I'm pondering a campaign concept, and considered introducing a naval element; PCs start off doing some missions about ships, then on ships, then they end up getting their own ship. A friend of mine pointed out that the issue with that is the ready availability of Fireballs and other spells with the potential to utterly wreck ships, turning them into more liability than asset in a fight.
After some thinking, we've determined that there's no easy and justifiable fix for this; so I'm curious as to whether there's any other literature on the subject? Did ship v ship and high-magic problems come up with 3.5? In 4e perhaps? How about in other very different systems, say GURPS?
Uh, why not get your ships to fly and contain all your loot and be all magically fortified up? Have higher-end ships be effectively artifacts with all sorts of spell resistance. Or build your ships out of permanencies walls of force, wreathed in permanent stinking clouds. Maybe make it invisible, just for kicks. Fireball only wrecks ships if they're not ironclads, so build turtle ships and laugh as your enemies' boarding maneuvers and flaming blasts fail utterly. Get a transmuter to turn different parts of your ship into lightweight, kersplosion-resistant materials.
tldr; Fight magic with magic.
Remember that historical naval combat focused more on killing the enemy crew than blowing up the enemy ship. Siege weapons weren't strong enough to reliably wipe out a ship until the 1800s. As a result, there wouldn't be much difference between low-magic ship combat and high magic ship combat. Even fireballs don't do much damage to a ship aside from destroying sails. A fire poses a bigger threat to the crew than the ship itself. The big difference is that ship captains would likely hire wizards instead of get more cannons, and ships would always have alternate methods of propulsion in case a sail gets destroyed.
The Skills and Shackles players guide has rules. Having played with them - they aren't good. Your best bet is to just handwave the ship-to-ship stuff and get straight to the boarding.
Maybe have a profession (sailor) check or two to get automatic initiative or avoid combat or something.
PFSRD has a sidebar on a lot of fire spells and related magics on how they relate to shipboard use. keep in mind that ships have hardness, take half elemental damage, are naturally buoyant, are massive piles of HP Also magic is not usually massively common that you will daily be interacting with wizards and magical artifacts. If that is how magic is handled in your game then you account for that; a sea going ship is a huge investment and any proper ship would have defensive wards built into it.
It can be a great excuse to change things up, maybe sails never became the standard means of propulsion? all ships use oars and are of a different scale to allow for better defenses against incoming fire attacks. Or its become common enough for a ship to have a magical device that summons water elementals to push it through the water. Or semi-domesticated giant sea creatures pull ships like sleds.
I ran an extremely fun campaign once where the party captured a Trireme built by giants and rowed by goblin slaves. I think it was something like 580' by 75' with originally having three decks and a single level superstructure. They had a field day dumping almost all available wealth into refitting it into a warship larger than any other in the known world. I ran the game with a lot of players from the Navy and they went really overboard setting up watch rotations, firing positions, contingencies... as well as dedicating cohorts and followers to damage control and setting up pay scales for hirings to man shipboard functions. they eventually turned their forward hold into an aviary for three griffin riders who would drop sacks of alchemist's fire on enemy ships while using the siege engine spells from ultimate combat from the balista deck. yeah, topside catapults, a half deck of balistas around the aviary and davits for raiding craft, they got detailed in the refits. It can really lets players go nuts in a good way since they made long term plans that allowed me to plan out the campaign well in advance. Embrace the What If nature of high fantasy sailing :)
Keep in mind too that the game (and specifically the majority of its spells and rules) were not designed with large scale combat in mind. You run into the same general issue when talking about besieging castles or fortified settlements as well as things like ship to ship combat. I think in reality you'd be looking at a couple of outcomes in such a world. Either there isn't any real defense against such things akin to how do planet earth populations protect themselves against NBC warfare and it becomes a MAD situation where societal pressures are the main deterrence to usage or defenses (in this case spells/magic/ship design) attempt to keep pace in an endless arms race (offense vs defense).
And probably some of both would occur with something like ship to ship combat the tipping point being the relative availability of casters and magic in that world/campaign.
Because of the above thoughts I tend to personally favor an outlook not to different from Torbynes. Namely have fun and encourage player creativity ... let them be the frontrunners in the current cycle of the arms race. Designing and altering ships, researching new spells and creating new items (magical or otherwise) if they seem so inclined. If not one can always handwave reality away and focus on the fun if not so realistic side of things.
Mundane ships serve little purpose in a high magic setting.
Teleportation of mounts is more effective then sailing a ship and cheaper to boot.
They also fail to project power since folks with 6+ PC levels will find wiping on out to be trivial. They only deterrent would be other folks with equivalent PC levels.
In a high fantasy setting ships are useful for cargo runs of less then 500 miles, passenger service, trade routes with many local stops (river boats) and as base for exploration.
If you play using Skull and Shackles rules for ships (which are the general rules for ship health) you're going to find out you can't destroy a ship easily, even if you're really trying.
Ships have over 1000 hp, you just can't destroy them easily.
When my group played Skull and Shackles we found it much easier and more efficient to simply move in as fast as we could and start killing the crew. Which is pretty accurate to life, since actually sinking a ship with another ship was a relatively difficult endeavor. You could disable the sails or rudder to make them easier to catch. But trying to punch enough holes in the hull to sink her....doesn't really happen.
In the PFS campaign world, magic users and magic items are just part of the market and the prices represent their market value. Large-scale commercial ships cost thousands of gold pieces, and so one would expect damage control wizards and clerics to be part of the crew. You'd also expect magic items that protect the ship from damage. Bards were part of real ship crews here on Earth. On Golorian, you'd figure on a large merchant or warship the ship's Bard would be issued a Lyre of Building.
GM Arkwright, you do know about Fire as She Bears do you ? It's FGG's take on a PFRPG nautical combat system, spawned during the Razor Coast kickstarter.
Basically, if ships can't stand up to weapons in common use, the ships will either vanish or be upgraded. Since ships still exist, they must have been upgraded.
Fire resistance is an obvious one. ;)
tonyz wrote: Basically, if ships can't stand up to weapons in common use, the ships will either vanish or be upgraded. Since ships still exist, they must have been upgraded.
Fire resistance is an obvious one. ;)
Wow now I know I type way too much sometimes :D Said more or less what I tried to say above in two sentences.
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