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I downloaded the Skulls and Shackles player guide. And I was disapointed. I'm not criticizing the campaign. Just the ship battle rules.
While I like seeing firearms and cannons in the rules, I dislike the technology level: we jump from the middle ages to the XVIII century. We directly have fragates! Even we have asomewhat ridiculous image of crossbowmen cannon-like shoting! Instead of having matchlock muskets or similar, you can shot every turn. That's not a musket, that's a Lee-Enfield rifle.
But the worst it's a complete lack of boarding rules. Pirates are all about grapples, jumping to the other's deck. Fighting to death, covering the planks with blood... Destroying the enemy ship with ballistas and cannons doesn't bring any money.
So I think Paizo should go back to the middle ages and bring rules of galleys, trirremes and dromons. Arrows, grapples and boarding, more boarding! Perhaps in the Shackles they use cannons and fragates, but I hope Katapesh and Vudra still have place for RE Howard' like piracy! More Lepanto than Trafalgar...
Hey there. First, this should probably be in Skulls and Shackles section, where you will find a lot of posts addressing these sort of topics.
On to the meat!
I would recommend, as many have before, to use Fire As She Bears (FASB) rules. They are simple, very plug in and incredibly solid and fun.
They offer something for everyone to do in ship battles, they offer a system for crew fighting and a way to make ships that makes more sense.
There is a fantastic topic around in the S&S section about using loyalty-morale for crew boardings in the background. FASB can be used for pre-cannon times either. It's just fantastic.
Also, considering it's Golarion and Pathfinder..ship realism...not to be too expected. You've got a world where Galleys, 1700s frigates and fireball hurling mages HAVE to coexist.
I would recommend having a look at One Piece, a manga about "pirates" (not really) but there you see a lot of different things together from huge warships to strange super powers.
I love naval history and accuracy. I do make my living in these vessels often and you just can't go all historical in pathfinder.
Why fire a cannon when you can cast Black Tentacles?
In closing, please have a look at S&S Ap subsection for a myriad of options, opinions and solutions to these issues.
I downloaded the Skulls and Shackles player guide. And I was disapointed. I'm not criticizing the campaign. Just the ship battle rules.
While I like seeing firearms and cannons in the rules, I dislike the technology level: we jump from the middle ages to the XVIII century. We directly have fragates! Even we have asomewhat ridiculous image of crossbowmen cannon-like shoting! Instead of having matchlock muskets or similar, you can shot every turn. That's not a musket, that's a Lee-Enfield rifle.
But the worst it's a complete lack of boarding rules. Pirates are all about grapples, jumping to the other's deck. Fighting to death, covering the planks with blood... Destroying the enemy ship with ballistas and cannons doesn't bring any money.
So I think Paizo should go back to the middle ages and bring rules of galleys, trirremes and dromons. Arrows, grapples and boarding, more boarding! Perhaps in the Shackles they use cannons and fragates, but I hope Katapesh and Vudra still have place for RE Howard' like piracy! More Lepanto than Trafalgar...
While I don't see anything wrong with having naval combat rules appropriate for Medieval times, the reason the pirates tend to be closer to age of sail than middle ages is simply because pirates of that time period are the most iconic and the type of pirates most people immediately think of. People who are really psyched for a pirate game are probably wanting the themes associated with that sort of setting
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. One Piece is definitely about pirates.
To the op. You may find things easier if you drop the idea and was ever about the middle ages. People fixated on find but ignore player armor 2h weapons etc.
A anyhow you need to realize areas of golarion are presented in themes that easily capture players imaginations. For pirates this is the new world pirate. Rather than say 14th century Herman pirates in the Baltic.
Its best to just ignore the parts you don't want. But expect most of your playets will think jack sparrow.
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I'm playing in a Skull and Shackles game; honestly, we toyed around with the ship-to-ship combat rules for a while, but we got really bored really fast. We all kept looking at the GM going "can we just catch up to them, board them, and kill them all already?"
Seventeen rounds of exchanging catapult and ballista firing is a phenomenal snooze fest, take my word for it.
In the end, our GM just kinda hand-waved past all the "destroy their sails so they can't escape" and the like, and moved on to the part where we actually play Pathfinder and boarded the ships.
Skull and Shackles does in fact have quite a bit in it about grapple hooks and boarding. There is even a training session for the PCs on doing just that.
I suggest you reread the rules before complaining about them:
"When the crew of one ship wishes to board an enemy ship and attack its crew, they must first grapple the other ship. To grapple, the two ships must be within 30 feet of one another (in other words, they must be in adjacent squares on the battle mat). If both pilots want to grapple, grappling is automatically successful. The two crews throw out grappling lines and draw the ships together. If both ships are reduced to a speed of 0 as the result of a ramming maneuver, they are also considered grappled."
It continues from there.
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People learn the secrets of guns, realize how often they misfire unless you spend a lot of time training on how to prevent misfires (i.e. take levels in gunslinger), realize how expensive ammunition and firearms are, and decide to stick to bows, which still do tons of damage without all the investment required for firearms.
Answering to Dave Justus: yes, the rules says something about throwing grapples, etc. But after that? No rules of mass combat, defending the wood castles on the bridge, throwing greek fire from the masts, etc.
I do agree. The rules for ALL ship combat within pathfinder are lacking, canons or no canons. I would certainly like to know what good having a forecastle to the brim with archers does, versus not having one. At the moment, there isnt a big difference.
The combat in the background idea works well enough, however I would like your decisions and resources to matter in how that combat goes, and the outcome of it affecting your own PC-focused combat.Implementation of corvus, actual ramming ships that aim to sink opponents rather than grapple, fire ships (immolation ships), fortress ships, Sea-to-Land and Land-to-Sea modifiers/effects, a better implementation of magic at sea.
I insist though, FASB has many things that can be used in all ages of sail, or easily modified, and they are vastly superior to anything pathfinder has made on the subject.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. One Piece is definitely about pirates.
We need to have "the talk"..come, sit here...
One of Paizo's most recent releases, Ships of The Inner Sea, is 100% ships and pirates WITHOUT guns. Not a one to be found. This drives me nuts about the book, but you may find it helpful, OP.
One Piece is a good example of a high fantasy series about pirates with random ships pulled from Various Eras, High level highly specialized Superpowers, and a good example of how you can run Mythic Skull and Shackles because every captain as well as every major officer or every straw hat crew member is loaded with mythic tiers and advanced template stacking.
Luffy might not be the baddest captain around, but he is one of the only captains whose entire crew is loaded with mythic tiers. despite having the smallest crew in the entire series.
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Seventeen rounds of exchanging catapult and ballista firing is a phenomenal snooze fest, take my word for it.
How on earth do you get 17 rounds of fire before boarding actions take place? The way the ship to ship encounter rules are written, you almost always start out within ramming distance of the enemy ship.
Roll initiative. Ram. Board. That's all that EVER happens!
How on earth do you get 17 rounds of fire before boarding actions take place? The way the ship to ship encounter rules are written, you almost always start out within ramming distance of the enemy ship.
This is one aspect I dont like about Pathfinder rules. Seldomly at sea would things start off so suddenly. Ships would see each other miles ahead, and chase for a whole day and easily loose track on the night.
Putting this into rules and actual play could potentially become a drudgery I understand. However, a simplified chart corresponding to ship speed, maneuverability and sailing ingenuity could go a long way.
17 rounds of ballista firing however would make for a dead crew or a sunken ship (depending what rules you follow, FASB is far deadlier to the ships).
The underlying problem here is that the sea is such a fickle and complex battlefield with many nuances that are hard to put down in paper, or to actually explain. Naval battle tactics are not an easy topic to jump into.
Answering to Dave Justus: yes, the rules says something about throwing grapples, etc. But after that? No rules of mass combat, defending the wood castles on the bridge, throwing greek fire from the masts, etc.
'Mass combat' for single ship duels is covered by combat in the background. While I get you might not like that, I think it does work pretty well from a game play perspective. If you want the crews more involved, I suggest you look at the troop subtype and make 'crew' troops to handle that while keeping the number of combatants manageable.
Pathfinder already has rules for cover, higher ground etc. These still apply whether you are on a ship or not, and I think provide sufficient allowance these advantages. Similarly alchemist fire and splash weapons are also covered.
My players quickly determined, mathematically, that if you filled all of the ship's slots with light ballista, you could destroy the sails of most any enemy ship in just two volleys.
Seventeen rounds of exchanging catapult and ballista firing is a phenomenal snooze fest, take my word for it.How on earth do you get 17 rounds of fire before boarding actions take place? The way the ship to ship encounter rules are written, you almost always start out within ramming distance of the enemy ship.
Roll initiative. Ram. Board. That's all that EVER happens!
While I agree that 17 is crazy long, you can never ram and board with a single action with the minimum starting distance of 90 feet and an initial speed of 30. Even if you end up in a good starting position it takes a couple rounds to close and board most of the time.
Of course our group usually just dimension doored onto the enemy ship directly.
Seventeen rounds of exchanging catapult and ballista firing is a phenomenal snooze fest, take my word for it.How on earth do you get 17 rounds of fire before boarding actions take place? The way the ship to ship encounter rules are written, you almost always start out within ramming distance of the enemy ship.
Roll initiative. Ram. Board. That's all that EVER happens!
Maybe they fail piloting checks a lot?
People learn the secrets of guns, realize how often they misfire unless you spend a lot of time training on how to prevent misfires (i.e. take levels in gunslinger), realize how expensive ammunition and firearms are, and decide to stick to bows, which still do tons of damage without all the investment required for firearms.
In most of my typical PF games I run, guns just aren't used at all, but when I do include guns, I'm all in and change some of the PF parameters regarding guns - which primarily means I eliminate the prohibitive cost to guns and ammo, making guns common and relatively cheap to use. Of course I never use the Golarian setting in my games, so what might be true or not true in Golarian usually has no reflection in settings I play.
While I haven't run Skull and Shackles, I have run several pirate based games. Now that I have FASB, which I agree is cannon based ship fighting and not ballista and catapults, I actually prefer to run a pirate ship combat with cannon and not ballista. Other differences between Skull and Shackles and FASB include ship speed - FASB ships are faster. Again, I haven't run the AP, but if I did, I'd convert all ships combat to guns and cannon and eliminate non-gunpowder seige weapons.
While I agree that 17 is crazy long, you can never ram and board with a single action with the minimum starting distance of 90 feet and an initial speed of 30. Even if you end up in a good starting position it takes a couple rounds to close and board most of the time.
Of course our group usually just dimension doored onto the enemy ship directly.
The rules in the Player's Guide specifically state that you "roll 1d4+2 to determine the number of squares on the battle mat between the two ships."
That means, at best, ship to ship combat will always begin between 90 and 180 feet apart.
Furthermore, at the beginning of every round, the pilots make opposed checks to see who has the upper-hand. For every 5 by which you beat the other pilot, you can reposition your ship by one square.
I can't speak for your players, but my players almost always won the upper hand by a dozen points, allowing them to close that gap substantially before having to spend any actions at all!
(And yes, they just used teleport spells too once they had access to them.)
You should look up the Hanse and the Vitalienbrothers, if you want to know more about medieval pirates. The Hanse was a trade-alliance between several coast-cities in northern Europe, founded in the 12.Century, and they were always threatened by pirates like the Vitalienbrothers. The tactic was mostly using bows and crossbows to soften the defense, and then the pirates would board the ship. Ballistas were common, mostly used to threaten the other ships with flaming arrows, or to tie the ships together. Cannons were uncommon and smaller than the ones used in the carribean. They were mostly used to demoralize the other crew or to destroy the rudder. Catapults however were never used, too heavy ammunition, too innacurate, and if they hit, they were most likely to sink the ship the pirates wanted to plunder. I think the only time catapults played a role in naval warfare was during the height of the Roman Empire.
A especially famous pirate of this time was Klaus Stoertebecker. Legend tells, that after being captured, he bargained, that every member of his crew he would walk past after execution was to be released. After he was decapitated, his corpse rose, and started walking around. He managed to safe half his crew, before an executioner put a chair in his way, which he fell over. Thus the rest of his crew was killed.
Alright, so I'm looking to start up a short pirate game in a couple o months. In the campaign there will be dragoner's (like whalers, but for dragons), piates, corsairs, privateers, etc. What resources should I be looking into (since it seems PF is lackin in good pirate rules).
How's about Razor Coast? I'll definitely be looking into FASB, but what else? Should I just homebrew some rules?
You should look up the Hanse and the Vitalienbrothers, ...
The northern european pirates are indeed very interesting. You also have the Barbary pirates in the mediterranean which had to be fought in wars eventually.
The thing with piracy is, we dont actually know that much. The piracy there was got very little doccumented (no official writings or few onboard/related that would write their procedures down). In comparison, they New World piracy was extremely doccumented; often the captains having been mariners or people of wealth, in an age where literacy was more common and so was the practice of writing things down.
There is also very little information of piracy world wide. We have a very European-centric mentality to all of this, including the sailing itself (just have a look at how poorly understood pacific sailing was to the european colonists).
In Pathfinder, I am still torn whether to use ship to ship combat at all. Adding an extra lair of rules is not something (most) of the table will appreciate, so it should be run mostly from the GM, elucidating which choices they have in a simple enough manner, informing the players in a qualitative/descriptive way how the battle is going.
I will add that I think that the Ship to Ship combat should be used in certain encounters. For example, they fight two ships. One of them might get grappled, but the other one is free to siege the PC's ship. Then you need rules.
Shane LeRose: Have a look at the Skull & Shackles AP section of these boards, there are a lot of resources there.
The northern european pirates are indeed very interesting. You also have the Barbary pirates in the mediterranean which had to be fought in wars eventually.
The Barbary Pirates are interesting, though depending on the era they were more like coastal raiders than "proper" pirates. Probably because mediterranean piracy in general was a very slave-driven enterprise on account of how manpower-hungry galleys are.
Seventeen rounds of exchanging catapult and ballista firing is a phenomenal snooze fest, take my word for it.How on earth do you get 17 rounds of fire before boarding actions take place? The way the ship to ship encounter rules are written, you almost always start out within ramming distance of the enemy ship.
Roll initiative. Ram. Board. That's all that EVER happens!
Can verify. That's all we ever did.
At the very beginning it was like...
"Okay we have one catapult and 3 light ballista. And with these it will take...holy crap thats a lot of rounds to do any significant damage to it. Um, how fast does our ship move? Oh really? That much? How far are they? Really? Okay, well we ram them and hop over the rails and start killing."
As far as small unimportant crewman on both sides we just kind of assumed our crew hurt them, their crew hurt our crew but for the sake of not letting it bog down the table we just sort of hand waved it all. They were unimportant and weren't going to do anything significant to us.
Also, as far as guns and cannons are concerned the only place where they are explicitly required was for Kerdak Bonefist and Harrigan. Basically Kerdak's ship is the only one in the shackles with cannons (unless you want it not to be). This helps keep them mysterious without really challenging the theme too much. I'm pretty sure there was even a blurb in the first book about how you could easily add or remove guns and cannons from the adventure.
I will say fleet battles are absolutely terrible. They leave players out if they don't invest in Charisma because you actually become more of a liability than you're worth. Which means (at least for our group) it was essentially two of our 5 players rolling dice for at least 30 minutes to resolve the fleet battle. It was awful. The other 2 players and myself literally walked away from the table for most of the duration because we weren't needed one bit. Anything that removes players from the game in that way is crap.
The other annoying fact I've found is incorporating your crew and the enemy crew beyond the officers in the actual boarding combat. It's just too many people.
It got to where our GM just ignored their side and our side except for major players, and said all movement was difficult terrain because of how many people were engaged in a mass-melee, and all parties were assumed to be in-melee for the purposes of precise shot, etc. No AoOs were taken by these invisible, ignored NPCs, 'cause they were wasting their one AoO on the other invisible NPCs. Kill the officers, the other crew immediately surrenders.
Don't forget that Europeans aren't the only ones to field pirates, Japan/Korea/China had a centuries long pirate tradition, centered around wakou pirates - see Samurai Archives on this.
I would definitely use Fire As She Bears over Skull and Shackle ship to ship combat rules - as they are far less boring, since all PCs participate in ship combat, not just one PC and GM playing a side game. And while I can understand preferring siege weapons that aren't cannon (as emphasized in FASB rules), you could either switch out cannons with ballista and other normal siege weapons easily enough, or keep the cannons as it is less boring to be able to shoot a cannon more frequently, than the additional rounds required to load a non-cannon siege weapon (if you're looking for less boring sea combat, keep the cannons.)
Since many Japanese merchant ships were considered to also be pirates, the Japanese government in early 16th century attempted to combat piracy activity by building red seal ships which were authorized armed merchant vessels, holding an official seal by the Shogunate for trade, while fighting pirate ships it runs into on the voyage. Red seal ships were the first Japanese ships to field cannons.
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A especially famous pirate of this time was Klaus Stoertebecker. Legend tells, that after being captured, he bargained, that every member of his crew he would walk past after execution was to be released. After he was decapitated, his corpse rose, and started walking around. He managed to safe half his crew, before an executioner put a chair in his way, which he fell over. Thus the rest of his crew was killed.
I knew the Hanse existed, but knew nothing about the Vitalien.
I know more about the Ancient age naval warfare. They used corvus (bridges to board enemy ships) and harpoons to catch and pull enemy ships.
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Don't forget that Europeans aren't the only ones to field pirates, Japan/Korea/China had a centuries long pirate tradition, centered around wakou pirates - see Samurai Archives on this.
FASB is interesting, but not what I'm looking for.
Good points about old Japan.
Also Korean used "turtle ships", real dreadnoughts for medieval times.
I think I found what I wanted in an old AD&D book: Of ships and the Sea.
Oh. Could we get a description/synopsis of how it works and what sort of things it focuses on? I am skeptical to buying more ship battle rules if they arent quite amazing by this point :P
Just gonna jump in to emphasize that firearms/cannons are optional in S&S. The default is you don't have them (except for some rare cases) and there are a bunch of sidebars stating where you can put more in.
I'm also gonna say that I guess, I am in the minority - I ran a ship-to-ship encounter in my pirate-themed campaign and they loved it! Now, it wasn't a battle, it was a chase where they had to escape the law but it worked really well.
Now, I did notice that the PC who drives is the one getting all the attention. So, I am looking for ways to make all the PCs useful/invested but it was a small skirmish type encounter so it wasn't too bad for a first run.
What I don't like are the ship stats. Right now, a 'Sailing Ship' covers everything from a sloop to well.. much bigger. It's a lack of variation and I find it causing me trouble. Compared to most ships available, the PC's boat is small and there is no accurate way to reflect that.
Of course, I can't expect to have individual stats for every ship there was/is but I would like to see a system that is maybe broken down by the number of masts? 1 masted ships have base stats of X, 2 masts have base stats Y/.. that kind of thing.
I'll have to check out FASB and Ships of the Inner Sea though..
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I think I found what I wanted in an old AD&D book: Of ships and the Sea.Oh. Could we get a description/synopsis of how it works and what sort of things it focuses on? I am skeptical to buying more ship battle rules if they arent quite amazing by this point :P
Basicaly it gives rules of seamanship and detailed battle rules of ships, includign critical results (like crushing enemy oars, cuting its sail's ropes, etc), and mass combat boarding. It's failry complete.