As far as I can tell, if your ship is damaged, you have the following options.
1) Dock on a planet with trained repair-people who will fix your ship for around 20 GP a day. It takes one full day to heal 1 hp of damage, meaning that very quickly it becomes more cost effective to throw the whole ship away at the end of any big battle, as spending weeks on the ground to repair all of 20 hp would mean losing untold amounts of gold from quests and battles in Wildspace. Also consider that a commoner stabbing a ship with a sword can easily deal enough damage to ground the ship for a week.
2) Cast the cantrip Mending for free, healing somewhere around 7 hp to the ship EVERY HOUR.
Firstly, if it’s this easy, shouldn’t every single spelljammer port have someone with Mending sitting there to fix any ship that comes in? It’s not exactly a hard spell to gain access to, nor does it expend any resources. Why are shipworkers spending a week to do what they could do in seconds with literally the smallest amount of magic? If I have a choice between spending a week and 140 gold at a dock or 60 minutes and probably less than 20 gold at Magic Bob’s Mending Hut, I know where I’m going. Secondly, from a balance point of view, mending makes this way too easy, and stopping for repairs makes engaging in any space battles completely pointless and totally stupid, as you’re almost guaranteed to be grounded for weeks to months after the smallest of scraps. Am I crazy or missing something, or does this just make no sense at all?
Slight edit: I completely forgot about the damage threshold rule, however, I think my point still stands, as most vessels’ damage thresholds are around 20 damage. Maybe a commoner with a sword can’t cripple a ship, but a second or third level character certainly could. I suppose one solution is to limp around wildspace with a battered ship, but this doesn’t feel good either: by the time you desperately required repairs it would definitely be better to scrap the ship and get a new one rather than repair it—definitely not the intent of the setting.
Allowing the mending spell to work does seem a bit of a cop-out, since mending can normally only repair simple breaks and tears, not replace missing sections of a wall!
Allowing the mending spell to work does seem a bit of a cop-out, since mending can normally only repair simple breaks and tears, not replace missing sections of a wall!
Exactly! I do love me some D&D, but there has been a tendency to pretty much hand-wave so many things in an attempt to make life simpler for the players themselves. Obviously this makes it easier on the characters as well, but the intent seems to be simply to make the game accessible and not get bogged down in the crunchy minutiae. The problem is I actually like the crunchy minutiae, and most of my players do as well to one degree or another. I do wish they would include at least some optional rules for many things, kind of in the same vein as they did with the Dungeon Masters Guide having alternate rules for more realistic healing.
In this case, yeah, allowing The mending spell to do what they say it does is definitely a cop-out.
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Shawn D. Robertson
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The bigger problem isn't repair, but that there's no description of what actually happens when a ship reaches zero hitpoints at all. And because of the strangeness of the rules Spelljamming, Wildspace, and the Astral Sea, that there isn't presents some "the DM needs to figure this out" problems.
Like... does the ship's remains stop moving or keep going because of inertia, or is this meaningless because of the "everything randomly floats around in the Astral Sea and location not very relevant" thing? What happens to the air bubble? What happens to the gravity plane? What happens to the crew? Can mending, indeed, raise a ship from the dead like healing word on a downed teammate, and make it whole enough to travel? At least with Saltmarsh the lack of a description of what happens is because "the boat sinks" is fairly obvious from a real world perspective. But because there's so many specialized rules for how Spelljamming and space travel works, not pointing out the process of what happens when a ship reaches zero hitpoints under these specialized rules seems like an extreme oversight, far more than the still ridiculous disparity between mending and normal repair. I mean, even players are meant to understand what happens when both their own characters and monsters reach zero hitpoints, but a ship? Apparently it's so obvious to the designers as to not even bear mention, but I can't imagine any AL DMs coming to any of the same conclusions for the same incredibly possible situation: when the players lose a space battle.
The bigger problem isn't repair, but that there's no description of what actually happens when a ship is destroyed at all. And because of the strangeness of Spelljamming, Wildspace, and the Astral Sea, that there isn't presents some "the DM needs to figure this out" problems.
Not to sound like an apologist here, but maybe this is intentional? Like say the DM wanted the disabled ship to keep drifting to the destination but a player pulls out the rules and says, "nope, it doesn't do that!"
There are costs to putting all this down in stone, just as there are costs to leaving it totally vague/unaddressed. It sounds like this book leans pretty hard to the latter situation, but who can say whether that is due to oversight or an intentional choice?
It's understandable, but as much as I hate to say it, "The DM can fix it" isn't a replacement for all rules: otherwise, why have any rules at all?
You have these rules ahead of time, at best, so the DM doesn't have to spend a bunch of time making stuff up in the middle of a game, but at worst, so that players don't feel scammed when the DM makes a choice that reasonably could have had a very different interpretation. The player can pull out the LACK of rules and say "nope it doesn't do that!" just as easily! You want to all be on the same page, and understanding the basic rules of how travel (and failed travel) works is something the players should reasonably be able to understand ahead of time. It's not about desiring crunch, it's about a reasonable setting of expectations, and not having any for very common situations seems bizarre.They set up a bunch of other rules for ships that imply this obvious potential situation, and then drop the ball. Heck, we're more clear about what happens when a SPACE CLOWN dies than when a ship does, and ships are WAY more common!
The larger problem with your argument is that they were already happy to make a BUNCH of things explicit about how spelljammers work, many of them far more ribbony and esoteric. They gave these objects specific capacities and descriptions of function all the way down to ONE hitpoint (in terms of how its air and gravity interact with other objects with higher hitpoints, primarily), but on hitting zero, then it all becomes up to the DM? Why?
As far as I can tell, if your ship is damaged, you have the following options.
1) Dock on a planet with trained repair-people who will fix your ship for around 20 GP a day. It takes one full day to heal 1 hp of damage, meaning that very quickly it becomes more cost effective to throw the whole ship away at the end of any big battle, as spending weeks on the ground to repair all of 20 hp would mean losing untold amounts of gold from quests and battles in Wildspace.
I don't know why they included this option either. It would generally be radically cheaper to hire a spellcaster to cast mending.
Also consider that a commoner stabbing a ship with a sword can easily deal enough damage to ground the ship for a week.
Generally impossible, because the ships have damage thresholds of 15 or 20, and a commoner with the most damaging sword in the game can't deal more than 12 damage with one.
2) Cast the cantrip Mending for free, healing somewhere around 7 hp to the ship EVERY HOUR.
Generally, 4.5 + modifier. If you hire a commoner-grade spellcaster, this'll be actually 4.5, but doing it yourself will be 7.5-9.5, in general. You may be able to higher a mender with a higher ability score than 11.
Firstly, if it’s this easy, shouldn’t every single spelljammer port have someone with Mending sitting there to fix any ship that comes in?
They likely do. Very lucrative work.
It’s not exactly a hard spell to gain access to, nor does it expend any resources. Why are shipworkers spending a week to do what they could do in seconds with literally the smallest amount of magic?
Well, if all of your menders are dead... desperate times call for desperate measures.
If I have a choice between spending a week and 140 gold at a dock or 60 minutes and probably less than 20 gold at Magic Bob’s Mending Hut, I know where I’m going. Secondly, from a balance point of view, mending makes this way too easy, and stopping for repairs makes engaging in any space battles completely pointless and totally stupid, as you’re almost guaranteed to be grounded for weeks to months after the smallest of scraps. Am I crazy or missing something, or does this just make no sense at all?
I mean, you're basically right. The repair crews will simply employ a mender. The only thing I think you might be glossing over is that the 2 repairs stack, so if you've got a very damaged ship, your maximum repair rate with mending (assuming your mender is a sage) will be about 24*(1d8+4)=204 per day. If your ship needs more repairs done than that and you're very wealthy, you may want to supplement that with the +1 per day from mundane work. If your DM interprets "per day" to really mean "per workday", which is 8 hours, you can even pay more money to get that up to 207 per day, not 205.
But yeah, at a core level, it makes significantly more sense to ensure your crew knows the mending spell, since the spell doesn't require berthing - you can just do it while traveling.
Allowing the mending spell to work does seem a bit of a cop-out, since mending can normally only repair simple breaks and tears, not replace missing sections of a wall!
Missing sections of wall are not minor repairs... A missing wall section on a spacecraft normally means serious depressurization and likely serious structural failure.
Precisely! But the Spelljammer rules let you repair that missing wall section by casting Mending enough times!
The bigger problem isn't repair, but that there's no description of what actually happens when a ship is destroyed at all. And because of the strangeness of Spelljamming, Wildspace, and the Astral Sea, that there isn't presents some "the DM needs to figure this out" problems.
Not to sound like an apologist here, but maybe this is intentional? Like say the DM wanted the disabled ship to keep drifting to the destination but a player pulls out the rules and says, "nope, it doesn't do that!"
There are costs to putting all this down in stone, just as there are costs to leaving it totally vague/unaddressed. It sounds like this book leans pretty hard to the latter situation, but who can say whether that is due to oversight or an intentional choice?
D&D is a game that has a lot of rules set in stone - especially when it comes down to what 0 HP means.
If people want something more vague there are plenty of other game systems which don't pretend to be as nitty-gritty as D&D.
The general rule for wooden sailing ships was that they carried lots of wood to do minor repairs and a lot of the crew were constantly fixing up the ship. As a DM I would rule that yes, every ship should have someone capable of casting mending.
Personally, if I were to DM this, I would house rule as follows:
If the ship has at least 50% of it's original HP after any battle, then a crew of 5 people that either have mending or are proficient with woodwork (or whatever) that has supplies, can repair it at a rate of 1% per crewman per day, max of 5% per day.
If the ship has less than 50% of max HP, it cannot be repaired except by a) 5 castings of the spell fabricate, afterwhich it has recovered 50% of max HP, or b) 1 day per 5% repair needed, minimum of 10 days, at a shipyard.
The general rule for wooden sailing ships was that they carried lots of wood to do minor repairs and a lot of the crew were constantly fixing up the ship. As a DM I would rule that yes, every ship should have someone capable of casting mending.
Personally, if I were to DM this, I would house rule as follows:
If the ship has at least 50% of it's original HP after any battle, then a crew of 5 people that either have mending or are proficient with woodwork (or whatever) that has supplies, can repair it at a rate of 1% per crewman per day, max of 5% per day.
If the ship has less than 50% of max HP, it cannot be repaired except by a) 5 castings of the spell fabricate, afterwhich it has recovered 50% of max HP, or b) 1 day per 5% repair needed, minimum of 10 days, at a shipyard.
I like this basic idea; I definitely think it's the kind of thing that is going to need to be house ruled for each campaign, as the default rules are weird.
What the balance on speed, resources used etc. needs to be is going to depend on how much you want to penalise taking damage, how long you want the players in downtime for etc. I don't necessarily mind the idea of being forced to put in for repairs for a few days or even weeks as an occasional gimmick (force the group to take downtime, or do side quests at the port etc.) but forcing it too often will get old fast. But likewise making it too easy will make it feel like damage has no consequences, definitely needs the DM to find the right balance for them.
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I think the repair rules for ships from Ghosts of Saltmarsh make more sense.
Repair (Bosun Only)
At the end of the day, the ship’s bosun can make a Strength check using carpenter's tools. On a 15 or higher, each damaged component regains hit points equal to 1d6 + the crew’s quality score (minimum of 1 hit point). A component other than the hull that had 0 hit points becomes functional again.
I haven't bought the book yet and am hesitant to do so, but given we already have rules for this kind of thing from ghosts of Saltmarsh (which is a fantastic book!) as well as there being several related rules expansions either homebrewed by people like myself or put on DM's guild, I'd be tempted just to ignore the nonsensical bits of this book & use the regular ship rules we already have tbh
The rules on this are just flat out bad. So incredibly bad they I can not conceive a single person play tested this, heck I don't think a single person other than the person who wrote that rule read it before print. They should feel shame for the entire ship combat section making it to print in this condition.
Realistic ship repairs would be the crew fixing more than 1 HP a day on their own without needing the mending spell. Changing mending spell to an appropriate tool proficiency and say that person can repair that much per hour with a DC 15 test, a ship can only benefit from one person doing this, a team of workers provides advantage or some other benefit. Then just flat out remove the moronic 1HP a day rule.
Not sure why so many would prefer parties to be just drifting aimlessly in space for a month or two 'playing out' realistic ship repairs.
I don't see any posts anywhere in this thread pitching that, but I will point out to you that without mending, if your ship fully breaks while at sea, you can't repair it at all with the rules we have, as you won't have a berth, so anyone letting their party repair their ship in any way while drifting is making the repair rules less onerous, not more. But seeing as both objects and hit points function at full capacity at 1 hit point and even DMs who want to house-rule this routinely simply cripple you at 1 hit point rather than making you totally nonfunctional, I don't think it's plausible any DM anywhere will have their PCs drift for a month or two - as soon as any repairs are done, you can start moving rather than drift.
Meanwhile, where are the massive cries of protest over the fact that if the captain does not actively order the ship to move, it sits stationary.
That's not true at all. Spelljammer ships only need an attuned spellcaster to move.
Note that this is also true in the rules for conventional surface ships.
Realistic ship repairs would be the crew fixing more than 1 HP a day on their own without needing the mending spell. Changing mending spell to an appropriate tool proficiency and say that person can repair that much per hour with a DC 15 test, a ship can only benefit from one person doing this, a team of workers provides advantage or some other benefit. Then just flat out remove the moronic 1HP a day rule.
The 1 hp per day rule appears to be a copy and paste of the DMG rules for ship repair, so I suspect people are simply making incorrect assumptions due to slight differences in the wording - the two rules don't actually say anything different, and the DMG rule's wording very clearly fails to imply that you can't repair as many hit points per day as you like provided you have sufficient materials and labor (and that the ship is berthed). Your DM can declare any number of repairpeople it takes to repair 1 hit point per day, but using 1 repairperson as an example unit, that would make the repair rate 1 hp per repairperson per day.
Meanwhile, the people who wrote SAIS absolutely failed to explicitly incorporate the Xanathar's rules for downtime activities, which make it clear that a "day" of work is really 8 hours of work. Unless your DM is deliberately being draconian, putting SAIS together with Xanathar's means the real repair rate (assuming 1 carpenter is sufficient for doing 1 hp's worth of work in a workday) is 3 hp per carpenter per day, except that your carpenters most likely need 8 hours of long rest (unless they're one of several playable races now that can long rest in 4 hours, allowing them to do more hours of work per physical day). A "day" of work is a workday.
What remains bizarre is why SAIS has the rules it has for mending being so very effective at ship repair (but only for Spelljamming ships, not for standard ships).
The 1 hp per day rule appears to be a copy and paste of the DMG rules for ship repair, so I suspect people are simply making incorrect assumptions due to slight differences in the wording - the two rules don't actually say anything different, and the DMG rule's wording very clearly fails to imply that you can't repair as many hit points per day as you like provided you have sufficient materials and labor (and that the ship is berthed). Your DM can declare any number of repairpeople it takes to repair 1 hit point per day, but using 1 repairperson as an example unit, that would make the repair rate 1 hp per repairperson per day.
Meanwhile, the people who wrote SAIS absolutely failed to explicitly incorporate the Xanathar's rules for downtime activities, which make it clear that a "day" of work is really 8 hours of work. Unless your DM is deliberately being draconian, putting SAIS together with Xanathar's means the real repair rate (assuming 1 carpenter is sufficient for doing 1 hp's worth of work in a workday) is 3 hp per carpenter per day, except that your carpenters most likely need 8 hours of long rest (unless they're one of several playable races now that can long rest in 4 hours, allowing them to do more hours of work per physical day). A "day" of work is a workday.
What remains bizarre is why SAIS has the rules it has for mending being so very effective at ship repair (but only for Spelljamming ships, not for standard ships).
I will admit my assumption when I heard about the rule was if you pay 60gp its 3 a day, but how the rule is written in Spell Jammer it does not seem to imply that. I would say its still probably too expensive and there should be rules for fixing it at sea whether its the astral sea or a normal one. Some repairs may require a berth but most logically wouldn't. Something like if your ship is reduced to half heath it needs to be repaired in a berth.
The reason this got a pass before in the DMG is the game was not sea combat focused, ships were pure back ground pretty much never used except by rare parties. Now in a setting that is focused around a ship, you kind of need better and more robust rules. At least add those salt marsh bosun rules in.
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And yes in Spelljammer, it is whoever is attuned to the helm. Silly me putting the Captain in that role on the theory that they would want to be the one with that power. While a spelljammer ship does not need an action to order the ship to move, it does require attunement, so if the helmsman goes down or is otherwise incapacitated, it would take an hour for someone else to attune to allow the ship to move, even if they have another spellcaster available to do so.
I'll note that looking at the ship stats, some are specifically noted as having both Captain's Quarters and Spelljammer's Quarters, while others do not. So while there are definitely cases where it could be sensibly understood that the captain is the one doing the spelljamming, there are also definitely intended to be cases where the captain and the spelljammer are different people. Further, under "Crew," it says "The standard crew complement for a spelljamming ship includes one captain to give orders, one spelljammer to pilot the ship, and one or more crew members to operate its weapons." It also says earlier in the chapter that "A ship can have more than one spelljamming helm aboard it, but only one spelljamming helm at a time can be used to control the ship." So if the captain or another crewmember is attuned to a second backup helm, that solves the issue of the helmsman going down.
As far as I can tell, if your ship is damaged, you have the following options.
1) Dock on a planet with trained repair-people who will fix your ship for around 20 GP a day. It takes one full day to heal 1 hp of damage, meaning that very quickly it becomes more cost effective to throw the whole ship away at the end of any big battle, as spending weeks on the ground to repair all of 20 hp would mean losing untold amounts of gold from quests and battles in Wildspace. Also consider that a commoner stabbing a ship with a sword can easily deal enough damage to ground the ship for a week.
2) Cast the cantrip Mending for free, healing somewhere around 7 hp to the ship EVERY HOUR.
Firstly, if it’s this easy, shouldn’t every single spelljammer port have someone with Mending sitting there to fix any ship that comes in? It’s not exactly a hard spell to gain access to, nor does it expend any resources. Why are shipworkers spending a week to do what they could do in seconds with literally the smallest amount of magic? If I have a choice between spending a week and 140 gold at a dock or 60 minutes and probably less than 20 gold at Magic Bob’s Mending Hut, I know where I’m going. Secondly, from a balance point of view, mending makes this way too easy, and stopping for repairs makes engaging in any space battles completely pointless and totally stupid, as you’re almost guaranteed to be grounded for weeks to months after the smallest of scraps. Am I crazy or missing something, or does this just make no sense at all?
Slight edit: I completely forgot about the damage threshold rule, however, I think my point still stands, as most vessels’ damage thresholds are around 20 damage. Maybe a commoner with a sword can’t cripple a ship, but a second or third level character certainly could. I suppose one solution is to limp around wildspace with a battered ship, but this doesn’t feel good either: by the time you desperately required repairs it would definitely be better to scrap the ship and get a new one rather than repair it—definitely not the intent of the setting.
Allowing the mending spell to work does seem a bit of a cop-out, since mending can normally only repair simple breaks and tears, not replace missing sections of a wall!
Actual repair rules at https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/sais/aag/astral-adventuring#ShipRepairs
Exactly! I do love me some D&D, but there has been a tendency to pretty much hand-wave so many things in an attempt to make life simpler for the players themselves. Obviously this makes it easier on the characters as well, but the intent seems to be simply to make the game accessible and not get bogged down in the crunchy minutiae. The problem is I actually like the crunchy minutiae, and most of my players do as well to one degree or another. I do wish they would include at least some optional rules for many things, kind of in the same vein as they did with the Dungeon Masters Guide having alternate rules for more realistic healing.
In this case, yeah, allowing The mending spell to do what they say it does is definitely a cop-out.
Shawn D. Robertson
"Deride not the differing views of others, for it is in thoughtful and considerate conversation we find our greatest friends."
~Me~
The bigger problem isn't repair, but that there's no description of what actually happens when a ship reaches zero hitpoints at all. And because of the strangeness of the rules Spelljamming, Wildspace, and the Astral Sea, that there isn't presents some "the DM needs to figure this out" problems.
Like... does the ship's remains stop moving or keep going because of inertia, or is this meaningless because of the "everything randomly floats around in the Astral Sea and location not very relevant" thing? What happens to the air bubble? What happens to the gravity plane? What happens to the crew? Can mending, indeed, raise a ship from the dead like healing word on a downed teammate, and make it whole enough to travel? At least with Saltmarsh the lack of a description of what happens is because "the boat sinks" is fairly obvious from a real world perspective. But because there's so many specialized rules for how Spelljamming and space travel works, not pointing out the process of what happens when a ship reaches zero hitpoints under these specialized rules seems like an extreme oversight, far more than the still ridiculous disparity between mending and normal repair. I mean, even players are meant to understand what happens when both their own characters and monsters reach zero hitpoints, but a ship? Apparently it's so obvious to the designers as to not even bear mention, but I can't imagine any AL DMs coming to any of the same conclusions for the same incredibly possible situation: when the players lose a space battle.
Not to sound like an apologist here, but maybe this is intentional? Like say the DM wanted the disabled ship to keep drifting to the destination but a player pulls out the rules and says, "nope, it doesn't do that!"
There are costs to putting all this down in stone, just as there are costs to leaving it totally vague/unaddressed. It sounds like this book leans pretty hard to the latter situation, but who can say whether that is due to oversight or an intentional choice?
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It's understandable, but as much as I hate to say it, "The DM can fix it" isn't a replacement for all rules: otherwise, why have any rules at all?
You have these rules ahead of time, at best, so the DM doesn't have to spend a bunch of time making stuff up in the middle of a game, but at worst, so that players don't feel scammed when the DM makes a choice that reasonably could have had a very different interpretation. The player can pull out the LACK of rules and say "nope it doesn't do that!" just as easily! You want to all be on the same page, and understanding the basic rules of how travel (and failed travel) works is something the players should reasonably be able to understand ahead of time. It's not about desiring crunch, it's about a reasonable setting of expectations, and not having any for very common situations seems bizarre.They set up a bunch of other rules for ships that imply this obvious potential situation, and then drop the ball. Heck, we're more clear about what happens when a SPACE CLOWN dies than when a ship does, and ships are WAY more common!
The larger problem with your argument is that they were already happy to make a BUNCH of things explicit about how spelljammers work, many of them far more ribbony and esoteric. They gave these objects specific capacities and descriptions of function all the way down to ONE hitpoint (in terms of how its air and gravity interact with other objects with higher hitpoints, primarily), but on hitting zero, then it all becomes up to the DM? Why?
I don't know why they included this option either. It would generally be radically cheaper to hire a spellcaster to cast mending.
Generally impossible, because the ships have damage thresholds of 15 or 20, and a commoner with the most damaging sword in the game can't deal more than 12 damage with one.
Generally, 4.5 + modifier. If you hire a commoner-grade spellcaster, this'll be actually 4.5, but doing it yourself will be 7.5-9.5, in general. You may be able to higher a mender with a higher ability score than 11.
They likely do. Very lucrative work.
Well, if all of your menders are dead... desperate times call for desperate measures.
I mean, you're basically right. The repair crews will simply employ a mender. The only thing I think you might be glossing over is that the 2 repairs stack, so if you've got a very damaged ship, your maximum repair rate with mending (assuming your mender is a sage) will be about 24*(1d8+4)=204 per day. If your ship needs more repairs done than that and you're very wealthy, you may want to supplement that with the +1 per day from mundane work. If your DM interprets "per day" to really mean "per workday", which is 8 hours, you can even pay more money to get that up to 207 per day, not 205.
But yeah, at a core level, it makes significantly more sense to ensure your crew knows the mending spell, since the spell doesn't require berthing - you can just do it while traveling.
Precisely! But the Spelljammer rules let you repair that missing wall section by casting Mending enough times!
D&D is a game that has a lot of rules set in stone - especially when it comes down to what 0 HP means.
If people want something more vague there are plenty of other game systems which don't pretend to be as nitty-gritty as D&D.
The general rule for wooden sailing ships was that they carried lots of wood to do minor repairs and a lot of the crew were constantly fixing up the ship. As a DM I would rule that yes, every ship should have someone capable of casting mending.
Personally, if I were to DM this, I would house rule as follows:
If the ship has at least 50% of it's original HP after any battle, then a crew of 5 people that either have mending or are proficient with woodwork (or whatever) that has supplies, can repair it at a rate of 1% per crewman per day, max of 5% per day.
If the ship has less than 50% of max HP, it cannot be repaired except by a) 5 castings of the spell fabricate, afterwhich it has recovered 50% of max HP, or b) 1 day per 5% repair needed, minimum of 10 days, at a shipyard.
I like this basic idea; I definitely think it's the kind of thing that is going to need to be house ruled for each campaign, as the default rules are weird.
What the balance on speed, resources used etc. needs to be is going to depend on how much you want to penalise taking damage, how long you want the players in downtime for etc. I don't necessarily mind the idea of being forced to put in for repairs for a few days or even weeks as an occasional gimmick (force the group to take downtime, or do side quests at the port etc.) but forcing it too often will get old fast. But likewise making it too easy will make it feel like damage has no consequences, definitely needs the DM to find the right balance for them.
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I think the repair rules for ships from Ghosts of Saltmarsh make more sense.
I haven't bought the book yet and am hesitant to do so, but given we already have rules for this kind of thing from ghosts of Saltmarsh (which is a fantastic book!) as well as there being several related rules expansions either homebrewed by people like myself or put on DM's guild, I'd be tempted just to ignore the nonsensical bits of this book & use the regular ship rules we already have tbh
The rules on this are just flat out bad. So incredibly bad they I can not conceive a single person play tested this, heck I don't think a single person other than the person who wrote that rule read it before print. They should feel shame for the entire ship combat section making it to print in this condition.
Realistic ship repairs would be the crew fixing more than 1 HP a day on their own without needing the mending spell. Changing mending spell to an appropriate tool proficiency and say that person can repair that much per hour with a DC 15 test, a ship can only benefit from one person doing this, a team of workers provides advantage or some other benefit. Then just flat out remove the moronic 1HP a day rule.
I don't see any posts anywhere in this thread pitching that, but I will point out to you that without mending, if your ship fully breaks while at sea, you can't repair it at all with the rules we have, as you won't have a berth, so anyone letting their party repair their ship in any way while drifting is making the repair rules less onerous, not more. But seeing as both objects and hit points function at full capacity at 1 hit point and even DMs who want to house-rule this routinely simply cripple you at 1 hit point rather than making you totally nonfunctional, I don't think it's plausible any DM anywhere will have their PCs drift for a month or two - as soon as any repairs are done, you can start moving rather than drift.
That's not true at all. Spelljammer ships only need an attuned spellcaster to move.
No it isn't. Here are the rules for traveling based on a wind or water current.
The 1 hp per day rule appears to be a copy and paste of the DMG rules for ship repair, so I suspect people are simply making incorrect assumptions due to slight differences in the wording - the two rules don't actually say anything different, and the DMG rule's wording very clearly fails to imply that you can't repair as many hit points per day as you like provided you have sufficient materials and labor (and that the ship is berthed). Your DM can declare any number of repairpeople it takes to repair 1 hit point per day, but using 1 repairperson as an example unit, that would make the repair rate 1 hp per repairperson per day.
Meanwhile, the people who wrote SAIS absolutely failed to explicitly incorporate the Xanathar's rules for downtime activities, which make it clear that a "day" of work is really 8 hours of work. Unless your DM is deliberately being draconian, putting SAIS together with Xanathar's means the real repair rate (assuming 1 carpenter is sufficient for doing 1 hp's worth of work in a workday) is 3 hp per carpenter per day, except that your carpenters most likely need 8 hours of long rest (unless they're one of several playable races now that can long rest in 4 hours, allowing them to do more hours of work per physical day). A "day" of work is a workday.
What remains bizarre is why SAIS has the rules it has for mending being so very effective at ship repair (but only for Spelljamming ships, not for standard ships).
I will admit my assumption when I heard about the rule was if you pay 60gp its 3 a day, but how the rule is written in Spell Jammer it does not seem to imply that. I would say its still probably too expensive and there should be rules for fixing it at sea whether its the astral sea or a normal one. Some repairs may require a berth but most logically wouldn't. Something like if your ship is reduced to half heath it needs to be repaired in a berth.
The reason this got a pass before in the DMG is the game was not sea combat focused, ships were pure back ground pretty much never used except by rare parties. Now in a setting that is focused around a ship, you kind of need better and more robust rules. At least add those salt marsh bosun rules in.
I wouldn’t bat an eye if a DM created a house rule to change this.
but also they gave mending some more utility.
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I'll note that looking at the ship stats, some are specifically noted as having both Captain's Quarters and Spelljammer's Quarters, while others do not. So while there are definitely cases where it could be sensibly understood that the captain is the one doing the spelljamming, there are also definitely intended to be cases where the captain and the spelljammer are different people. Further, under "Crew," it says "The standard crew complement for a spelljamming ship includes one captain to give orders, one spelljammer to pilot the ship, and one or more crew members to operate its weapons." It also says earlier in the chapter that "A ship can have more than one spelljamming helm aboard it, but only one spelljamming helm at a time can be used to control the ship." So if the captain or another crewmember is attuned to a second backup helm, that solves the issue of the helmsman going down.
Birgit | Shifter | Sorcerer | Dragonlords
Shayone | Hobgoblin | Sorcerer | Netherdeep