D&D General What's your view on a pirate-driven campaign?

[Koloth]

One side's pirates are another side's privateers. If your heroes are working for a government entity, grant them a Letter of Marque and Reprisal to make their activities legal and define rules of engagement for the party. Of course, there is no guarantee that other governments will honer a Letter so your heroes will probably be considered pirates by other governments.

If your party is truly going full pirate, then everyone is their enemy. Other pirates may consider them friendly enemies. A pirate port might consider them neutral enemies. Everyone else will consider them kill on sight or flee for lives enemies.

 

[Voadam]

One thing I haven’t figured out how to do is make certain kinds of ship-to-ship combat engaging for everyone. If the pc’s ship is in a cannon fight with another ship, it’s going to have an unequal distribution of agency, since the captain (or whoever is deciding where the ship goes) is the only one making real decisions.

D&D is mostly not about canons though so boarding actions often can fit really well with normal D&D.

The big issue I would say is you often have casters with fireballs a few times as you close from a few individuals on perhaps both sides, while archers do their thing as well before you get the classic boarding action for the fun melee with cutlasses. The same issue of starting at big range in D&D.

But it is generally not the same as the classic captains maneuvering their ships to set up broadsides with rows of canons where it is mostly one person on each side spotlighted in the ship to ship combat. I say lean in on the diverse party going into melee boarding action.

You can even do some world building to encourage this with say common magic in shipbuilding preventing long range spells so that you have to close and board to do a lot of fighting.

 

[AlViking]

D&D is mostly not about canons though so boarding actions often can fit really well with normal D&D.

The big issue I would say is you often have casters with fireballs a few times as you close from a few individuals on perhaps both sides, while archers do their thing as well before you get the classic boarding action for the fun melee with cutlasses. The same issue of starting at big range in D&D.

But it is generally not the same as the classic captains maneuvering their ships to set up broadsides with rows of canons where it is mostly one person on each side spotlighted in the ship to ship combat. I say lean in on the diverse party going into melee boarding action.

You can even do some world building to encourage this with say common magic in shipbuilding preventing long range spells so that you have to close and board to do a lot of fighting.

There's a lot of things that were not invented or needed in the real world, like fireball resistant sails. In addition, the goal of a pirate is not to sink the enemy ship, it's to loot the enemy ship. A ship that sinks to the bottom of the sea is a goal in warfare not so much piracy, so boarding actions should be the norm. Another thing to consider is the taking of captives - they could be quite valuable for many reasons as explained in this article Pirate Hostage-Taking - Ransoms and the Art of Negotiation. Which also, of course, leads to another option for adventure, rescuing captives.

I would say that archers may not be all that effective, after all the ships are both moving and a ship is hardly a stable platform. On the other hand, spells like water walking or breathing (especially if combined with rings of swimming) could open up boarding techniques rarely if ever used in real life.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I began a new game with four players, and the main theme is : Pirates!
My goal in this campaign is to focus on rp, exploration and giving the players more agency than ever (a sandbox, if you will). I'm looking for ideas of sea-based adventures for my players; do you have any ? I'm also curious on what is your view of a campaign where the players are pirates. I already have in mind the inclusion of a few adventures (re-worked for the world of the campaign) of Ghosts of Saltmarsh in mind, but I search more.

(For more context : The campaign sets on the Nomad Lands, an archipelago. At the center of it, the religious captial of Toram extends it's dominion over the Nomad Lands, but not entirely. I suppose the main interest of the players will be the the lands outside the dominion, where tales & legends of the people come to life.)

I ran a years-long fork of my Ptolus campaign set in Green Ronin's Freeport, which also included Goodman Games' Tower of the Black Pearl, Atlas Games' Maiden Voyage (strong, strong recommendation for this one), the Freeport Trilogy, Goodman Games' Bloody Jack's Gold (skippable, unfortunately) and Vengeance in Freeport. I also strongly recommend the system-neutral Pirate's Guide to Freeport (set after the Freeport Trilogy, but easy to use despite that, and a much better setting than the earlier, often very silly Freeport: City of Adventure).

I also ran a mini-campaign for my dad, who decided his bard's background was pirate and wanted to lean into that, which sent us from the docks of Ptolus to the Isle of Dread (Goodman Games' OAR edition) to a bunch of haunted islands in between. (He and his companion robbing a treasure chest in undead-filled flooded tunnels and having to outrace pursuit, looking for air pockets along the way, is an all-time D&D highlight for me.)

And even if you don't play it, but just use 5E, it's worth picking up Pirate Borg, which is stuffed full of random generation tables that allow you to create a satisfying pirate adventure in less than three minutes. There's also a 5E conversion book (might be PDF-only) and naval combat rules from Limithron that I'd definitely pick up.

There's a ton of support for 5E piratical and nautical adventures, often from very good creators. Nowadays, I personally would just do it all in Pirate Borg, but that's a very particular flavor of pirate adventures (Evil Dead + Pirates of the Caribbean), and it's hard to go wrong with a pirate-based campaign, IMO, as long as everyone's on the same page, tonally. (I was in an abortive 5E pirate campaign that was extremely grim and mean-spirited and no one seemed to be having much fun.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I always found the problem was the ship. At low levels are the PCs the main people on the ship or are they just crew. If they are crew, then the players have less agency to sandbox. If one is the captain, then there is ship stuff to deal with which feels a bit like having animals in the party. In the way that some things that happen would get handwaved like a fireball destroying them/it.

They could be a strike force with a smaller ship or start the campaign with everyone just surviving a massive attack from the local guards.

Go with a sloop, which can be handled by a minimal crew and, in real life, was a very popular pirate ship because it was both fast and nimble, meaning one could harry much bigger ships and live to tell the tale. It also means the DM doesn't have to wrangle a dozen or more crew NPCs.

Another thought for the OP: Download a copy of Sid Meier's Pirates! from Steam or Good Old Games and try it out. You get a good sense of what Caribbean piracy was like, including how islands changing hands or the political alliances of distant nations changed things for the pirates, often with little warning. It also includes a surprising amount of non-ship-based stuff to do, which is good to break up all the ship-based stuff for the players.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Well all I know about a pirate-driven game is that it's "drivin' me nuts!"

 

[DeviousQuail]

For ship actions I think it's more fun for the players to do group rolls. Either additive against higher than normal DCs, average or median roll, or count successes. One way I saw it handled in another system was the player(s) can use their character abilities to aid a group roll only for their specific job on the ship. Otherwise they just rolled for the group check. It felt more like a team activity than most systems I've played with vehicle combat/exploration.

Specifically for D&D your ships need to have countermeasures. Elemental resistant wood, wands of mending, blink or ethereal shenanigans, traps against boarders, deployable fog clouds, and stuff like that.

Adventure ideas:
Defend against an invasion. Fight them at sea and then move toward defending on land. Whether it's against soldiers, pirates, or mythical beasties depends on you.

Make a sale/delivery in enemy territory. Honest ports aren't going to let pirates sell their goods openly. That doesn't mean there aren't buyers willing to deal. They probably pay better too.

Blockade runners. Probably better to hire pirates for the job.

Score of the century. Getting the info on the score, tracking them, planning on how you're going to steal it, actually stealing it, getting away, selling it, and dealing with the fallout. And not just stealing from other ships. Plundering something like The Vanishing Isle from Aladdin and the Forty Thieves sounds amazing, especially with the time crunch.

Pirate politics. Whether it's control of ports, pirate on pirate fighting, splitting the takings, romantic quarrels, or cockerel measuring contests. There's always something or someone causing a stir. Look to other media for inspiration.

Cursed objects. And not just something that a simple remove curse spell can undo. We're talking major badness like the coins from Pirates of the Caribbean, the corruption from Moana, or 99% of the stuff you encounter in Act 1 of the videogame DOS2.

Spirits, gods, and mythical beasts. Humanoids aren't the only ones running around. Especially in lands divided by vast stretches of water. Each island or region could be it's own little microcosm.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

"A true pirate is going to be evil". This one I am going to have to disagree with. Look at the history of piracy in the Caribbean and you see that many pirates ended up pirates because of politics. Take Captain Kidd. He set out on a legally financed and supported privateering mission. He was hunting pirates. When he refused to attack a ship that was not covered under his privateering letter, his crew got mad at him. Then he attacked the Quedagh Merchant, an Indian Ship captained by a Englishman, sailing under French sea passes. It was sailing under French colors and should have been a legit prize, but the owners had politic pull and suddenly Kidd found himself destined for the gallows as a pirate.

Yeah, reading modern histories of pirates (Under the Black Flag, Empire of Blue Water, The Republic of Pirates, etc.) really underscores how many pirates were either sailors who threw off truly brutal treatment from European navies, screwed over politically or economically, were freed slaves, etc.

The pendulum has almost swung too far -- they weren't all proto-workers' rights revolutionaries -- but the "pirates are villainous scum" is largely British imperial propaganda, for obvious reasons.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

One thing I haven’t figured out how to do is make certain kinds of ship-to-ship combat engaging for everyone. If the pc’s ship is in a cannon fight with another ship, it’s going to have an unequal distribution of agency, since the captain (or whoever is deciding where the ship goes) is the only one making real decisions.

Get the Limithron naval combat book. It uses a version of the ship combat system from Pirate Borg and it gives all the players something to do.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

One side's pirates are another side's privateers.

Privateers are the way to go, if only so there are safe harbors for the PCs to use. (Again, Sid Meier's Pirates! is instructive on this. I strongly recommend the OP plays it, even if he doesn't want to read a bunch of real life history books.)

That said, it'd be fun to let players figure this out the hard way and have to get back into a nation's good graces after discovering that having no place to run is a recipe for a short, miserable life. (Most famous Caribbean pirates' careers were very short: Blackbeard's legendary career was about two years long, discounting the period when he was a crewmember on a privateer.)