Hussar
Legend
Just to go back to the point I was (badly) trying to make. By keeping your ships and whatnot smaller, it makes running the game a thousand times easier than trying to juggle the massive numbers when you get into really big ships. The grunt work of tracking cargo, food, water, that sort of thing, all the book keeping, gets a lot easier when you're only dealing with ships with a crew of 10-15 that carry 20-50 tons of cargo. Combat is simpler, you have far less head ache of trying to keep track of a cast of dozens or hundreds of NPC's, so on and so forth.
What I've come to realize, and this is purely based on my own personal experience trying to run naval campaigns in D&D, is that something that looks like this:
is all you actually need. Sure, those massive three masted (or more) galleons with hundreds of crew and whatnot are so COOL. I get that. I honestly REALLY get that because I'd LOVE to be able to do it. As I said earlier, this is my white whale of DMing. My advice is based on hundreds of hours of failure. Every single naval based campaign I've tried has failed. Thirty years of failure.
And, again, totally just my personal opinion here, the primary reason it failed is size. It's just too freaking big to run a campaign and try to juggle these great big ships. The scale just doesn't work in D&D worth a crap. Think of it this way. Would you want to run a campaign where the PC's are running (as in they need to deal with the day to day stuff) a mid sized town? You as the DM need to be able to detail out dozens of NPC's, track all the things needed for a mid sized town and THEN you need to figure out the same thing for every other mid sized town that the PC's are going to be in conflict with. The scope and scale is too much for me. I admit my defeat.
Keep it much smaller. Stick to cogs and longships and your naval campaign will be far more successful. At least, that has very much been my experience.
What I've come to realize, and this is purely based on my own personal experience trying to run naval campaigns in D&D, is that something that looks like this:
is all you actually need. Sure, those massive three masted (or more) galleons with hundreds of crew and whatnot are so COOL. I get that. I honestly REALLY get that because I'd LOVE to be able to do it. As I said earlier, this is my white whale of DMing. My advice is based on hundreds of hours of failure. Every single naval based campaign I've tried has failed. Thirty years of failure.
And, again, totally just my personal opinion here, the primary reason it failed is size. It's just too freaking big to run a campaign and try to juggle these great big ships. The scale just doesn't work in D&D worth a crap. Think of it this way. Would you want to run a campaign where the PC's are running (as in they need to deal with the day to day stuff) a mid sized town? You as the DM need to be able to detail out dozens of NPC's, track all the things needed for a mid sized town and THEN you need to figure out the same thing for every other mid sized town that the PC's are going to be in conflict with. The scope and scale is too much for me. I admit my defeat.
Keep it much smaller. Stick to cogs and longships and your naval campaign will be far more successful. At least, that has very much been my experience.
