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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9777726" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think you have to get as deep in the woods as tracking barrels of fish and depending on the campaign setting you probably don't need to track food and water portions if you can assume stops in ports are pretty frequent the same way you don't track food while the PCs are in town.  There is a thing where you go off on a two month ocean voyage where knowing you have enough food for 200 men for two months is a thing, and you can get into what happens when the food spoils and things like that if it adds to the story, but it's not required.  (Then again, Skull & Shackles never seemed to recognize Create Food and Water existed in the setting, or how stupidly easy the rules made doing that.)On the other hand, deducting costs for the upkeep of men and ships probably ought to be part of the piracy.  These two hundred cutthroats aren't following you entirely out of the goodness of their hearts, especially if they are hungry or thirsty or aren't getting paid.  And the inspirations for the story do very much focus on the motivations of the men serving aboard the ship.  That is something that comes up even in the most fantasy unrealistic movie versions.  So there is a need to ask, "What do pirates think is fair pay?" because you do have to deduct that from the treasure taken.  And if they feel cheated, you have a problem.  The men are feeling mutinous shows up in even Pirates of the Caribbean, even when the crew is undead and doesn't need upkeep in any traditional sense. One of my problems with the Skull and Shackles adventure path is that they did a really good job with this when the PCs were a sailor.  The officers they served under were brutal and arbitrary and cruel and did not rule with the consent of the crew.  And you could easily imagine why the crew would want to mutiny.  But after establishing that this was part of the inspiration for the game and a part of the story, the act of becoming elected the new officers didn't in the game really involve promising to do better than that and worse didn't involve actually fulfilling that promise.  Under the rules, if we had followed them, we were going to be worse bosses than the ones we'd induced the crew to mutiny against, and paying them lower wages and smaller shares of the treasure than they had received before.  And that just makes no sense.It's not that hard to compute and deduct expenses.  Lots of campaigns I think will say something like, "Ok, you've been living in town for a month but we haven't been playing out every meal, clothing purchase, shoe polish expenditure, and haircut  Deduct 30 g.p. per level of your character to cover your cost of living for this month."  Pirate campaigns are just that with a lot bigger expenditures.  You can abstract it out to a high level but it does need to be there.Also, like wind speeds are a thing and you don't have to track them every day but they do add to the richness of the game of being at sea.  Storms and calms and fair winds and having to tack to go up against the wind, and the fact that square and triangle rigs perform differently in different winds and want you to run in different directions make for fun gaming and chases and evasion and so forth.  And if you have sailed combat at sea, then to a large extent the speed and direction of the wind are the terrain of that battle and it makes the battle more interesting in the same way slopes and obstacles make a land battle more interesting.  Do you have to pay attention to it?  Probably not, but at some point it won't feel much like a sea adventure.And again, Skull and Shackles did a pretty good job of doing this from the perspective of the PC as sailor aboard a pirate ship, but a lot less of a good job of doing it once the PC's became the masters and commanders of a pirate ship.</blockquote>

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