Quote from: Bren;909006And lots of galleys throughout history were rowed by paid freemen.

Very true.

Ben Hur has a lot to answer for, with Chuck Heston being made a galley slave by the Romans, establishing the idea of galley slaves being a given in the ancient world. In antiquity rowers were relatively highly paid and respected skilled workers, who fought with the marines in any boarding action if two ships were locked together. I have a book called Gunpowder and Galleys (written by a USAF officer) which goes into great technical detail about 16th century naval warfare in  the Med. Apparently galley slaves became a thing with both Christian and Moslem fleets when inflation (caused by the Spanish flooding world economies with New World gold) pushed up the price of grain so much that the cost of free rowers wages made then too expensive to employ.

So, the fleet gets worse rowers but you now have somewhere to put prisoners of war and religious non-conformists.

Personally I think a game set on a ship sailing the wine dark seas of ancient Greece would be a blast. A different island or port each session, a quest for a magical artefact or just a monster of the week episodic game. Or you could do a simulation of real bronze age history. In fact I've got a half prepared set of games doing just this (the monster of the week version that is) for the BoL supplement Heroes of Hellas.

Oh, and as for endless sea voyages, in the world of ancient galleys and sailing vessels, you rarely sailed out of sight of land for long periods and usually beached your vessel every night on a convenient beach before you bedded down.

Quote from: Gruntfuttock;909062Ben Hur has a lot to answer for...

I was thinking the exact same thing...curse you General Lew Wallace!

QuoteI have a book called Gunpowder and Galleys (written by a USAF officer) which goes into great technical detail about 16th century naval warfare in  the Med. Apparently galley slaves became a thing with both Christian and Moslem fleets when inflation (caused by the Spanish flooding world economies with New World gold) pushed up the price of grain so much that the cost of free rowers wages made then too expensive to employ.

One theory - not sure how well supported - is that the multi-rower per oar style of galley made it more practical to use less skilled labor thus facilitating slave rowers. I'll have to look for that book.

QuoteSo, the fleet gets worse rowers but you now have somewhere to put prisoners of war and religious non-conformists.

Every cloud has a silver lining...of sorts. :eek:

Quote from: Gruntfuttock;909063Personally I think a game set on a ship sailing the wine dark seas of ancient Greece would be a blast. A different island or port each session, a quest for a magical artefact or just a monster of the week episodic game. Or you could do a simulation of real bronze age history. In fact I've got a half prepared set of games doing just this (the monster of the week version that is) for the BoL supplement Heroes of Hellas.

I really enjoyed the brief (ran less than a year) heroic Greece campaign I ran in first Grad School. BoL sounds like it would work well for that. I may have to check out Heroes of Hellas.

Quote from: Bren;909006And lots of galleys throughout history were rowed by paid freemen.

Indeed, in my favourite era, the Hellenistic age, slave oarsmen were rare. Because where do you keep them at night (and prevent them running away or turning on the crew)? How do you preserve any sort of morale amongst the free element of the rowers when there are slaves present? And as noted, slaves make the worst oarsmen, paid professionals have reason to do a good job.

Of course lots of people believe nonsense propagated by movies like Ben Hur, which implied all Roman oarsmen were slaves. Even the Romans, poor sailors as they were, understood that you needed professionals. Which is why they often employed Greek crews.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;909030Naval, assuming you're excluding pirates and focusing on Navies, tends to be highly regimented with a clear chain of command and specific roles/classes that everyone falls into.  Which to some players (maybe a lot more, but I know only of a selected group) feels stifling, even pirate games tend to limit the freedom an 'adventuring party' can do by assigning specific roles on board.

Not saying games emulating naval life can't be full of freedoms and adventure, but most media never really shows this.

No, I deliberately cast this in as broad terms as possible. I was talking about privateers and other non-military options in the original post.

On media, The Last Ship does a pretty good job of demonstrating lots of RPG-able activities of a modern, military vessel.

Quote from: Ravenswing;909041I'm considerably less interested in the opinions of the Internet than I am of my players, a third of whom have been female in my campaign from 1978 on forward (and I've never not had a woman sitting at my table).

Anyway, that being said, folks are missing an important point.  The reason that naval games aren't as popular as other systems isn't that there's something wrong with naval games or the sea as a milieu.  It's that they're limited.

Seriously, think about this.  How popular would D&D be today if the game was nothing but dungeons?  No skill but was applicable to dungeons.  No spell that was useless outside a dungeon.  No class pertaining to anything but dungeons.  No published adventure that didn't take place solely within a dungeon.

Not all that much, huh?

Any limited milieu game will be by definition uninteresting to people uninterested in the milieu, and really only resonate to players who want to play in that milieu and nothing but.  Even to gamers heavily into seafaring (and I've run pirate campaigns, and have always been heavily into nautical adventures), I expect they're far more likely to use their regular familiar systems to replicate the percentage of time adventures deal with the sea.

I know of D&D groups who do nothing but dungeoneering. The game might not be limited thus, but the way people use it often is.

The only limitation of a naval game is of imagination. You've got exactly the same world you would have if the PCs were wandering about the land, only there's a shared element that ties them together and provides it's own source of tensions and interest.

Quote from: Bren;909064One theory - not sure how well supported - is that the multi-rower per oar style of galley made it more practical to use less skilled labor thus facilitating slave rowers. I'll have to look for that book.

Lionel Casson has lots to say about ships in antiquity (not a terribly well-researched topic, unfortunately). Basically they never had more than three banks of oars, all the number increases in the polyreme naming convention came from having more men on each oar. Thus the numbering referred to the number of oarsmen on a file, not the number of oar banks.

So a "five" (pentere/quinquireme) was three banks of of oars, the top two banks with two men per oar, the bottom with one. A "seven" was 3-3-1 or 3-2-2. The ridiculously high ones like the "forty" were catamaran arrangements (ie four files of ten oarsmen).

Which supports exactly what you're saying, only the man at the inner end of the oar needed to know how to keep time to the stroke and the follow instructions of the oar-master, and the men further down just needed to do as he did.

Quote from: Bren;909064I was thinking the exact same thing...curse you General Lew Wallace!

I really enjoyed the brief (ran less than a year) heroic Greece campaign I ran in first Grad School. BoL sounds like it would work well for that. I may have to check out Heroes of Hellas.

Yeah, old Lew couldn't manage to arrange for Billy the Kid to surrender, as well as getting his history wrong! What a wanker, as we say in South London.

Heroes of Hellas is just a supplement to BoL, so you will need a copy of BoL for the main rules - it's written for the Legendary Edition mind, not the latest Mythic Edition (LE still available as a pdf, I believe). As PCs start out very capable in BoL, it's a good fit for ancient Greece games.

Oh, and the book: Gunpowder and Galleys - Changing technology and Mediterranean warfare at sea in the sixteenth century by John Francis Guilmartin Jr. - Cambridge University Press, 1974 (Republished 1980).

Actually this thread inspires me to re-read it and then run a late-16th century galley game using Honor+Intrigue!

Ha! I've just flicked open the Guilmartin book at random (I haven't read it in years) and just found the method used by all the naval powers in the Med for cleaning the smaller galleys after they switched to all slave rowers: find a safe beach - partly submerge the galley - let the turds float away!

I'd definitely use that in a game.

Quote from: Opaopajr;908998And I think the core reasoning for using this play shorthand is because many GMs are not as well read (or lived) in how to creatively complicate movement through the seemingly everyday.

It's hard to perpetually improvise slices of life encounters in the vast swaths of assumed unexciting travel. And often GMs no longer prepare content generators to aid them in this task. Thus you get "skipping," of the type more reminiscent of LPs on turntables than those action flick cut scenes many so desperately seem trying to emulate.

It's the uncertainty of travel that is exciting. And if anything shows more someone's lack of actually traveling, one's lack of worldliness, it's the assumption of uneventful travel, especially over long distances. Getting 'way over there' complete with all your luggage and sanity in one piece without incident is remarkable, even today.

Getting from one place to another is a genuine challenge (it has been over the course of human history, been one of the major challenges of life and advancing culture beyond feeding oneself and keeping others from taking your stuff). However, making that story into an exciting adventure is a nontrivial task. I'm not going to assume that our hypothetical GM is unworldly because they don't know how to take the events of travel and turn it into something that includes 1) potential for success, 2) potential for failure, 3) meaningful decisions on the players' parts, and 4) a mechanism for determining how their actions contribute to the success of failure. It's a real challenge.

One of the problems is that travel situations can be rather boolean. Does something happen? Yes, you arrive at your destination, but your luggage does not. You can either wait for it to catch up with you or forge on ahead. Next problem: you get lost. Then you either find your way back on track, or don't. Obviously you can make meaningful events and options (the PCs look for natives who might be able to tell them how to get back to familiar territory, search that island for new fresh water so that they don't have to turn back, etc.), but it's not as easy as a full on sandbox where they can choose to do anything or a full on/pseudo- railroad where how they can contribute to their success is fairly laid out (at least in the GMs mind).

Traveller does a good job of addressing this, where the game is predominantly resource management (funds and fuel), with breaks at each port of call where they trade, adventure, or pick up adventure hooks), but even that can very easily just turn into another "you see pirate sails on the horizon, roll for initiative" (in space).

hmm... I am actually surprised that people find nautical adventures limiting or difficult. I don't really get it. Ships and the sea regularly feature in my campaigns.  The sea seams such a natural place for adventure: Sindbad, vikings, the Odyssey, pirates, Atlantis, exotic ports, strange new lands, mysterious islands... in the unknown lands beyond the PC homeland anything is possible: strange temples, cults and religions, foreign cultures, exotic technology, steaming jungles And frozen wastes in the same game, riches and danger await. Ships are also a contained environment, a very manageable sandbox great for intrigue and NPC interaction. Ships a are a great way to introduce characters from disparate lands and cultures helping to explain why a party of adventurers are together and need to cooperate - providing a vary believable PC halo.  The Sea itself as a hostile environment of constant peril presents challenges that require thought, caution and cooperation sometimes even with enemies.  Storms, sea monsters (there is no better environment for monsters), enemy ships and pirates are great tools for the GM to force a story to a specific location without seeming too railroady, because all of these dangers are completely plausible.  My veteran players leave a little space to take swimming, navigation, survival, and sailing as a skills for good reason. In fact, it's become running joke between the veterans in my group with new players at my table, whether their combat maxed characters sink or swim.

Quote from: Opaopajr;909055Yes, I don't understand the assumption that vessels be so large, and travel on trackless swaths of "uneventful" open ocean.

Hollywood.  Almost every cinematic treatment of seafaring use giant honking ships, the better to fit satisfyingly large deck battles and camera and tech crews on, and after all what they're generally replicating are Age of Sail ships, not medieval cogs.

Full length rant contained here.

Quote from: Opaopajr;908998One of the big challenges in running RPGs in general I noticed is the tendency to elide away the challenges of traveling distance itself. This applies to the oft neglected sea campaigns, as well as wilderness and hex crawls, but even down to the simple starting distances of encounters. The core problem comes to rapidly creating content to provide exciting context with which to interact.

In example, take a generic tavern brawl -- when was the last time someone lovingly described the "opportunities" and layout, and your character's place within, before combat started? Far too often combat start essentially mise en scene and everyone's within kissing range (except for the ranged NPC squishies, of course, 'cuz reasons). There's often no organic descriptive development of moving through space over time because of the assumption that it's just the boring stuff in the way of "the action."

Setup, which is social and exploration's bread and butter, is skipped over for chucking dice for combat -- and then complaints about inequitable combat strength ensue, and thus begins the snowball into niche protection and scene time.

At that point things are just disjointed teleportations from one slice of "action" to another.

And I think the core reasoning for using this play shorthand is because many GMs are not as well read (or lived) in how to creatively complicate movement through the seemingly everyday.

It's hard to perpetually improvise slices of life encounters in the vast swaths of assumed unexciting travel. And often GMs no longer prepare content generators to aid them in this task. Thus you get "skipping," of the type more reminiscent of LPs on turntables than those action flick cut scenes many so desperately seem trying to emulate.

It's the uncertainty of travel that is exciting. And if anything shows more someone's lack of actually traveling, one's lack of worldliness, it's the assumption of uneventful travel, especially over long distances. Getting 'way over there' complete with all your luggage and sanity in one piece without incident is remarkable, even today.

I very much agree, and it's interesting to read you writing about that. One of my main interests in games (and in adventure/action stories and films) is in the details of the experience and thinking and cause & effect of the characters, which of course has many details and surprises even in mundane situations. I'm more interested in heroics that involve cleverness with mundane situations than I am in superhuman feats. That's what I appreciate most about Alfred Hitchcock and e.g. North By Northwest - heroism by cleverness and situation, not by being a superhero.

When the GM runs a game that takes those things into account and offers opportunities (and risks) based on the details, the players tend to get interested in them too, and start doing quite clever and unexpected things, which I find really gratifying and interesting, and generally much more fun and immersive and original and less cliche`.

I also notice it in my attitude to travel, especially abroad - I tend to enjoy traveling and having to figure things out and not be sure what's going to happen next or what I'm going to encounter - though many of my companions have had the opposite attitude, wanting to minimize surprises and delays and just get from A to B, being stressed by delays or uncertainties, etc.

Heh, as much as I love the absurd in my action films, it doesn't carry that it is the only style I like. I love grounded coherence quite a bit, too.

I also think cinema's influence has had its negative RPG influence, as well as good (just like video games & book, etc.). One such bad influence being poor coherent examples taken as gospel for inexperienced (overzealous? unworldly?) GMs. Hollywood ideas, and film's usually fixed (vs. alt endings,) linear narrative structure (vs. flashbacks/cross-cuts/etc.,) doesn't help much, especially for those gamers who don't seem to step outside into the world much.

Yeah, I agree. The conceit/expectation that the main characters generally won't die, fail to triumph at the end, or in nautical genres, that the ship isn't going to sink or at least that the main characters aren't at a real risk of drowning. To me, when you take away real elements, you're removing them from play too, and the game is no longer about what you're pretending it's about. I tend to much prefer to experience a game or story which is about the actual risk of loss, and what people do in those circumstances, compared to the "we known Anakin isn't going to crash or get fried by any of those energy blasts, because he's Anakin" conceit.

If you're playing a game about taking risks, but really the GM and/or rules are protecting your characters from risks of serious consequences, are you really playing a game about taking risks, or playing a game about pretending to take risks, but knowing it's all going to work out somehow, because your personal angel/god the GM is going to make it ok? I think what bugs me the most about those conceits in film and recent pop gaming attitudes is that instead of being conscious choices, they seem to often be assumed as necessary or best or not even acknowledged, when to me they tend to stand out as glaring and weird and undermine my interest and immersion.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;909084Getting from one place to another is a genuine challenge (it has been over the course of human history, been one of the major challenges of life and advancing culture beyond feeding oneself and keeping others from taking your stuff). However, making that story into an exciting adventure is a nontrivial task. I'm not going to assume that our hypothetical GM is unworldly because they don't know how to take the events of travel and turn it into something that includes 1) potential for success, 2) potential for failure, 3) meaningful decisions on the players' parts, and 4) a mechanism for determining how their actions contribute to the success of failure. It's a real challenge.

You're right, no one is born knowing. But those first three are pretty much integral to RPG resolution from the start. One and two can be summed up by "Pass/Fail Probability." And three is the GM's routine decision whether PC actions even matter in the resulting roll.

Four is the meat of the question, and brings up another obvious but seemingly forgotten aspect to travel: what ever happened to legs of travel? Time, and distance, divided into periods is at the heart of making a big experience digestible. Just like a dungeon's rooms, levels, and random encounter roll rates, the breakdown is analagous. It's a great time to check Content Generators and let players insert meaningful choices in response.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;909084One of the problems is that travel situations can be rather boolean. Does something happen? Yes, you arrive at your destination, but your luggage does not. You can either wait for it to catch up with you or forge on ahead. Next problem: you get lost. Then you either find your way back on track, or don't. Obviously you can make meaningful events and options (the PCs look for natives who might be able to tell them how to get back to familiar territory, search that island for new fresh water so that they don't have to turn back, etc.), but it's not as easy as a full on sandbox where they can choose to do anything or a full on/pseudo- railroad where how they can contribute to their success is fairly laid out (at least in the GMs mind).

Traveller does a good job of addressing this, where the game is predominantly resource management (funds and fuel), with breaks at each port of call where they trade, adventure, or pick up adventure hooks), but even that can very easily just turn into another "you see pirate sails on the horizon, roll for initiative" (in space).

Eh, just about anything can be reduced to a boolean expression. That's the advantage of abstractions, reducing the real and complex into unreal and simple models. As long as you don't get too sold on conflating the two — that the abstraction IS the reality, and reality must then conform to the abstraction — you should be fine.

In this case, it's the issue of forgetting that each little tidbit adds up to a dynamic spread. Sure you can get lost with a big flowchart map. But if that's not helping don't enslave yourself to that methodology on a micro-to-macro continuous scale. We break up distance measurements into relative functional increments, too — i.e. don't feel obliged to measure miles by the inches, and similarly not measure travel by the momentous disruptions. Mix it up: offer branching options, opportunities, innocuous relationships, souvenirs...

(Edit: I'm also having difficulty seeing how travel differs from a full on sandbox. Just because you have a means to travel does not mean that it must travel. How does a vessel crimp your sandbox play?

Is it the responsibility of such a large asset? Akin to having land or political responsibilities, its gravity well changes the nature of the campaign? I can see that. But it still can be a sandbox, as it is just a shift in scale  -- in ship's case a shift in access. (Versus land's shift in regional investment, politics' in constituencies, et cetera.)

Quote from: Kiero;909067Indeed, in my favourite era, the Hellenistic age, slave oarsmen were rare. Because where do you keep them at night (and prevent them running away or turning on the crew)? How do you preserve any sort of morale amongst the free element of the rowers when there are slaves present? And as noted, slaves make the worst oarsmen, paid professionals have reason to do a good job.

the Spanish and Ottomans managed in the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. But it would seem like there would be a considerable advantage in a boarding action if your rowers were armed and fought. Though if Arturo Perez-Reverte is to be believed in Pirates of the Levant (and I have absolutely no reason to disbelieve him) Spanish soldiers considered rowing beneath them (because most rowers were slaves and slaves were criminals, heathens, and heretics) and would refuse to do so even to escape a stronger enemy force.

QuoteLionel Casson has lots to say about ships in antiquity (not a terribly well-researched topic, unfortunately).

I found the creation and operation of actual triremes convincing. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone build a quadreme or quinquireme though. You’d need a lot of volunteer rowers to crew one.

Quote from: Gruntfuttock;909074Yeah, old Lew couldn't manage to arrange for Billy the Kid to surrender, as well as getting his history wrong! What a wanker, as we say in South London.

At least he kept the Rebels out of Washington at the Battle of Monocacy.

QuoteHeroes of Hellas is just a supplement to BoL, so you will need a copy of BoL for the main rules - it's written for the Legendary Edition mind, not the latest Mythic Edition (LE still available as a pdf, I believe). As PCs start out very capable in BoL, it's a good fit for ancient Greece games.

I checked and I have a PDF sitting on my hard drive. So all good there.

QuoteOh, and the book: Gunpowder and Galleys - Changing technology and Mediterranean warfare at sea in the sixteenth century by John Francis Guilmartin Jr. - Cambridge University Press, 1974 (Republished 1980).

Thanks!

QuoteActually this thread inspires me to re-read it and then run a late-16th century galley game using Honor+Intrigue!

I've run a lot of H+I combat.

One caveat is that the combat rules are considerably more detailed than simple BoL. This can have the affect of slowing down combat considerably. The problem can be substantially mitigated if all your players understand the rules for combat well so that they can choose maneuvers quickly, do their die rolls and add their modifiers quickly, and clearly give you the result e.g. I rolled 7 for a total of 11.

Thus unless you want to do 1-on-1 type of duels the combat is more detailed than you might want for simple boarding actions.

Quote from: Gruntfuttock;909076Ha! I've just flicked open the Guilmartin book at random (I haven't read it in years) and just found the method used by all the naval powers in the Med for cleaning the smaller galleys after they switched to all slave rowers: find a safe beach - partly submerge the galley - let the turds float away!

I'd definitely use that in a game.

Oi! There goes another floater.

Quote from: Skarg;909103If you're playing a game about taking risks, but really the GM and/or rules are protecting your characters from risks of serious consequences, are you really playing a game about taking risks, or playing a game about pretending to take risks, but knowing it's all going to work out somehow, because your personal angel/god the GM is going to make it ok?

If there is risk to the characters but not the players, you are already playing a game about pretending to take risks. If you remove the risk to the characters, then you are playing a game about pretending to pretend to take risks.

Personally I like including one level of pretend risk in my gaming. GMs who actual whack their players upside the head with a 2x4 everytime the player's PC gets hit in combat is a little too confrontational, even for me. And let's not even talk about trying to add any romantic risk to your gaming.