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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5810292" data-attributes="member: 4937">I was in a fairly long naval campaign.   I remember all the following questions coming up:1) What sort of trees can be used to build a ship?2) How long does it take to build a ship, and how expensive is it?3) How do ships from different naval eras compare?4) How long can a ship stay at sea?  5) How long before they need to be replaced? 6) How far can a ship travel in a day?7) What happens when a ship suffers a 'critical hit', like a large hole below the water line, the rudder being splintered, or the main mast falls down?8) How far does a ship go off course under different conditions of travel, or different skills of navigator?9) How long does it take a ship to sink?10) How long does it take to repair a ship?11) What sort of spells exist to defend against ship wrecking problems like magical fire?  (We personally found it necessary to assume low level rituals were available for making wood and cloth relatively and permenently fireproof, otherwise, romantic ship combat based on sailing vessels just didn't really make sense.)12) How do ship scale weapons interact with individual creatures?  This is  important, because you want to be careful that the broadside of a 'ship of the line' whether it be of cannons or mangonels not be something easily trained on a single NPC or medium sized monster.  Warships are powerful items to put in the hands of PC's, but they shouldn't be too powerful.  First edition had relatively little tools for grappling with this issue, and it was one of the several problems that led me to modify and then abandon the system.  Third edition has some obvious tools to pull on.  I'm not sure about 4th.I think abstracting the manuever phases of ship combat is fine, because otherwise you've got to get out protractors, rulers, compasses, and so forth and do some occasional math.  'Hot Pursuit' style abstract chase or combat rules that lend themselves to narration seem ideal for most gaming scenarios.  I personally think that you need to approximate 'armor as damage resistance' for sailing vessels regardless of system, as one of the most key elements of pre-guided missile/torpedo naval combat is that larger vessels are relatively immune to the weapons carried by vessels of a smaller class.</blockquote>

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