Plunder price and weight


Skull & Shackles


Hello All!

I'm going to GM S&S soon and currently reading a lot of stuff about future campaign.
And I'm really confused with plunder system.
1 point of plunder costs only 1000 gp and has weight of 20000 lb.
So, we must assume that abstract goods plundered on average have cost of 5 cp per 1 lb. For me it breaks immersion, really.

Will it break adventure balance if I reduce plunder weight at least by 50%?
Thank you in advance.

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Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook Subscriber

It may.

I had a severe problem with amounts of treasure when I attempted to run this campaign. Really it got to the point that the only thing that was slowing them down for loot was the amount of treasure their holds could carry.

I also deeply regretted not figuring out how much a day's worth of supplies counted toward that total and keeping track of it better.

By the time my group was 8th level they were already at a WBL of just a little past 10th level.

The ship travel / modification / combat / weather systems of this campaign are pretty much the number 1 thing I recommend to DM's starting this path to fully understand.

The weather tables are the ones I missed for the longest time because they are in the latter half of the 3rd book.

Went off on a tangent there. Skull and Shackles gave me a lot of headaches.


Hm... Daily supplies?
Can you please help me - in what book there is information regardin supplies rules?


I'm not aware of any rules apart from the one plunder for the crew whenever you sell stuff. Everything else has to be eyeballed and should probably be ignored unless your party has exceptionally high expenses.

The weigth of plunder is an abstract average, because most plunder doesn't consist of gold but trading goods with a lot less value per pound. If you still want to reduce the weight you should reduce the ship cargo limit by the same factor as the rules don't really differentiate between weight and space there.

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Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook Subscriber

It's pretty much that. I never found the rules for supplies anywhere. I could have sworn it was somewhere discussed on the boards and here are a few of the links I have that helped me:

Exploring the Shackles

Dudemeister's Wormwood Mutiny

Module Recommendations

Naval Combat for the Whole Party

Villain Rebuild Thread

Use with caution but some of that stuff was very helpful to me.

I came up with a series of rules for supplies where I believe that 1 tonne of food and water equaled 1 days worth of travel. In addition when it seemed appropriate I would also charge the ship every time it entered dock in a major city (1 plunder for crew pay / 1 plunder for repairs / 1 plunder for supplies).

In retrospect maybe 1 plunder / 5 days of supplies might have been a better choice.


The Wormwood Mutiny (book 1) has this to say:
One point of plunder is worth about 1,000 gp, and
takes up 10 tons of cargo capacity, unless otherwise noted.

This is space, not weight.

While I cannot find a source, my party had a 50gp/day cost for supplies for a ship.

/cevah


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I would suggest decoupling Plunder from Gold altogether. As mentioned above, S&S has a lot of headaches (but worth them, good AP).

If you dont make Plunder be worth gold you can still make it be worth other things. In Pathfinder there are few things as efficient in character building as gold.
Reputation, Ship goods and upgrades, paying/hiring crew, bribing other captains, using it to give + to some skill checks (the the infamy checks), buying ship "slots" (thus pacing how many ships they can mantain). These are resourcelike and kinda boring but you could also use them as more volatile general hero points, just not for in combat stuff.

Increase the distance between islands by 3 if you want to mantain a semblance of reality in ship travels.

I banned long distance Teleportation (and Divination) because there is no points to ships and this AP otherwise.

Adopt Troop rules for mass combats if you plan on running something big instead of keeping it toe to toe.

Weather tables as mentioned above. Random ship encounters, while some might think boring, actually getting to see a lot of the dangers of the sea will add a lot of the world. Go through a bestiary search with "aquatic".

Use Automatic Bonus Progression for all NPCs. These were built a long time ago and terribly so. Everyone's a weak mix of fighter rogue. Be prepared to run a lot, a lot, of humanoids (tell your players, they can build pcs around this, like disarm etc).

Use Unchained poisons (SO many poisons in this AP).

Some of my suggestions for this Ap.

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