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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9777562" data-attributes="member: 4937">UPDATE: Ooops.  Sorry.  I thought this was a response to a post about the Skull & Shackles AP.  What I wrote isn't actually a response to what you are claiming.So, if you don't have ship to ship combat like people expect when they imagine pirates, and instead you have something more medieval like Viking pirates in long ships or Greek galley pirates I think your expectation is fine.  But it won't take my level of research for this problem to start rearing its head in just about any setting where you have some sort of reified ship to ship combat and boarding actions.  The average person probably hasn't thought much about it but once they start thinking about it the idea of a crew of 20-30 starts falling apart.  Let's say that they do believe a crew of two can sail a frigate to Tortuga as in Pirates of the Caribbean.  At some point though they are going to want to fire all the cannons.  Well, you've got like 15 cannons on your broadside.  Even if they only think it takes two people to fire a cannon they now have a crew of 32.  And they are probably going to think, "Well, we do still benefit from having people on deck and in the fighting tops during the fight.  So they go, "Well, the ship is like 120 feet long so one guy every 5 feet is like 24 marines/pirates plus a few snipers up on those platforms whatever they are called."  And now you've got a crew of 60 before you even do any research into what it takes to actually sail a 120 foot square rigged ship and fire a cannon.And then you go, "Wait a minute, what if the enemy in those big galleons we are raiding for treasure gets more soldiers than us?"  How many soldiers are on the Spanish Galleon analogue?" And that's not even getting to whether the average gamer has played something like Sid Meyer's "Pirates".  It doesn't have to be a very realistic game at all before you realize having an army can be better than not having one for certain things you might want to do.Irrelevant older response clipped:[spoiler]That sounds good on the surface but it requires having a fantasy setting where no one expects any ship to have more than 20 or 30 crew.And the problem with this is not only is this not made explicit by the adventure or the setting or the rules, but the rules actually give players the opposite expectation.  For example, it turns out under the rules that the most powerful ships in the setting are rowed galleys with crew of like 600 or something (or some other large number I don't remember).  So it's not just my expectations about how a square-rigged sailing vessel works that are pushing me to think "we need a bigger crew" but also what I can glean from the rules themselves.  Because remember, at this point we're only like 3rd level characters.  Hundreds of even 1st level characters is an overwhelming force to us.And even like the GM were to have a discussion with the players (which he eventually did) where he says, "OK, in the rules your crew size doesn't matter and for that matter it doesn't look like the crew size of the opposing ship matters." (because the rules of the ship minigame aren't player facing) that really only works if you can suspend disbelief that your ragtag crew of 20 can overwhelm and defeat the opposing ships crew of hundreds kind of off stage while you are doing the whole fight with the enemies leaders.  But that doesn't really work intellectually or in terms of the game, because Pathfinder isn't abstract in its combat gameplay.  It has deck plans and tactical movement, so this fight between the two crews isn't really off stage somewhere it's supposed to be happening all around you.You'd be right if this was a Spelljammer like setting and there was some rule about breatheable atmosphere that limited crews to 20 or 30, only IIRC there are plenty of fortress sized spelljammer ships with crews of hundreds or thousands, so there isn't really a setting where there is reason to imagine crews don't matter to the outcome of combat and shouldn't join into it.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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