TheRPGSite

Admittedly, I'm an inactive gamer right now, haven't done anything since the birth of my third child and most of my creative energies are being channeled into coding Europa Barbarorum II. But every now and then I do something that tickles that unscratched itch.

Right now that's reading, my guilty pleasures are the "boys' own" tales of GA Henty (avoid the ones about Africa and you sidestep most of his casual racism). One I just finished was about the Greek War of Independence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_War_of_Independence), but rather than a standard military tale, the protagonist is part of the crew of a privateer. Privately-owned craft seizing prizes and trying to do some good by resettling refugees. The details are all irrelevant for the most part, but the central premise: take a small ship and its crew, make their activities the centre of the thing, is a good one.

For the most part I've tended to avoid anything nautical/naval - mostly because of both the issues many gamers have with anything military (and thus having a chain of command and ranks) and I too often struggled with what they'd do. But that's due to not being imaginative enough; a good naval game isn't about travel across large distances (which you can elide away with downtime anyway) but coasting and island-hopping, visiting lots of different places and getting into trouble in them. Plus bonus ship-to-ship combat.

My group had great success with this in a different genre entirely - sci-fi with our Mass Effect game, but the principle can apply to any historical era or fantasy or sci-fi.

Am I imagining that this is largely overlooked as a medium of a game? You have a mode of transport which creates it's own issues; keeping the ship sea-/space-worthy, maintaining the crew, staying out of trouble with port authorities and foreign powers, and more. Decide as a group how big it is (thus how much personnel hassles you have, but also scope for raiding or fighting) who owns the ship (do they have owners to satisfy with a minimum profit?) and how it's run (are the PCs officers or just crew?). Perhaps decide on an initial goal, and you're done. Set it somewhere appropriately fractious and you've got all the ingredients for a great game.

Through the early part of gaming history, there was the issue of having a whole crew to deal with. I remember playing in a ship-to-ship boarding action in Stormbringer back in the mid-80s. It took forever to deal with all the characters on both sides. It was enough to put us off on nautical adventuring for a long time.

I did run 50 Fathoms for Savage Worlds. The mook rules made the boarding actions a lot more manageable.

I think this is part of the reason that sci-fi games like Traveller filled this niche in gaming. A PC group can easily cover all the crew roles without having a bunch of NPCs around to slow down the action.

Well, pure naval games are probably generally unpopular for the same reason that pure naval films are - whatever the reason, people aren't as swept up in the majesty of sea travel these days.  Sure, Pirates of the Caribbean was pretty popular for a while, but that was more about Jack Sparrow jumping around and being interesting than the ships themselves.

When you turn it around to space, well, that's basically the idea for Traveller and Star Trek, isn't it?  As Baulderstone pointed out, in a Traveller game everyone's got their ship in common that they're steering from star to star, dealing with problems from earning enough to pay for the fuel to dealing with boarding actions from space pirates.

Quote from: Baulderstone;908931Through the early part of gaming history, there was the issue of having a whole crew to deal with. I remember playing in a ship-to-ship boarding action in Stormbringer back in the mid-80s. It took forever to deal with all the characters on both sides. It was enough to put us off on nautical adventuring for a long time.

I did run 50 Fathoms for Savage Worlds. The mook rules made the boarding actions a lot more manageable.

I think this is part of the reason that sci-fi games like Traveller filled this niche in gaming. A PC group can easily cover all the crew roles without having a bunch of NPCs around to slow down the action.

Yeah, I think having mook rules and something simpler than regular combat for skirmish/mass combat helps. Not just for boarding actions, but also for things like surprise attacks on coastal fortifications, or simple raiding.

Quote from: jcfiala;908932Well, pure naval games are probably generally unpopular for the same reason that pure naval films are - whatever the reason, people aren't as swept up in the majesty of sea travel these days.  Sure, Pirates of the Caribbean was pretty popular for a while, but that was more about Jack Sparrow jumping around and being interesting than the ships themselves.

When you turn it around to space, well, that's basically the idea for Traveller and Star Trek, isn't it?  As Baulderstone pointed out, in a Traveller game everyone's got their ship in common that they're steering from star to star, dealing with problems from earning enough to pay for the fuel to dealing with boarding actions from space pirates.

I guess there's some of that, too. One of my favourite shows of the moment, Dark Matter, manages a big, frigate-sized ship with seven people. That's because one of the crew is an android who is linked into the ship's systems and can run them remotely, sparing the humans a lot of the boring stuff.

I think the travel bit is overlooking the fun, though - that comes from the destinations, not the means of getting there. Star Trek and the like do this with a different world every week, but it's no different to featuring a different island every session.

This is an interesting question, but I think the reason why is the same reason that fantasy RPG are more widely played than sci-fi ones. It is simply easier to run a game where the players are walking around slowly than one where they can travel great distances quickly. Once the player get out to sea, there are dozens of places they can go, which means that the GM needs dozens of adventures to be prepped depending on what they decide. Either that, or the game has to be railroaded where the players don't really have complete freedom to travel where they want which takes away much of the appeal of being on board a sailing ship.

Maybe it's because the designers tend to be all at sea? That would make rather a wash of the setting.  I'll get my coat.

I think part of it may be that naval fiction is not as widely popular as it once was and so most players and GMs do not feel as comfortable with nautical themes.

Because the sea is dangerous, and no one likes to drown.:-)

I think what's popular and what's fun & interesting, and what's challenging to GM or play for different GM's & players, are all different things. Nautical & naval subjects are full of interesting aspects, and full of challenges and things many people don't know about and aren't used to, and that may crimp the style of many players or cause conflicts between players. Even real-world couples I know who own boats, seem to have a high rate of conflict around who's in charge of the boat. A military or pirate/adventure ship without a captain clearly in command is liable to have issues. Then there's the whole aspect of the importance of what happens to the whole ship, which again is largely the business & decisions of the captain. The players may often have little to do while the ship's movements largely determine the fate of everyone. In a military setting, even the captain is liable to be under someone in the chain of command, his decisions more about details than free choice. And then there's the bit about many people not knowing much about sailing and historical naval warfare, or if they do, wanting it to be included in the game. There are some very interesting game systems for gaming out naval combat (e.g. Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Ramspeed), but they involve wind, multi-turn maneuvers, and single ships being single units, and passengers are not very significant. But it can work out and be fun, if you manage not to get bogged down and/or don't have players who want the usual control & attention of typical RPGs, and/or you just have the slow/complex aspects of the ships' affairs be mostly NPC/GM handled.

Oh, and by the way, one of the most interesting games I've found for Android (not saying much but still) is Pirates & Traders, which is this genre but single-player with you as captain.

Quote from: jcfiala;908932Well, pure naval games are probably generally unpopular for the same reason that pure naval films are...

Master and Commander was a brilliant film, and an RPG emulating the Napoleonic era is simple enough if you just make the PCs the officers.

I suppose the deeper issue is that unless you're playing in a fantasy or alternate-history world, there will be no female PCs--something a good portion of the internet won't tolerate.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;908954Master and Commander was a brilliant film, and an RPG emulating the Napoleonic era is simple enough if you just make the PCs the officers.

That movie sent me straight out to look for a naval wargame... I didn't inspire much interest in playing a character on a stuffy Napoleonic warship.
Pirate games or games set amongst a bunch of islands seem like more fun to me, Traveller with small merchant ship in an archipelago.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;908954Master and Commander was a brilliant film, and an RPG emulating the Napoleonic era is simple enough if you just make the PCs the officers.

I've heard that Dave Arneson was more interested in Napoleonics than fantasy. Makes me wonder what would have happened if he created RPGs set in 1800s France instead of Blackmoor.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;908944This is an interesting question, but I think the reason why is the same reason that fantasy RPG are more widely played than sci-fi ones. It is simply easier to run a game where the players are walking around slowly than one where they can travel great distances quickly. Once the player get out to sea, there are dozens of places they can go, which means that the GM needs dozens of adventures to be prepped depending on what they decide. Either that, or the game has to be railroaded where the players don't really have complete freedom to travel where they want which takes away much of the appeal of being on board a sailing ship.

Good point. In science-fiction games, you often have about two adjacent systems you can travel to. Once there, you need to refuel, make some money and probably get entangled in an adventure. The buys the GM enough time to stay at least one step ahead of the party. It is still a tricky kind of sandbox for many GMs, but it is manageable.

In a nautical campaign, there are whole coastlines dotted with cities and towns that you can pick a destination from.

Quote from: cranebump;908951Because the sea is dangerous, and no one likes to drown.:-)

True. The ship sinking and everyone dying is crappy way to end a campaign. It's one place where nautical campaigns can have an edge on most science-fiction settings, as boarding actions are more likely, letting the PCs fight on their own terms.

I remember talking to one of the designers of Fading Suns at Gen Con when that was new. He told me one of the conceits of that game was that as spaceships were usually rare treasures of an earlier age, almost all space battles were boarding actions as nobody wanted to risk a ship being lost. It was an interesting way of bringing the edge nautical games have into science-fiction.

You can always give the PCs a MacGuffin that your campaigns villains absolutely need. Then they will never want to sink their ship and risk putting the MacGuffin on the bottom of the ocean.

QuoteYou can always give the PCs a MacGuffin that your campaigns villains absolutely need.

Name the PC ship the "Heart of Gold" and everyone will avoid shooting at them (except the Vogons).

Issues with nautical campaigns people have pretty much stated, here is my list:
GM Issues
1.Lots of good ship combat rules, but not many meant to be integrated with PC skills thus allowing character mechanics to be reflected.
2.Possibility of mass melee combat during any boarding action, again, good games for this, but again, not that well integrated with RPG systems.
3. Any port in a storm.  The PCs may decide to get involved in a fishing/trade war between the towns on the north and south side of the Bay of Dragons or they may decide to sail to the New World or find the best whore on the Razor Coast, or all three and more as they circumnavigate the globe.

PC Issues
1.PCs get in trouble, trouble makes ships sink, PCs can't breathe water. :D
2. Managing a ship: weather, supplies, mutiny, trade, etc. It's not all rum and wenches.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;908944This is an interesting question, but I think the reason why is the same reason that fantasy RPG are more widely played than sci-fi ones. It is simply easier to run a game where the players are walking around slowly than one where they can travel great distances quickly. Once the player get out to sea, there are dozens of places they can go, which means that the GM needs dozens of adventures to be prepped depending on what they decide. Either that, or the game has to be railroaded where the players don't really have complete freedom to travel where they want which takes away much of the appeal of being on board a sailing ship.

Or the GM can use other principles to run games, such as situational and improv techniques.

One 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.

Honestly, I think largely because ships were not a particularly pleasant to be for most of history.  They combine all the pleasure of being in an overcrowded prison with the added bonus of drowning.  

That's why for most of history, ships were crewed by slaves - either out and out slaves, or those forced into it by press gangs or shanghaiing.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;908954Master and Commander was a brilliant film, and an RPG emulating the Napoleonic era is simple enough if you just make the PCs the officers.

I suppose the deeper issue is that unless you're playing in a fantasy or alternate-history world, there will be no female PCs--something a good portion of the internet won't tolerate.

I used a Troupe system, where each player had 3 characters, Officer - Petty Officer, and Seaman - in my napoleonic naval game.

-clash

Quote from: JeremyR;909001Honestly, I think largely because ships were not a particularly pleasant to be for most of history.  They combine all the pleasure of being in an overcrowded prison with the added bonus of drowning.  

That's why for most of history, ships were crewed by slaves - either out and out slaves, or those forced into it by press gangs or shanghaiing.

Actually, that's not true. Only the British relied on a press-gang system - because they refused to pay their naval seamen properly, or give them any rights. As for slaves, they made terrible sailors. Only galleys used slaves, and they were criminals, condemned to death in the galleys, not slaves purchased for the purpose.

And lots of galleys throughout history were rowed by paid freemen.

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

Absolutely! The effective ones were, Bren! :D

-clash

Quote from: hedgehobbit;908964I've heard that Dave Arneson was more interested in Napoleonics than fantasy. Makes me wonder what would have happened if he created RPGs set in 1800s France instead of Blackmoor.

He was, and also an expert in the Age of Sail. It's what made him so good as Captain Harchar, in Prof. Barker's campaign.

He did, but it was in the late 1600's; I played a PC with Prince Rupert's fleet in the West Indies, privateering against the Commonwealth.

Quote from: Baulderstone;908931Through the early part of gaming history, there was the issue of having a whole crew to deal with. I remember playing in a ship-to-ship boarding action in Stormbringer back in the mid-80s. It took forever to deal with all the characters on both sides. It was enough to put us off on nautical adventuring for a long time.

Why were you micromanaging every single NPC?

Naval, 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.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;908954I suppose the deeper issue is that unless you're playing in a fantasy or alternate-history world, there will be no female PCs--something a good portion of the internet won't tolerate.

I'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.

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.

Huh! Really? All roleplaying games are limited. All roleplaying games contain infinity. Certainly I have run a fuck ton of naval roleplaying games, and they are infinitely variable. Sometimes they are bombarding Tripoli from hot air balloons with fused barrels of naptha. Another day they are founding a colony on a heretofore ignored island. Another day they are negotiating with the Miskito Princess. Another day they are stopping a slaver and liberating the slaves. Another day they are marching across the desert with their Bedouin allies, heading to take an oasis for the hetman. Of course there are limits! They serve to define the game! What is between those limits is always infinite!

First: 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 (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-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.)

Small ships allow for a crew about the size of a typical party of PCs, say 2-6, give or take. That's common in Sci-Fi games like Traveller (Scout or Small Freighter are possible enlistment bonuses) and Star Wars (e.g. the Millennium Falcon or some other Tramp Freighter). Star Wars can also do a squadron or half squadron of independent fighter pilots.

Ocean going ships for earth both modern andhistorical as well as most fantasy tend to have larger crews which require a system and/or play style that can accommodate the larger crew sizes.

Troupe style play where each player has multiple characters worked well for us in Star Trek where mass crew action is seldom seen. In Star Trek each player had at least 3 characters: a bridge officer, a security person, and a medical,  science, or engineering crew person or officer. That allowed every player to have someone appropriate both on the ship (usually the bridge) and someone on the landing party / away team. Over time we each created additional and back up characters.

A second approach is to use a system that allows a more abstracted method of dealing with multiple NPCs. Fortunately many games e.g. much of D&D, Savage Worlds (or so I read), Star Wars D6, Honor+Intrigue all include methods of abstraction.

A third approach is to go old style and use the one figure = multiple sailors approach of old style miniatures battles. That would allow resolution of boarding actions using the exact same system for 1-to-1 combat treating each unit (or figure) as a single opponent with multiple lives instead of multiple hit points.

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

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

Any size ship can travel uneventful for days, weeks even. The ocean is vast. Furry Pirates and some other seagoing RPGs point this out. Alot of the action will be as you near ports and points of interest or any known shipping routes.

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. (http://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/2014/08/how-to-do-your-own-age-of-sail.html)

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.

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 (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-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. (http://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/2014/08/how-to-do-your-own-age-of-sail.html)

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.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;909150How does it compare to late D&D (3e - 5e) combat in terms of time sunk?

I have no clue. Sorry.

Quote from: Kiero;909164Ships 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?

Agree 100%.  A ship, as a home base, and a means of survival and transportation is an important resource to be managed adding a new dimension and challenge to the game. Wooden ships are pretty resilient.  A lot can go wrong without it completely sinking and being destroyed.  A ship that goes through lots of hardship can become a "character" in its own way and a part of the story.  Besides, if a GM is impartial to character death, why on earth we he be afraid to challenge and possibly destroy the characters' primary assets? It's not like ships are irreplaceable.

Perhaps this video will shed some light on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTwq1_9VH68

Quote from: Madprofessor;909086hmm... 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.

Ditto.

Boats and ships have played a prominent role in just about every campaign I've ever run or played in. Crew size really shouldn't be much of an issue. A seaworthy Viking-era cargo ship like Skuldelev-1 could be crewed with as few as six men. Some of the mid-sized dhows (like Sinbad's boat in the movies) and cogs could get by with around a dozen men, and caravels like the Niña and Pinta could be crewed with around 20-25 men. So it's not like players would have to keep up with a ship of the line.

Quote from: Kiero;909164Ships 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.

Actually, the problem with some 'partial' damage to a boat can be catastrophic.  Break the rudder and you're not likely to ever hit land, or get sucked into a storm, or worse, because you're at the mercy of the currents.  Break a mast, and you could literally be dead in the water, especially if it's got no oars.  Crack the keel, and the ship is done, time to swim, cuz it will sink.

A ship is much more fragile than we are often led to believe.  But it's also a pretty sturdy vehicle at the same time.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;909216Actually, the problem with some 'partial' damage to a boat can be catastrophic.  Break the rudder and you're not likely to ever hit land, or get sucked into a storm, or worse, because you're at the mercy of the currents.  Break a mast, and you could literally be dead in the water, especially if it's got no oars.  Crack the keel, and the ship is done, time to swim, cuz it will sink.

Ships of any size included many carpenters and spare materials to fix such things.  Rudders and steering oars are simple mechanisms and you can do a lot to steer with the sails themselves, even sail against the wind if you have a lateen sail.  Most ships carried some kind of back up plan, spare sail material (which by the way, in the early middle ages, was practically the most expensive part of the ship), spare masts or materials to build them, oars or something.  The sea is a harsh mistress.  Sailors know this, and they prepare for it.

You're right, a broken keel would be bad, but unless you were rammed (or it was eaten by a kracken) it was unlikely to break.  It was the strongest part of the ship, and wooden ships (many of them) were designed to give somewhat.  Even with a broken keel, a wooden ship could take a long time to sink (in fact it could capsize and drift to shore floating for weeks - it is wood).  And if it's a naval battle there are other ships to swim to.  

Of course, ships did sink, and storms could and did tear them apart and send them to the bottom with all hands.  That danger is part of what makes it fun for gaming.  It would take a sucky GM to randomly throw a squall and sink the PC's ship and have them all drown.  In a nautical campaign, players will likely pull out the stops to keep their ship afloat (crew, skills, gear, spares, etc). But even if their ship goes down, there is debris to catch, other ships to board, or they could wash up on an unknown shore.  It doesn't necessarily mean their death.  The way I see it, a sunken ship should lead to new adventures.

Quote from: Madprofessor;909227Rudders and steering oars are simple mechanisms and you can do a lot to steer with the sails themselves, even sail against the wind if you have a lateen sail.

Even my limited carpentry ability is sufficient to rig a crude steering oar.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;909216Actually, the problem with some 'partial' damage to a boat can be catastrophic.  Break the rudder and you're not likely to ever hit land, or get sucked into a storm, or worse, because you're at the mercy of the currents.  Break a mast, and you could literally be dead in the water, especially if it's got no oars.  Crack the keel, and the ship is done, time to swim, cuz it will sink.

A ship is much more fragile than we are often led to believe.  But it's also a pretty sturdy vehicle at the same time.

Sorry, that's bollocks. Any ship with a moderately competent crew has lots of means of jury-rigging temporary ways to get about and otherwise weather damage until proper repairs can be effected.

Most sailing vessels carry spare rudders and spars, so breaking a rudder or mast isn't fatal. And it's eminently possible to improvise. Plus they usually have boats which can be used to tow the ship. You think people never survived storms or accidental collisions?

Quote from: Kiero;909252Sorry, that's bollocks. Any ship with a moderately competent crew has lots of means of jury-rigging temporary ways to get about and otherwise weather damage until proper repairs can be effected.

Most sailing vessels carry spare rudders and spars, so breaking a rudder or mast isn't fatal. And it's eminently possible to improvise. Plus they usually have boats which can be used to tow the ship. You think people never survived storms or accidental collisions?

And how many players know all that?  Sadly, very few.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;909256And how many players know all that?  Sadly, very few.

It's the GMs job to know that, and it's another reason why having a crew is an asset in this sort of game, not a liability. Because an NPC can be the one to suggest a means of solving a problem.

It's really not that hard.

Quote from: Kiero;909261It's the GMs job to know that, and it's another reason why having a crew is an asset in this sort of game, not a liability. Because an NPC can be the one to suggest a means of solving a problem.

It's really not that hard.

I must apologize, when I say 'players' I usually include GMs.  Sorry if I was unclear.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;909264I must apologize, when I say 'players' I usually include GMs.  Sorry if I was unclear.

OK, but what kind of a piss-poor GM would run a game without bothering to do basic research on those sorts of things?

Quote from: Kiero;909270OK, but what kind of a piss-poor GM would run a game without bothering to do basic research on those sorts of things?

An excessively lazy one? :D

Quote from: Opaopajr;909136But you are more charitable than I in giving that rationale more strength than sheer lack of creativity and due diligence to prepare.

It is a philosophical position I try to take when posting on forums not to assume that we're the smart/creative/mature ones just because we happen to be here. I figure it is best not to assume that there are large swaths of total ignoramuses out there in gaming land, especially if there's a potential explanation more along the lines of people-don't-find-that-interesting/don't-see-how-it-would-be-a-good-game/think-it-sounds-intimidating-to-run.

Quote

Good points all around. Obviously, a lot of what I said about can't actually lose the ship isn't true if the ship is easily replaceable. I have some half formed thoughts I'll work on through the day and post when I'm off of work. Something vaguely around 'breaking a mast isn't really threatening the ship if you aren't then prepared to follow through and actually have the ship sink (thus restructuring the direction the campaign was going) or crew starve at sea. People have been coming up with some really good adventure hooks off partial damage, so maybe I'm being too categorical (although I did say that these were hurdles, not insurmountable ones). I'll see if I can hammer out a response.

Nice conversation. :-)

Quote from: Madprofessor;909162In 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.

I think we can agree that when it comes to the premise that RPGs Seldom Get Medieval Exactly Right, Harn is almost always the great outlier.

Quote from: Kiero;909270OK, but what kind of a piss-poor GM would run a game without bothering to do basic research on those sorts of things?

C'mon.  Most of them, and you know it.  The standard "research" done by most GMs is comprised of a mashup of their RPG collection, their favorite fictional novels, and the relevant TV shows/movies they've seen.  Heck, let's make it pertinent to this thread: how many of the participants in this thread (a) have done treatments of medieval-tech seafaring, and (b) included ship's wheels on their craft?  Almost certainly the majority: I have never seen a GM other than myself who didn't.

Quote from: Madprofessor;909162In 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.

I agree, it not quite as straightforward as running a merchant campaign in Traveller but out of all the different ruleset for fantasy sailing ships the Pilot Almanac comes very close to the simplicity and utility of Classic Traveller.

The only major issue I have is that the Harn product line need an equivalent for the Pilot Almanac rules for land based trading. Most of the information is there but scattered among a dozen products.

Quote from: Bren;909271An excessively lazy one? :D

Too lazy to even read some Wikipedia articles on the fundamental lynchpin around which the game turns?

Quote from: Ravenswing;909276C'mon.  Most of them, and you know it.  The standard "research" done by most GMs is comprised of a mashup of their RPG collection, their favorite fictional novels, and the relevant TV shows/movies they've seen.  Heck, let's make it pertinent to this thread: how many of the participants in this thread (a) have done treatments of medieval-tech seafaring, and (b) included ship's wheels on their craft?  Almost certainly the majority: I have never seen a GM other than myself who didn't.

I don't play games set in a medieval milieu, personally. However, I have read quite a lot of what's available on how oared galleys in antiquity worked, and have a basic grasp of ships from the Age of Sail.

Quote from: Kiero;909288Too lazy to even read some Wikipedia articles on the fundamental lynchpin around which the game turns?

That would be par for the course for most of the GMs I know, yes.

That's not the huge problem people are making it out to be.  There's only so much effort anyone wants to put into this hobby, and expectation/subject matter expertise clash is one of the oldest problems in gaming.  There may well be groups out there where the GM says "Hey, I want to run a fairly realistic campaign focused on medieval sailing; it's going to be a lot of research and we're all going to have to work to keep it authentic, but we'll learn a lot and it will be incredibly immersive! Who's in?" and the players say "That sounds awesome! When do we start?  And we're totally not lying about what we want from an RPG experience!" but I've never seen one in the wild.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;909216Actually, the problem with some 'partial' damage to a boat can be catastrophic.  Break the rudder and you're not likely to ever hit land, or get sucked into a storm, or worse, because you're at the mercy of the currents.  Break a mast, and you could literally be dead in the water, especially if it's got no oars.  Crack the keel, and the ship is done, time to swim, cuz it will sink.

A ship is much more fragile than we are often led to believe.  But it's also a pretty sturdy vehicle at the same time.

You have several options for replacing a rudder. You can use an oar as a steering oar. This will work, though not ideal by a long shot. A better option is a "danube rudder" which is a drag - a bucket or cloth - served out on two lines, one from either side of the vessel. Shortening the starboard line will cause the starboard side to drag more, turning the vessel in that direction, and vice versa. You can also repair rudders, or make emergency rudders, with a bit more time. Any flat surface mounted on gudgeon pins will act as a rudder, the larger, the better.

(Apologies, just read all the posts between the one I quoted and my own! Sorry!)

Quote from: daniel_ream;909289That would be par for the course for most of the GMs I know, yes.

That's not the huge problem people are making it out to be.  There's only so much effort anyone wants to put into this hobby, and expectation/subject matter expertise clash is one of the oldest problems in gaming.  There may well be groups out there where the GM says "Hey, I want to run a fairly realistic campaign focused on medieval sailing; it's going to be a lot of research and we're all going to have to work to keep it authentic, but we'll learn a lot and it will be incredibly immersive! Who's in?" and the players say "That sounds awesome! When do we start?  And we're totally not lying about what we want from an RPG experience!" but I've never seen one in the wild.

I absoutely agree. Most GMs are lazy ass mofos. They want more of the same stuff they have always done - easy, predictable, and safe. The vast majority of GM stuff from publishers is "Here's more of what you wanted before, with slight variations to catch your players off guard, but not different enough to challenge you." So, the answer to "Why isn't there more maritime adventuring going on?" is "Because it would require me to actually do something I never did and make my players do something they never did, and I can't be arsed."

Quote from: Ravenswing;909276I think we can agree that when it comes to the premise that RPGs Seldom Get Medieval Exactly Right, Harn is almost always the great outlier.

Who cares?

QuoteC'mon.  Most of them, and you know it.  The standard "research" done by most GMs is comprised of a mashup of their RPG collection, their favorite fictional novels, and the relevant TV shows/movies they've seen.  Heck, let's make it pertinent to this thread: how many of the participants in this thread (a) have done treatments of medieval-tech seafaring, and (b) included ship's wheels on their craft?  Almost certainly the majority: I have never seen a GM other than myself who didn't.

Well, that's really all the GM needs, now isn't it? A few episodes of Hornblower, a few Sinbad movies, a few viking movies* and generous helpings of Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power movies, topped off with Jason and the Argonauts and The Odyssey are really all the "research" you need to run or play a seafaring adventure. Fuck it, throw in some Robert Louis Stevenson and a little Star Trek too while you're at it.

*The Long Ships, which mixes the hokiest bits of viking movies with those from your typical Sheikhs & Shiksas movies is a twofer:

(http://s19.postimg.org/w3lqxip43/k_Gm2ow90.png)

(http://91.207.61.14/m/uploads/v_p_images/1964/01/4560_0_screenshot.png)

Quote from: Elfdart;909330Well, that's really all the GM needs, now isn't it? A few episodes of Hornblower, a few Sinbad movies, a few viking movies* and generous helpings of Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power movies, topped off with Jason and the Argonauts and The Odyssey are really all the "research" you need to run or play a seafaring adventure.

If that's what your group is into, go for it. Most of the games we are thinking of were inspired by pulp novels, right? Who are we to be judgy? :D

Quote from: Kiero;909288I don't play games set in a medieval milieu, personally. However, I have read quite a lot of what's available on how oared galleys in antiquity worked, and have a basic grasp of ships from the Age of Sail.

And that's pretty much the standard.  Certainly a good many GMs have some basic knowledge of the Age of Sail ...

... which, properly, really started with the 17th century.

And that's the point: that the vast majority of gamers who think they're doing "medieval" seafaring wind up looking a lot like Horatio Hornblower and Peter Blood.

Quote from: Elfdart;909330Who cares?

Certainly a lot of assholes and trolls don't, I'll grant you.

QuoteA few episodes of Hornblower, a few Sinbad movies, a few viking movies* and generous helpings of Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power movies, topped off with Jason and the Argonauts and The Odyssey are really all the "research" you need to run or play a seafaring adventure.

I'll concede perhaps the gamers in my area are atypical, but I think I could find an honest politician and an ethical lawyer long before I could find players who had either seen those media or were willing to.  I have, but then I'm atypical.

Quote from: Ravenswing;909346And that's the point: that the vast majority of gamers who think they're doing "medieval" seafaring wind up looking a lot like Horatio Hornblower and Peter Blood.

Well, to be fair, a real medieval sailing campaign would probably be "horror" and not "fantasy."

Quote from: Ravenswing;909276Heck, let's make it pertinent to this thread: how many of the participants in this thread (a) have done treatments of medieval-tech seafaring, and (b) included ship's wheels on their craft?  Almost certainly the majority: I have never seen a GM other than myself who didn't.

Its been decades, but as I recall, we had a steering oar on the long ship and I think the cog had a tiller and rudder, but I might be wrong on the cog. Personally, I am/was a lot more familiar with ancient sea faring. No wheels there. So having wheels on the medieval ships wasn't too hard to avoid. To illustrate my point that not everyone uses a ship's wheel, I had to reread your sentence to even realize you meant a steering wheel. On first reading I was thinking to myself, wheels for transporting the ships overland? WTF is Ravenswing on about?

Quote from: flyingmice;909302So, the answer to "Why isn't there more maritime adventuring going on?" is "Because it would require me to actually do something I never did and make my players do something they never did, and I can't be arsed."

That is a very cynical thing to say. I don't say you are wrong, but you are cynical.

Quote from: ThatChrisGuy;909353Well, to be fair, a real medieval sailing campaign would probably be "horror" and not "fantasy."

Well, that's certainly true.

Quote from: Elfdart;909330Who cares?



Well, that's really all the GM needs, now isn't it? A few episodes of Hornblower, a few Sinbad movies, a few viking movies* and generous helpings of Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power movies, topped off with Jason and the Argonauts and The Odyssey are really all the "research" you need to run or play a seafaring adventure. Fuck it, throw in some Robert Louis Stevenson and a little Star Trek too while you're at it.

Well, yeah, I get this.  A lot of anal historical prattling can sink a game faster than a broken keel and a steering oar manufactured by Bren - if it's not what you're going for.  I like SW Slipstream and the only "sources" I need for it is the 1978 Flash Gordon cartoon and a 12 pack of beer.  I'm not trying to simulate real rocket cycles in outer space - that's retarded.  Going after your genre or whatever you want to call it may or may not have anything to do with reality.

I am a medievalist, however, and I like ships. I like gritty realistic games, and a lot of my players (many of them are historians too) come to me for that experience. So most of what I have said is only valuable if you like that kind of thing, and is pretty worthless if you're running DCC  vs chaos dinosaurs (which also might be cool).

...still, something nags at the back of my head that says a good foundation in history and reality, though not a requirement of fun, is not a bad starting point for any game.

Quote from: Bren;909360That is a very cynical thing to say. I don't say you are wrong, but you are cynical.

I'm a very cynical person. It's why I am so very cheerful all the time. :D

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;909390I'm a very cynical person. It's why I am so very cheerful all the time. :D

-clash

There certainly is some consolation in being right and if you truly expect the worst from people you will often be pleasantly surprised by the reality. Small wonder you are cheerful. ;)

Quote from: Ravenswing;909276C'mon.  Most of them, and you know it.  The standard "research" done by most GMs is comprised of a mashup of their RPG collection, their favorite fictional novels, and the relevant TV shows/movies they've seen.  Heck, let's make it pertinent to this thread: how many of the participants in this thread (a) have done treatments of medieval-tech seafaring, and (b) included ship's wheels on their craft?  Almost certainly the majority: I have never seen a GM other than myself who didn't.

(The odd fellow in the back row tentatively raises his hand.)

Does schooner racing off Cape Cod count for ships' wheels?

Fascinating discussion! If I may add a historical footnote, Prof. Barker had two rather epic voyages in his campaign, both with the redoubtable Capt. Harchar in command - the ship was run by Dave Arneson, with the help of his three NPC mates and the NPC Purser. each voyage lasted a year or two of real time, and about the same in game time elapsed. We had chartered the ship and crew for each trip, and we used her as the base for quite a lot of memorable adventures, both on-board and ashore. We had quite a lot of fun, even when Dire peril didn't impend.

Here are two samples of our adventures afloat:

http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=8005 (http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=8005)
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=7964&p=28118& (http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=7964&p=28118&)

Quote from: chirine ba kal;909418(The odd fellow in the back row tentatively raises his hand.)

Does schooner racing off Cape Cod count for ships' wheels?

I'd expect that schooners do have a wheel. But if it's a schooner[1] than it's not a medieval ship. Though it might be a large beer served in Lawrence, KS[2] in a rounded glass with a short stem. But then it wouldn't be very likely to have a wheel.

[1] If that was a joke Chirine, it went over my head like a...well like something bigger than a hat, 'cuz I have a large noggin.

[2] Yes, I can read Wikipedia too, but the only place I've ever heard a beer glass called a schooner was in Lawrence.

Quote from: Madprofessor;909375Well, yeah, I get this.  A lot of anal historical prattling can sink a game faster than a broken keel and a steering oar manufactured by Bren - if it's not what you're going for.  I like SW Slipstream and the only "sources" I need for it is the 1978 Flash Gordon cartoon and a 12 pack of beer.  I'm not trying to simulate real rocket cycles in outer space - that's retarded.  Going after your genre or whatever you want to call it may or may not have anything to do with reality.

I am a medievalist, however, and I like ships. I like gritty realistic games, and a lot of my players (many of them are historians too) come to me for that experience. So most of what I have said is only valuable if you like that kind of thing, and is pretty worthless if you're running DCC  vs chaos dinosaurs (which also might be cool).

...still, something nags at the back of my head that says a good foundation in history and reality, though not a requirement of fun, is not a bad starting point for any game.

The problem is that even the experts on the subject know very little about medieval ships. There are very few surviving examples, and modern replicas are few and far between. On top of that, very few have been tested under hazardous conditions (understandably, since it's not worth risking one's life to sail a mock-up of a medieval ship into a storm). So the best people can do is take the replicas under good conditions and/or use information from more modern ships, and extrapolate from there. Even then, for game purposes it's probably more useful to have a quick and dirty system where ships fall into a few categories based on ship type and size (e.g. small freighter, large warship). It will never satisfy tedious know-it-alls, but nothing pleases tedious know-it-alls, so fuck 'em.

Quote from: daniel_ream;909351I'll concede perhaps the gamers in my area are atypical, but I think I could find an honest politician and an ethical lawyer long before I could find players who had either seen those media or were willing to.  I have, but then I'm atypical.

I had a similar issue when I DMed for my nephews and their friends, who wanted to do a sea adventure the next week, but weren't familiar with the genre. I simply popped in a DVD of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (https://thane62.wordpress.com/2015/07/01/the-golden-voyage-of-sinbad/) and they were hooked -and not just because of Caroline Munro.


I let my nephews borrow my copies of The Vikings, Jason and the Argonauts and Captain Blood. They watched the movies with their friends during the week and were totally on board for seafaring adventure the following session.

So, if nothing else, I have learned a few things about ships from this thread and what to expect and how to fix them.  I will be incorporating these things in my next Pirates of the Spanish Main campaign for flavour at the very least.

I honestly thank you all.

Quote from: flyingmice;909390I'm a very cynical person. It's why I am so very cheerful all the time. :D

-clash

I used to be a cynic but I got tired of being right all the time.

Quote from: cranebump;908951Because the sea is dangerous, and no one likes to drown.:-)

That has always been my main issue with naval adventures. What is a rickety wooden ship and a bunch of sailors with crossbows (at best) going to do to a sea serpent or kraken? Naval stuff in a fantasy RPG just seems like suicide.

In Fantasy ships are primarily transportation.  Defending them from sea serpents is  hero's work.

Crimson Cutlass and Mazes & Minotaurs are among my favorite RPGs so I have done lots of maritime and naval gaming. My OD&D has always been inspired by my playing of the early Ultima CRPGs where it was awesome to find a ship, sail along the coast, risk the open sea, blast some sea monsters and visit places only accessible by ship.

Most of the people I have played with were uninterested in a game where characters are part of a defined hierarchy.  It's the same for Star Trek even though Starfleet is military-lite at most.

Quote from: yosemitemike;909461Most of the people I have played with were uninterested in a game where characters are part of a defined hierarchy.  It's the same for Star Trek even though Starfleet is military-lite at most.

Not every naval game need be military. There are plenty of civilian options that don't require a chain of command (beyond "owner" and "captain").

Quote from: Kiero;909463Not every naval game need be military. There are plenty of civilian options that don't require a chain of command (beyond "owner" and "captain").

No ship of any size operates without some sort of hierarchy.  Any way you slice it, someone is in charge whether you call that person the owner or the captain.  Even on a 25 foot sailboat, people have assigned roles and someone is in charge.  The players I have known just don't like the idea.

Depends on your players (but most things do...)

I played in a few games of Privateers and Gentlemen, set in the Napoleonic Wars with the PCs being British Royal Navy officers. We had fun. While the chain of command could be a problem for some, we approached it by assuming that as we were all living in close quarters on a small brig (later a frigate), we had to get along as well as just obey orders. Soon we developed into the roles as friendly work colleagues who also socialised together while ashore - i.e. it was a 'happy' ship. Star Trek may have been an influence.

However, I think a traders or pirates game would work for those who can't work in chain of command (although they will not have the satisfaction of foiling Napoleon's invasion of India by burning his invasion fleet transports anchored in the Persian Gulf).

Vikings can be traders one minute and pirates the next, and often were. (So were other people at other times, particularly in the Med). Pirates in the Caribbean seems a popular choice, but you might suffer from an excess of Johnny Depp jokes instead of Monty Python jokes - but with the wrong sort of players you always will. (Only a problem if you are trying to run something serious, of course). If you must have magic and monsters in your games, this setting gives you plenty of options.

Of course pirates were not nice people in real life - but that's never stopped us before, has it?

Personally I'd go for a location like the Med of the Caribbean - lots of places to go and not long distances between points of interest, so the game doesn't have too many days at sea with little happening. I'd use Heroes of Hellas for sword and sorcery ancient Greek games a la Clash of the Titans, or some version of BRP for a more crunchy/historical game. Some mash-up of BoL and H+I for a swashbuckling Caribbean game, for me. But Savage Worlds have done all the work for you if you don't like BoL.

And if you really hate pirates, you can hunt the buggers down and hang 'em high. But then you'd be back in the navy.

A game built on long voyages probably have less appeal to many gamers, so go archipelago!

Quote from: yosemitemike;909464No ship of any size operates without some sort of hierarchy.  Any way you slice it, someone is in charge whether you call that person the owner or the captain.  Even on a 25 foot sailboat, people have assigned roles and someone is in charge.  The players I have known just don't like the idea.

Not necessarily. If the PCs are the owners, then the captain is actually subordinate to them, even if they're the one directing the crew.

We had exactly that sort of setup in our Mass Effect game. The five PCs were jointly the owners of the ship and the mercenary company, the Executive Officer who actually commanded the ship was their employee and took his orders from them. However, in matters of running the ship, they left him to it, not least because they were the "away party" who left the ship a lot to deal with things.

But if you have players allergic to even the suggestion of a command structure, even that might be too much.

Bloody hell, Kiero, that's a really neat solution to the chain of command problem! (For those that see it as a problem.)

Running a Firefly game (using a sci-fi hack of BoL, naturally - for us) I've found in play that the Captain had the last say in any decisions, but as the crew worked for shares of profits (just like pirates IRL) they had a voice in decisions about where to go next, what jobs to take, etc. Obviously this all depends on your players. Some just prefer for their PC to have total freedom to act as they desire.

I seem to recall that pirate captains in the 17th and 18th centuries had the right to instant obedience only when their ship was in action. Otherwise they had to persuade their crews to follow a course of action. Captains recognised as competent and successful could expect to get their way without any discussion out of combat. However, less successful or forceful captains would need to win the crew over to their decisions. Those failing, could expect to loose their position and be replaced.

For anyone considering a more historical game set in the classical world and interested in using BRP, it might help to check out Paul Elliott's Warlords of Alexander. Not sure if it covers naval action, but the author has a real love of the period and it is free from his website! Based on RQ2, I think.

An inspiration for 17th century games can be found in 'The Adventures of Captain Alonso de Contreras' - translated by Philip Dallas - Paragon House, 1989. It is a translation of Contreras's autobiography. At 15 he joins the Spanish army, and soon is aboard a galley, fighting the Turks. He ends up as a mercenary, and later a Knight of Malta. (He even briefly fights Sir Walter Raleigh.)

Quote from: Gruntfuttock;909498I seem to recall that pirate captains in the 17th and 18th centuries had the right to instant obedience only when their ship was in action. Otherwise they had to persuade their crews to follow a course of action. Captains recognised as competent and successful could expect to get their way without any discussion out of combat. However, less successful or forceful captains would need to win the crew over to their decisions. Those failing, could expect to loose their position and be replaced.

That aligns with my recollection of the general pirate SOP.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;909437So, if nothing else, I have learned a few things about ships from this thread and what to expect and how to fix them.  I will be incorporating these things in my next Pirates of the Spanish Main campaign for flavour at the very least.

I honestly thank you all.

That may be the most inspiring and surprising post that I have read since I have joined this site.

Quote from: Gruntfuttock;909499For anyone considering a more historical game set in the classical world and interested in using BRP, it might help to check out Paul Elliott's Warlords of Alexander. Not sure if it covers naval action, but the author has a real love of the period and it is free from his website! Based on RQ2, I think.

It's a good sourcebook for the Hellenistic era, but I don't remember there being much specifically about naval elements in there.

Quote from: RavenswingI think we can agree that when it comes to the premise that RPGs Seldom Get Medieval Exactly Right, Harn is almost always the great outlier.

Quote from: Elfdart;909330Who cares?

People who find such things interesting.

Quote from: Kiero;909488Not necessarily. If the PCs are the owners, then the captain is actually subordinate to them, even if they're the one directing the crew.

There is still someone in charge.  What they have objected to isn't any sort of authority.  It's one player's character having authority over the others.  I am just telling you what my players have said when I proposed such games.  They were uninterested for that reason.  If you want to argue the point, take it up with them.  There were only two exceptions and they were both games where the PCs made up the entire ship's complement and no one was in charge.  In both cases, they had stolen the ship and none of them were the legitimate owner or captain.  One was a group of ex-Star Fleet officers who had stolen a Kilingon Bird of Prey and gone freebooting.  Another was a group of supers who had stolen a prototype warp ship and taken off with it to adventure.

Quote from: yosemitemike;909464No ship of any size operates without some sort of hierarchy.  Any way you slice it, someone is in charge whether you call that person the owner or the captain.  Even on a 25 foot sailboat, people have assigned roles and someone is in charge.  The players I have known just don't like the idea.

One way to play it is to let the PCs be passengers who hire the ship. The captain and crew go about their business making sure the ship goes from Point A to Point B and the PCs are free to do as they like, provided they don't hinder the crew. If the ship has an encounter, the PCs can interact with it; if the ship is attacked they can help fight off the enemy. Players who aren't a pain in the ass might want their characters to crew the ship (perfectly doable with hired hands and loyal retainers) instead on NPCs, while the special snowflakes do what special snowflakes do.

Quote from: Bren;909425I'd expect that schooners do have a wheel. But if it's a schooner[1] than it's not a medieval ship. Though it might be a large beer served in Lawrence, KS[2] in a rounded glass with a short stem. But then it wouldn't be very likely to have a wheel.

[1] If that was a joke Chirine, it went over my head like a...well like something bigger than a hat, 'cuz I have a large noggin.

[2] Yes, I can read Wikipedia too, but the only place I've ever heard a beer glass called a schooner was in Lawrence.

I'm sorry; I was making an allusion to my time spent afloat as a deckhand in a vintage sailing ship, albeit a small one, in answer to the poster I quoted. I have also been aboard a number of historical sailing ships, including several from the 'Age of Sail' and several of the medieval replicas. I also had the opportunity to read through the several hundred volumes that Dave Arneson had in his library on the subject under discussion. I had thought that this experience and research might qualify as an answer to the poster's question about GMs who had information on the subject, but I may very well have been mistaken.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;909559I had thought that this experience and research might qualify as an answer to the poster's question about GMs who had information on the subject, but I may very well have been mistaken.

You may have been mistaken, but I sorta doubt it.  I may have been obscure. I was making a joke and, as the Brits say, taking the piss out of you -- as a schooner is a sailed ship that (along with a fast catamaran) is the antithesis of medieval naval technology.

Quote from: Bren;909560You may have been mistaken, but I sorta doubt it.  I may have been obscure. I was making a joke and, as the Brits say, taking the piss out of you -- as a schooner is a sailed ship that (along with a fast catamaran) is the antithesis of medieval naval technology.

No problem. :)

Quote from: flyingmice;909302I absoutely agree. Most GMs are lazy ass mofos. They want more of the same stuff they have always done - easy, predictable, and safe. The vast majority of GM stuff from publishers is "Here's more of what you wanted before, with slight variations to catch your players off guard, but not different enough to challenge you." So, the answer to "Why isn't there more maritime adventuring going on?" is "Because it would require me to actually do something I never did and make my players do something they never did, and I can't be arsed."

Quote from: Bren;909360That is a very cynical thing to say. I don't say you are wrong, but you are cynical.

Quote from: flyingmice;909390I'm a very cynical person. It's why I am so very cheerful all the time. :D

-clash

Me too! It's the secret to cheerfulness! The secret to life is joy!

And I'm more cynical about material existence than I am about humanity! So company among humanity is to me a gas! :D