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My players have finally obtained their own sailing vessel, and I'm eager to get them started on ship to ship battles, new upgrade options, and other awesome vehicle rules. It's the whole reason I bought Ultimate Combat, to use those rules with sea-fairing campaigns like Skull and Shackles.
But...erm...S&S seems to use different rules altogether. The stats for a sailing ship in the S&S Player's Guide are absolutely nothing like the stats for the same sailing ship shown in Ultimate Combat. What's more, the ship stat block the designers say to use (the sailing ship on page 25 of the Player's Guide) doesn't ad up with what the module days (the stat block is for a ship 30x90' whereas the PC's ship is 30x105'). A bigger ship should be worth more and have more hit points than the one shown. Also, the ship only goes half the speed of a normal sailing ship as presented in Ultimate Combat (which is EVEN smaller at only 20x75').
Now I'm completely lost. I feel like this is the one setting that will really utilize the new rules well and for some reason...it doesn't.
What should I do? What rules should I be using? I want to use those from Ultimate Combat, but I don't know how to convert the adventure content. I would hate to use those in the Player's Guide, then have a different vehicle-based game later in which my players have to learn a different rule set for vehicles.
Wow, I'm glad you brought this up just now! I'm also running Skull & Shackles, and my players are going to get [a ship] after we return from a holiday break. (We meed on Tuesdays, which doesn't work out well this year.) I'll be watching this thread for answers.
Could it be that the later publication is a refinement of the rules found in the earlier book? Or are they so different as to be two different rule sets?
(I don't have Skull and Shackles so I am curious)
I thought that too. I checked the dates, but the Player's Guide simply says "2012." Since they were both made in 2012, I don't know which came first.
They are similar rule sets. About as different as v3.5 was to Pathfinder. Some things mesh, others simply don't.
Ultimate Combat was published in August 2011 first, if that helps. I don't have any of S&S to look at publication dates for them.
Well why the heck didn't they use the existing rule set then?
If I correctly remember a post from James Jacobs, they didn't use the Ultimate Combat rules because they proved too complicated for what they had in mind for Skull & Shackles.
Yes, that's it.
If I correctly remember a post from James Jacobs, they didn't use the Ultimate Combat rules because they proved too complicated for what they had in mind for Skull & Shackles.
Yes, that's it.
Thanks! That at least lets us know the "why" of it.
I just thought that those ships had been modified from their previous stats, like the Players can do when they take the ship to that "little cove" where all the newly "liberated" ships go. :)
Then where is the breakdown of the modifications? Many of the NPC ships are modified, and they explicitly say what's been changed from your typical ship type.
I have deduced that the Man's Promise (PC's first ship) should take up 4 squares (rather than the 3 shown for the sailing ship for the Player's Guide vehicle scale) or 126 squares (rather than the 60 shown for the sailing ship for Ultimate Combat's character scale).
That means the ship should have 1,890 hit points, not 1,620 as shown in the Player's Guide. Simply put, it's bigger and tougher than your normal sailing ship. Its 90 squares of sails (per the Sailing Ship in the Player's Guide) should have 450 hp, not 300 (per the rules of Ultimate Combat). She's a big ol' merchant galleon!
Likewise, the hp for the 10 squares of sails on the Player's Guide's ship boats is off. It should be 50 hp rather than 40.
This strikes me as a number of mathematical errors, even if you consider that they were attempting to simplify the rules. These numbers aren't just simplified. In many cases, they're just wrong.
Think I've got many of the rules figured out now. Many of them are the same, but are worded differently, which can get confusing. For example, UC presents us with a number of vehicle maneuvers called "accelerate," "decelerate," "keep it going," "reverse," or "turn;" whereas S&SPG refers to those same maneuvers as "full ahead," "heave to," ""stay the course," "full astern," or "hard to port/hard to starboard." S&SPG also throws in 2 new maneuvers. The outcome is generally the same though (making my original assessment somewhat inaccurate).
The Player's Guide also offers up additional rules for sailing vessels and ship to ship combat such as shearing off the oars of an enemy ship, or making a broadside attack with siege weapons.
Now that I've studied it more closely, the only real conflicts seem to be with the stat blocks. They don't always follow the rules, or have completely different numbers than other stat blocks representing the same ship.
Has anyone else had any problems trying to consolidate these rules?
They've all but made a mess of my games.
dotting for interest
One of these days, Paizo needs to come out with an Ultimate Rules Revision and include all their final decisions/errata/FAQ's and stuff in it. Would be very nice to have an updated version of all the rules rather than digging through faq's/splatbooks/errata/online messageboards