[Skull & Bones] Naval Combat

[Pbartender]

Embarassingly enough, one of the major sources of pirate lore has been the computer game, Sid Meier's Pirates!. However, now that I'm looking a bit closer, I'm seeing that some of the discrepencies between your info and mine is that I was misreading some of the material in the book. Oops.

Oddly enough, within the basic three-ship categories Sid gets them mostly right. Take a look at the models used for the different types of ships, and that's pretty close to what they'd really look like.

Sea Dogs was another good computer game for pirate lore... It was like an earlier, more complicated, more detailed version of Pirates!

I have a great respect for Sid Meier... I got to meet him at his church once... Hadn't realized it was him at the time... He asked me to join the choir.

 

[CarlZog]

I've posted this before, but I'll say it again.

Naval combat should NOT be tedious. Too many GMs gloss over ship-to-ship battles because they're not sure how to handle the mechanics and keep the players involved at the same time. So they just describe the ships approaching and firing broadsides, then skip to the boarding and revert to the usual man-to-man combat. That's missing out on half the reason to be at sea.

Or they get caught up in extended miniatures maneuvering, and their RPG becomes a two-player wargame between the DM and whatever player is handling the maneuvering of the ship while the rest of the group takes a nap.

I'm a big fan of miniatures wargaming and I've done a lot of age of sail wargaming, but I also recognize that when it comes to running an rpg, that's not always the best approach. So if you're willing to surrender some of the tactical detail, here's my thoughts on running RPG ship-to-ship combat.

-- Ditch the minis. Keep rough track of the relative locations of the ships in your head, but DO keep track of it.

Describe the approach of the other ship, and encourage your PC's -- particularly whoever the Capt or leader is -- to telll you what she wants to do. "I want to see if we can get up behind him." "I want to chase him down and ram him." "I want to try to lure him on that reef." We'll get to how you resolve these actions in a minute, but as the maneuvers unfold, just try to keep a rough idea of the relative positions of the ships in your head and describe it to the players. DON'T break out minis and start metagaming this by having players moving ships X number of hexes, etc. Keep everybody's imagination at deck level and in character.

-- Organize the rest of the crew and the ship's actions.

This is critical. A ship's crew should be broken down by its functions and
each group should be treated as an NPC with set skills, hit points etc.: the gunnery crew, the sailing crew, the damage control team, etc. So, when you fire a starbd broadsides, it's the starbd gun crew whose attack bonus, mods, etc is rolled. Let the players roll all this stuff too. As a functioning crew group loses "hit points", their ability to do their job should decline. Think of the "hit points" as being the individual crewmen in that group. The ship itself is just a vehicle and should be treated as such, but should be broken down into hull and rigging to reflect damage to speed and damage to guns and flotation.

- Emphasize the PC's skills and their role in directing the rest of the ship.

Part of what makes this kind of combat boring is that ship becomes the character and the PCs are shunted to the sidelines to wait for the end of the wargame. This is not necessary. Keep the focus on the action at deck level. If the Capt. wants to try to maneuver closer, the PCs with the sailing skills should be working with the rest of the crew to trim sails. You can treat a lot of this as series of crew skill checks with PC's using aid another or leadership. Again, don't get hung on the letter of the law. The goal here is that cinematic sense of Captain Jack shouting orders to the crew. If you're firing cannons, you're also leading the gun crew.

Keep the players involved in the action from the initial sighting of an enemy all the way through the clash of spars and grappling hooks. Then the PC's can be engaged in battling the pivotal NPCs or the other crew mooks. But even then, you should be keeping track of the clash of the crew "groups" battling it out with each other, describe that aspect of the chaos to the players and give them a chance to influence that tide of battle. Whether you do a series of attack rolls, or just an occasional secret "tide of battle" roll modified by the crews' attributes is up to you, but keep the crews involved and give the players a chance to do heroic stuff while also leading the crew.

 

[CarlZog]

If you decide you do want to pursue a little more tactical naval combat and break out the minis, you can fall anywhere on the scale of simple to complex.

Just to get it out of the way, I'll say that if you want real full-fledged rules for naval combat with a small number of ships per side, I recommend "Heart of Oak" from FGU for it sailing rules. I also really like the gunnery rules in "Beat to Quarters" by Command Perspectives. Heart of Oak is still available as a pdf, but Beat to Quarters has been out of print for a long time.

As an overall RPG I like Skull and Bones a lot, but I don't really like its ship maneuvering rules. Skull and Bones ship speed characteristic represented an outer limit rather than a measurement of efficiency at using the existing wind. Despite adding modifers for a number of other factors, I've alwasy felt that this mechanic fails to really acknowledge the performance distinctions among vessels which is at the heart of tactically entertaining combat.

Also, as the original poster discovered, a six-second round just isn't long enough for anything meaningful to happen. I agree with converting to one-minute rounds. Beyond that, S&B covers the basics OK.

Living Imagination's Broadsides! book offers up more detailed maneuvering and combat rules that I like, but they are definitely more complex and slower moving. Very wargamey.

Rel's proposed maneuvering rules are particularly abstract, and I'd proabably at least add a third category of speed. But at first glance, I think it covers the bases well enough to provide some tactical interest to the rpg.


Carl

 

[CarlZog]

Oddly enough, within the basic three-ship categories Sid gets them mostly right. Take a look at the models used for the different types of ships, and that's pretty close to what they'd really look like.

Sea Dogs was another good computer game for pirate lore... It was like an earlier, more complicated, more detailed version of Pirates!

Sea Dogs was produced by the Russian developer Akella, who also did "Age of Sail II: Privateer's Bounty" , a 3-d, real-time sailing ship battle game. The AI was sketchy, but it's a very good looking game and had great multiplayer -- although online interest has declined in the last couple years.

 

[GMSkarka]

Just FYI -- sometime before Christmas, we'll be releasing a follow-up product to Corsair: The Definitive D20 Guide to Ships (which is our stand-alone version of the Skull & Bones naval rules, plus extra material from our support zine, Buccaneers & Bokor).

The follow-up current has no title (I'm still trying to come up with one I like!), but one of the main things that it will feature is a more narrative, less wargame-y version of the rules, so that folks can use whatever version they prefer.

 

[Captain Boff]

cool GMSkara I'll definately check that out .. I like the waregameyness, but i just sort of need a way to accelerate it. I think i'm going to put my pirates campaign on hold for a bit and run something in medieval europe.

 

[Rel]

Rel's proposed maneuvering rules are particularly abstract, and I'd proabably at least add a third category of speed. But at first glance, I think it covers the bases well enough to provide some tactical interest to the rpg.


Carl

Thanks for the various words of wisdom, Carl. Chalk me up as owing you another beer (I'm up to about a keg now I think ).

Tonight as our GM and another player were out of town, myself an the other two players sat down and playtested the rules I cobbled together above. I have to say that my expectations were low and I was all set to drop back to a more abstract and "hand wavy" method of ship to ship combat. But as it turned out, it went really, really well!

It turned out to be really neat as to how the fairly small number of variables (ship speed, wind speed, turning capability, sail configuration) combined with a few skill rolls to make for a very dynamic combat that somehow managed to feel a bit realistic at the same time. I was particularly happy with how quickly the players grasped the Point of Sail concept and how having to make a Sailing check to turn upwind and tack made wind direction an important aspect of the battle. The Weather Guage really does make a difference in these rules!

We tweaked the rules for cannon fire and dropped the idea of # of cannon equalling the range. What we did instead is to set a standard range of 6" and any shots fired beyond that range require a "scatter die" roll that still has a 2 in 6 chance of hitting the target but otherwise goes off in a random direction by a few inches. This makes firing long shots into groups of ships still let you have a good chance of hitting SOMETHING. It also means that if you fire a long way near your friends you might hit a friendly ship!

The damage mechanic worked nearly flawlessly. I need to cobble together a little set of sheets to keep track of Crew and Hull damage but that should be pretty easy. I also need to tweak my critical chart a bit and I think I may expand it to add some additional results. But the core means of attack and damage resolution worked in a way that I was most pleased with and the devastating effect of a large broadside being fired at your ship was clearly seen. I need to add Bar/Chain Shot and Grape to the available arsenal but I can already see how it would be easy to do so with no need to change the rules at all.

It was also noted that attacking a ship with a very large crew with a ship with a very small crew was probably ill advised because they had many more casualties to take to their crew as well as having more people to spare for repairing damage and putting out any fires.

Carl, I take your point about possibly adding another speed category. The thing that helped to broaden the range of speeds was that ships sailing close hauled were slowed down by that as well as an occasional shot into the sails and rigging, contrasted with the ships sailing at a Favorable Point of Sail AND whose Captains made skill checks to get the most efficient setting of the sails to gain an extra point of speed.

What made me keep smiling was all the other little customizations and tweaks that could be added to this basic setup. You've got cotton sails on your sloop? Well that's good for another point of speed! You've got bronze cannons on your frigate? Well they fire 8" instead of 6! You haven't careened your brigantine in months? Welcome to Wide turn status! (or maybe a slower speed, I dunno).

One thing that I for sure decided however was that as cool as I can see this ruleset being for campaign play, I'm not going to attempt to use it for the one-shot game I'm planning in the near future. It's just a bit too daunting to try and teach it to folks for one encounter of an adventure, particularly since few of them will have even played Warhammer FRP before. But that gives me more time to tweak it before I get around to running the campaign so it works for me.

If folks would like then I'll keep posting updates to the rules here but many of you may not care because this is designed to be Warhammer compatible rather than d20.

 

[CarlZog]

Just FYI -- sometime before Christmas, we'll be releasing a follow-up product to Corsair: The Definitive D20 Guide to Ships (which is our stand-alone version of the Skull & Bones naval rules, plus extra material from our support zine, Buccaneers & Bokor).

The follow-up current has no title (I'm still trying to come up with one I like!), but one of the main things that it will feature is a more narrative, less wargame-y version of the rules, so that folks can use whatever version they prefer.

Do I recall correctly that you were also looking at an add-on that would cover medieval ship designs? Or is that part of what you're talking about?

Carl

 

[Henry]

If folks would like then I'll keep posting updates to the rules here but many of you may not care because this is designed to be Warhammer compatible rather than d20.

Count me as interested, because I'm planning a Piratey game at some point in the future, and these rules would be really useful to me. (I especially like the tweak to the cannon rules you all came up with.)

 

[GMSkarka]

Do I recall correctly that you were also looking at an add-on that would cover medieval ship designs? Or is that part of what you're talking about?

Carl

Indeed it is.