took a trip to the high seas for this one GRIM HOLLOW, THE PLAYERS GUIDE: bit.ly/35RlYPr MERCH: www.bonfire.com/store/xp-to-l... PATREON: / xptolevel3 TWITTER: / xptolevel3 DISCORD: / discord
@@Kahadi Most people's response to finding out their kidney has been stolen is to panic or scream. Jacob's is to record a video and rant on his dissapointment's of a D&D module
@@dragonmaster613 Did you know that is not supposed to happen? However, I don't know if you should consult a proctologist or a chiropractor in that case. Maybe both.
One day Spencer comes home and finds Jacob taped to the ceiling. Spencer: “Is all this setup for me? But how I am supposed to get to there?” Jacob: O.O
@@sebg5528 if the ceiling is slanted so his head is down, then yes. But if it’s slanted to where his head is higher than the rest of his body, then no.
In our salt marsh campaign, the ship's cook is a light cleric who was previously on a ship (in a prequel oneshot for a character in another campaign) and he uses a pickle to cast his magic.
I had a party member use all of his money in a call of cthulu campaign to buy as many spoond as he could carry, dud a literally convinced is to craft him a outfit with them, and so the murder hobo, (literally his character was a crazy, violence tending hobo) king of the silver ware waged war on the cultists. The best thing from this is when he rolled to intimidate after killing a cultist with a spoon, in front of another cultist, by gouging his eyes out , that he rolled a fucking d20 and the dm went on later to tell us when we were infiltrating their hideout after murder hobo got killed in a 5-on-1 melee brawl that the cultist was traumatised and had spread rumours of The Mad Spoon Lord and all the low level cultist refused to go near a spoon.
when your dream class is a homebrew chef with the most absurdly well written mechanics for a class you've ever seen, with an amazing character in mind for the job you'd want to be a cook too
Captain: We're being followed by an enemy ship, where is the wizard at?! First mate: On the deck giving the ship advantage sir! *A half-elf wizard on deck is turning blue by frantically blowing at the sails*
If I could figure out what species Quina Quen from Final Fantasy 9 would be in D&D, I would play them in a heartbeat so yes add me to the list of who would want to play a chef.
Could you imagine trying to explain this scene to 13 year old Jacob? One day in your near adult life, you're going to be sitting in your bath tub, fully clothed, discussing an imaginary role playing game for money on the internet. I just imagine little Jacob's reaction being "Really?...cool" and just walks off
And as Jacob explains the details of Ghosts of Saltmarsh... ...rising out of the water is the King. And he begins to tell us about the trouble in the kingdom.
@@Mihail4444 ... Ok, so, Preston Garvey is from Fallout 4, and has a meme of "Hello General, another settlement needs your help! Here, I'll mark it for you" (similiar to that of the king, he pops up out of nowhere to tell you)
@@hossdelgado626 Yeah, but this is a reference to XP to Level 3’s earlier video about being in a railroady campaign. Now with that being said... *GENERAL, A SETTLEMENT NEEDS YOUR HELP!*
So as I understand it the original adventure being named "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" was an intentional red herring. TSR was tired of their cool twists being spoiled by the name of the adventure and the cover art giving it away, so they put "Ghosts" in the name and said it was about exploring a haunted house when it was really about smugglers. That is why there are no ghosts in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. As for the naval combat; I don't think there even should have been a captain role. If the players want to call one player the leader and let them decide what every one does in combat than that is up to them, it should not be a mandatory game play mechanic. Replace it with a pilot role, or ditch roles all together and have various stations the players can man as and when they please. That's how most cooperative nautical video games work (Guns of Icarus, Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time, Etc.) and it works quite well.
That’s how i run ship combat TBH. The stations are on the ship, anyone can use them, the party decides together what to do and then at least one of them has to get to the proper station to make it work
Starfinder(Pathfinder in Space) that’s sort of how it works. Each character man’s a specific section. The pilot of course steers the ship, the gunman(or men) each fire on their turns, and depending on their skill will get bonuses, the engineer can repair the ship, but can also “reroute power” and bolster defenses, speed, or make the guns stronger. There’s even one for spellcasters where they sort of do the hub of the engineer, but with magic.
Hey, don't try to explain something to someone trying to make money from RU-vid without checking if the premise of his video has already been answered on RU-vid!
"Man I really wish we were closer so I could just jump on that ship and use my battleaxe." You hit the nail on the head here. This is how naval battles were fought before the invention of the canon. While ancient societies like the Roman Empire and Greeks made use of some artillery on their ships, medieval naval warfare (prior to the cannon) almost always consisted of ramming a ship and then boarding them to fight blade-to-blade. So removing the artillery from the ships cooouuuld be a good fix for Ghosts of Saltmarsh, since it would incentivize boarding actions, at least for a table that wants their game to cleave more closely to a medieval pre-gunpowder setting. It would definitely be appropriate for Greyhawk, in any case.
Though to also be fair, Medieval (not Antiquity/Ancient) Navy warfare became almost non-existent. Outside of Asia, and a few spots like Byzantium, most nations prior to gunpowder did not have permanent navies. Even the vikings, famous for their navy beach assaults, never commonly fought boat to boat. Crusader Kings 3 is actually more realistic in that they completely removed navy combat mechanics than Crusader Kings 2 because of this (other than fringe cases like Byzantium)
My players that didn't have "useful" ship roles would always do this anyway. If for some asinine reason who ever they picked to be captain doesn't want to ram/board the other ship make the enemies do it, you do have control over them after all. Also sometimes it's fun for the captain to be an NPC in the first place, then there's no "I am the leader" situations. The party hired a fully crewed ship or were hired as guards. During ship combat they can do what they normally would do in combat, shoot arrows if they're close enough, polymorph/wildshape, cast spells or try to board the other ship/ fight off boarders.
Spellcaster become canons (or worse) at level 5+. The addition of magic really changes the shape of war... when magic is common. Eberron is full of "low level" magic in the battlefield. But you can make boarding a better option with enviromental effects, fog or a heavy rain make shooting hard
@@estebanrodriguez5409 good suggestions, another thing you could do is have NPCs on the player's ship that have reasons not to want them to blow up other ships as a side quest or even a main thing I guess. For instance the pirates probably have stolen treasure, or the ship was stolen, they have captives, or maybe someone's kid had a rebellious phase and fell in with pirates. I guess you could also do this type of thing with player's backstories and their own family members. Maybe an NPC wants to bring pirates to justice and murdering them and destroying a perfectly good ship that could be repurposed as a merchant vessel is a bad thing. Sure, fire the canons a few times so the ship takes on water and slows down, but the goal is to board the ship and take the loot, capture the enemies, free the captives. Not sit at a distance shooting a ship. You could do this the other way around as well with the enemies wanting something or someone the player have or even the ship so they try to chase them and board. But yeah, adding weather, islands that block a side, a crazy storm that will hide ships behind waves, you could even do crazier things with magic easily. Same kinda thing with land combat, a blank flat square is significantly less fun.
@@Nildread If you destroy the sails, a ship is basically a sitting duck. To me the insteresting this about "vehicle combat" is that it brings an interesting location for the fight that can really change things up. Unless the system you are playing in has some ROBUST rules, it's probably better to roll the dice a couple of times and discribe what side had the upper hand for the boarding conflict.
Ironically, I used the tables in Ghosts of Saltmarsh for my island hopping Theros Adventure, and a lot of the stuff is amazing for a Odyssey or Jason and the Argonauts themed campaign.
I think I can make the Lizardfolk thing make sense. See, Lizardfolk take everything quite literally so they'd probably get pissy if someone entered into a building through a door that's clearly not supposed to be the entrance.
What I found most curious about the Lizardfolk attitude table is that an adult Lizardfolk's life is valued at one (1) single gp of stolen treasure. It seems in order of value, high to low, their attitude is: Treasure > Hatchlings > Intrusions > Adults. They must've studied under a black dragon I guess. ^^
In my opinion, Ghosts of Saltmarsh needs a lot of DM home brewing in certain areas. I’m running a home brew campaign with XGtE, Ghosts of Saltmarsh and a few books written by me and my players. The problem with Saltmarsh is that it has a very limited view on ship combat. What ive done is that I scrapped Saltmarsh and just took the idea of ship combat and completely repurposed it. The vehicle being it’s own creature idea is GREAT, the problem is that the players can’t work as a team. In my campaign, the captain steers, the head gunner rolls all of the guns on one side (as the crew mates), navigator navigates etc. what Saltmarsh needs is more actions for players.
Honestly go look at Starfinder, it basically overcomes that weakness with each player being able to cover a portion of the ship and able to aid in the fight.
Reminds me of FTL and its stations Pilot and drive, weapons, shields, oxygen, med bay, sensors, doors Dodge and engage/disengage, attack, defend, stay alive, know what is going on in the ships, control what goes in and out of rooms Everything can work on its own to a degree but manning each station makes them better or faster I can see players taking the helm to control movement and evasion, coordinating fire and watching for problems and opportunities on either ship but I gotta say that just patching the hull and putting out fires is quite boring
Watching Jacob have a stroke trying to explain the 4th quest is essentially me attempting to work all my characters secret backstories into the campaign I'm running
Having read through Ghosts of Saltmarsh, I got the impression that playing cover to cover wouldn't make a lot of sense. I like the way I used it, which was finding the best parts of the adventures and just plugging them into my groups Homebrew world. We started with Salvage Operation and then did the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh when the heroes returned to town. It's a lot more fun to let the players wander and "discover" the other adventures by putting them at the next destination.
To be fair, the book states you can play it as a Lvl 1-12 campaign, as written. I'd say this is just a case of choosing a poor selection of adventures to adapt.
Personally, I changed the evil cultists into an isolated tribe who, and had the skeletons being what keeps them on the island because a dead necromancer put a spell on the island which is why there are so many skeletons. The party is then tasked with systematically killing all of the skeletons which made for a really fun combat, and dispelling the magic of the necromancer after which they can convince the native tribe to stay or leave to see the world.
"I do not see it this way, please tell me your secrets." I know we're talking about a make believe game, but that statement was accidentally _deeper than an ocean trench._ The world would be a better place if more people thought like this.
You could just switch how you do everyone's actions. The other members make everything, the attacks, movement, e.t.c, and the Captain is the one who boosts the other functions, but he needs to choose wich one he wants to boost. Kinda like how it works Starfinder, the captain is still the charismatic leader, but in essence he's just the one giving buffs and deciding the priorities of the ship. It's very awesome.
5:00 I've been running a campaign with a lot of small islands, making ships necessary to navigate the world, but i never made the party act as the crew for the ship, and I honestly never even thought to. Basically after they got the ship they had to spend some time trying to find npc who were willing to help run the ship. One of the party was the captain, but that was just because he had the sailor background.
Yeah, I don't really know how much the rules in ghosts of saltmarsh assume that it'll be your party by themselves. Most of the roles seem like npc or added background things. I like using the island generators in Ghosts of saltmarsh and the ones mythical odyssey of theros to make fun islands to explore.
I low key would like a series of module reviews in detail like this one. I know he rated them in a video, but it was obviously done quick to fit every module.
I backed Guy Scalander's Nautical Campaigns book on Kickstarter -and one of the things I enjoyed most about it was the "officer classes" were like power-skill sets that could be used to increase the ship's movement attack or some utility function. And the ship was divided up into weapons, helm, sails and hull. As I recall, the Bosun was able to heal the ship with skills like "Canabalise" stealing HP from say the Helm to repair a gun. He also had an emergency "All hands on Deck!" commsnd that could stave off imminent disaster. The Captain had "Focus Fire" which let a gun fire twice. "Target the Bridge" was The Ship's Surgeon command to direct the guns to Target the crew rather than the ship. The Quartermaster could spend ship's rations to inspire the crews morale score, competing morals was how crews matched up by promising increased pay or rum to fight on fight harder. I used this system to run a special deck invasion of seabolds in 3 waves trying to burn the ship out from under them. One of the most dramatic games I've run. It came down to one single roll and the ship would either sink or stabilise. The buffs they had applied to the ship's morale meant they beat the DC by 1. Thank you Great Gm for an answer ship combat.
I actually love that, I spend a whole week creating quests for a campaign I never ran just on the little information that's given. Setting books shouldn't give you everything on subjects they mention and then not mention anything they can't elaborate on. No, screw that, mention all sorts of tiny but flavorful little things that you never elaborate on to give *me* a chance to get my creative juices flowing, please!
I ran the third adventure as a Halloween one-shot. It was a blast and ended in an epic escape from the ship with one character alive just pushing the box along with the other two characters stacked on top of it. That was pog.
Um, so, as someone who has actually sailed a boat, I think it makes perfect sense that you’d need to take a move action. If you drop specific lines to go do other stuff, you’ll still have some momentum, but you’ll basically drift very very slowly in whichever direction the tide pushes you.
@@XPtoLevel3 With the tide, only slightly, not enough to matter in a 6 second turn. If it’s the momentum you’re concerned about, you should take it up with... well, most of d&d honestly. It’s also very unrealistic that you’d be able to turn on a dime, that your speed doesn’t dramatically change based on your point of sail, that there aren’t tacking or wind shadow mechanics, but hey, that sounds really boring. I guess my point is this: a buccaneer sailboat doesn’t have an anchor, but you can pretty well stop it by just dropping the main line, especially when you’re tracking time in 6 second rounds.
But the ships here are not the modern small recreational boats, they're supposed to be traditional big sailing ships with dozens of NPC crew in addition to PC officers. As far as I understand, on those ships you don't need to actively hold the lines to keep sailing.
If the ship has sails it will move as long as there is wind in the sails. Your situation is only true is the ship only moves via a motor, oars, or anything mechanism.
I'm gonna run a GoS game soon-ish so I'm gonna put timestamps for my own sake so I can keep refering to this video 4:32 - Problems with Ship Combat 8:30 - You don't get to use your boat that much 16:06 - Fixes to Ship Combat 22:02 - Conclusion
I am currently using The Ghosts of Saltmarsh as a guide for homebrew, the first chapter is very useful and full of detail for making what I hope to be a versatile adventure world. I am glad I watched this before I tried any ship-based sessions though, it seems the book will be a good grounding for the basics of running combat with some tweaks here and there. I guess the problem might be that GoS mislabels itself as nautical themed, as in far out to sea, when it is really more coastal-nautical.
I usually modify modules when I use them and the lighthouse island one was great for that. It's a fun three part adventure. Part one, the skull dunes, needs a LOT of work to be more than just "kill six skeletons. Now kill four more. Now it's eight." I modified it by adding a survivor who could explain the backstory (a lot of these old modules have extensive backstory that they never provide a way to communicate to the players!), provided some rolls to determine whether there were skeletons in Part two, the cultists, offers the players a way to resolve things without a fight, but they have to work carefully and eventually assassinate or depose the existing leader because he adamantly refuses to leave under his own power. Part three, the dungeon, was a fun old school dungeon crawl. I did some reworking to make the traps a little more interesting and varied.
Yeah, I have the book. I was so excited when Guy from How to Be a Great GM was expounding on the book... Then I read the ship combat options. Makes NO friggin' sense! PERIOD! Here are my proposed fixes: 1. Fix the roles. These are the roles on any ship that matter in combat: Captain, Helm, Rigging/Sails, Carpentry, Bilge, Medic, and Weapons. Outside of Captain (And maybe medic if manned by a cleric with healing spells), all other stations have skill checks associated with them. And characters should be able to move between them. Maybe make the movement between certain positions take a full round before they can work the new station in situations where they have to move between decks. 2. Unless there is a condition where the ship stops moving; like all the ores are out of the water, winds calm and sea is dead; sails are furled and lashed to the masts, magic is used to slow/stop the targeted ship, etc., the ship keeps moving at the same speed as it had the last round. If the helm position is unmanned, the ship enters a state called "Adrift". This is where the DM would roll on a table to see what degree the ship moved from it's course, and what position it is in. A modified version of this table will be used if the person filling in the navigation/helm role fails their navigation/helm skills check, or they can take a speed reduction as a penalty. Helm roles should be INT and WIS based 3. Sails/Rigging is mostly a support role. If they make their checks, it gives a "help action" to helm and weapons in the form of a +something to the skill roles for helm and weapons. I'd say +1 for each player in that role if more than one, or greater if only one player. But not more than +5 overall. A failure at this station should impose a penalty for the helm and/or slow the ship. This is going to be STR and DEX skill checks. 4. Carpentry is healing for the ship. Sounds boring but it can be tied into helm and ship's speed. As the ship takes damage, it's going to handle differently. Certain percentages of HP loss should reduce the speed of the ship AND add a penalty to the Helm's dice rolls. Skills should be INT and WIS based skills. 5. Bilge is kind of same as Carpentry, in that the ship will always take on water and need that water pumped or dumped out. As the ship gets damaged, the amount of water coming is increases. Certain levels of water on the ship should serve as penalties to ship's speed and helm rolls. Skill checks should be STR or INT (depending on if muscles or machines are being used to pump out the water.) 6. Medic is whomever has medical skills and can help heal people. Healing PC's should be handled normally, but they can do a medicine skills check to see how much damage to the crew they can offset. 7. Weapsons: This is the biggest mess. First, Dump trebuchets and Catapults. I don't know how much, if any, catapults were used. If they were, it would have been by bronze age cultures before their big die offs. Trebuchets are basically giant levers on wheels. There is no way you could use one on a ship's deck without it causing the ship to either pitch or roll (depending on orientation) the ship. No Fricken' way. Balistas would have been used on SOME ships (again, we're talking early on.) Since 5e allows for blunderbusses and muzzle loaders, cannons should also be allowed. Cannons came way before handheld firearms. So, if the setting has personal firearms, it should also have cannons. Plus, we have mages and artificers. They should be able to come up with other gadgets capable of flinging damage at the enemy. All weapons will have a Dex skills check for aiming, and the DC target is set depending on if the target is in point blank, close, medium, far, and outside of range. 8. Captain gets to Order the ship about. This takes the form of ship's actions. This can be ordering the crew to stations (giving boosts to rolls of other stations on successful CHA skills checks) to ordering the ship to outrun or even ram the other ship. These actions should be treated like spellcasting, as some are instantaneous and some require several rounds to complete with concentration. CHA, WIS, and INT skills checks should be used for these actions, depending on what the action is. 9. Turn order should use a ship based imitative, where the initiative rolls indicate which ship goes first, and party turn order is based on ship role: Captain, Sails/Rigging, Carpentry, Bilge, Weapons, Helm, and finally Medic. This is to make sure the bonuses and penalties are flowing the correct order. The DM could have the party roll for initiative as a group and either add up all dice totals or average it out. (And the NPC ships can just make one roll to make things simple.) 10. PCs should always be seen as "Throwing an extra body at the task", but let the players roll for the stations they're on. Otherwise, if the NPC crew is working the station, the roll is unmodified outside of bonuses and penalties from other stations. Remember, the crew are seasoned professionals at sea, but the PC's probably aren't. 11. PC's with sailing backgrounds or backstories should get a +1 to any roll they make, since they should have some idea as to what they're doing. 12. Sailing should introduce a new Wizard subclass: The Sea Mage. Figure this person will specialize in elemental magics of wind, water, and wood/life, but also have some combat spells (like FIREBALL! FIREBALL! FIREBALL!) I'll have to write this up proper and post it in the Discord. But, this is the start of my chaotic thoughts on the subject.
One aspect of the Bilge role i'd change would be: If the ship takes too much damage, it begins to make it's own counterpart to Death Saves, if you have enough people bucketing out water fast enough, it can keep the ship afloat. Could have it staggered like Exhaustion. The higher level of Breaches it has, the faster you need to remove said water, and if it gets too much, then everyone has to make a varying DC Dex save to avoid death (or drink a waterbreathing potion/be a race that can breathe underwater/generally doesnt need air) Of course, similar rule to Downing, if the ship were to take an absurd amount of damage past 0, it instantly goes to the Sinking stage, if it takes extra damage while Downed/Floundering, said incoming water increases in rate dramatically, and if unattended by people or machines, the Water of course would continue to rise and cause further penalties. Said Bilge role would of course, get modifiers for how fast you can get rid of said water if manual. Carpenters would of course contribute to removing said Breach modifiers
Your point about casting being OP in ship combat is pretty right, we saw it in crit role where cadeyshack literally just said “no more combat” by capsizing the enemy ship with control water.
Lol imagine just playing a ship only game where characters are just different ships, like your character sheet is literally a ship your whole party is ships that’s it ☝🏼 no just ships only ships shhh it’s okay ships
Ok, this is my first video from you... Where do I start? xD At first, I was like: "Why is he in a bathtub?" That quickly became irrelevant as the video went on and I just accepted it. Then, you made me laugh so hard, I cried... Your whole personality and the way you talk... Well, Jacob, you got yourself a new subscriber and I'll be binge-watching your channel! =) Keep up the good work, my man! =)
I love how this book is like the pirates of the caribbean ride at Disney. We saw from the movies how epic it could be, but it's about as exciting as it's a small world after all. Keep creating my friends!
lol being a cook during ship battle would be amazing, imagine carrying hot pans or delicate bakery goods and the ship takes a hit and you got to roll to not get injured and save the food you are making! That is going to be RP craziness!
Complete guide to nautical campaigns by how to be a great GM is what i used in place of saltmarsh rules for ships. i've never run or played saltmarsh, but the Nautical campaigns book made my homebrew ships and ocean adventures WAY more interactive and fun. I abstracted things a little bit to make it a little less crunchy realistic, but my players still talk about their ship that sank after a large ocean battle
I just stuck very closely to Descent Into Avernus in a ship combat encounter. The party (4 people, 2 zombies) were running around on a large, magic enhanced ship. The fun in the combat encounter came from the party trying to find out the most efficient way to get the cannonballs (inside the ship) to the trebuchet (on the deck) while still steering the ship and keeping it afloat.
Seems like this ship combat would work better on a larger scale, with each player character being the captain of their own ship, and get NPC's to crew them. It would still kind of suck for the players who don't have the right stats/skills to be good at captaining a ship, but could be something interesting.
Those are some good new rules. I'll be sure to keep this video in mind when I finally get around to implementing my homebrew peninsula-country after our Curse of Strahd game is finished lol
This sounds like a great book, you don't have to care about the boat all of the time. Pirates do hang out outside of the ship. So it shouldn't be aggravating that you are not playing on a boat the whole time. Pirates and Privateers do alot on land just like the real life versions. Underwater? Awesome, that would be crazy fun and also with alot of tension.
You're really praising a campaign that lies about being about high-seas pirating as though it's a good thing that there's almost no ship combat in a book that created rules specifically for it...I genuinely don't want to know what kind of games you like to play, because they must be torture for normal players.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh is an adventure that is good for a DM that enjoys homebrew. It isn't perfect, but it can be an absolute blast with the right DM. I personally am running it right now, and I've homebrewed the chapters the following way: 1: fine as it is. I made it so the party goes to saltmarsh after surviving a pirate ambush on the caravan they were guarding. 2: fine as it, it's a lot if fun as the party must investigate what the hell is going on in this "haunted" house 3:scrap the point system, make the party fight thousand teeth to earn the lizardfolk's trust. (My party earned the trust of the lizardfolk by negotiating with them in chapter 1 on the boat 4: I made the octopus a kraken, and changed the boss fight to be a druid stuck on the derelict. I also made the whole ship kraken themed, with giant octopi, sea spawn, and even chuul feasting on a dead druid. The druid was an islander who fled after the sahuagin attacked and freed a kraken they were keeping dormant via magic and toxins. The sahaugin wished the free the kraken so that they could build bases where the kraken (to not needing to deal with the previous settlers) attacked and capturing survivors to act as slaves. 5: I homebrewed this chapter 100%. It sucks, scrap it or make something in it's place. I made it so the party was looking for survivors of the sahuagin attack, and found the kraken's minions filling the inside wishing to get revenge for their master. It ended with the party facing down a kraken priest riding a hydra. It was a lot of fun. 6: since it is recon, I made it more of a scouting mission than a dungeon crawl. Then when it comes to the final battle, I had it so the party came up with the plan with the armies at their disposal. IT was a lot of fun having the party strategize and try to take out the baron and his army. 7: I'm working on preparing this one right now. I can't offer too much insight beyond this, but I know the party will have a show down with the kraken in Saltmarsh and have to follow it and slay it in it's lair after it retreats.
Talking about adventure modules. We just started playing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden and the DM modified it heavily. We have ski rules, sled rules, different type of sleds, unstable condition and etc. The 1st session was a blast. We got ambushed by hobgoblins and a chace soon followed, barely surviving. (we started on a merchant caravan that was just getting back from Luskan, bringing very valuable supplies to Bryn Shander in Ten Towns.)
A suggestion, Star Wars 5e Starships Handbook works really nicely for spaceship combat, and can work for ship combat too. (Just change the flavor text). The roles are set up really nice to make everyone feel like they have an important job and ship modules are set up so that only specific roles can use them, like an engineer is the one in charge of repair and weapons mods, whilst the pilot does maneuvers and the like. Seriously check it out.
16:30 This is why my D&D and Star Wars games both have house rule entries titled Vehicle Momentum. Vehicles will continue to move along their current trajectory until action is taken to steer them or slow them down. Some vehicles will loose momentum if not propelled, depending on their drive type (treads, wheels, sails, repulsors, ion drives, etc.) Other factors, such as being on an incline, passing over rough terrain, or hurtling through the void of space can affect this as well. It's very circumstantial.
I played in a campaign that used ship combat. The vehicle roles that you're describing from Avernus are a lot like how we ended up handling ship combat. The captain was at the helm and controlled how the ship moved, two of our players were each commanding a portion of the crew manning the different weapons, my artificer was using his force ballistas to take pot shots at the enemy and was leaping onto the other ship to deal with their mage, our druid was using defensive magic like Wind Wall to protect the ship, and our bard was running repairs and healing the crew.
For the ship combat: why not have the actions work like the apparatus of kwalsh? Have the players able to run around and do actions instead of assigned roles. I've never read either salt marsh or avernus so I could misunderstanding something
Right? Like, if you've got enough movement to get over to one of the cannons and it's loaded, can't you just use your action to aim and fire? Why do you need a captain to issue a "ship order" to fire the guns? It just seems so unnecessary.
I know I'm late on this but anyway I found this video because I decided that I wanted to run GOS for my friends, and after reading through GOS I too was very confused about how the story makes no sense, with Pirates, and Assassins being mentioned but never really being used throughout the story. The book gives you the ingredients and tools to make a coherent campaign work you just gotta get a little creative on how you can structure it. There's a ton of stuff on reddit that I have found to be very useful. Hope this helps for anyone else that wants to run GOS :)
Ive noticed that allot of dnd adventures have massive misnomers for names, as for ship combat, boarding actions make things allot of fun. Also commanding lots of boarding crews can be a blast for everyone
As for fire ball spam i'd say in a fantasy setting a caster with the ability to cast counter spell, and control water (for putting out fires) would be an auto include for any competent pirate ship
Huh, Jacob is married now. Cool. Also, ship combat should be able properly simulate Pirates of the Caribbean (The two ships shooting eachother in the whirlpool while Jack Sparrow and Davey Jones sword fight).
Thank you, I’m actually gonna run this and always have at least one Druid on an enemy ship with create water. Maybe even reflavored meld into stone so they can Davy Jones through the ship
I think one way to create a better boat system is to have your players be commanding their own part of the boat. Divide the ship in a couple of parts and let the captain of the ship have the part of the boat with the stir, so they're still a bit more important than the other crewmembers. This system also gives opportunity for players to gather npc's for their part of the boat and maybe upgrade their part of the ship to their liking.
"Chapter 5 took us a month to finish" Me, a Lizardfolk Necromancer Wizard, my Aasimar Death Cleric Necromancer, and a Shepherd Druid all begin laughing.
I've found this video very helpful. I was running a navel adventure around a set of island with my players before that campaign got canceled do to the shut down. Everyone was having fun, but I was having a hard time making the down time with the ship and encounters on the high seas interesting. Now I have a much better idea of how to implement a system that'll be closer to what I wanted to do that will also be fun the the players. So thanks.
