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

[Paul Farquhar]

Problem there is one PC ends up the captain and everyone else ends up following orders

Some groups may be happy to have a player be captain. Others might decide to run the ship by committee, or take turns. Rule breaking is what pirates are all about, and that includes standard chain of command.

If they're all crew (or special passengers) then at least they're on an equal footing.

Equally missing out on the essence of a pirate campaign.

That progress can be reflected in ship size and-or capabilities. They start with a small frigate then - if they want, it's their choice - move up from there as they capture bigger and better ships.

The trouble with that is the players become emotionally invested in their ship in the same way that they become invested in their characters. One does not “trade up” the Millennium Falcon or the Enterprise.

 

[GrimCo]

Also, bigger ships are bigger targets. Band of happy pirates in cutter or small sloop, attacking smaller coastal traders, smuggling between islands and similar shenanigans may fly under the radar. Even if you come across ship of the line, you can usually outmaneuver it and hide somewhere out of reach. But with corvette, frigate and similar medium to large sized ships, you can't really do that. Plus, ships are expensive to buy and to maintain. Larger the ship, more expensive it is ( and it groves closer to quadratic/exponential). Plus, people get attached to their ships.

Pricing wise, used a bit of chatgpt magic to create 3 ships, sloop corvette frigate. Fully equipped they are priced at 22k gp, 61k gp and 170k gp. Even if players get that kind of money, you can't really buy it that easy.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

CAN you do huge ships with hundreds

Sure, easily. I played a fair bit of Star Trek RPG with a crew of over 400. They are just a stat that occasionally goes down during ship combat, provides a pool of redshirts, and occasionally replacement PCs. And I boarded Imperial Star Destroyers playing Star Wars d6 too. A ship with a crew of thousands is just a floating dungeon.

 

[Hussar]

Sure, easily. I played a fair bit of Star Trek RPG with a crew of over 400. They are just a stat that occasionally goes down during ship combat, provides a pool of redshirts, and occasionally replacement PCs. And I boarded Imperial Star Destroyers playing Star Wars d6 too. A ship with a crew of thousands is just a floating dungeon.

All I can say is more power to you. I've tried it. I've tried it in D&D repeatedly and failed. The amount of work that is required to do that sort of thing in D&D is too much for me. Sure, I suppose I could hand wave it, but, then, if I'm doing that, why bother using D&D? If I'm ignoring so much of the rules just to make something work in D&D, I'll use a different system that doesn't require me to handwave so much of the rules.

My advice? Stay small. Keep things manageable. 20 crew max. See, because in a Star Trek ship, you can ignore 390 of those crew 99% of the time because they are just part of the ship. You don't have to take actions from those 390 crew members because they are all just running the ship. The ship does most of the work here. It's not like you have 100 red shirts hanging around on the hull firing phasers at the enemy. But, in a sailing ship, those 100 red shirts are actually acting every single round of every single encounter. Sea monster pops up and immediately dies because you have a 100 archers. So, you use three or four sea monsters just to make it an interesting encounter, which then grinds on for the next hour and a half while the entire group checks out and starts staring at their phones.

I'm not really disagreeing that hard with your points about technology. You're very much not wrong. But, if you go down the road of Age of Sail, my advice would be to not use D&D at all.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I suppose I could hand wave it, but, then, if I'm doing that, why bother using D&D? If I'm ignoring so much of the rules just to make something work in D&D, I'll use a different system that doesn't require me to handwave so much of the rules.

All RPGs handwave it. There isn't any way to deal with a crew of hundreds that doesn't abstract it in any RPG. Abstraction works just fine. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand crew, because the PCs are never going to fight more than a handful at a time.

 

[GrimCo]

But, if you go down the road of Age of Sail, my advice would be to not use D&D at all.

Yup, like 7th sea, which is already set during that time and it's built around swashbuckling adventures we usually connect pirate fiction with. It gives much better experience and it's much more DM friendly out of the box.

If one insists using d&d for pirate theme, i would strongly suggest to go with Treasure Island, Pirates of Black Water, One Piece direction rather than Master and Commander or Black Sails. It aligns itself better with game mechanics.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I would point out that Master and Commander has nothing to do with pirates, and is Star Trek (ToS, Balance of Terror) transposed to the sea. Definitely Star Fleet, not Pirates.

 

[Hussar]

All RPGs handwave it. There isn't any way to deal with a crew of hundreds that doesn't abstract it in any RPG. Abstraction works just fine. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand crew, because the PCs are never going to fight more than a handful at a time.

But, again, this is the problem with trying to use D&D for this. You're pretty much given zero guidance as to how to hand wave this sort of stuff in D&D. D&D doesn't do this very well. Like I've been saying all along, as soon as you have about 30+ combatants to a side, D&D stops helping you at all. So, if you want to stick with D&D, again, my advice is to keep the numbers under that 20 (ish) to a side.

I mean, when I ran Spelljammer last year, I added a house rule that the gravity bubble around spelljammer ships was inherently chaotic, meaning anything passing through the bubble would shoot off in a random direction, making all ship to ship combat come down to nothing but boarding actions. There was no point in having ship based weapons. Worked fantastic. Added an extra thing that when two bubbles intersected, if the bubbles weren't lined up, it was random which gravity well would dominate, meaning that it was pretty much suicidal to try to board another ship unless your gravity planes aligned.

Again, worked great. Skipped over all that boring crap where you're plinking away with catapults and whatnot for an hour and skipped right to the fun stuff.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You're pretty much given zero guidance as to how to hand wave this sort of stuff

You do realise handwaving is inherently something you do yourself, not with external guidance!

 

[GrimCo]

I would point out that Master and Commander has nothing to do with pirates, and is Star Trek (ToS, Balance of Terror) transposed to the sea. Definitely Star Fleet, not Pirates.

Acheron (french ship in M&C) is privateer. It's also a movie about naval warfare between frigate and heavy frigate (Acheron is “ship of the line–like” heavy frigate). It's pirate movie in reverse in a sense, since it's told from the perspective of British hunting French privateer along the coast of South America. Novel series movie is based off are solid read tough as inspiration for anyone into that kind of late Age of Sail nautical campaigns (it does contain privateering aka government sanctioned piracy, since Aubrey both protects British merchants and attacks French and Spanish ones).