roguerouge
First Post
What should happen if the crew wins an advantage roll but the captain loses one?
Artoomis said:I'd say keep it simple. In real life, the tall ships were often manned by rif-raff, quite literally dragged off the street.
It truly was the captian who made everything work. It was the captain who required the sail and gunnery drills until the crew was proficient. It was the captain who drove morale, too, limited by some external factors like number of days at sea and things like that.
Laman Stahros said:Sorry Veril, that is just too many rolls. Some ships from Stormwrack have over a hundred crewmen. Would you want to roll all of those dice?
green slime said:Perhaps. But not all of the crew members were riff-raff, freshly press ganged into service, or your looking at disaster, no matter how good the captain is.
roguerouge said:Anyone got any fixes for this system? I like it's simplicity, but I want to revive the importance of the crew.
Artoomis said:That's true, but it depends upon the time frame. Key leadershop was not press-ganged, but, at times, virtually all the crew might be. Times like that were the biggest tests of leadership.
For rank and file crew there were virtually no volunteers, at least not for a long time for ships of the line.
Kraydak said:And yet the navies with experienced crews (say, the British) routinely beat navies without experienced crews (say, the French or Spanish). The fact that the navy payed far less than the merchant marine while requiring more arduous service and so couldn't find volunteers for their crews didn't mean that the navy wasn't crewed by experienced professionals. I'd be tempted to allow (1) officer, and the averaged crew a DC X-5ish check each to give the captain a reroll on a DC X check. That allows a heroic captain the ability to perform with a subpar crew (important for a game like DnD), but a competant officer corps/crew will greatly boost the odds for DCs within their skill range. An incompetant captain will still be able to let a good crew down too, since the actual skill checks are still made by the captai.