Quote from: Omega;909021Why were you micromanaging every single NPC?

I wasn't the GM in that game, so it wasn't my call. It was also the mid-80s, so at least in my gaming scene, The philosophy was that you played things out even if they were a huge pain in the ass. I did sometimes elide and simplify resolution as a GM back then. Still, I always felt that I was cheating by doing so.

Quote from: Baulderstone;909117I wasn't the GM in that game, so it wasn't my call. It was also the mid-80s, so at least in my gaming scene, The philosophy was that you played things out even if they were a huge pain in the ass. I did sometimes elide and simplify resolution as a GM back then. Still, I always felt that I was cheating by doing so.

Yep. Play-it-out was common in my experience.* And I don't believe that Stormbringer (or RQ, or BRP) came with a system for resolving company level combat like what you might have in a boarding action. One reason that Pendragon added army combat was so there was a faster way of figuring out what happened on a raid or in a battle.



* Which shouldn't be a huge shock given the origins of the hobby.

See... there is no DUNGEON on a boat...


I mean, ya got the belowdecks and all that, and they can seem pretty dark and scary, but really, where are you gonna keep the Dragon? On the cannon deck? With the GUNPOWDER?

No, man... just... no

Quote from: Spike;909120See... there is no DUNGEON on a boat...


I mean, ya got the belowdecks and all that, and they can seem pretty dark and scary, but really, where are you gonna keep the Dragon? On the cannon deck? With the GUNPOWDER?

No, man... just... no

I know you're being facetious, but that bold part is another issue, a lot of local people believe the whole Hollywood gun fetishizing as the ULTIMATE weapon, and tend to shy away from games that make them appear, which during the Age of Sail, they were coming into prominence.

Quote from: Opaopajr;909105(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.)

It could be. The ship is the PC's primary treasure, home, base of operations, primary means of generating more adventures (by going new places), asset and liability. Sure you can do most everything you can in full open sandbox mode, but it all has to come back to the ship in the end (so, an inescapable gravity well, to extend your comparison).

It's also really hard to partially threaten. One PC can be killed, cursed, geas'ed, have a family member kidnapped, lose their favorite toothbrush +5, what-have-you. If you actually take out the ship (and it has to be a real possibility, as Skarg points out, there's little fun in facing a threat you know the DM can't let you fail), you've truly restructured the whole campaign (unless of course they can just steal another :-P). Sure, it can lose a mast, rudder, get held up in customs, possible get stolen by Johnny Depp, but how many times? The ship gives the players freedom and adventure hooks, but also becomes a big liability because its loss means the end of that freedom, but then becomes untouchable because as a DM do you actually pull that trigger?

Again, I'm not saying these are insurmountable by any stretch, they are simply hurdles and or intimidating factors. And again my central point was that I found the idea that DMs were intimidated from prepping travel adventures a more persuasive explanation than that they are unworldly.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;909121I know you're being facetious, but that bold part is another issue, a lot of local people believe the whole Hollywood gun fetishizing as the ULTIMATE weapon, and tend to shy away from games that make them appear, which during the Age of Sail, they were coming into prominence.

That sounds like an excellent topic for another thread....


Hmm... wait... Its been a few years, but I seem to recall a weird lack of musketry in 7th Sea, which has of course been on my mind with people talking about the reboot. (Canadian Spike: Aboot the Reboot...  its funny,so I share...).  Damnit, now I gotta go check on the state of firearms in Theah!  :mad:

Quote from: Willie the Duck;909125Again, I'm not saying these are insurmountable by any stretch, they are simply hurdles and or intimidating factors. And again my central point was that I found the idea that DMs were intimidated from prepping travel adventures a more persuasive explanation than that they are unworldly.

About a large asset's gravity well, and its loss affecting so much of the campaign, yes — it is probably very intimidating to GMs.

But you are more charitable than I in giving that rationale more strength than sheer lack of creativity and due diligence to prepare.

It's not like DMGs and MMs of a variety of systems have not been around for ages. Why the neglect of content generators and setting advice, yet lovingly overcrafted, theatrical, set piece battles? With all that minutiae calculation involved in CRs and the like, I am not leaning towards intimidation as the suspect.

However, that is neither here nor there. The more important thing would be a discussion on how to quickly produce best practices we found useful. I might post more on that later.

Quote from: Bren;909112I'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.

Very true - H+I would be a bitch for a boarding action. Perhaps Gnombient's homebrewed mix of regular BoL and H+I might be the solution?

https://gnombient.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/bol-pike-shotte-sorcerie-rules-july-2015.pdf

I seem to recall an evocative plate from an Osprey book of a Venetian (?) cavalier-type soldier fighting pirates in the 17th century off the Dalmatian coast. Umm...must look into that sometime.

Quote from: Gruntfuttock;909144Very true - H+I would be a bitch for a boarding action. Perhaps Gnombient's homebrewed mix of regular BoL and H+I might be the solution?

https://gnombient.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/bol-pike-shotte-sorcerie-rules-july-2015.pdf

Thanks. I have not seen this, so no clue how well it would work. Once I've read it and have a think I'll post something.

QuoteI seem to recall an evocative plate from an Osprey book of a Venetian (?) cavalier-type soldier fighting pirates in the 17th century off the Dalmatian coast. Umm...must look into that sometime.

Osprey does have some beautiful art.

Quote from: Bren;909112I'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.

How does it compare to late D&D (3e - 5e) combat in terms of time sunk?

Quote from: Justin Alexander;909046First: They carry an additional mechanical load. Even if you have a game which features those mechanics, it remains an impediment.

Second: Naval ships tend to mean crews larger than the size of an RPG playing group. This creates a logistical hurdle.

Third: Most GMs are limited in the scenario structures they know how to use. The typical list consists of railroads, mysteries, and location crawls. Hexcrawls are also getting some renewed exposure. A ship-based campaign is antithetical to the railroad (the freedom of the wide open sea being inimical to the railroad; or the railroad robbing the naval campaign of its strongest theme). It's poorly suited to mysteries. And location crawls tend to reduce the ship to merely a means of transportation. The exploration mechanic inherent to the hexcrawl seems more appropriate, but I've generally found it isn't well-suited to naval games in practice. (Most sailors aren't Columbus, sailing hopefully out into the unknown and hoping they stumble on something.)

I totally disagree here. A ship travelling between ports is ideal for a locked room murder mystery adventure.

Harry Turtledove (writing as H. N. Turteltaub, because shit, Harry, no one's going to spot that) has a series about two cousins in Hellenistic Greece trading around the Aegean on a small, fast ship, so to make a profit they have to engage in speculative trade in luxury goods.

My personal favorite segment is the one where the more studious cousin (who studied under Socrates at the university, you know) loses his shit when he finds a merchant selling a fossilized ceratops skull.  He's convinced it's the skull of a griffin, which proves they were real and not mythical like all educated people know.

Someone earlier was mentioning Traveller relative to age of sail trading.  I ran into a hackup of LBB Traveller into a Roman setting called Mercator.  I didn't save the link, but I have the file somewhere in my piles of stuff if anyone wants to take a look at it.  PM me with a receiving email if you want it.  One of the advantages is that the ships of the period have smaller crews, which can either limit the effort the GM has to go through or enables some troupe play.

Quote from: Ravenswing;909092Hollywood.  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.

In reference to your rant, while it's not exactly historical, The Pilot's Almanac for Harn is a pretty believable RPG treatment of medieval seafaring.  The best I have seen.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;909125It could be. The ship is the PC's primary treasure, home, base of operations, primary means of generating more adventures (by going new places), asset and liability. Sure you can do most everything you can in full open sandbox mode, but it all has to come back to the ship in the end (so, an inescapable gravity well, to extend your comparison).

It's also really hard to partially threaten. One PC can be killed, cursed, geas'ed, have a family member kidnapped, lose their favorite toothbrush +5, what-have-you. If you actually take out the ship (and it has to be a real possibility, as Skarg points out, there's little fun in facing a threat you know the DM can't let you fail), you've truly restructured the whole campaign (unless of course they can just steal another :-P). Sure, it can lose a mast, rudder, get held up in customs, possible get stolen by Johnny Depp, but how many times? The ship gives the players freedom and adventure hooks, but also becomes a big liability because its loss means the end of that freedom, but then becomes untouchable because as a DM do you actually pull that trigger?

Again, I'm not saying these are insurmountable by any stretch, they are simply hurdles and or intimidating factors. And again my central point was that I found the idea that DMs were intimidated from prepping travel adventures a more persuasive explanation than that they are unworldly.

Ships are very easy to "partially threaten" - damage them. Your options are not merely "destroy or leave totally unscathed". Not least because damage often has immediate consequence for the ship's performance and longer-term ones for how the PCs respond. If the PC's ship lost it's ram in that last boarding action, they have a very immediate problem of needing to survive (ie not sink!) long enough to effect some kind of repairs. Then it's a choice - do they repair the ship properly, taking long time and needing the right raw materials and possibly specialists, or patch something up themselves so they can carry on with their journey? Are they going to miss a planned meeting as a result of that? Will they have to be careful if they encounter hostile vessels until they get a new ram? Should they consider abandoning the ship when they next get to shore?

Though I have to say a game where the ship is totally inviolable sounds boring in the extreme. It's not as though it's hard for enterprising PCs (especially those willing to fight) to get another one.