I have made a house rule to have the animal companions go on the same turn as their owners. This made turns a lot quicker, but I feel this is actually hurting the party in the tactics department.
It's the same for my enemies. I put them all the same order as when I first started the campaign I would have up to 10 enemies in a huge army type scenario. It was a pain to keep track of them all so I lumped them all together on 1 initiative.
I am thinking of going back to the previous way is this correct?
Second question.
When running ship combat, do I need to have the enemy ship unable to move in order for the PCs to board?
I have made a house rule to have the animal companions go on the same turn as their owners. This made turns a lot quicker, but I feel this is actually hurting the party in the tactics department.
This is a very standard houserule. Don't feel bad about using it, but if the players want to be more tactical, IMHO it wouldn't hurt to give them (between combats of course) the choice of whether to use separate initiative for their pet or not.
It's the same for my enemies. I put them all the same order as when I first started the campaign I would have up to 10 enemies in a huge army type scenario. It was a pain to keep track of them all so I lumped them all together on 1 initiative.
I am thinking of going back to the previous way is this correct?
The "correct" (RAW) method is to give each creature its own initiative. I recommend trying to stick with this if you can, otherwise the tactical situation changes all at once in a weird way.
Second question.
When running ship combat, do I need to have the enemy ship unable to move in order for the PCs to board?
I don't see why that would be the case. Certainly IRL (or at least fiction) pirates board moving ships. If you can get a grappling hook up there you can climb the rope whether the ship is moving or not. Is that what you're talking about?
Thanks Fuzzy.
I mostly had the ship question as their current ship is really fast and can catch enemy ships really quickly and makes their Seige Engineer almost useless when they are in ship combat.
Perhaps I can have the enemy ship pick up speed faster in order to give them more time in ship to ship combat before boarding.
On my first ship I was on our VBSS team. We boarded a few ships for training, , what matters most is relative motion. You want the the relative motion between the vessel you are leaving and the one you are boarding to be as little as possible. That said, the faster both ships/boats are going, the less safe the boarding. When we did boardings we wanted the ship to be boarded to come to "bare steerageway" or the minimum speed at which a ship may be kept on her course.
There are still a lot of ship boardings done. Mostly in counter piracy type situations. There is still a significant amount of piracy off the Horn of Africa.
Bottom line is boarding would be easiest if both ships were going about the same speed in the same direction while next to each other. Coming to a dead stop would be unnescessary.
In respect of initiative I tend to try to compromise and split large (8-10) groups of creatures into 2-3 smaller groups.
I find even when separate initiatives for ACs are permitted most players delay to the lower initiative anyway so it hasn't made any difference in my games.
The other point to consider about boarding while in motion is that the ship being boarded can maneuver as people try and cross over so that small gap suddently gets bigger and now you are between the 2 hulls and being crushed to death.
Better to grapple and hold the ships together before boarding , most historical boarding actions occurred when ships had grappled , rammed or were stationary and adjacent to each other
I know the pain of running multiple creatures on Initiative order. The big downside to lumping them all together is that your players will suffer all their attacks at once instead of getting to react between their actions. This can increase the chance of player death.
In respect to animal companions, typically I rule that the animal delays their turn until after their owner's turn unless specifically given an order via Handle Animal to the contrary. This keeps things a bit simpler.
Usually I group enemies together so that there's 2-4 points for them in the initiative order (e.g. boss, lieutenant, mooks; e.g.2. boss, main group, reserve).