Not sure where's best to ask this; the RC Necromancer forum is pretty inactive so I thought I'd try here.
I was going through Fire as she Bears in detail and had questions/suggestions/etc. Some are for clarifications and/or errata and some are just for if you do a version 2 or supplement for it.
1. Ship combat and Below the Waterline. This works oddly; other sections ablate hit points normally but Below the Waterline loses half its hp if one hull section is trashed, 3/4 if two, all if three.
So... You can't sink a 2 hull unit ship at all?
And... You can sink a 500 hull unit ship (like, by my calculation, the USS Ronald Reagan) by destroying any three hull units?
Am I missing something? That seems to obviate a lot of differences between ships especially since targeting a given segment isn't that hard.
2. Crew stores. It's 5 sp/day to feed them but it'd be interesting to know required tonnage that has to go to food/water. Finer grained encumbrance/speed might be nice, to try to convince people to dump stores and cannon to get speed if they have to.
3. Equipping your ship. It's not clear all what a hull unit can do. It can hold X guns but if it's "dedicated" it can hold 2X guns, but it's not clear what else locations have to do except to be "special location," of which a galley is the mandatory one. It "requires a full hull location" too. So in a normal 3-hull unit 60' caravel type ship, one unit needs to be a galley, but can it be a galley and have guns too, is it exclusive? What else "consumes" hull units, it seems like there's no accounting for other general use areas (crew sleeping, cargo, etc.). Like the Teeth of Araska from Second Darkness is a typical 60' x 20' caravel, with a galley and brig, and if you say the other section is 'dedicated' to guns but the other ones can have the normal amount, you could put say 12 12-pounders on it? Oh, I guess you'd need a powder magazine too, so I guess it's 6 12-pounders max. Are those numbers of guns cited per side or total? I assume total but that's weird because it's an odd number (e.g. 3 12 pounders per hull unit), you'd think it would be 1/side (2), 2/side (4), etc.
4. Weather... Need weather generation! And a little more about seaworthiness.
5. More actual piracy related would be good too. Crew loyalty just has wages, what about pirate ships that operate by shares... Some tables for cargo and random ship encounters and stuff...
4 and 5 are sorted for you, PDF of dead mans chest has those details. I believe i think the 2 books work together?
4 and 5 are sorted for you, PDF of dead mans chest has those details. I believe i think the 2 books work together?
Oh, yes? Since I was an original RC backer I didn't get the like $110 level Kickstart that would have given me Dead Man's Chest. Thought it was 3.5e and unrelated. Can you tell me more about what it's got in it? The description sounds more like "monsters feats and spells!" which bleah, but if it has good pirating info I'd get it.
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Hey Ernest,
The Below the Waterline location does not lose half its hit points if a hull location is trashed. Below the Waterline is an abstraction. It's a pool of hit points calculated as 20% of all your hull locations hit points.
First, when you reduce a hull location to 0 hit points, this only affects the BtW area if that hull location was part of the ship's base level. Ie, if that hull location is partially underwater and not part of deck two or three of a ship.
If you have a two hull location ship and destroy one of the two hull locations, the BtW section has lost half its hit points and begins taking on water at a rate of 1000 pounds per minute. A 2 location ship isn't strong, nor has it a large carrying capacity -- so that puppy sinks fast.
If you have a 500 hull location ship and you make a 60' foot hole (3 hull locations) in its side, underwater, plus other holes in its side underwater (remember it needs to have less than half its hit points when another base hull location is totally destroyed), then it takes on water at a rate of 5,000 pounds per minute.
Calculate the load a 500 hull location ship can carry and you'll see the rate at which it sinks. A whole lot of minutes, because a 500 hull location ship is BIG and STRONG.
I'm on traveling at the moment and have to run, but I'll have responses for your other questions shortly.
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I was going through Fire as she Bears in detail and had questions/suggestions/etc. Some are for clarifications and/or errata and some are just for if you do a version 2 or supplement for it.3. Equipping your ship. It's not clear all what a hull unit can do. It can hold X guns but if it's "dedicated" it can hold 2X guns, but it's not clear what else locations have to do except to be "special location," of which a galley is the mandatory one. It "requires a full hull location" too. So in a normal 3-hull unit 60' caravel type ship, one unit needs to be a galley, but can it be a galley and have guns too, is it exclusive? What else "consumes" hull units, it seems like there's no accounting for other general use areas (crew sleeping, cargo, etc.). Like the Teeth of Araska from Second Darkness is a typical 60' x 20' caravel, with a galley and brig, and if you say the other section is 'dedicated' to guns but the other ones can have the normal amount, you could put say 12 12-pounders on it? Oh, I guess you'd need a powder magazine too, so I guess it's 6 12-pounders max. Are those numbers of guns cited per side or total? I assume total but...
I think the notion that will clarify this is to recall that your Hull Location is a 20' cube, that you can bisect with a deck. If you line up cannon next to each other, left to right, with room to fire them, you can only line so many cannon up next to each other.
Specifically:
12 - 3 pounders
6 - 6 pounders
4 - 9 pounders
3 - 12 pounders
1 - 24 pounder
1 - 32 pounder
But if you put a ceiling inside your 20' cube at the 10' mark, you could put another set of cannon on that deck.
If you have a ship that is 3 hull locations long and only one hull location wide - ie its made from 3 hull locations - and you want to put 12 pound guns in it then, yes, the size of the guns means you have to stagger them. The cannon are large and recoil when fired. The single hull location width of your ship plus the size of the 12 pound guns means you can't put an even number of them facing out each side, like you could with 9, 6 or 3 pound guns. Solution if you want an even number of guns pointing out each side? Build a ship 2 hull locations wide or stick to the smaller poundage guns.
Here's the missing piece of information about special locations: if the RAW does not specify that a special location requires a full hull location or the RAW does not specify a minimum space requirement, then you can make your special location any reasonable size you like and put multiple special locations inside a single 20' cube Hull Location.
For example in a single 20' cube Hull Location you can put a Captain's Quarters on the top half. It'd have a 10' ceiling and be 20'long x 20' wide. Below it you could put an atypical Powder Magazine that stored a 1/2 ton of powder - as opposed to the typical one described in the text that requires a full Hull Location.
Not that I'd want to be that captain, mind you.
Oh - and the price would remain the same because the majority of the cost is in building the location into the ship. And not abstracting the cost creates tiresome bookkeeping during ship design.
Here's a mistaken assumption: many historical ships did not have galleys as such, and they are not required on a ship. Galleys in FaSB combine food storage, an outfitted kitchen, and a dining hall for 30 sailors. Smaller ships could simply store barrels of hardtack and barrels of water inside half a Hull Location, require sailors to eat on deck and call it a day.
Alternately you could create a smaller galley that stored half the amount of food and water, sat only 15 sailors, and took up only half a 20' cube Hull Location.
In short, where there is a required amount of Hull Location that something takes up, we specified it in the description of the equipment. Other than that we left it to GMs and players to decide what can reasonably fit in a 20' cube, given that you can divide that cube into 2 - 10' high decks.
As a rule of thumb we didn't want to spend word count on tables specifying the volume that various mundane objects occupy in a three dimensional space. Again we relied on abstractions -- for example the assumption that crew hang hammocks where they will, in between other gear -- because otherwise the level of bookkeeping for figuring how much of what can fit where swiftly grows tiresome for most folks.
Could ship design be much more specific? Sure. Then we'd be creating something like they have in Star Fleet Battles, but for age of sail ships. It was a conscious design choice not to go to that level of component detail when equipping a ship. Should be easy enough to do for anyone so inclined. Just figure out how much stuff you can cram into a 20' cube.
Alternately, we could implement a rule that for every X number of crew, Y amount of Hull Locations must stay empty for crew quarters. I don't think such a rule is necessary, but for people who want that extra layer of realism in their ship design then by all means, house rule it.
2. Crew stores. It's 5 sp/day to feed them but it'd be interesting to know required tonnage that has to go to food/water. Finer grained encumbrance/speed might be nice, to try to convince people to dump stores and cannon to get speed if they have to.
I think you're right that giving a guideline for food and water stores is a good idea.
Anyone want to do the math and figure out how many barrels can fit in a 20'x20'x10' space then how much food and/or water can fit in that many barrels? We'd also need to knock off a few barrels to account for accessing through a door into the area.
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4. Weather... Need weather generation! And a little more about seaworthiness.
The opening to Chapter 5 of the main Razor Coast book contains a few pages on weather on the Razor, and we didn't want to duplicate them here. Instead we decided to keep this book focused on ship to ship combat as opposed to a handbook covering all the aspects of life at sea. But, you're right, that'd be a nice expansion.
In the meantime if anyone wants to assess whether a storm would tear a ship apart or what happens if your ship hits a reef, my suggestion is to translate the weather effects or the specific event into damage and apply the sinking rules from FaSB.
5. More actual piracy related would be good too. Crew loyalty just has wages, what about pirate ships that operate by shares... Some tables for cargo and random ship encounters and stuff...
Good stuff to have, but again not really what we wanted FasB to be about. We tried to keep our focus tight to ship-2-ship combat with a head nod in other directions when we just couldn't help ourselves. Otherwise the book might have swiftly ballooned into an unaffordable monstrosity. We'll definitely keep it in mind, because again you are right -- that would be good stuff for an expansion.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Hey Ernest,
The Below the Waterline location does not lose half its hit points if a hull location is trashed. Below the Waterline is an abstraction. It's a pool of hit points calculated as 20% of all your hull locations hit points.
First, when you reduce a hull location to 0 hit points, this only affects the BtW area if that hull location was part of the ship's base level. Ie, if that hull location is partially underwater and not part of deck two or three of a ship.
Yeah, I think the problem (and this is the deal with the whole 20x20 cube idea that can be multiple decks) is that most Razor Coast (and Skull & Shackles) ships are really only one hull location high (60-100 feet long seems to be the sweet spot everyone stays in) so almost everything is "base level" except in the much more rare capital ship combat. And the confusion between 'decks' and 'hull levels' is a tough one (it permeates even your answers here...).
I'm considering a mod where once a hull section is destroyed it doesn't automatically hurt the Below the Waterline section but it definitely exposes it to fire. Seems like the rules are pretty generous in that you can always target a specific section except with a broadside, though, so you're really still talking about just needing to to 150 points of damage to a normal sized ship to sink it handily, and that's a simple amount of damage to deal out. A simple 60' caravel with 6 12-pounders can dole that out in a round if it mostly hits. Seems like it makes naval combat over with super quick.
They may only be one hull location high, but when you start statting them out they have a lot more hull locations than you would think. That 100' ship is 5 hull locations long and if it is 40' wide that is another 5, now add fore and aft castles and you are easily at 14 hull locations for a ship that is not all that big. Now add 8-9 rigging locations at least. And that caravel is probably only going to have long 9's and you have to subtract the hardness for each hit. A 12 lber was a big cannon for the period.
They may only be one hull location high, but when you start statting them out they have a lot more hull locations than you would think. That 100' ship is 5 hull locations long and if it is 40' wide that is another 5, now add fore and aft castles and you are easily at 14 hull locations for a ship that is not all that big. Now add 8-9 rigging locations at least. And that caravel is probably only going to have long 9's and you have to subtract the hardness for each hit. A 12 lber was a big cannon for the period.
Well but that's kinda my point - that ship you cite there could sink itself in one combat round easily. Because all it's gotta do is break 2 hull sections, really, and it's taking on tons of water a round. And even taking hardness into account, the 100' ship can bring how many 12 pounders to bear, 15? And you can freely target what hull locations you like, so the additional layers are no real hindrance.
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Hey Ernest,
I think you're missing something. It can be quick for a ship to start taking on water, but not quick to sink. Here is something like how it went for us in playtesting.
Round 1 (lucky shot) - destroys a hull section. Ship starts taking water at 1,000 per minute
Round 2 shots bring total BtW hp below 1/2; crew takes action to repair breaches and bail water, but doesn't get the BtW hp above 50% despite valiant effort.
Round 3 - destroys a second hull section. BtW reduced to 75%. Ship takes on water at higher rate, but still measured in minutes
...and so forth.
With non-magical repair work from the crew, we found it took around 6-8 rounds of repeated broadsides before ships (the size brvheart described up to light frigates) began taking on water at a rate of 5,000 per round.
Once they started taking water at that rate, depending on how heavily laden they were from the outset, they'd start to sink.
For example, take Quell's Whore from the back of the book -- Bethany Razor's ship.
She's got a Strength of 40, but we're saying 3 Hull Locations were destroyed, so that's reduced to a strength of 37. That makes her light load 33,216 lbs and her sunk load 5x that. She's carrying 72,204 pounds, leaving 93,876 pounds before she sinks below the waves.
Once she starts taking on 5,000 pounds per round in water, it'll still take 18 - 19 rounds before she heads to the bottom (93,876 / 5,000 = 18.7752). Assuming no additional intervention on the part of the PCs, of course.
So we're still talking a minimum of 24 rounds to fully sink a ship.
Quell's Whore, for example, is an 18 gun sloop (7 per side, 2 fore and aft) mounting 9 pounders, based on the tradeoffs in price, maneuverability, and speed. She might very well defeat your hypothetical, heavier 30 gun ship based on her ability to outmaneuver and outdistance her foe (think Nelson at Trafalgar).
That's how it worked when we playtested it; however, if you find something different when you run a few combats - please let me know.
John and I would absolutely love to put out revisions based on your your experience in play sooner rather than later!
OK, maybe I need to reread all the taking water stuff. We'll give this a try on our next outing.