Looks like my upcoming campaign will involve a good deal of ship-to-ship combat, cannons and maneuvering. I don’t need a whole new subsystem to resolve it (although a scripting system could be kinda cool), but I want to have a few tricks up my sleeve as far as how to set up multiple tests scenarios.
How have you resolved this in the past? Linked tests? Sequences of versus tests? Which tests would allow help and from whom? Say you’ve got two crews facing off, each with the full gamut of seafaring skills, Command, Artillerist, etc and they’re both maneuvering in to fire on each other with cannons… each has the intent to sink the other ship, but you don’t want to resolve the scene in a single vs. test, mainly because each player wants to do their part (and accomplishing this intent is a job for a large group with a varied skillset on each side, too.)
I realize it all comes down to intent and task here, and that there are many ways to go about it. I’m just wondering if you’ve got some good ideas on setting this up. Does Range & Cover work in this context? What would the complications be, there?
In our Burning Airships game, we were using the Mass Combat rules for this. One was the ship vs. a flock of night terrors. Our goal was to escape, essentially, while the night terrors wanted to wreck the ship. The second one was our attempt to reach the heart of the capital city that had been overrun by orcs.
R&C work very well with Naval engagements. Just be clever and replace appropriate R&C skills with Naval skills. Replace Cover with Wind Gauge as the fictional reason for Advantage dice. Or maybe fog banks, atolls, etc…
There’s been many scenarios discussed on these boards over the years that did just what you wanted. Stats for cannons and ships discussed over and over. Even an adventure based on it. Somewhere…
The scenario that came up in tonight’s game just involved the players picking off a couple straggling scout ships so I didn’t feel the need to pull out anything R&C based. Just some Observation/Pilot for maneuvering and Artillerist and Command when it came to firing guns and boarding. Worked out really great.
I found the Naval Gunpowder combat hack to R&C on the wiki and will look into using that next time.