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I was a player in this campaign for the first 2 books, and unfortunately due to multiple issues the game had to end. We will be going to back to the game at some point but there are two things that just made the game SIGNIFICANTLY less fun, pretty much everything involving the ships.
There has to be some way to make the running of fleets and ship to ship combat actually interactive for more than one player.
I'm considering trying to adapt the kingdom building rules to ships and the like (each boat counts as a settlement, build points become booty, etc.). Resolve a "Sailing" phase once every week at sea, and resolve a "Docking" phase (income) every time you dock at port.
This doesn't really fix the combat though. Has anyone put together a better version of that?
Thanks in advance!
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Somewhere here in the Skull and Shackles forum there are several threads that attempt to make the process of ship to ship combat and dealing with port situations more interesting.
Here is one of them:
Naval Combat for the Whole Party
Here is another:
Exploring the Shackles
A lot of them are incomplete and unbalanced. Also remember that if you try to use these extra systems you have to come up with stats (at least skills) for the officers of enemy ships.
I had difficulty doing that when I attempted to use them.
There is also a system that some poster cribbed from a 3rd Party book to help with crew management. I wouldn't recommend it, however. The difficulty of keeping up with several squads of crew that are always changing, and making them interesting kind of distracted from the main game for me.
Hope that helps.
In all honesty, when I ran S&S, the answer to this question was just for the table as a whole to dedicate themselves to getting better at doing ship to ship as written.
It takes a few tries to learn the rules and everyone needs to care about doing it, but once you're comfortable with the rules, it's not bad at all. Don't give up too quickly. Run the optional ship encounters in the AP bestiaries as extra practice.
I made cheat sheets for the table and we just worked off of those until we got good at it. Most alternate systems are just as complex in their own ways or unbalanced as roktitan said.
If you ignore ship to ship, there is a significant amount of treasure in the AP that you might as well as sell outright, because it's only useful in those scenarios. This includes trying to use the simplified ship to ship combat rules in the Gamemastery Guide. BUT, if you are determined to do something different, I'd recommend what's in the Gamemastery Guide because it works okay.
If you just want to do away with it in total that's doable but removes some depth; just change the ship to ship treasure to something of equal value your PCs will use, I guess.
I liked the basics of the above link, combat for the whole party.
I also experimented with the concept of using a chase deck system as the whole idea seems to be similar. That worked fairly well but my party did more land based adventures so it came up less often than usual.
In our group, they chose to just let me handle it and try to power through the fleet battles quickly.
I was a player in this campaign for the first 2 books, and unfortunately due to multiple issues the game had to end. We will be going to back to the game at some point but there are two things that just made the game SIGNIFICANTLY less fun, pretty much everything involving the ships.
There has to be some way to make the running of fleets and ship to ship combat actually interactive for more than one player.
Er? Everything I've read on it (we haven't started yet) says pretty much to focus on the PCs' (all of them) combats and let everything be a foregone conclusion, like:
The NPCs, named and otherwise, do their bit (any crew losses might be just random numbers of unnameds, depending on the level of the opponent, or your crew's so awesome there aren't any losses) in the background, since the PCs are the stars.
We'll have a Swashbuckler, a Sorceress, a Fighter (eventual Master Gunner), a Cleric, and a Rogue. Seems to me, there's something for everyone there. Once a boarding action begins and the PCs are on one ship or another, it's basically a fight on land (with the occasional worries about falling overboard to hungry predators, of course ;->). Don't sweat the details, IMHO, or if it happens to arise, I'll follow Shaun's advice. :D
'Cause seriously, a pirate AP without taking ships is like a day without sunshine. ;)
LB
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You might want to consider using the third-party ship-to-ship combat system Fire As She Bears! from Frog God Games, for their Razor Coast campaign setting/adventure path.
By all accounts, it's much more robust and fun to play system than the official Paizo rules.
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For what it's worth, Fire as She Bears has great reviews. I haven't tried it myself, though.
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My group also used the ship-to-ship combat as presented in the S&S Player's Guide and they really liked it; by the end of the campaign they were sad that there wasn't more opportunities to use the rules in the campaign because they wanted to do more single ship-on-ship battles rather than the fleet battles at the end of the campaign.
They were so enthusiastic that they coated their ship's ram in Glaucite (the Iron/Adamantine alloy) in preparation for ramming more ships.
Our group ignores the ship combat rules unless the other ship is clearly superior, which hasn't occured so far (save for the dominator encounter with special rules).
Instead we use a very simple chase system using opposed sailing checks (modified by the ships speed) to see if the party reaches the ship and skip straight to the boarding after that.
As there are 2 players with maxed sailing I don't feel like the fights would even be exciting and rather reward their investment in other places.
