Following reading the discussions in this thread (originally concerning a cheating player, then devolving into discussing how to pilot a ship - go figure), combined with the fact that there are going to be several ships involved in my campaign I'm running, I've decided to come up with some rules for dealing with storms and inclement weather.
These rules will mean more work for me (as DM) but hopefully not too much bookkeeping for the players, unless they decide to make notes as they go on it. Unless you try and combine this with combat, I'm hoping it won't be much more to track than hp/spells/etc. of a few enemies in a combat!
This is literally going down from my mind, and is certainly incomplete - I'm looking for feedback on the concept and ideas for how to make it work!
For starters, I want to make the running of a ship work through some steps:
1: Seeing what's coming - a high DC wisdom check will tell you what's coming - seeing the spray whipping off a headland, or the white waters of a reef ahead, and so on. This step is to give the players an edge in the time it takes them to respond.
2: Knowing what to do - an intelligence check will be needed to work out what to do in response to what's happening. This can be made early if step 1 was successful.
3: Doing it - Strength checks to perform the tasks; steering, hauling ropes, lowering or raising the anchor, etc. These tasks will have different strength requirements, so you can allocate the strongest players to the hardest tasks.
4: Locking it in place - If any ropes have been pulled to adjust the sails, dexterity checks are needed to tie the knots.
The ship will be set up with several things the players can adjust - the anchor (up/down), wheel (steering the ship to desired angle, in 45° increments), ropes for the sail (slacken/tighten) and the sail itself (raise/drop). Everything will be fairly binary - anchor is up or down, sail is full, half or none, ropes are tight or slack, the boom sail is either left or right (and swings in response to the wind).
For the DM to track will be:
The Storm:
the wind speed & direction, wave size & direction, and obstacles ahead. This will all be determined in a random manner, and will swing around rather than jump - so a northerly wind can change to north-westerly or north-easterly, but it can't suddenly jump to southernly. Same with the waves, they can grow larger or smaller but won't jump. This should keep it flowing naturally.
The Ship:
The direction and speed of the ship needs to be tracked by the DM, as well as the condition of the ship, the strength of the knots and so on. The condition of the ship depends on how well they respond to the changing weather conditions, and can be rocking, listing, capsizing for tilt and taking on water, sinking and sunk.
The Interaction:
The final thing the DM needs to do is track the interactions between the ships direction & speed and the storms hazards.
The way I'm putting this together is such that it expects the ship to come out of the storm either in a bad shape or entirely sunk. This is to make an interactive plot device, which they players can affect the outcome, but which is also somewhat foregone - being in a ship in a storm will have bad results, however good you are at riding it out. You might have a ship with some water and a broken mast at the end, or you might be swimming.
I'll add more to this as I can put it down on paper and work it all out - for now, what have other DM's done for storms & sailing? Does anything like I'm proposing exist?
These are all perfectly fine. The DM SHOULD be keeping track of the storm and the affects of it on the ship. Not doing so is simply failing the players. As the DM it is YOUR JOB to tell the players about natural hazards and features such as bad weather so that they can decide what to do about it.
Also, make sure the players are on board with a game that can go south at any moment in this way. I had a DM once who did the same thing, and by bad luck/ rolls or whatever we were fighting off storms everywhere we went. Being almost tpk'd because of a single random dice roll by the DM doesn't feel very good
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I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
The plan is more to make this an encounter, but one which is stretched out somewhat, without making it drag. It's going to be a pre-planned event rather than a randomly encountered one (there will be a storm at a certain point) and how well they deal with it will determine the effectiveness of their ship when they come out the other side.
My thoughts are to have the intensity of the storm as a multiplier for effects, and then have the storm gain or lose intensity. My thoughts for the storm are:
1: randomly determine the number of "rounds" of storm they are having to deal with. It's going to be unrealistically quick, because we aren't going to want to deal with a storm for hours of gameplay, it'll get boring. I'm thinking 3d4 rounds of storm - anywhere from 3 to 12 rounds.
2: The eye of the storm - The number of rounds is what it takes to get to the eye of the storm. The storm starts blowing in a random direction and then I'll adjust it randomly each round to keep the conditions changing. After the 3d4 rounds, they will arrive in the eye of the storm - the wind drops, the sky clears, and the storm rages around them.
3: Coming back out - the storm on the other side lasts for 3d4 rounds again - rolled randomly - and does so in a randomly determined direction etc. This has a good chance to catch them out as their ship might not be set correctly for the storm as they leave. The wind might have been blowing easterly, and now be blowing southerly.
I need to work out a scale of intensity and how it's going to affect things. I'm trying to make the ship as monster stat blocks, in several parts (EG sails, rudder, hull) so it can take damage in different places and it mean something. I'll then have the storm feature incremental DC's for checks, where it makes staying upright and pulling ropes more difficult the stronger the storm is, and of course depending on which direction it's going! waves side-on is harder to stay upright in than waves head on.
I'll be mucking around with this tonight and see if I can get some rules hashed out...
You probably thought of it, but just in case, this kind of encounter is a great chance for some characters to shine. Say someone with a sailor or pirate background, or who had a backstory of being on the water, might get advantage on checks. If some has a proficiency in carpenters tools ( and probably a couple other tool proficiencies), they could actually use them to help plug holes in the hull. You might design the encounter to let them show off those skills a bit.
You probably thought of it, but just in case, this kind of encounter is a great chance for some characters to shine. Say someone with a sailor or pirate background, or who had a backstory of being on the water, might get advantage on checks. If some has a proficiency in carpenters tools ( and probably a couple other tool proficiencies), they could actually use them to help plug holes in the hull. You might design the encounter to let them show off those skills a bit.
I had thought of giving advantage to people with sailor history, but I hadn't thought of the carpenters tools, that's a good one to add!
What's the benefit of randomly determining the length of the storm? Knowing an encounter will be 12 rounds instead of somewhere between 6 and 24 rounds would allow you to structure things much better, and honestly 24 rounds of anything just sounds exhausting.
It also seems possible that the length of the storm could have a much greater effect on the ultimate condition of the boat than the players' actions would. If this encounter is a measure of how well the players deal with a storm, their successes and failures should be the primary factor in how things play out rather than a random roll that they couldn't influence and never saw.
I would also make sure the mechanics all have a clear effect on the gameplay and outcome that justifies the complexity you'll have to deal with. What is the gameplay effect of the wind changing direction every round? Does it actually matter on that scale or could you just do it once when they exit the eye? And what is the result if they end up going south instead of east? If it's just an extra hour of sailing that is narrated in one sentence, will it really matter? If you want to keep it in, make sure it matters.
Overall I've found that when I design a system like this, it can be really helpful to go through it as a player and think about what they experience and which parts are happening behind the scenes that don't actually end up having any effect on that experience. It's very easy to overlook that in the fun of creation and then feel kind of let down when it actually happens at the table.
If you’re going to be doing a lot of naval stuff, it may be worth getting a copy of Stormwrack from 3rd edition. While there’d be a bit to work out mechanically, it’s probably the most thorough naval book D&D have produced.
Try to think of magical solutions too, because your players will. Looking through a familiar, druids sensing the weather, magically bound knots. Don’t want to go off course but need a nap? Immovable rod in the wheel is handy...
What's the benefit of randomly determining the length of the storm? Knowing an encounter will be 12 rounds instead of somewhere between 6 and 24 rounds would allow you to structure things much better, and honestly 24 rounds of anything just sounds exhausting.
It also seems possible that the length of the storm could have a much greater effect on the ultimate condition of the boat than the players' actions would. If this encounter is a measure of how well the players deal with a storm, their successes and failures should be the primary factor in how things play out rather than a random roll that they couldn't influence and never saw.
I would also make sure the mechanics all have a clear effect on the gameplay and outcome that justifies the complexity you'll have to deal with. What is the gameplay effect of the wind changing direction every round? Does it actually matter on that scale or could you just do it once when they exit the eye? And what is the result if they end up going south instead of east? If it's just an extra hour of sailing that is narrated in one sentence, will it really matter? If you want to keep it in, make sure it matters.
Overall I've found that when I design a system like this, it can be really helpful to go through it as a player and think about what they experience and which parts are happening behind the scenes that don't actually end up having any effect on that experience. It's very easy to overlook that in the fun of creation and then feel kind of let down when it actually happens at the table.
That's a fair point with the duration. I think my goal was to make sure the players didn't metagame by assuming the storm would last the same amount of time going out of it as going into it, but I think that's a bit of an unnecessary worry! Building it around a set number of rounds would also make it easier to give a success vs failure outcome.
My thoughts (in their simplest form) are that each round gives a change of conditions, and they will need to change the ship's "settings" (whilst a correct term, it sounds way too computer age to refer to a ship!) to properly ride out the storm. Each round, they will get some time (determined by their ability to predict the weather shifts) to change the ship - steering, adding or losing canvas, etc. - and then the weather shift will hit. If they are set correctly, the ship will only take minor damage, and if they are set incorrectly (or the knots aren't good enough) then the ship will take some more damage, or start rocking, or take on water.
So if I make it (as random numbers) 6 rounds (3 in, 3 out) and up to 5 turns warning of impending weather shifts (which they might not need all of), and then have the ship have 4 stages of disrepair, with the fourth being it's wrecked and sinking. So 3 successes out of 6 and you've still got a working, if somewhat damaged, ship.
If you’re going to be doing a lot of naval stuff, it may be worth getting a copy of Stormwrack from 3rd edition. While there’d be a bit to work out mechanically, it’s probably the most thorough naval book D&D have produced.
Try to think of magical solutions too, because your players will. Looking through a familiar, druids sensing the weather, magically bound knots. Don’t want to go off course but need a nap? Immovable rod in the wheel is handy...
I will have a look through that when I get the chance, thanks!
I'd love it if the players found magical solutions to their issues. I will be giving the seas & winds a strength statistic (of sorts) so an immovable rod is all well and good, unless the seas get powerful enough to move it!
Following reading the discussions in this thread (originally concerning a cheating player, then devolving into discussing how to pilot a ship - go figure), combined with the fact that there are going to be several ships involved in my campaign I'm running, I've decided to come up with some rules for dealing with storms and inclement weather.
These rules will mean more work for me (as DM) but hopefully not too much bookkeeping for the players, unless they decide to make notes as they go on it. Unless you try and combine this with combat, I'm hoping it won't be much more to track than hp/spells/etc. of a few enemies in a combat!
This is literally going down from my mind, and is certainly incomplete - I'm looking for feedback on the concept and ideas for how to make it work!
For starters, I want to make the running of a ship work through some steps:
1: Seeing what's coming - a high DC wisdom check will tell you what's coming - seeing the spray whipping off a headland, or the white waters of a reef ahead, and so on. This step is to give the players an edge in the time it takes them to respond.
2: Knowing what to do - an intelligence check will be needed to work out what to do in response to what's happening. This can be made early if step 1 was successful.
3: Doing it - Strength checks to perform the tasks; steering, hauling ropes, lowering or raising the anchor, etc. These tasks will have different strength requirements, so you can allocate the strongest players to the hardest tasks.
4: Locking it in place - If any ropes have been pulled to adjust the sails, dexterity checks are needed to tie the knots.
The ship will be set up with several things the players can adjust - the anchor (up/down), wheel (steering the ship to desired angle, in 45° increments), ropes for the sail (slacken/tighten) and the sail itself (raise/drop). Everything will be fairly binary - anchor is up or down, sail is full, half or none, ropes are tight or slack, the boom sail is either left or right (and swings in response to the wind).
For the DM to track will be:
The Storm:
the wind speed & direction, wave size & direction, and obstacles ahead. This will all be determined in a random manner, and will swing around rather than jump - so a northerly wind can change to north-westerly or north-easterly, but it can't suddenly jump to southernly. Same with the waves, they can grow larger or smaller but won't jump. This should keep it flowing naturally.
The Ship:
The direction and speed of the ship needs to be tracked by the DM, as well as the condition of the ship, the strength of the knots and so on. The condition of the ship depends on how well they respond to the changing weather conditions, and can be rocking, listing, capsizing for tilt and taking on water, sinking and sunk.
The Interaction:
The final thing the DM needs to do is track the interactions between the ships direction & speed and the storms hazards.
The way I'm putting this together is such that it expects the ship to come out of the storm either in a bad shape or entirely sunk. This is to make an interactive plot device, which they players can affect the outcome, but which is also somewhat foregone - being in a ship in a storm will have bad results, however good you are at riding it out. You might have a ship with some water and a broken mast at the end, or you might be swimming.
I'll add more to this as I can put it down on paper and work it all out - for now, what have other DM's done for storms & sailing? Does anything like I'm proposing exist?
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
These are all perfectly fine. The DM SHOULD be keeping track of the storm and the affects of it on the ship. Not doing so is simply failing the players. As the DM it is YOUR JOB to tell the players about natural hazards and features such as bad weather so that they can decide what to do about it.
Also, make sure the players are on board with a game that can go south at any moment in this way. I had a DM once who did the same thing, and by bad luck/ rolls or whatever we were fighting off storms everywhere we went. Being almost tpk'd because of a single random dice roll by the DM doesn't feel very good
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
The plan is more to make this an encounter, but one which is stretched out somewhat, without making it drag. It's going to be a pre-planned event rather than a randomly encountered one (there will be a storm at a certain point) and how well they deal with it will determine the effectiveness of their ship when they come out the other side.
My thoughts are to have the intensity of the storm as a multiplier for effects, and then have the storm gain or lose intensity. My thoughts for the storm are:
1: randomly determine the number of "rounds" of storm they are having to deal with. It's going to be unrealistically quick, because we aren't going to want to deal with a storm for hours of gameplay, it'll get boring. I'm thinking 3d4 rounds of storm - anywhere from 3 to 12 rounds.
2: The eye of the storm - The number of rounds is what it takes to get to the eye of the storm. The storm starts blowing in a random direction and then I'll adjust it randomly each round to keep the conditions changing. After the 3d4 rounds, they will arrive in the eye of the storm - the wind drops, the sky clears, and the storm rages around them.
3: Coming back out - the storm on the other side lasts for 3d4 rounds again - rolled randomly - and does so in a randomly determined direction etc. This has a good chance to catch them out as their ship might not be set correctly for the storm as they leave. The wind might have been blowing easterly, and now be blowing southerly.
I need to work out a scale of intensity and how it's going to affect things. I'm trying to make the ship as monster stat blocks, in several parts (EG sails, rudder, hull) so it can take damage in different places and it mean something. I'll then have the storm feature incremental DC's for checks, where it makes staying upright and pulling ropes more difficult the stronger the storm is, and of course depending on which direction it's going! waves side-on is harder to stay upright in than waves head on.
I'll be mucking around with this tonight and see if I can get some rules hashed out...
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
You probably thought of it, but just in case, this kind of encounter is a great chance for some characters to shine. Say someone with a sailor or pirate background, or who had a backstory of being on the water, might get advantage on checks. If some has a proficiency in carpenters tools ( and probably a couple other tool proficiencies), they could actually use them to help plug holes in the hull. You might design the encounter to let them show off those skills a bit.
I had thought of giving advantage to people with sailor history, but I hadn't thought of the carpenters tools, that's a good one to add!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
What's the benefit of randomly determining the length of the storm? Knowing an encounter will be 12 rounds instead of somewhere between 6 and 24 rounds would allow you to structure things much better, and honestly 24 rounds of anything just sounds exhausting.
It also seems possible that the length of the storm could have a much greater effect on the ultimate condition of the boat than the players' actions would. If this encounter is a measure of how well the players deal with a storm, their successes and failures should be the primary factor in how things play out rather than a random roll that they couldn't influence and never saw.
I would also make sure the mechanics all have a clear effect on the gameplay and outcome that justifies the complexity you'll have to deal with. What is the gameplay effect of the wind changing direction every round? Does it actually matter on that scale or could you just do it once when they exit the eye? And what is the result if they end up going south instead of east? If it's just an extra hour of sailing that is narrated in one sentence, will it really matter? If you want to keep it in, make sure it matters.
Overall I've found that when I design a system like this, it can be really helpful to go through it as a player and think about what they experience and which parts are happening behind the scenes that don't actually end up having any effect on that experience. It's very easy to overlook that in the fun of creation and then feel kind of let down when it actually happens at the table.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
If you’re going to be doing a lot of naval stuff, it may be worth getting a copy of Stormwrack from 3rd edition. While there’d be a bit to work out mechanically, it’s probably the most thorough naval book D&D have produced.
https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/28313
Try to think of magical solutions too, because your players will. Looking through a familiar, druids sensing the weather, magically bound knots. Don’t want to go off course but need a nap? Immovable rod in the wheel is handy...
That's a fair point with the duration. I think my goal was to make sure the players didn't metagame by assuming the storm would last the same amount of time going out of it as going into it, but I think that's a bit of an unnecessary worry! Building it around a set number of rounds would also make it easier to give a success vs failure outcome.
My thoughts (in their simplest form) are that each round gives a change of conditions, and they will need to change the ship's "settings" (whilst a correct term, it sounds way too computer age to refer to a ship!) to properly ride out the storm. Each round, they will get some time (determined by their ability to predict the weather shifts) to change the ship - steering, adding or losing canvas, etc. - and then the weather shift will hit. If they are set correctly, the ship will only take minor damage, and if they are set incorrectly (or the knots aren't good enough) then the ship will take some more damage, or start rocking, or take on water.
So if I make it (as random numbers) 6 rounds (3 in, 3 out) and up to 5 turns warning of impending weather shifts (which they might not need all of), and then have the ship have 4 stages of disrepair, with the fourth being it's wrecked and sinking. So 3 successes out of 6 and you've still got a working, if somewhat damaged, ship.
I will have a look through that when I get the chance, thanks!
I'd love it if the players found magical solutions to their issues. I will be giving the seas & winds a strength statistic (of sorts) so an immovable rod is all well and good, unless the seas get powerful enough to move it!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!