On Pirate Campaigns

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    In the past weeks that I haven't been writing here on the blog, I have been creating and running a Pirate Campaign for my normal table. We have been having great fun with it, but as I have worked on cobbling together the systems to run it, I have hit quite a few brick walls.


A Standard for Every Ship

    Among the most annoying problems I have encountered, is the handling of ships. Every system I have encountered has its own ways of handling ships and they rarely agree, even if they are ostensibly easily convertible between them.

    Now, historically, in the pirate age one of the most popular boats was called a Sloop, usually being a single-masted sailing ship that was quick and maneuverable in the water. If a Sloop has 2 masts, it becomes a cutter though that doesn't change much about the ship other than making it slightly bigger.

    After robbing some nobles' pleasure flotilla, my players earned a massive haul and wanted to upgrade to this popular piracy ship. My lack of preparation showing, I hadn't completely cohered everything about this because I had been focused on prepping the flotilla. Now, consider how many different and contradictory pieces of information I had to work with.

  • OD&D doesn't have a sloop class of ships. The closest might be the "Boat" class which seems too small or the "Merchant Small" which seems too big. Prices are not easy to locate (if they are listed anywhere) with similar results of cargo space.
  • The compiled "Oops, I'm at Sea" rules from Dragonsfoot for AD&D would have a sloop as "Small Sailing Ship" probably, which gives it a cost of 5,000 gp, a hull value of 6-36, and a cargo capacity for 100,000 cn or approximately 5 tons.  
  • ACKS sells "Small sailing ships" for 10,000 gp, giving them a capacity of 10,000 stone (50 tons), not counting the expected crew of 13. 
  • Historically, there were sloops or sloops-of-war which have anywhere from 100 to as high as 300 tons of burden with difficult to find (if any) pricing information
  • The wonderful Equipment Emporium from Basic Fantasy also lacks a specific sloop, but does list both the Caravel and Coaster which give 10,000 gp and 5,000 gp prices respectively, along with 75 tons or 100 tons of cargo space.

    As a final detail to make this whole mess even worse, I have made gunpowder so expensive in setting that cannons just aren't common (saves me a lot of headaches with naval combat), so I need to be looking to lower capacities where possible to account for the fact that there aren't tons of heavy cannons, powder, and ammunition on the ship.
    On the fly, I declared that my players' new Cutter would cost them 7,000 sp (Silver standard, 1-to-1 with gp in other campaigns) and have a capacity of 90 tons. Looking back over everything, I seem to have undershot the size and value of a Cutter, but got close enough.

Swimming

    Here's another thing that no one can really agree on: swimming rules. Every system I found for dealing with swimming had its own ways of handling things. The traditional approach, starting back in OD&D, seems to be that you just make a check to see if someone fails to swim and drowns, instantly killing the character. Other approaches just assume that people can swim. Some people say you hold your breath until you fail a check, at which point you drown (slowly or instantly, it varies). Others give a time limit.

    For my campaign, I managed to come up with some coherent rules that seem to work. Since all of the characters are pirates, it is fair to assume that they can swim, at least a bit. When making a swimming check, a character makes a T20 check (d20 + level) plus their Strength plus bonuses or penalties based on the situation. 

    In terms of drowning or holding one's breath, I ended up liking Delta's approach in his OED house rules. Characters holding their breath take set amounts of HP damage over time, to simulate their breath running out. It recovers just as quickly once they can breathe and the damage rate can be increased for someone who was suddenly forced to hold their breath, like getting swept overboard. 

    I did, however, do my players a kindness by granting every character an "Air Pool" of 6 + Con that gets damaged first, which I think will work better when underwater combat eventually occurs and makes swimming a much less daunting proposition. Notably, this Air Pool will not increase with level, so all it does is make them about 2 levels higher for drowning in the OED approach, which itself is calibrated for 3rd level characters. 


What does this mean?

    All this means is that I am being forcibly confronted with the issues that currently exist for waterborne campaigns and am being forced to iron them out one at a time. Sometime in the near-ish future, I will probably be posting my current WIP (but cleaned up) Pirate Campaign Rules.

    Expect coherent ship stats, sailing rules (combat, encounters, and travel), swimming rules, and whatever else I end up needing to add to it.

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