Hi all
I am planning a sea encounter using the Sea Scourge monster:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/oozes/sea-scourge/
The monster has an Acid Jet ability that causes 2d8 points of damage. The description is only referring to damage to creatures, not inanimate objects. However, in the monster's description it specifically says:
A sea scourge’s acid is capable of dissolving wood in addition to flesh and bone, making it a particularly dangerous threat to most boats.
The ship the PC's are sailing on has 900 HP. So just based on this, the Acid Jet can't significantly effect it. However, based on the description above, the creature does have the capability to potentially destroy sea-going vessels or at least make a hole big enough to make them drown. I am thinking of the movie Alien, where damaging the creature causes it to spew acid, which then trickles down all the levels of the ship, causing damage.
What would you say would be the right way of approaching this? Would a single hit with the Acid Jet be enough for potential drowning? Should I have some kind of ticking clock for the PC's to work against in order to contain the damage, like in Alien? Would you set a certain amount of damage, beyond it the ship drowns? There is just a certain disconnect between the actual damage the creature inflicts and its supposed capability of drowning a ship.
Thanks.
Firstly I would point out that boat and ship are not the same thing.
That being said let's try to figure this one out. So 2d8 Acid damage, and with the note about it dissolving wood I would give it the ability to ignore hardness. So we are looking at 10hp per inch. I would guess that You are not going to find much thicker sections on the hull than 6 inches, and 3-4 is likely. So we have 30-60hp to deal with to do a significant hole that will have to be dealt with or the ship will sink.
Since the average damage is 9 and after the first stream it will take 2.5 rounds to use it again. So in the first 6 seconds it has done 9 damage, and then on average it will do another 9 damage every additional 15 seconds. So going with the HP numbers from before, we can deduce that the time taken to create a significant hole is 51-96 seconds(on average). I would call that a rather significant threath even to a ship. So essentially the crew of the ship is on a time limit. Unless they decide to just escape which is an option given the swim speed is mere 20ft.
Naturally you should come up with rules for bailing water out too, and how fast water is coming in etc.
Interesting! Thanks for the analysis. These are the tactics I came up with so far for the creature:
Tactics: The Sea Scourge ambushes the ship and begin climbing on it. It will take 3 rounds for it to reach the deck.
If the Scourge is detected while climbing, it will attack with its slams, first taking out hapless NPC crew members before attacking the PC’s. If a PC stands directly above it, though, it will attack it.
Once on the deck, the ooze immediately uses Acid Jet on everybody that is in front of it, also damaging the boat.
If there are less than 5 persons left on deck, it will begin to use Engulf. If more than 5 people, it will continue attacking with slams until there are 5 or less left.
If brought below 20 HP, the Ooze retreats to the side of the boat, starts to climb down, and begins dissolving it with acid.
The ooze fights until destroyed.
Now, based on what you wrote above, 51-96 seconds gives us between 8-16 rounds. Seeing as the Ooze's AC is only 7, I would venture that the PC's. all level 4, have a good chance of hitting it every round (unless they roll really poorly, or are grabbed/engulfed). So it might not even reach round 8. But notice that tactics say the creature will retreat and try to destroy the ship by avoiding conflict with the PC's when it's taken enough damage.
So it can go either way.
I'll set up some timer for the removal of water/plugging of hole. It would really depend on the PC's actions, I feel. But there will be a point of no return where all they can do is escape and watch their ship go down.
As to the ship/boat thing. Yes, I was aware of it, but it seems to me a ship can still take significant damage to its hall from an acid attack such as this, the only difference between it and a boat is that it takes it much longer to be damaged irrecoverably and sink.
Thoughts?
I'd agree with the first response. Also I'd assume any acid damage done to the exterior hull would be considered 'washed off' for any continuous damage.
If an ooze can 'stick' to a hull it can damage just that 5ft section and bodily prevent wash off.
As I recall typically objects take half damage from spell effect typed damage such as fire or electrical. Acid Arrow, Fireball, etc.
Amusingly Fabricate is probably the most dangerous spell to seagoing vessels.
Azothath wrote: Amusingly Fabricate is probably the most dangerous spell to seagoing vessels. How come?
Because you don't damage anything with Fabricate, but you can turn part of the boat in to, say, a house. Instant hole.
You are really trying to model a situation that is only glancingly covered by RAW. It's what GMs do every day to plan out an encounter and envision possible lines of tactical engagement and keep things reasonably believable(realistic).
I usually go with real world physical realities and then fit it into the game model. It's more complicated but more realistic and you have to decide how that fits within the game model, thus involves non-RAW aspects.
On ooze tactics... they aint smart (usually). It would only attack a ship if it had successfully eaten tasty objects in one before and thus has learned these big wooden floaty things are filled with non-pinching, non-biting, non-stinging meat-bags without shells. Yummy.
People on board are food objects(meat-bags). It goes on top, tastes things, acid jets things in the way or that hurt it, engulf/eat meat-bag, take off to safe area if getting hurt.
Azothath wrote: People on board are food objects(meat-bags). It goes on top, tastes things, acid jets things in the way or that hurt it, engulf/eat meat-bag, take off to safe area if getting hurt. Yeah, that's what I was going for. I might let it retreat if dropped below 10.
When I originally planned the encounter, the idea was for the ooze to drown the ship. But since then things have happened in the campaign where it's not really needed anymore, so I'm gonna give the PC's a fighting chance to save their ship. And looking at the analysis above, I was probably too confident anyway in the ooze's ability to succeed with it so easily.
However, I struggle with coming up with a reliable way to calculate rate of water coming in through a breach in the hull. I might have to play this one by ear. If enough damage has been generated, and enough rounds have passed, I might just initiate a timer based on feel.
My hope is for the PC's to finish the creature off before it does any real damage, but anything could happen.
The monster description and the actual mechanics of boats in Pathfinder aren't really compatible.
And by that I mean, it totally works just fine but it's not a serious threat to the boat. In fact most combat isn't much of a threat to a boat. When my group played skull and shackles basically every ship to ship combat (not mass naval combat rules) went like this:
1) They fire at us
2) Us laughing
3) Captain orders ramming speed
4) We crash our boat into their boat
5) We begin boarding an actual combat
Actual ship to ship combat just takes forever, the weapons don't do enough damage, and it becomes more just an endurance test against the tedium as it becomes needlessly boring.
So how do you run this combat?
As the previous poster mentions, have it "attack the boat" and when the crew begins to notice they start attacking. Either the monster goes onto the boat and tries to drag people off, or people go into the water. Either way attacking the boat should really just be to get the attention of the crew.
Edit: It looks like you're trying to figure out how a ship might be sunk by the acid jet...I can't remember the exact rules, look in skull and shackles but I'm pretty sure a ship simply doesn't even begin sinking until it reaches 0 hp. That's just the rules.They didn't want ships to be made of paper mache and instantly sink at the first sign of damage, the problem being is that they're currently too hard to sink. But the system I've seen you propose are probably too easy to cause the ship to sink.
But doesn't it make sense that when a hole is burned through the hull of the ship, then assuming the hole is big enough, water will start rushing onto the boat? It doesn't make sense to me that a ship only starts sinking when it gets to 0 hp, the ship used in our campaign has 900 hit points! Does it mean it's unsinkable? What happens if it gets into the Eye of Adendego? Some situations simply defy the rules as written.
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And it doesn't make sense that a character doesn't suffer any ill effects of hit point damage until he's reduced to 0 HP, but here we are.
You could make the creature more of a nuisance by having it be sneaky.
What if it attached it's self to the bottom of the ship like a barnacle. Then it bores a hole through the bottom of the ship that is large enough for the creature to slip though. All of which can easily happen undetected.
Once it's inside the ship it may make noise in it's attempts to rummage about, all the while (completely by accident) plugging the hole with it's own body. Once it's discovered the pcs not only have to deal with the threat of the monster, but the consequences of killing it.
This still fits with the idea of it being a threat to ships since if this sort of thing goes unnoticed and the ooze leaves the general area of its' entry point, a ship can easily take on an alarming amount of water without anyone realizing what's happening.
Heck, you could even have it hide below decks and after the mysterious hole is fixed, crew members could start getting picked off one by one.
Also, it's actually pretty difficult to sink a wooden boat. Depending on the size, type of craft, method of construction, and what said boat is carrying in terms of cargo, a hole say a foot across might not even 'sink' it so much as founder it and leave it only a little bit sunk. Like, most of it would still be above water, just un-sailable.
Lynos wrote: But doesn't it make sense that when a hole is burned through the hull of the ship, then assuming the hole is big enough, water will start rushing onto the boat? It doesn't make sense to me that a ship only starts sinking when it gets to 0 hp, the ship used in our campaign has 900 hit points! Does it mean it's unsinkable? What happens if it gets into the Eye of Adendego? Some situations simply defy the rules as written. As Blaphers mentioned, as I stated in my previous post, yes ships are basically unsinkable and it's the same sort of problem as "characters don't get weaker as they take damage". It doesn't provide realism. But Pathfinder was never meant to provide realism.
Take a look at Skull and Shackles rules for ship to ship combat, and you can potentially extrapolate to rules for ship vs monster, but the monster is probably never going to pose a serious risk of sinking the ship unless the PCs just ignore it.
You can have the ooze drifting on the surface, where it may or may not be spotted by any lookouts. It attaches to the hull, but not necessarily below the waterline, but at the waterline. It then begins to burn a hole into the hull (to get at tasty innards that it knows are inside such tough wooden shells). If someone spots it, then they can attack it on the hull and then it resorts to moving over the rail and attacking until it takes too much damage and is driven off.
If no lookouts spot it, just assume it gets inside and, depending on what area it's in, starts eating food supplies or damaging crates to investigate what might be in them (looking for food of course, not intelligently searching). Otherwise, it creeps out in the corridors and quarters until it's defeated in the cramped spaces. During this time, you don't have to worry about sinking unless you want to, since the hole is at the waterline, there will be water coming in, depending on the waves and the ship's rise and fall, but it doesn't have to seem like a bomb countdown in the last 60 seconds. If things in the fight are going easy, or the PCs are being overly-cautious, then you can make it more desperate to get the scene moving. If the scene is going well (game-wise), and you don't need to have everyone freaking out, then you have an easy-enough description that you can stretch out the time by just stating that the damage is harming the ship's maneuverability and seaworthiness, but it isn't foundering yet.
Thanks guys for all the great inputs and ideas!
I did not consider the ooze entering the ship unnoticed and just skulking there. It's interesting, but having it bore a hole right from the get-go, and if it moves then water will be rushing in... a bit dangerous, but I guess it can be done if handled carefully. Only thing is you need some reason for PC's to venture down there (hearing a noise is probably the default incentive).
As for HP rules, I would compare a ship with 900 HP getting a big hole in it to a character suffering a Bleed condition. That's the best I've got.
And even with a bleed condition you don't go unconscious until you hit 0
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