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One of the players in my group is a winged race and has this idea of sinking ships by dropping objects onto the ship from up high in an attempt to damage and punch holes in the hull.
Basically, I'd like to ask you guys to double check my thought process here and make sure I'm doing this right and make sure I'm not overlooking a feat or combat rule somewhere.
Whatever they're dropping is going to be an improvised weapon so, without the proper feat(s), it's a -4 to their attack roll right off. Then there's the cumulative -2 for every range increment beyond 10 feet. Thrown improvised weapons have a max range of up to 5 additional increments and fired improvised weapons have a max range of up to 10 additional increments. Since dropping an object obviously isn't firing it in any way I'm going with the thrown ruling.
Whatever they drop isn't going to just stop falling after 60 feet though, it's going to continue to fall no matter the range. I'm of two schools of thought here. Either a) the object simply splashes down somewhere in the water and is an automatic miss because they are too far away to be any kind of accurate, or b) since the object will eventually make it the necessary distance, just not necessarily to the correct position, we just keep adding -2 penalties for every 10 feet. So if they're 100 feet up they can make a ranged touch attack with a -22 to their roll.
Thoughts?
Once you're beyond "max" range, you just have to hope for a 20. Look up the scatter rules. For extra credit, calculate the altitude from wich the dropped object must be dropped for it to take more than a single round to reach the surface.
I'm not sure a winged race can carry enough heavy projectiles to really get past the hardness of even a wooden deck.
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I'm not sure a winged race can carry enough heavy projectiles to really get past the hardness of even a wooden deck.
Yea, that was the first wrench I threw in their gears. At first they wanted to use Feather Token: Anchors and tie bottles of alchemist's fire to them. I can't even begin to say how many problems there are with that idea.
Next up was a bag of holding with anchors in it. Then I pointed out the weight restriction on the bag.
I just wanted to make sure I had the mechanics correct in case they do figure a way to try this.
Well, you're not going to sink a boat with it, but I like the flying bard using Summon Instrument to drop a Double Bass on my enemies. KaBONG !
You might prefer a marching band's bass drum or kettle drum, but to each his own.
I would look towards the splash weapon rules. As it is being dropped, rather than thrown I wouldn't apply the -4 non proficiency penalty.
There are several different ways of treating the targetting component. The base method would be to treat the targetted square of the ship as a medium size AC5 object (a square is AC5 and medium size) and taking the -2 range increment penalty for every 10 feet. Given the dropped object has to land somewhere the splash rules work well, but are likely to mean that the targetted square is very rarely hit but the ship is always hit due to its size. You may decide to house rule that the ship is comprised of 10 foot squares, i.e. each targetted square is 4 5 foot squares. This could be extrapolated out further for huge etc. By extension this would increase the range increment to 40 feet. Another alternative would be to omit the to hit role and use a d10 instead of d8 to determine where the dropped object hits, with 9 and 10 being the targetted square. This is my favoured method as the first method feels wrong, if 100 boulders were dropped from a great on a target square form a height, 5 would be in the middle and an average of 12 would be in every surrounding square. The second method doesn't work to well with damage allocation, hence the third method.
Damage is quite simply the falling object rules meeting the break object rules. Wood has a hardness of 5 and 10HP per inch thickness is a 5 foot square. The falling object rules are relatively clear, assuming the character is medium sized and carrying a heavy small object they would do 2d6 of damage to the square if dropped between 30 and 150 feet. At this point I would suggest that a small sized stone would be too heavy to carry and that a tiny stone or lighter small object is carried, in which case the damage is probably closer to 1d6. Unless dropped from above 150 feet the object is unlikely to do sufficient damage to get past the wood's hardness - perhaps you could be kind and rule it is forcefully released and the high altitude doubling occurs at 30 feet instead of 150 feet.
There are too many variables to handle in this situation, at least for me. I would try to make it as simple as I could.
First of all, the players have come up with an idea. Don't deny them the opportunity to go through with it. If they invest money in the idea, which it sounds like with anchors and alchemist's fire and such, then ships will be damaged.
I'd look over the vehicle rules too. Give you some ideas.
I'd just say, you drop so many items, there will a certain percentage of successful hits. I wouldn't want to have a roll for each item dropped.
Or, maybe an area attack? The more items dropped, the bigger the area? Then you could calculate everything ahead of time (range, altitude, area, size modifiers for bigger or smaller ships, etc.) Make an area attack and the better the roll, the more items hit the ships and more damage done.
And, of course, there has to be some retaliation from the ships. Archers, catapults, magic, whatever you can think of.