical chart. Taking away "Hull Points" is fine and all but what's really fun in ship to ship battles is stuff catching on fire, magazines blowing up and masts collapsing. Over the next several days I'm intending on putting together something in this vein if my strenuous attempts to find something stealable online fail.

I'll also post the idea that I come up with for the maneuvering of the ships. The only thing I know for sure about this idea is that it will include the words "Point of Sail"!

Thanks, Piratecat for showing me this thread. Apologies again to Captain Boff for hijacking your Skull & Bones discussion. If you want me to take it elsewhere then please just tell me. Finally, I intend to (pardon the pun) pull out the big guns and call in CarlZog on this discussion. Because that guy knows everything there is to know about about sailing and then some and has already been a HUGE help to me in getting some thoughts together on my Pirates game. Plus, I think he may own Skull & Bones and actually know what the hell he's talking about where that book is concerned.

 

[Hussar]

While I haven't used these particular rules, they sound close enough to the Broadsides!! rules for government work.

Yeah, tedious describes ship combat very well. Actually, mind-numbingly boring comes to mind as well. The scales simply don't work for d20 combat. 5 foot scale? For ships? Come on, most of the combat will be at around 300 feet or so. You need a heck of a sized table to do that on. Never mind that spotting can occur at miles away. Then you have the oh so joyous fun of running the game for the next 9 in game hours while the ships close on eachother.

Wake me up when it's over.

My thought for this is to completely toss all realism. Scrap it and go to a completely abstract system. I've been tossing this idea around in my head for a long time, but, I completely suck at coming up with rules. So, if someone who is good at doing that sort of thing likes this idea, I'll buy the book you put it in.

My idea is to convert ships to a single monster. Use the template format to convert ships into either Gargantuan or Collosal monsters. No ranged attacks, or, maybe very limited ones. Let them have melee attacks based on how much damage they can do, a bit of math for marines, that sort of thing. Give it hit points based on crew. That sort of thing.

Then, when ship to ship combat comes up, you plunk down the minis on the battle map and have at it. Start combat at 100 feet or so and let fly. Perhaps use some ideas from DDM for terrain effects and the like to simulate islands and reefs and the like.

So, instead of ship combat taking about 15 hours of game play, it takes 15 minutes.

That's my advice after trying to run a naval campaign for a year and a half.

 

[GMSkarka]

I wrote the ship rules for Skull & Bones --- I don't have the time to do a round-by-round right now, but just to point out one mistake:

If your ships were doing 5 knots, that should have been 50ft per round, not 5, as you wrote. If you look at the ship speeds, you'll see that we figured feet per round by multiplying knots by 10.

 

[Insight]

As I was reading this thread, I was wondering how long it would take for Gareth to show up.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I wrote the ship rules for Skull & Bones --- I don't have the time to do a round-by-round right now, but just to point out one mistake:

If your ships were doing 5 knots, that should have been 50ft per round, not 5, as you wrote. If you look at the ship speeds, you'll see that we figured feet per round by multiplying knots by 10.

Heh, I did not even notice that. We were using smaller scale ships (one of the players had bought the collectible ship game from Wiz Kidz), and were using a 10' per inch for movement. So I did not pay a lot of attention to the speed that the OP was describing.

I had fun with the ship combat, but then again, I was a miniatures gamer a long time before picking up OD&D.... (I started wargaming when my age could still be measured in single digits.) It is a more patient form of battle. Once you know what you are doing the turns can go by much faster.

That said - WotC's Storm Wrack has rules for 'Narrative' ship combat, which I did not like for the exact reasons that I do like Corsair.... it might be more your speed, though it is certainly not mine. (While I do not like them I will be the first to admit that it is my personal taste.)

A final option is to use the rules for large battles in Heroes of Battle, which focuses a great deal more on heroic actions than on extended mass combat. (I actually like the system in Heroes of Battle a great deal.) It would take some tweaking, but could be done.

The Auld Grump

 

[Sanackranib]

as I recall from reading skull and bones even a 3rd or 4th rate ship-o-the-line will blast a smaller vessel to kindeling and the damage of a 1st or 2nd rate is enough to make you want to curl up into a very small ball. and since cannon range is based at least loosely on cannon size those 18 and 32 pounders are gonna hurt you from a LONG LONG way off

 

[Hussar]

Heh, that was something I pretty quickly realized when doing naval warfare.

Ranges are huge! Even using catapults and ballistae, you're engaging the enemy at ranges you just don't see in DnD. I mean, who ever fights at 300 feet? It's a really different sort of combat.

I can see perhaps the attraction, but, it just takes so bloody long to resolve.