mass shipboard combat card game

[Steff]

So I have kind of struggled with the mass combat on-board ship or in the town pillage section of skull and shackles last time and I was trying to figure out a better way to do it. I read online in these forums where someone thought a card game would work and I liked the idea but I have not found anything concrete so far. if this already exists, can someone enlighten me so i don't have to reinvent the wheel?

the party:

each character has a character card for the encounter deck as well as a personal deck of cards based on his class. fighters have weapon and armor cards. magic users have spell cards. clerics have spells, armor, and weapons. rogues have weapons, armor, and 'special' to reflect backstab. other classes have cards that make sense for them. etc etc etc.

then there are the crew cards. Each crew member of the party deck gets one card. Each card has a strength, a defense, and any special effects reflected.

lastly, shipboard weapon cards. Any weapon that can be used when grappled with another ship that can do damage to personnel ie balista.

the encounter:

there is a captain card and associated weapon/armor/spell cards depending on how he is set up.
there are various officer cards, each with his armor/weapon cards.
there are crew cards. Each crew card reflects from 1-10 crew members and does damage accordingly. This is to reflect that the ships you fight often have a larger number of crew members who are not as proficient with weapons.. ie they have no individual weapon or armor cards. (for example. it might say 6 crew members - roll d20. 1-2, ineffective this turn, move to discard pile. 3-10 - move d3 party cards to discard pile (wounded), 11-15 - move d2 party cards to void (killed), 16-18 - move d4 party cards to discard and d2 party cards to void, 19-20, move d4 party cards to void and draw another card... something along those lines)

they also have shipboard weapons cards.

There is the play pile, the discard pile and the void pile in front of each player.

you put the individual cards in front of each player. the character cards, crew cards, ships weapons cards, etc. are all shuffled into one pile. the GM shuffles all of the cards together on his side and you are ready to rock.

determine initiative and that person gets to go first. ships captain gets his initiative mod. party chooses their highest.. both roll.

you pull the first card. if it is a crew member it will have a d20 table on it. low roll (1-2) indicates something negative. for an individual crew member, they may have knocked themselves out. move that card to the discard pile. for a spell, it may have gone funky, like webbing your own people, move d3 of your cards to discard pile. or it might be something worse, like some of your people get caught in a fireball, move d4 to the void - dead. healing spells retrieve cards. so, if the cleric gets pulled, he can choose to either cast a spell or use a weapon. if he casts a spell, and it is cure light wounds, then he gets to retrieve d4 cards from the void and the spell goes to the void. If the fighter is pulled, he gets to use a weapon card which will allow him to roll to remove a random number of opponent cards to the void. etc. etc. etc.

For characters with armor cards, if their card is pulled to go to the void or discard pile, they can play an armor card to get shuffled back into the active deck instead. out of armor cards? out of luck.

on the other side, same thing. captain is pulled, pull a weapons card, remove random number of cards from players hand to either the void or the discard pile. if a player is one of those pulled for the void, they are placed there temporarily. they can be pulled out by healing as a direct action when the cleric is pulled ie, the cleric could burn a spell and immediately place that players card back into play. if, however, at the end of the combat, the player is still in the void and the cleric is out of spells, then surviving players could check for items (potions, scrolls, etc) that they could spend to "buy" back that character. no items? no spells? start rolling a new character.

At the end of the combat, the party can randomly pick like 2d4 items from the ships discard pile. that includes any special items or crew members to recruit to be pirates. keep the ones they like. ransom those that they don't. the rest are assumed lost.

that is what i have so far. What do you think? I think it would be a pretty simple way to do mass combat. You could definitely scale it up to any large scale combat, including land combat, simply by how you structure the leaders (general versus a captain) and the troops.

I was thinking the ships crew would be a number of cards equal to the number of players cards but with randomly more people on them so that the turns would be even. The larger ship would hit more often (it has more people) but would not do as much damage (not as well trained) and any discrepancies would be compensated for by the party's ability to influence the combat (spells and armor).

Any suggestions? What sounds stupid? What sounds cool? What am I missing?

[KarlBob]

You seem to be including the PCs and the enemy "champions" (usually the enemy captain and a group of officers or marines) in the card game. Am I reading that right?

The S&S modules assume that the PCs will use regular Pathfinder combat against the champions of the enemy ship. The modules also assume that the mass melee between the PCs' crew and the enemy crew will roughly mirror the fight between the PCs and the enemy champions. The awkward part is that they don't really spell out how to apply this "mirror effect" in terms of injuries or deaths among the two crews.

I like the idea of a tool to determine results and casualties in the mass melee, but I don't think most parties would want to give up their PCs' freedom of choice in combat to a shuffled deck of cards.

Particularly at mid-to-high levels, PC combat is much more effective if characters can decide how and when to apply things like spells and feats. Having a chain of actions interrupted by a random draw from the deck could be pretty irritating.

I suggest keeping the card game for the crew battle, but letting the players use Pathfinder combat for the champion fight. If the PCs win their battle, but the enemy crew is winning when it happens, then you can check to see whether the enemy crew's morale breaks, or if the PCs have a new problem on their hands.

[Steff]

Right. I was thinking about how Richard the Lionheart was felled by a crossbow bolt from some castle defender. the problem I guess I have with how it is set up is that in reality, during a large combat, the characters won't always have their choice of opponents. If they and their 30 crew members come upon a galley with a crew of 50, it seems like they would have to fight their way through at least a few layers of opponents before they get to the ship champions as it were.. and then it would be hard to structure the encounter so that it was evenly matched. You want the characters to ultimately prevail but they should have to work for it.

What I was really trying to do was to find a more efficient way for the characters to gain infamy and plunder without me having to constantly gin up fresh encounters. After a while they all start to feel the same and they take up so much time. I thought that a randomly drawn opponent matched up against their "built" character decks would be the ticket.

Thanks for the input. I'll keep plugging away at it.

[Steff]

another thought i had was that i start with the cards and then have a "trigger" card randomly in the deck that designates the start of the pc battle... so they get to do mass combat with everyone else for some random length of time before their cards get pulled for the separate battle with the "heroes" of the other ship. do that as a side effort while still using the decks of cards for the mass combat..

that might be a way to go.

[KarlBob]

Steff wrote:

another thought i had was that i start with the cards and then have a "trigger" card randomly in the deck that designates the start of the pc battle... so they get to do mass combat with everyone else for some random length of time before their cards get pulled for the separate battle with the "heroes" of the other ship. do that as a side effort while still using the decks of cards for the mass combat..

that might be a way to go.

For the purpose you described, I like the trigger idea a lot.

Random enemies definitely make things easier on the GM, and more abstract combat seems less likely to become repetitive and boring. It's so different, it just might work.

[Steff]

once the trigger is pulled, each side draws the next d6 cards and that determines who is in the combat.. ideally for the pc's it would be a mix of pc's and ships crew.. for the other side.. a mix of officers and ship's crew..

since the cards are being played in a round based format, the mass combat keeps going simultaneously.. in theory, you could have 2 or even 3 pc encounters going at once, in different areas of the ship, while the mass combat rages around them.

hmmmmm... thinking..

[KarlBob]

I like where that's going. It makes a lot of sense to me that the PCs might be involved in separate skirmishes all over the ship (or both ships).

Another advantage of the card system is that it doesn't require a 5 foot square for each combatant. Space is at a premium on deck, and I think a lot of real-world shipboard combats happened in much tighter quarters than one combatant per five foot square.

I've been thinking lately about taking basically the opposite approach to yours, and playing out the entire melee in Pathfinder combat. My group has only fought through one boarding action so far. When they did, one of the PCs dispatched the closest enemy officers, then left the rest of the party, jumped onto another boat, and looked for more officers to fight.

The best way I can come up with to impress on a PC the seriousness of that kind of decision is to make the whole melee real, so the solo PC risks being dogpiled by enemy crew members. That brought me face to face with the limitations of combat by five foot squares. It's harder for the enemy crew to drag down a hero under a sea of bodies when they're penalized for packing tighter than one per five foot square.

The card game approach doesn't totally solve the spacing problem, but it certainly lets you put a lone PC up against a big hand of enemy crew members.

[Steff]

for those interested.. here are a few of the concept cards i came up with.. just used some art that came up on the internet so the cards don't suck.. did them in photoshop..

keeping it simple for now.. based each cards stats on the average class level so that the encounters stay roughly consistent as the characters go up in level.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r1e34b3nzn66zxj/AADqN2GgCkWEguailbxY2UwMa

lemme know what you think. how can i improve the concept?

[Steff]

hope i did that right.. lemme know if that link doesn't work.

[G.ame O.perational D.irector]

looks great I'm good with anything that makes running easier.

[Steff]

so.. i have written up the basic rules and created some of the cards... it is obviously a work in progress but I am looking for some feedback from seasoned players. i want to know what works.. what looks good.. what looks stupid. how can i improve this?

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n8efn7iowu52w7a/AABMp_cVm-pIgjYYHTWZ0II1a

I have not loaded all of the files.. but quite a few of them. One of those is the rules.. such as they are.

Anyway.. lemme know what you think. Have many more cards to make and then play testing and yada yada yada but I wanted to get some feedback.. thanks for the time.

Steff