When a lot of exploration was historically done by ship, why are ships not a centerpiece for most adventure games?
I guess this would be true for Viking style games but what about Sinbad, Jason and Odysseus?
Are these not good adventures to model games after?
Star Trek and Firefly are good examples for the Sci-Fi genre.
Or is it me? Are there a ton of them and I have just not noticed?
One reason is because it´s harder for the referee - the pc´s can go almost anywhere with a ship (althogh the ref can always control the wind i guess).
I love ships (I´m also a sucker for piratemovies) and have lots of supplements and articles for different systems, which i often read but never uses,.
I use ships - and other vehicles - a lot in my adventures, but they are ususally abandoned, sold, crashed, sank, burned or eaten, so it would be hard to base adventures around them.
I've considered a Travelleresque campaign using Tolkien's elvish ships. Remember that Middle Earth is curved, and human ships sailing off to the west follow the curve of the planet. Elvish ships go straight: Depending on tide, wind, and water currents, an Elf ship could leave Harlindon and wind up at Waterdeep, City State of the Invincible Overlord, or anyplace else the GM says is reachable. The kicker is, it depends on when you leave. If you don't catch the Waterdeep Tide, you'll have to circle around to other, less desirable ports until you can locate an alternate route.
To answer the OP, it's not the default because most GMs are landlubbers who need a good hard pressganging.
Myself, I love GMing games where the PCs are on a ship of some description, as I enjoy giving the players that sort of agency. I've also found that players get more invested in games where the ship is a central component, as it becomes something of a character in and of itself. Why, I'm working on a game just now that lets the players have/build a fleet of spaceships, with the flagship being just as important as any major NPC.
Quote from: zx81;1118062One reason is because it´s harder for the referee - the pc´s can go almost anywhere with a ship (althogh the ref can always control the wind i guess).
Just because you can go anywhere doesn't mean it makes sense to. Seems to me it wouldn't make a difference as long as the players were able to get enough details to give them "Somewhere to go".
Should make a "Point Crawl" type game easier as you can just get on with it and arrive at the next "Point".
I think that the reason ships aren't more central to the game is that they require more specialized rules for ship combat and navigation, and leave the characters stranded on a vessel on long voyages that can take days or weeks to reach the next landmass without ANYTHING for characters to do but watch the waves and get sea sick. With land based adventures you have more frequent and easier to handle random encounters, with relatively shorter trips back to town to pawn off loot then get back to exploring and killing stuff. Continental based adventures are also common in history and fiction, with plenty to do and explore, places to visit, etc.
Though, it is true that sea based adventures are far more common in history and fiction than they tend to be in most games, particularly in cultures based around the Mediterranean (or fantasy cultures inspired by them), so there should be more effective ways to work them into the game.
Quote from: VisionStorm;1118067I think that the reason ships aren't more central to the game is that they require more specialized rules for ship combat and navigation...
This.
Which is exacerbated by the fact that a ship typically requires a crew while most tables are focused on a small band of PCs -- not a few PCs and a bunch of NPC crew. In addition, a ship implies a captain and a lot of players don't want to play or really just can't handle a setting where someone else gives their PC orders.
Quote from: VisionStorm;1118067I think that the reason ships aren't more central to the game is that they require more specialized rules for ship combat and navigation, and leave the characters stranded on a vessel on long voyages that can take days or weeks to reach the next landmass without ANYTHING for characters to do but watch the waves and get sea sick.
I would think that depends on how big the ship is and how far away from land you go. Even so, there is no reason "long voyages that can take days or weeks" take that length of time in actual play.
Quote from: VisionStorm;1118067With land based adventures you have more frequent and easier to handle random encounters, with relatively shorter trips back to town to pawn off loot then get back to exploring and killing stuff.
Ships that hug the coast can be adventuring on land every time they want and still make quick trips to a port.
Quote from: Greentongue;1118074Ships that hug the coast can be adventuring on land every time they want and still make quick trips to a port.
Even with coast-hugging ships* I'd expect wind and tide to matter to the point of needing some rules for handling ship movement and for being blown off course.
The word used was ship, not small boat so even if nearly all the action occurs on land, having a ship's crew with 30+ NPCs will require some sort of rules to quickly resolve small scale (squad or platoon size) mass combat.
* Coast-hugging basically describes the voyages in the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and a lot of the water voyages of Sinbad.
I did a campaign with a dwarven steamship that moved from port to port, sort of like the Enterprise moving from planet to planet. My goal was to have a bunch of one-shot adventures for the group but eventually they connected together as the crew had to find special gemstones which would power the ship and some of its components. (One gemstone gave it levitation, another powered a "lightning cannon.") I found that this was a neat way to move the group from one-shot to one-shot.
Mostly because my players didn't want to deal with ship combat...Nor could I find good ship combat rules.
Ships are awesome. They are about exploration, and a homebase all in one! A Combat homebase with cannons and a crew!
The Savage Worlds 50 Fathoms setting provides an excellent opportunity to have a campaign centered on the party traveling by ship. It has a good plot point campaign, and provides plenty of adventure seeds for practically every location. In part the setting could do that because it's about a couple thousand miles across, the relatively small size allowing making it possible to provide the information it does for each of the islands. One might do something similar if they based their campaign on the Mediterranean, and then sink most of the rest of the world leaving around 50 islands where the major ports are at.
Coast hugging gives a lot of opportunities for shore excursions as well as urban encounters.
Savage Worlds 50 Fathoms does show that it can be done.
Furry Pirates pretty much lives on this idea. The PCs are crew, or own their own ship and putter about the Age of Sail Authentic world.
Why are ships not more common? Why arent caravan homes more common? For that matter why arent mounts more common even?
Vulnerabiliy is a huge reason.
A mobile base is... well... Mobile. It can be stolen. It can be wrecked. Or in the case of mounts, killed.
Ships are also high maintenance. You have to take care of them or bad things may happen. You also have to likely pay and feed crew or they may flip out and take your ship. They may flip out and take your ship anyhow!
Ships are also horrendously vulnerable to severe weather.
And lastly. In a fantasy setting everything AND the water wants to eat the ship, or the people on it, or BOTH! Especially if its Faerun!
My DCC setting is a huge ocean dotted with islands. The coastlines are marked on the edges of the maps, but the players are much more interested in island hopping. But weather and supplies and "here be dragons" rumors are always factors, so they plot their course accordingly. Same in my sci-fi game, where they might theoretically be able to head off in any direction, but fuel management and jump distance is definitely a thing. So I don't buy into the idea that boat=too much player agency, but a GM does need to be on their toes. That said, too much pedantry and you're basically punishing your table for buying into your campaign conceit, so I soft-pedal a lot of stuff until and unless I'm using it for dramatic effect.
Quote from: Greentongue;1118061Or is it me? Are there a ton of them and I have just not noticed?
Naval warfare is not popular.
Quote from: finarvyn;1118084I did a campaign with a dwarven steamship that moved from port to port, sort of like the Enterprise moving from planet to planet. My goal was to have a bunch of one-shot adventures for the group but eventually they connected together as the crew had to find special gemstones which would power the ship and some of its components. (One gemstone gave it levitation, another powered a "lightning cannon.") I found that this was a neat way to move the group from one-shot to one-shot.
In one campaign, to avoid a lot of wilderness mapping, I gave the players a flying ship (just to travel about in among significant places, and not intending it to be relevant to combat). They spent most of the campaign (which fizzled for other reasons) in paranoid speculation about exactly how I was planning on destroying it. But all I wanted was to deliver them to relevant adventuring sites.
A small downside of a ship based campaign is what to do about players who miss a session, if there's really no opportunity for them to be off the ship. Shipmates of Odysseus couldn't just catch up at the next port. I would expect them to be sick below deck and not participating in the session, but there's still sometimes pressure to involve them in the current events.
For me, it's because I just don't find nautical fantasy adventures appealing. I'm also losing any good feelings towards ship-based sci-fi.
Have you downloaded Mazes & Minotaurs (http://mazesandminotaurs.free.fr/) yet? Best naval rules in any RPG! And its free.
M&M is Greek Fantasy D&D via Ray Harryhausen, so the default play is Jason & the Argonauts. My drop-in campaign was the PCs had their ship and men-at-arms and sailed throughout the Archipelago having adventures.
Greetings!
I have a group of players that embraced a campaign that centered for quite some time on board the Dominus. The Dominus is an ancient naval warship that is over 300-feet long. The ship has numerous masts, each with the finest gossamer-silk sails, multiple decks, a powerful, fortified forecastle, as well as an animated, and sentient, Dragon-Headed prow. Below the waterline, the great ship has four immense, animated whale-flippers, and an immense, fluked tail, like that of a great Sperm Whale. The group's leader served as the captain of the ship, and was ceremoniously linked to the Dominus through the Command Throne. The group manned the great warship and sailed on adventures throughout the Dragon Sea, fighting against groups of fierce pirates, and infiltrating several pirate strongholds from the sea. From there, the group explored several mysterious islands, and encountered fortresses of Lamia's, Sirens, hostile giants, and citadels full of evil Minotaurs. The group spent several years exploring the jungles and wilderness of the lands of Mandewah and Khambalay, fighting against evil gnoll armies, fleets of savage human marauders, gigantic dinosaurs, and dark citadels ruled by vampire queens. The group then set sail for the far northern lands on a diplomatic mission to aid a far off elven kingdom. The group became involved in a series of naval campaigns between rival Viking kingdoms, as well as aiding an ancient kingdom of noble giants against evil giants, orcs, and beastmen. To the south, great island kingdoms of evil humans and kingdoms ruled by terrifying Fomorians presented a challenge, and an opportunity to aid family members of the group's Druidic priestess. So, the Dominus was loaded up with hordes of Viking allies, and they sailed southwards in great campaign of raiding and conquest against the Fomorians and the kingdoms of the Caandru tribes. The group eventually returned to their main base in the south, in the Dragon Sea, where they put the Dominus in a secret, sea-side cave, before embarking on further adventures deeper within the lands to the east.
Ship-based campaigns can be a lot of fun. The DM has to have some good maps laid out though, and at east a good section of notes detailing a good number of cultures, peoples, religions, environments, as well as local towns, ports, food, monsters, and characters for the players to deal with. Ship-based campaigns can include large elements the DM may not be fully prepared for, from dynamic social environments, to demanding climate and weather, amphibious races, as well as sea monsters and mythical creatures the DM has not put a lot of thought into before, now becoming much more prominent. I think it is also important, critically so--to have lots of shoreline raiding, and fighting on land, on other ships--beyond always fighting on their own, primary ship. So, lots of changing scenery and tactics going on. There is always room for lots of different enemies and rivals, different threats and hatreds, from wizards and pirates, to barbarian raiders, civilized kingdoms, dragons, giants, and sea monsters. Such ocean-based campaigns have a lot of "moving parts" and can be very demanding for a DM. I highly recommend them though!
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
I could see playing a type of Thunder in Paradise game for some wacky hijinks
As I've mentioned I ran a several years long Star Trek campaign. It started with the PCs as a specialized away team (because the Vulcan captain felt it would not be logical to send senior staff into dangerous situations) and it took awhile for them to break from the general RPG mentality of "we're on our own" and "authorities won't help any more than they are forced to."
Once they made that leap though it was glorious. The away got into habit of making regular reports to the Captain via comms (and in turn, the Captain being able to give the team relevant updates), requesting specialists (which allowed me to engage in one my favorite GM activities; playing minor characters with distinct personalities) or equipment as needed (the moment when the party needed a specific, but not typically carried, piece of tech and one of the players for the first time made the leap from "what can we improvise" to "I contact the ship and ask for one to be beamed down" and it was immediately was a watershed moment that finally let the party engage with the problems they were sent in to solve the way I'd intended.
It was a big deal when they first got to take control of running the ship (due to them not having been captured by the Pirates who'd siezed it by duplicity) and then again when they got assigned to the task of being the OpForce in a training exercise (the Captain was the neutral overseer of the exercise) and a chance to "think outside the box" as their mission was to harrass convoys being escorted by green crews (personnel shortages post-Dominion War were seeing people as low ranked as LTs being given command of smaller ships and crews rushed through an accelerated training program) with performance based on how many cargo vessels made it to their destination.
Their enjoyment of the more tactical side was one reason I swapped the rules over to a tweaked d6 Star Wars as it had enough tasks for capital ship-to-ship combat that everyone could feel involved as they eventually got their own command (the CO rolled command checks to give bonuses to the rest, the pilot handled maneuver checks, the security officer handled weapon attacks, the science officer ran the shield/resistance checks, the engineer managed power and damage control/repair check).
All told, there's a lot of pluses to running a campaign from a ship. First, nothing says the PCs have to be the ones in charge of the ship so the GM can plan where the PCs will be instead of them going anywhere they want to (and in the case of Star Trek above, even when they got their own ship, they still had orders from above they had to fulfill that sent them to specific places at specific times).
Second, depending on the size of the vessel it's like bringing a town of recurring NPCs with you. Sometimes people have had a cruddy week and don't feel like going land/planet-side so you can just do some RP with the rest of the crew and what they do with their downtime. Those people can also be reasonably skilled in areas the PCs aren't, but might find useful (the most interesting was turning the ship's supply officer; the guy who made sure all the "paperwork" of accounting for and restocking the ship's stores was done; into a forensic accountant in trying to figure out what was going on with a colony's supplies apparently being siphoned off for other uses).
Plus, if you can find a set of battle rules that keep the players involved, ship-to-ship battles can be a nice change of pace from the usual person-to-person conflicts in a lot of games.
Well, let's see. I have actually run two campaigns which featured a ship as the home base (technically each was owned by a specific player in each case), they were very fun. It provides for some really interesting opportunities different from a traditional campaign. Ships have featured prominently in several of my other games as well; in one, it became a running joke that the party couldn't own a ship for more than a day without smashing it on the rocks (nearly killing everyone after the giant carnivorous lizards descended to the gutted boat and the unconscious occupants) or getting blasted to pieces with cannon fire. The last campaign I ran in my fantasy setting began with the party figuring out how to steal a ship and flee across the sea from their pursuers.
The campaign I'm devising will be mostly based on river travel. All the shippy goodness and I can cause the river to bend into whatever direction I want the PCs to head. The plan is for a vast river system with an endless supply of branches and tributaries to keep the wandering fresh. With an overall campain 'plot' but lots of Star Trek-like one shots when docking at small villages on the riverbank.
I think the variety might be more limiting than you'd think. With land based adventuring it can take place in the mountains, desert, vast cityscape, snowy tundra, underdark, great plains, etc. With a ship you're pretty much locked into a large waterscape and shore visits. Also with a ship base, you're probably always going to be on the move(otherwise what's the point of the ship?), while land based campaigns can run entirely in one place, or be a traveling caravan.
Ship adventuring probably makes more sense for a specific campaign(50 Fathoms, Skull and Shackles, Spelljammer) than as the default.
Quote from: Dracones;1118381... can take place in the mountains, desert, vast cityscape, snowy tundra, underdark, great plains, etc.
Most of what you listed can be reached by ship/boat. Just a matter of wanting to.
I'm sure it would be less creative work by a GM if you were to run a specific campaign(50 Fathoms, Skull and Shackles, Spelljammer).
Quote from: Greentongue;1118383Most of what you listed can be reached by ship/boat. Just a matter of wanting to.
Exactly. It also broadens the potential variety of cultures, races, etc. which can be encountered among those adventures (ala sailing from South America to Western Europe, with the potential to become an adventure itself). It's definitely worth noting that the party does not need to stay with the ship at all times; pay a docking fee, use your contacts, or find a nice hideaway for it and get going; think of it as something like the PC's home city or home town. It need not be adhered to as the vehicle for adventure at all times, but it serves as a hub and can be a source of intrigue and adventure in and of itself.
Quote from: Greentongue;1118061When a lot of exploration was historically done by ship, why are ships not a centerpiece for most adventure games?
I guess this would be true for Viking style games but what about Sinbad, Jason and Odysseus?
Are these not good adventures to model games after?
Star Trek and Firefly are good examples for the Sci-Fi genre.
Or is it me? Are there a ton of them and I have just not noticed?
I'm literally running this right now in my weekly Talislanta game. The PC's are part of a crew of a Cymrilian Windship traveling on a science/diplomacy/surveying/first-contact tour of the continent. On the way, they're doing missions for their respective factions they represent, exploring locales (while the ship travels elsewhere and returns to pick them up) returns back to the Seven Kingdoms for R&R (and training), all the while geo-political stuff occurs based on the results of their trip.
Fantasy Sword-and-Sorcery Star Trek.
While a ship-board campaign can be a special kind of campaign, it also means the PCs will be very dependent on a ship, theoretically also a crew, and circumstances. Handling storms, and long voyages with little to do along the way, has a way of disempowering the players in relative comparison to a land-based adventure where the PCs can basically decide to go in any direction and without being so directly dependent on the whims of nature or other people.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1118868While a ship-board campaign can be a special kind of campaign, it also means the PCs will be very dependent on a ship, theoretically also a crew, and circumstances. Handling storms, and long voyages with little to do along the way, has a way of disempowering the players in relative comparison to a land-based adventure where the PCs can basically decide to go in any direction and without being so directly dependent on the whims of nature or other people.
We are talking about a game here where the GM can control the time line and weather correct?
If these factors are not fun, why are they being included? What value does it add to include details that are boring and disempowering?
Quote from: RPGPundit;1118868While a ship-board campaign can be a special kind of campaign, it also means the PCs will be very dependent on a ship, theoretically also a crew, and circumstances. Handling storms, and long voyages with little to do along the way, has a way of disempowering the players in relative comparison to a land-based adventure where the PCs can basically decide to go in any direction and without being so directly dependent on the whims of nature or other people.
While spaceship-based games don't tend to worry about the weather, the rest of what you wrote applies. The dependency on the ship can cause major problems if the players and GM don't agree on the degree of plot armor for the ship. I ran a Star Wars game where the players stole ships, crashed ships, had ships shot out from under them, and stole more ships. One player wanted to have his plot-armored Milennium Falcon stand-in and didn't like how easily ships would come and go (the go usually came because the PCs would either take it into heavy combat or would attract so much heat that ditching it for something less notorious was a smart idea). OTOH, I had a friend running a Star Wars game and the way things went, it was painfully obvious that we were supposed to treat our starting ship like another PC and never even think of replacing it (but don't worry, no matter how banged-up it got, it was always repairable).
Interesting thing I've found about adventures on ships is that it gives pcs and players freedom i.e.
"Wherever we want to go, we go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is... is freedom."
This means that players can go all Jack Sparrow and say "Give me that horizon" and sail away from the carefully designed adventure in to the wild oceans of the sandbox. I am always pleased when players jump off of the trail of breadcrumbs and decide to do their own thing, but other GMs may not be.
My characters had a flying ship for years, and it was not a problem to DM the campaign. Some areal battles were just unreal.
WEG Star Wars had the "Smuggler" template that started with a spaceship and a huge debt with a mafia boss. I guess every party had one.
I thought the thread was in reference to sailing ships. I've run a lot of sci-fi games based on spaceships. There's a different type of liberty of movement there.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1119985I thought the thread was in reference to sailing ships. I've run a lot of sci-fi games based on spaceships. There's a different type of liberty of movement there.
It really works out about the same (except most PC spacecraft have crew sizes of < 10 so there is usually little need for too many NPC crew--WH40K's Rogue Trader being a big exception).
Quote from: RPGPundit;1119985I thought the thread was in reference to sailing ships. I've run a lot of sci-fi games based on spaceships. There's a different type of liberty of movement there.
I had thought mostly about small sailing ships but there is not reason that they are the only option.
Different considerations with varying sizes but that just gives more possibilities.
Did a 2e starwars campaign centered on a strike cruiser, npc captain to prevent fist fights at the table, each player had 3 characters; a ground assault character (stormtrooper, imperial army trooper with light vehicle or naval trooper security detail type) a starfighter pilot character and a gunnery or bridge-pit crew character. It did pretty well until captain was killed by a rebel straffing run on the bridge and a player got promoted to captain then there was the typical strife of no one wanting to follow orders from another player, it slowed the game down somewhat with bickering but never went off the rails until half the group no longer wanted to follow orders from imperial naval command and decided to defect. The other half were loyal sons of the empire so mutiny was the order of the day; pvp ensued, the ship was scuttled, there were many escape pods, and after that the group divided into a pair of players who were up for anything, a pair who wanted to do rebel only, and that one guy who has to be contrarian about everything. Had to switch to D6 fantasy for while to defuse the bickering, then real life caught up and scattered everyone to the winds before we could try it again. Now, was it the ship? I dunno, I lean more toward player immaturity here, which is sad because everyone were adults. The only thing that ever caused this much strife at my table before was an argument over who would hypothetically win, tarrasque or age category 12 red dragon, which nearly came to blows. Adults can be such children. Ship or last slice of pizza, some people become monsters if dice are involved.