I made a high seas campaign a few months ago, and as part of that I had to come up with a few homebrew rules to cover the rather lacking rules governing ship combat in the core handbooks.
Over the months I've come to expand the rules little by little until I have, what I feel is a somewhat usable core to build off of. I wanted to eventually turn this into something I could put up on DM's Guild, but before I fully flesh it out with more things, I wanted to run a sanity check and see if these core rules seem sensible to other people first. They've worked for me in my current campaign, but I wanted a few outside opinions before I continue. I also realise that there were already a few ship rules already up on the DM's guild, but none of them felt quite right to me.
The following homebrew is EXTREMELY bare bones. It covers pretty much just the mechanics of ship combat, with three example ship stats just to help put things into perspective. I intend later on to include the rules for: environmental hazards, treating giant monsters as "ships", list of ships, ship equipment, ship customisation, new spells, etc. Before I get into that however, I need to get the basic rules in order first.
So please, let me know what you think, if it's terrible, if it doesn't make sense, if it seems to slow, if it seems too complicated. I already feel in particular a problem with the "Crew Bonus" section, and would love if anyone has some advice on how to scale these rules up for very large ships.
Hello everyone,
I made a high seas campaign a few months ago, and as part of that I had to come up with a few homebrew rules to cover the rather lacking rules governing ship combat in the core handbooks.
Over the months I've come to expand the rules little by little until I have, what I feel is a somewhat usable core to build off of. I wanted to eventually turn this into something I could put up on DM's Guild, but before I fully flesh it out with more things, I wanted to run a sanity check and see if these core rules seem sensible to other people first. They've worked for me in my current campaign, but I wanted a few outside opinions before I continue. I also realise that there were already a few ship rules already up on the DM's guild, but none of them felt quite right to me.
The following homebrew is EXTREMELY bare bones. It covers pretty much just the mechanics of ship combat, with three example ship stats just to help put things into perspective. I intend later on to include the rules for: environmental hazards, treating giant monsters as "ships", list of ships, ship equipment, ship customisation, new spells, etc. Before I get into that however, I need to get the basic rules in order first.
So please, let me know what you think, if it's terrible, if it doesn't make sense, if it seems to slow, if it seems too complicated. I already feel in particular a problem with the "Crew Bonus" section, and would love if anyone has some advice on how to scale these rules up for very large ships.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a9K6Ikwd7aKPHZ3Xdsb0ZZnwORSUuX_f/view?usp=sharing
You're doing a bang up job