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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 3019181" data-attributes="member: 99">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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  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"! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />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.</blockquote>

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