I think that the Savage Tide really needs more naval battles in it, and I plan on having the biggest of these as a precursor to Serpents of Scuttlecove.
Now it's all very well having several sets of rules to work with, but what I really need is a source of small, cheap model ships. Does anybody know where I can get such things?
Before you asked, yes I have tried Google, but all I can find are the massive models that cost at least £50 each...
Now it's all very well having several sets of rules to work with, but what I really need is a source of small, cheap model ships. Does anybody know where I can get such things?
We used the Wizkids Pirates CMG ships for our naval battles. Worked great.
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I had the same opinion before I started the AP, but quickly came to realize that the PC's make mince-meat out of naval battles at even mid-level power.
I realized this during Sea Wyvern's Wake, when the pirate ships attack the party on the Sea Wyvern. The total encounter was staggeringly easy. The water shugenja cast "wall of water" on the ship's deck, meaning all the crew had to either hold their breath, jump overboard, climb the rigging to get above the waterline, or some other evasive maneuver. Most pirates have minimal if any swimming skills, and are only lvl1-3 rogues. The ship's captain, unless he's some kind of legend or something, is unlikely to be higher than level 5.
That encounter, if you recall, also had a mage, and I did try to use him with effect, but he was quickly overwhelmed, and our archer in the crows nest was able to pick him out with a good spot check, and hit him at fairly long range. It made him lose a spell, and he too was gone after a few rounds.
At higher levels, fireball, fly, dimension door, teleport, etc etc make the whole thing a total cakewalk, even if you make the crew of the other ship unreasonably tough.
We did this before scuttlecove, and it was a lot of fun. I'd recommend erring on the side of simplicity, and use a lot of window-dressing to describe fancy ships to your players. Stormwrack suggests naval combat rules which barely crawl compared to the speed of PC vs. NPC/monster combat. I recommend keeping the ships moving on a battle map. Use small cardboard cut-outs to represent the ships on a large-scale map, but keep a standard battlemap nearby, so that when the PCs attempt to board, they can zoom in on the action.
Keep it fast and loose, round numbers to speed things up, use averages for dice values, etc, because all those ships and all those NPCs will soak up time your players aren't rolling their dice. All in all, it's totally worth the effort.
I had the same opinion before I started the AP, but quickly came to realize that the PC's make mince-meat out of naval battles at even mid-level power.
I agree, but you would think in a world where ship mages were fairly common, that defenses against such things would develop. Maybe a ring of spell turning fitted for a ship or something.
The ranges on most spells make it so that boarding rarely ever happens, it takes several rounds to close with another ship and by that time the whole crew can be fireballed to death, even with the +8 to saves that the gunwhales can provide.
Anyone have any suggestions to make what to me is an exciting part of an adventure, ship battles, so that it can work with D&D?
Bob
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And yes, as others have said, a few of those "Pirates of the Spanish Main" ships are great for showing the positioning of the ships at long range, and then when they get close, zoom to the battlemat and/or the "Ravaged Pride" ship set available on this site. I highly recommend that if you're planning on running this path.
I am going to try the encounter "Sable Drake" from Stormwrack in SWW. It has the advantage that the enemy ship sneaks up on the Sea Wyvern at night, and that there probably will be some boarding action. If all goes well, we will play it on Friday (depending on how fast my players go, they do not play very fast). I will keep you informed on the results.
Basically, prior to cannons, ships were troop transports. In DnD, since it's so much easier to kill sailors, you're better off thinking of ships as moving platforms.
In the narrative naval combat system, it's essentially impossible to sink a sailing ship without a wizard as a living cannon (and perhaps the judicious use of a ram.) While easy to hit, ships have a hardness that subtracts 5 points right off the top of every physical blow. Ships take full damage from only the following forms: slashing and bludgeoning melee weapons (including rams), siege engines that are not a ballista, force and sonic damage. (Most bard area attack spells use sonic energy, making bards better than one would expect as a cannon.) Everything else does half damage or less. Fire, electricity, acid, ballista bolts, and piercing melee weapons do half damage. Cold does one quarter damage. Medium and small sized missile weapons do no damage.
One section of a caravel has 80 hit points and a hardness of 5. You need to hole six sections to sink a ship, although it can sink from fewer holes than that number. And a ballista bolt, at 3d8 damage, after halving the damage and subtracting out the hardness, does 1.5 points of damage on average to the ship section and it can fire one shot every four rounds.
The oft-mentioned fire ball wand? (5d6)/2 produces average damage of 10.5 points per round to up to 12 sections of a ship (a 20' radius fireball and each section is 10' cube). At that rate, you'd need 8 charges to get your hull sections holed. Any section holed harms each section on either side of that due to rippling damage weakening each adjacent section by half its hit points.
As far as a fireball starting fires, the way that Stormwrack deals with that issue is to note that ships were not floating tinderboxes until the advent of powder magazines, although fires can and do destroy ships without gunpowder. Ships faced with one of a long list of fire spells make a fire check vs. DC 10+spell level. Ships prepared for battle with buckets of sand and water on deck and decks wet down get a +4 bonus on this roll. So, a battle-ready ship hit by a fireball has got to get a 9 or better.
If it did catch fire, half the squares exposed to fire ignite. A twenty foot radius spread, placed for maximum effect, would damage 12 sections, so six sections would be on fire. A burning square deals 2d6 damage per round to that hull section. A fire will typically spread to a new square every four rounds. That would decrease the time spent to sink a ship, certainly, as the sailors would have to be insane to go put out any fires started in that area, as that area's the wizard will target with a fireball next round.
Essentially, if we want to do naval battles with the fantasy equivalent of cannon fire, we’re going to have to use force effects rather than fire effects.
But if you want to use real cannons, there are rules for bombards in Stormwrack.
Right, what fireballs are good for is clearing the crew off the deck, not so much for use against the ship itself. :)
And is what my original query was about. A typical ship crew will be fried off of any ship before it gets anywhere near a boarding action. Also to consider is that ships have a minimum crew that it needs to operate properly, let alone survive long enough to board.
Maybe it's just systematic of the whole 3e power creep as stated in the recent Knights of the Dinner Table. A first level fighter in 2nd could kill 5 goblins before dying, 10 goblins in 3rd, and now 24 goblins in 4th.
OK - so I agree with the rules reiteration and the conclusions drawn from them. What I would like to brainstorm about is a NPC ship / naval combat encounter that would challenge the players. I'm talking about a good fight on the seas.
The NPC ship could be staffed by a NPC group as well as a bunch of blood thirsty mooks.
So - assuiming they:
Have a cleric -
there are all kinds of resist spells that would make the mooks and the ships more able to deal with the dreaded fireball. Maybe even a custom spell the grants resist fire to the ship itself. This could be prepped before medium range easily enough.
NPC wizard -
well maybe hes got some fireballs of his own! IMAGINE THAT! Also cone of cold will swiftly put out any shipboard fires. Mass fly for a boarding party? Sonic orb spells? Dispel magic? anyone? Bueller?
NPC druid -
tasty summoned water elementals pulling apart the partys ship from below? Nasty summoned flying things harassing the partys rigging?
NPC fighters -
maybe a group of archers with str longbows and the farshot feat? A crack squad of swashbucklers with mass fly dropping in to say hello?
NPC monks -
yes please
NPC bards inspire courage too!
What I'm saying here is that a group of pirates who live in a dnd universe will have developed PLENTY of ways to be menacing badguys. I'm sure i have just scratched the surface here - i dont have any books here with me.
I'm with the OP - I would love to see a truly bad ass and challenging ship to ship fight sometime during this path. Can I get some more ideas from you fine fellows for making up some really nasty and clever pirates?
Use a number of fog or mist spells. They give the ship and the crew concealment (50% miss chance).
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Yeah, they DO have that potential. I realize that the pirate ship encounter written into SWW is not a great test case. The pirates on that ship are not doing well - broke, starving, and low on resources. In a case like that, the storyline prohibits their ability to do/have anything fancy more or less by default.
The problem is that they apparently represent the "average" pirate ship in that area at the time. So if you go too far overboard with super neat and fancy gear and guys aboard it, you run the risk of their not being believable in that area.
And if they ARE there, they'd be pretty legendary, so it would require some pretty significant buildup, rumors about them would abound, and so on. To have them as a "random encounter" would stretch the limits of what's possible or likely, at least in my eyes (as always ymmv). At THAT point, you're talking a chapter or two of the campaign on their own, and a significant detour from the published storyline.
Now, if you want to take that detour and go that route, that's cool - I certainly did more with SWW than the published adventure does - but you have to be prepared for some consequences, such as having PCs that are suddenly a level or two ahead of where they should be, or have more loot than they should, or (likely) both.
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as far as how to run a ship-to-ship combat scene:
Make Cardstock or Cardboard cut-outs of the ships you plan on using (caravels most likely) and map out the top of the decks and rigging points. This gives you an actual moveable "battlemat" terrain feature that the pc's and npc's can move around on.
as far as the "combat-ability" of the pirates, remember, these can be the crimoson fleet guys out to hunt down and destroy the traitors to their organization.
depending on level, you could use the following suggestions for a massive ship-battle.
1: Yuan-Ti boat, done up like the one at farshore...fireball slinging wizard/sorcerer guy, bunch of snake people, maybe a golem on board.
2: Crimson Fleet captain and crew. these are the guys tasked with bringing in the traitors. See Serpents of Scuttlecove and use the Crimson Fleet Captain and maybe some Scuttlecove Thugs for the captain/crew
3: Traitor boats: use the crappy stuff from the SWW adventure, perhaps subbing out the NPC's for something not quite so feeble. These are the "prize" ships for the PC's...something to kill fast and easy, board, and take home with them.
4: The unknown entity: a kraken, some fiendish giant squid, an elder water elemental, or some other kind of sea monster could all make for cool/interesting combat times.
So what I am envisioning is this:
On the way to Scuttlecove, the party sees some long-range ship-to-ship combat (fireballs, cannons, waterspouts on the horizon type stuff). They either move to investigate and get pulled into a pitched battle between 4-6 different vessels (not including the PCs) or get ambushed by a fog-clouded, silent-running ship (or sea monster).
From that, the pirates either die, flee, or bring a pitched battle against the PC's (allows for plenty of large scale magic interference, ship-movement jockeying, and long-range sniping/fireballs) and leave the PC's to deal with the aftermath. Do they scuttle these ships, losing thousands of GP worth of vessel, do they split up and sail them back, how do they handle prisoners (either captured pirates or prisoners the pirates themselves had)?
This should get you what you're craving in terms of a naval-encounter, net the PC's some good XP and swag, and allow for lots of RP style "what do we do now" moments.
Plus, you get to foreshadow the split among the crimson fleet and the reason for so much of their force not being present during the upcoming adventure.
-t
Thanks for the ideas. As far as explaining the presence of powerful pirates in the area i think it makes sense that the C Fleet would have some toughs lurking about Scuttlecove or the the other fort (the wreck ? iirrc) I think players might actually find it odd that there are no other ships that can even rival their power, given the scope of the C Fleet.
what about an entirely invisible ship? some high level illusion a ala Klingon birds of prey? Also - water and air elemental could GREATLY increase a ships advance / escape / RAMMING SPEED !
Just what would evil demon pirates do to be a naval power?
What I am thinking is that Cold Captain Wyther is afraid of any force powerful enough to defeat "that damned Vanderboren" and 5 of his finest picked crews. He has also consulted Demogorgon and discovered through divination that the PC's are not finished with the Crimson Fleet. In response to this, he sends out a fleet of 8 ships packed with the fleet's finest under the command of Captain Named NPC With A Mini And Class Levels to patrol the waters around Scuttlecove and attack any ship that was on the expedition to Farshore, the Blue Nixie, the Sea Wyvern, and any other ship associated with the PC's. Harliss Javell can then warn the PC's that they will need 'a veritable fleet o' seaworthy ships' to reach Scuttlecove. At this point, the PC's will be allowed to recruit some ships through diplomacy or privateering (perhaps the emerald pirates mentioned in Savage Tidings) and then use this fleet to defeat the Crimson Fleet in battle.
During the battle, Captain Levels will bring his ship alongside the PC's and attempt to board, giving a nice climactic encounter.
I gotta tell ya, that's bloody brilliant. :)
I'll withdraw all my previous points. :)
Thankyou.
Many of the Crimson Fleet's other Captains will be watching the battle through scrying alongside Captain Wyther, and when they see Captain Levels lose the battle, that (along with Death Knight/Vampire Vanthus commandeering ships) will finally cause the mutiny that splits the fleet and makes half of the captains leave, closely pursued by the other half.
Thanks for the ideas. As far as explaining the presence of powerful pirates in the area i think it makes sense that the C Fleet would have some toughs lurking about Scuttlecove or the the other fort (the wreck ? iirrc) I think players might actually find it odd that there are no other ships that can even rival their power, given the scope of the C Fleet.
what about an entirely invisible ship? some high level illusion a ala Klingon birds of prey? Also - water and air elemental could GREATLY increase a ships advance / escape / RAMMING SPEED !
Just what would evil demon pirates do to be a naval power?
Invisibility is not going to work: all the PCs have to do is look for water displacement.
O, but they then still do not know where the pirates are on the ship...
Good point about the displacement - and ships are kinda loud.
You could use a variant whole ship invis spell to hide the ship and then a major image of ocean water to mask the displacement. Add an area silence spell or two and you should be pretty well cloaked.