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

[Zardnaar]

Cannons definitely have their place and are just as medieval as full plate and rapiers, crows' nests, abundant currency, standing armies, and stable nation state monarchies and republics.

I've never seen one true medieval town in all of my time playing the game.

In my own campaign it's canonical that chemistry works nothing like the real world, and that there really are four elements - earth, fire, air, and water. This let's me get around any players metagame chemistry. It's canonical in the history of the world that goblins have invented and tried to deploy guns on multiple occasions, only to have it eventually spectacularly backfire because a single low level magic spell (or simply dropped bag) can trigger a chain reaction in every musketeer's powder case, killing the entire army. By canon, the most powerful explosive known to alchemical science has the brisance of black powder and the stability of raw warm nitroglycerin. Fireworks and explosives are known, but they generally have to be prepared and used the same day. Storing large quantities of explosives just isn't feasible in the homebrew world by design.

(I may have gotten the inspiration here from the Amber series, where the fact that explosives don't work in every universe is a major plot point.)

It's not the firearms that bother me. It's the player that wants to solve all problems by just blowing things up. I have bad enough problems with there is always some PC that wants to burn down the dungeon rather than explore it. The problem gets worse if they can haul gunpowder around. And it's not even really the balance issue to that (hint, it doesn't really work). It's the fact that it's just really unfun.

But cannons themselves are fun, and my only problem with muskets is that they make 1st and 2nd level really hard to survive and they imply the existence of say caplocks, breach loaders, rifled miniballs, elephant guns, punt guns, revolvers, lever action rifles and other merely mechanical things which would be easy to invent in the setting - dwarves would figure these things out in the life time of a single dwarf at most if they had a functional black powder. If muskets are allowed, very little stops you from M-16's and that creates massive anti-heroic balance issues.

Pirate ship cannons are beyond the scope of typical D&D games.
Its the rate of fire as well. Vaguely historical way to slow. To abstract and no point using bows or whatever.

And pirates didnt generally want to full broadside a ship anyway which is a very PC mentality. Espicially if the waters shallow enough for water breathing spells.

Firing 50 cannons plus crews a pain. 1-5 cannons doesn't really capture the feels. Grapeshot in D&D terms is usually to efficient.

 

[Lanefan]

And, of course, this brings up another point. Age of Piracy era is pretty anachronistic for D&D. We're talking several centuries ahead of what D&D is typically pegged at. If you keep to Medieval (say 1400 (ish) (yes, yes, I KNOW that's not right, but, it's a decent rough number, sit down in the back) level technology, then the ships are a LOT smaller and easier to work with in the game. Crews of 5-10 aren't unreasonable at all for most of these ships, which means you can have the PC's plus a nice, manageable number of NPC's on the ship. I would recommend keeping things lower technology, especially since you're not likely to be using cannons and gunpowder anyway.

While I agree with this, I'm also quite happy to anachronize to allow age-of-sail ships - even up to Trafalgar-era - in an otherwise medieval-or-earlier setting. Hell, I've already got ancient Greeks and war-of-the-roses English just across a sea from each other, it's not like anachronisms aren't already waiting around every turn.

No cannons, though. 'Tween-decks and on-deck heavy ballistae can and do serve the same function instead.

 

[Lanefan]

The one I was in that worked used age of sail trappings, right down to the major military powers having "ships of the line". The GM didn't want to introduce gunpower - less because of the worry about cannons and firearms and more about the worry of PC's putting barrels of gunpowder in portable holes and then blowing everything up - and so we had ships loaded with ballista and "mangonels" of various sizes (interpreted as torsion powered ballista). Functionally these worked basically like cannons (but with maybe half the range). It was an unrealistic compromise of course, in that real age of sail warships would have bounced torsion engine fired missiles without damage,

The hulls might have bounced them but massive ballista bolts would make a mess of any sails and-or rigging they hit (thus slowing the target so you could catch it and board it, or - if on the other side - give yourself a better chance to escape)

And a direct hit on one or more people, or on something fragile on deck (e.g. a lifeboat, the helm, etc.) with a massive bolt would be very similar to what a cannonball would do.

 

[Celebrim]

The hulls might have bounced them but massive ballista bolts would make a mess of any sails and-or rigging they hit (thus slowing the target so you could catch it and board it, or - if on the other side - give yourself a better chance to escape)

And a direct hit on one or more people, or on something fragile on deck (e.g. a lifeboat, the helm, etc.) with a massive bolt would be very similar to what a cannonball would do.

We actually found siege weaponry vastly too powerful under 1e AD&D rules because they assumed AC 10 on all targets with no official penalties for size class or low accuracy (at least that I could find). A broad side of a SOL would murder just about anything in the game short of a castle or other SOL.

And yes, rigging was a valid target but like I said, we just basically treated them as cannons because it fits the imagination better.

 

[Lanefan]

It's not the firearms that bother me. It's the player that wants to solve all problems by just blowing things up.

I love those players!

I have bad enough problems with there is always some PC that wants to burn down the dungeon rather than explore it.

And after they burn the dungeon down they realize that all the sweet sweet treasure that dungeon contained has also gone up in smoke*. Problem at that point usually becomes self-solving.

* - or, as with the party I'm running right now, buried: their go-to solution to a lot of things these days is Transmute Stone to Mud.....

 

[Lanefan]

We actually found siege weaponry vastly too powerful under 1e AD&D rules because they assumed AC 10 on all targets with no official penalties for size class or low accuracy (at least that I could find).

Decades ago I threw together a homebrew system for ship-v-ship combat using ballistae, built around the idea that you'd be rolling to hit the target ship at all (with modifiers for distance, sea conditions, relative speed, etc.) and on a successful hit it would then be random just what part of the target you affected and how much effect you had.

On a rolling sea with very limited (or no) way of fine-tuning your aim, it was next to impossible for heavy fire to target a specific part of a ship e.g. the helm or the captain.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Cannons definitely have their place and are just as medieval as full plate and rapiers, crows' nests, abundant currency, standing armies, and stable nation state monarchies and republics.

I've never seen one true medieval town in all of my time playing the game.

In my own campaign it's canonical that chemistry works nothing like the real world, and that there really are four elements - earth, fire, air, and water. This let's me get around any players metagame chemistry. It's canonical in the history of the world that goblins have invented and tried to deploy guns on multiple occasions, only to have it eventually spectacularly backfire because a single low level magic spell (or simply dropped bag) can trigger a chain reaction in every musketeer's powder case, killing the entire army. By canon, the most powerful explosive known to alchemical science has the brisance of black powder and the stability of raw warm nitroglycerin. Fireworks and explosives are known, but they generally have to be prepared and used the same day. Storing large quantities of explosives just isn't feasible in the homebrew world by design.

(I may have gotten the inspiration here from the Amber series, where the fact that explosives don't work in every universe is a major plot point.)

It's not the firearms that bother me. It's the player that wants to solve all problems by just blowing things up. I have bad enough problems with there is always some PC that wants to burn down the dungeon rather than explore it. The problem gets worse if they can haul gunpowder around. And it's not even really the balance issue to that (hint, it doesn't really work). It's the fact that it's just really unfun.

But cannons themselves are fun, and my only problem with muskets is that they make 1st and 2nd level really hard to survive and they imply the existence of say caplocks, breach loaders, rifled miniballs, elephant guns, punt guns, revolvers, lever action rifles and other merely mechanical things which would be easy to invent in the setting - dwarves would figure these things out in the life time of a single dwarf at most if they had a functional black powder. If muskets are allowed, very little stops you from M-16's and that creates massive anti-heroic balance issues.

Understandable. I don't generally concern myself with heroics, and am actually excited about all those things being invented in a fantasy world. To each their own, right?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Pirate ship cannons are beyond the scope of typical D&D games.
Its the rate of fire as well. Vaguely historical way to slow. To abstract and no point using bows or whatever.

And pirates didnt generally want to full broadside a ship anyway which is a very PC mentality. Espicially if the waters shallow enough for water breathing spells.

Firing 50 cannons plus crews a pain. 1-5 cannons doesn't really capture the feels. Grapeshot in D&D terms is usually to efficient.

I think most people would drop bows once firearms become relatively commonplace, so this isn't an issue for me. Slow cannon fire is just how it is (although I'm not above some degree of abstraction here).

 

[GrimCo]

very little stops you from M-16's and that creates massive anti-heroic balance issues.

No need for that. Player in one of old 3.5 campaigns made Wand of magic missile lv3 gatling gun. Single pull of trigger revolved and activated all six of them, each firing 2 missiles. Other one cobbled double barreled shotgun like grenade launcher out of 2 Wands of fireball. Who needs guns when wands exist (and in older editions, they were affordable).

Back to original topic. In the end, it all boils down to what kind of fiction someone wants to emulate in the game. One Piece, Black Sails, Pirates of Dark Waters, Treasure island, Cutthroat Island and Sandokan are all pirate fiction, but they are very different in themes and mood and would be very different games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

We actually found siege weaponry vastly too powerful under 1e AD&D rules because they assumed AC 10 on all targets with no official penalties for size class or low accuracy (at least that I could find). A broad side of a SOL would murder just about anything in the game short of a castle or other SOL.

And yes, rigging was a valid target but like I said, we just basically treated them as cannons because it fits the imagination better.

I have a houserule system in place for siege weapons I like. My homebrew doc covers weapons up to nuclear missiles, from all eras of play.