Fights can happen in many different ways inDungeons & Dragons. While it often boils down to using your character’s features against someone, there are ways to spice it up, such as using special weapons (like siege), having alternate goals during the fight, or, a popular choice, having a naval confrontation, where you ship best all others or sink trying.
D&D offers very little in terms of ship combat. Fortunately, there are tons of homebrew material for you to rely on, so you still get to make some memorable moments at sea during your campaigns. While we won’t focus on homebrewing mechanics, we’ll help you keep some things in mind when running such an encounter.
10Running Ships Like Characters
Leave That For The Real Characters
Outside of hit points, armor class, and movement speed, ships won’t have the same stats as a player character. Depending on the homebrew rule, even one of these three can end up leaving. And that’s okay.
Ships aren’t supposed to be run like a character. You can utilize features such as vessel conditions for different parts of the ship and a massive health pool, and the damage it causes is based on the cannons or hull, not the vessel itself. Creating or researching your own rules to make it more interesting is welcome.
9Making The Captain The Only Important Member
The Party Is The Crew
Someone will spend most of their turns controlling the ship — preferably, one of the players. The rest of the party still needs a job. While the captain will be able to do extra things by ordering NPC crew members (like telling them to open fire), other roles can be done with other player characters.
A barbarian who doesn’t understand anything about sailing can protect the ship from invaders, or they can invade the enemy ship and fight there. Spellcasters can attack from afar or use magic to control the ship better. Random setbacks can occur that require someone to rectify them, such as a sail falling and needing to be hoisted again.
8Ignoring NPC Crew Members
There’s Still The Rest Of The Crew
On the other hand, the NPC crew members need to be more than ‘bots’ that just do what they’re told, especially depending on how they’re treated or how successful the player side of the crew is. They’re still people, after all!
They can make their own suggestions, complaints, and overall reactions to the players, their choices, and the consequences. You have a perfect plot for a bunch of charismatic characters to blossom, and they’ll make fights even more memorable. The risk of their deaths will also significantly raise the stakes.
7Worrying Too Much About Grids
Theater Of The Mind Helps
Unless you want to be very mechanical about things (which may require some knowledge of ships in general), worrying too much about having a nice battlemap with all the distances and calculations might be more trouble than it’s worth.
If you’re playing online, a battlemap for the party’s ship and the enemy’s (for boarding) is interesting. Still, as for the sea itself, it’s not necessary, especially because that gives you room to play with other things, as we’ll mention below.
6Not Paying Attention To The Weather
What’s The Forecast?
How helpful or detrimental is the wind during the fight? How big are the tides? Are there any icebergs, waterspouts, or maelstroms along the way? The sea is more than just a lot of water, and this water is definitely not staying still.
you may make theweather give mechanical bonuses or penalties(such as advantage or disadvantage depending on whether the wind is in your favor) or just straight-up obstacles to avoid or even lure enemies into.
5Not Using Sea Creatures In The Story
Release The Kraken!
What if the obstacle fights? A fight that is happening at sea can draw the attention of creatures that don’t often appear in campaigns that take place on land. Having a ship battle disrupted by a Kraken is just the purest form of such fantasy.
Still, if you don’t want to get the party shipwrecked, there are plenty of othermonsters you’re able to use for aquatic settings. You can add them along with the weather conditions for the ultimate encounter or use them at a different moment to offer varied challenges.
4Making Sinking Ships The Only Important Thing
What Treasures Do They Have?
In most cases, players fight to kill — it’s normal for a D&D fight to end only when all enemies (or player characters) are dead. The equivalent here is to sink every enemy ship you see, thus conquering the seas for yourself.
Why do that and waste all the booty, though? More often than not, taking an enemy ship is more valuable than sinking it. Show your players that the enemies might have something worth taking. Keeping the enemy vessel afloat makes fights harder, but it can be more rewarding, and the players get to pick which route they should take for each fight.
3Resting Too Much
Your Ship Isn’t A 5-Star Hotel
There are things you can do outside combat that will improve the overall experience of fighting, and one of those things is the downtime between confrontations. We have already addressed that ships aren’t characters, and that also means they don’t get to take short or long rests.
While the players should be able to do simple repairs by themselves, adding the complication of needing a lot of time and gold to fix the ship after taking a lot of damage will make their future fights more strategic. It might encourage pillaging other ships, which may be beneficial or not, depending on the campaign’s focus.
2Not Enhancing Your Ship
Ships Should Level Up, Too
Loot isn’t just for repairing the ship. If sailing is a core part of your adventure and will happen often, being able to purchase upgrades for the ship is imperative. It should get stronger as the sessions go, just like the characters do.
It won’t magically get stronger, though, so you need to present NPCs that are capable of making better cannons, magical ammo, and improved hulls, among other things… for the right price, of course. Your players need options and the power to pick and choose what they want.
1Avoiding The Use Of Magic
What Role Does It Play Here?
Our focus has mainly been on the realistic side of sailing, but this is D&D. What role does magic have in your ship combat? Does it offer elemental shots? Can the ship move in ways that’d be impossible? Are there safety measures to save the people if it sinks?
A simple yet clear example is whether you want to make this fightrevolve around Spelljammersrather than regular ships. Flying ships in space will have many new things to consider, such as a new axis to move the ship around. Make these fights magical.
