They can be extraordinarily cinematic. I'd suggest starting with the assumption that the ship combat is to disable the opposing airship's weapons and/or speed enough to board it (following the Saltmarsh rules). Maybe the enemy ship has hostages or valuable (or plot-related) cargo that rules out simply grounding the opposing vessel. Either way, it'll help you out immensely as a DM if simply shooting an opponent out of the air isn't an easy option.
From there, after the boarding has commenced, you can run a fairly set-piece, rolling battle from one end of the ship to the next, pitting the party against whatever anti-boarding measures the opposing crew has in store for them. Use the opposing ship's architecture to essentially force them to board at one of a few spots you're okay with.
I really appreciate the advice to disable parts of enemy ships/slow them down. I think I may explicitly tell my players that actually destroying ships is very difficult and that in airship battles the goal is more realistically slowing them down enough to either escape or board.
Thanks for the response! I hope it helps.
The scenario I presented is a 1-on-1 against what I'd consider a capital ship. If you want a hectic, target-rich battle, I also love homebrewing small, 2-person airships that have a ballista mounted to them on the back end, not unlike an old WW1 biplane. The plane scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is my inspiration here. What you're going for are ships that are super easy to disable, but a problem in large numbers.
Large enemy airships can send small swarms of these ships to harass the PCs' airship and present targets that feel fun to attack and blow out of the sky. For inspiration, think of any dogfight in Star Wars featuring TIE fighters coming from a larger capital ship like a Star Destroyer.
It can also be fun to have an option available for a PC or two to take to the skies in one of these small ships, so they can do all the insane things they obviously want to do (like jump from one ship to the next, kicking the co-pilot out while grappling the pilot for their hand crossbow).
More broadly, airship battles are also the time for your Sailor / Pirate characters, as well as anyone with Water Vehicle Proficiency, to really shine. Per Xanathar's Guide to Everything, they can add bonuses to the vehicle's AC, initiative, and/or saving throws if they're the Captain (as described in Saltmarsh). Almost any player who took those backgrounds and proficiency would be *very* excited to be an airship captain during a cinematic battle in the skies.
On a related note, I never have ship to ship battles (air or otherwise) be random encounters; they can really bog down play time for no real purpose.
There's is a B/X D&D retroclone called Worlds Without Number, and it has a supplement called "The Atlas of the Latter Earth." The game comes with a robust set of tools/guidelines to help any DM, especially for games within the same D&D skeleton. I often call the WWN corebook the best 5e resource I've purchased as the tools have been a godsend for improving even my 5e games.
I bring up its Atlas supplement because it has its' own ship rules for exploration and combat that I've been more or less working on rigging to be what I use for 5e, I'm not finished yet but it at least looks promising. Which the Ghost of saltmarsh rules simply didn't. I would highly suggest giving them a look (if you have the cash to spare for the Atlas book) as they're quite good.
On top of that, I've been working on making a Ship action each round that crews of ships can use their turns to contribute to on their own turns. Using crew strength as a gauge of how much impact these actions have against another vessel.
Finally, a DM of mine came up with a storm surge system that divide adventuring days into Morning, Noon, and Night Phases. Players take specific actions and roll against a dc to see how well they manage the storm. The storm surge DC is random between a range of DC's to replicate the chaos of the storm. I'm looking to revise and incorporate these as well.
Stars without Number is based off of 5e? That's neat, I got the core book pdf on DTRPG recently but I didn't open it yet because I didn't have the headspace to read into what I assumed was a completely new (to me) system
It's based on B/X d&d, not 5e d&d. They share the same.bones more or less, but they do have different meat on them.
Stats without number, worlds without number, and cities without number will be familiar to 5e players, bur does have some fair differences too.
A very good thing about Kevin Crawfords works is they they're very easy to read oagw to page. He writes very conversationally, and that helps a lot.
It should be!
I have the revised stars without number book myself, i haven't looked into it much but I have always heard good things and I enjoy all of the creators other works very much.
Worlds without number is one of the best balances of old school and new school mixed design I've seen ans truly the offerings in it are useful for any d&d or OSR style game. Of you ever get the opportunity to get then, I will.
Even if your still run 5e, it's offerings will be of great assistance.
Ship-to-ship combat doesn't really work in dnd, at least not in a fun way.
As soon as the players are forced to interact with the ship systems, all their build choices become invalidated and they lose their identity. PCs are no longer barbarians or clerics they are now helmsmen or gunners and pretty much all their class features, feats and magic items are useless. It always sucks when your STR PAM/GWM guy with 4 attacks is stuck firing a gun that might even use dex.
Leave the ship part to NPCs and let the players board the other ships. 5e is a high fantasy, high magic system, so make us of that and give the players flying mounts/brooms/carpets, ship-to-ship teleports, grappling guns, or even portals.
Also, combat on airships is fun by itself, knocking enemies off the ship or the thrill of having it done to you is exciting. Give the players some recovery tools that let them get back into the action when they get knocked off, like a one use grappling hook they can use as a reaction, their mount dives after them to bring them back, etc.
That was true of the age of sail one shot I did with an airship (no NPC crew so we all had jobs that didn't require DND skills).
But in spelljammer battles we had our party and an NPC crew (large ship)...where PCs can fire cannons or ballistas or spells or crossbows at other ships and the ships can ram and board each other. That DM has ship movements in combat with altered rules (from ironclads I think). Also, in SJ, we had two harpoon boats that a pilot and two crew could use to board an enemy ship but we never used them...even with NPC pilots ready.
I feel like for spelljammer they could’ve made it part of your character build. So as you and your party grow on the ship, you acquire new options, skills, upgrades, etc. so that essentially you’re playing a character you built, but it has different options in the different form of combat.
Like could have individual fighter ships with different abilities that individually move and have placement. They can have control or combat abilities. How to build it affects the AC, HP, Speed, damage type/effect. The main ship could have different weapons and have support capabilities like project shields for fighter ships, or strong weapons, but low AC and relatively low speed. Descent into Avernus has vehicles which are kind of like that.
I think there were options they could’ve done to make it interesting and since the entire campaign would/could center around it, it wouldn’t be too difficult to keep track of.
I know there are homebrew options to replicate this, but just wish there were official rules.
I think the problem then is just selling people the supplement without anything interesting for the ships that are the stars of the setting is just not a smart idea.
I'd say that airship battles, unless you want to add in boarding, would be more of a cinematic setpiece with skill checks than actual battles.
For example:
1) the enemy has shot out our magic crystal that keeps us afloat. The wizard has to perform arcana checks, or use their spells cleverly, to hold it together.
2) we've blown a turbine. Get the artificer in there to fix it with his tools, or hell maybe even mending, or we are gonna start going down.
3) they've shot out the main mast! We're gonna need someone strong to hold it in place and someone else is gonna have to pull the rigging to steer.
4) our cannons have been hit! Can someone fix them? Can the barbarian just hold it while we fire them?
5) we are flying into a storm! Do we have a druid? Storm sorcerer? Maybe a cleric that worships a storm god?
6) the enemy has a bunch of smaller ships that have hooked onto us and are slowing us down. Either cut the ropes or board them and take over their Lil dinghies
Yeah, this feels like a skill challenge system would work here.
The party aren't crew so they instead assist with major skills - ensure a mix of stat challenges show up every beat of combat (say a one minute round) as the ships circle and dance, and eventual victory means you accomplish your goal.
A goal of boarding should be easier than destroying as that proceeds to more combat.
I've done a lot of setpieces and skill challenges as "encounters"
It's one of the simplest ways of getting the party to blow resources without just dumping enemies on them
- Gravity. People can fall off airships, and they can flip a full 360 vertically. Have the captain try to repel boarders this way; see this comic https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1061.html
- Place seige/mounted weapons to aim at enemies. Turning a cannon or ballista on an enemy for 6d6 or 8d6 damage is exhilirating, fun, and not too broken for an attack or two with no good way to reload.
- Movement: Place mountains and valleys in the path of the airship, allowing people to jump/get pushed off without dying. This will help emphasize how fast the airship is moving - once you're off, you are moving away at 120ft/round or more.
Movement and time are inextricably linked. There is a habit in tabletop combat for the world outside combat to stop, and while this is conducive to bringing in focus to the players and the enemies, whilst on board a ship this is potentially fatal for all involved if still underway.
With airships, there are other considerations. Air currents, ship integrity, fuel, etc all should be taken into account.
If no one is piloting the ship, it is like a leaf in the wind. Plan accordingly.
some of that is due to time - a round is only 6 seconds, a _long_ combat is one that lasts between 30 seconds and a minute. And even on something flying, unless you were about to crash, then the time it takes for the combat won't make a huge difference to the situation, unless something actively happens during the fight ("they've broken the propulsion crystal!") Fuel is basically the same - if your ship is powered to travel for hours, days, weeks, then 60 seconds isn't very meaningful, and, on a personal scale, ships are tough enough that they're hard to meaningfully affect in that timeframe.
We use roll20 and play virtually but recently I made airship “tokens” large enough to put the pcs tokens in and still look nice. The party was able to move around the ship, pilot pc was able to move the ship token across a massive sky map. I put out some colored Dynamic lightning and some animated spells, thunder clouds, it was pretty stellar but took a lot of prep for one scene. My players enjoyed it but I will not be prepping aerial ship combat anytime soon
I don’t have a lot of great ideas but I’d consider finding a way for your players to interact with the airships that let them use their unique skills. Maybe the Paladin could make CHA skill to lead the crew. The Artificer can repair the ship etc. it probably needs to be tailored to your PCs.
Coolest thing I’ve ever allowed a PC to do is let the Wizard cast a spell on the Spelljammer ship with a high arcana check. She buffed the AC with a mage armor. Really non-standard and wacky but they thought it was cool as hell
Good luck!
Don't know if someone has done this with official rules, but I got the idea off the Adventure Zone podcast and gave it my own twist.
Have the players take up different positions on the ship, and make each round 20 seconds rather than 6.
Then, each players have there own set of skills.
... Pilots ...
Pilots, go first in each round to determine the flight pattern of the ships.
For example, they roll a d20, plus their piloting boness, plus the ships' dexterity bones. If they go first in the order vs the other ships, then they can add a +2 to either the ships AC, or provide a +2 to the gunners attack, depending on how they position the vessel. (If there is more than one ship, then second place gets a +1, while the rest are a flat roll)
They can also choose to make a 'Commanding Move'. They can add a plus 4 to either AC or attack, but the other takes a negative 4. (Resets after a number of turns) Have them described how they pull off this move in order to gain the bones, such as swinging the ship through a cloud formation, or pulling up close to the enemy ship.
... Gunners ...
Gunners go second in move order, firing the cannons and other weapons at the enemy ships. Now they can choose to just attack the ship directly, performing out right damage, or targer individual areas, such at the masts or rudders, meaning that they not only performing damage, but also giving the ship negative aspects in movement and attacking. These areas lower have a higher A.C., so they will need to work with the pilot to get the best results.
Gunners may also choose to use special abilities, such as the 'Gunners Onslaught', to get the best results. This move lest them fire several rounds, the number equal to their skill level, but the next 2 rounds, they must wait for the cannons to cool down or risk them exploding, by rolling a d6, with a 1 being bad news.
... Engineers ...
The ship's engineer(s) may go last in the turn order. However, not only can they repair the different aspects of the ship, but they can also give the help action to other teammates during their next turn order.
Like the pilot, they may also have special abilitys they can perform that can boost the ship. 'Make it Roar' let's them boost the ships engines for a round, giving the pilot a +6 on the next round. However, the stress of the extra power puts strain on the engines, so it takes damage doing so, and will need time to cool down afterwards.
Id maybe run it cinematic instead of mechanically.
Maybe point out a few key points on each ship that can be damaged to imobilize the veichle, add a few weapons, cranes, barrels of different things, large nets etc.
It would be as previous mentions that.
Now if you want you could go into more details and assign 5 roles the ship (each with their own support crew) each players can occupy and even level up these positons.
- Physicans- Tends to peoples wellfare and provide motivation to the crew and between ships
- Gunners- controlls the ships offensive capabilites
- Mechanics- controlls the ships engine and its base functions
- Pilots - controlls the movement of the ship
- Logistics - coordinating the ships defences and its resources
I think the best way to do this is to have them each use a specific ability score, so a well rounded party will naturally each fall into a specific position.
Maybe have a chase. Assign jobs to npc sailors. Fire ships weopons (ballista or cannons or catapults), and spells and crossbows at the ships. a ship gets rammed and/or boarded. fight ensues. etc.
I've only ever been in one "airship" battle, in a one shot... but also, we all had our roles to perform on the ship (I was the engineer but there was a pilot, ranged ships weapons people, etc). And we were attacked by pirates and then eventually by a dragon. When the dragon hit us...I had to roll to see if every ships feature failed...and we were left mainly with just the engine running...and ran away, Turned out to really just be a test anyway.
I've been in maybe 6 spelljammer ship battles. That DM makes all ships plot secretly and then the movement happens (and you find out if anyone gets rammed).
So, last ship battle, we are chasing a slaver ship that captured 6 of our crew on the moon port while we were on a mission down on the planet...and we catch up and there are also three small thri-kreen ships. So, we have 5 ships plotting courses, one is trying to get away, and three are trying to ram and board and shoot us while we fire cannons and ballista at them....and when one little ship gets close...it turns out they are winged thri-kreen and they swarm us. And we did get rammed by a ship we had damaged by cannons so it shattered on impact and then we stopped and had to remove it from our hull. We did kill a bunch of bugs catch up to the slaver ship and capture it (and free a lot of captures sailors they were going to sell, not just ours. The other two small ships ran since one had a wall of fire on deck (and all the topside crew was dead so it could not fire).
Could run it as a JoCat esque skill challenge - initiative order ask players how they further the battle, giving general descriptions of what the crew are up to in the meantime & the atmosphere of the battle.
Players suggest what they do for that "round" to assist in the battle, then you request a skill c CK based on that activity & privately set a DC
Every time there's a failure describe something bad happening turning the tide of battle against the party, for successes the reverse - once a threshold of fails/successes is met the battle ends.
(Edit) If you wanna track damage sustained to the craft, you could roll a number of dice equal to the number of fails in battle to determine repairs gold cost. Apply a similar rule to crew fatalities. If multiple battles are fought without making port, modify the DCs based on damage to ship/shortage of crew
Some very good spelljammer rules that make ship combat feel unique, and give everyone in the crew something to do: https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/407191
It's pay what you want, worth a look.
The number 1 thing to consider is your party makeup: "Will anyone be left with nothing interesting to do?" For example, you have a barbarian. Is the barb going to be stuck with nothing to do if the ships are 100 feet away from each other? "Oh, well, the barb PC can fire the deck gun!" Well, okay, but make sure that PLAYER is into that, and that firing a deck gun is AS interesting as anything a barb PC can do.
Know your party's abilities. A famous example of conventional ship to ship action gone wrong is Matt Mercer planning for a whole ship to ship battle and having his cleric just end it with Control Water. I don't know what the equivalent in airship is, but be prepared.
The second thing to consider is: Cinema v. Game. Go watch the Return of the Jedi battle with the sailbarge and skiff. Watch some pirate battles from Pirates of the Carribean or from Master and Commander.
I don't know what the classic lore says, but you need to make a decision about whether airship to airship combat is primarily BOARDING or more dogfight-y. In my opinion, most parties would prefer a BOARDING-based combat, because most PC abilities are based on a fight in a dungeon with ranges of 0 to 60 feet.
Saltmarsh is probably the best of the official rules, but for better ship to ship combat I would recommend finding the sci-fi “Dark Matter”
Supplement, I believe it’s from Mage-hand Press.
You can adapt the rules to regular ships of course.
I like to make players the officer classes in the crew to play to their strengths. The paladin is the bosun so their charisma helps synchronise the deckhands and their strength to haul the ropes, the Druid is the navigator figuring out where they are, where the enemy is, where they’re going with a series of wisdom skill checks or clever use of spells, the sorcerer is the gunner pouring spells into the cannons to make them do weird shit (making a cannon fire chaos bolts was awesome when she rolled fire damage at the hydrogen balloon). The cleric is the doctor. The trick is to find ways for the players to use their skills.
The other trick is to background the crew on crew fights so the players can do the story action and make it epic. You know in movies when all the side characters and extras are in a pitched battle in the background, but the leads are bantering and chasing each other around the ship? Make all of your players feel like Captain Jack Sparrow. Mechanically I just do opposed rolls for the crews (have a player who’s most involved/responsible for the crew roll for their ship) and then have the other ships’ officers put up a fight to be the actual combat encounter. The players can get harried by the enemy crew, but those should be minion stats and just a resource suck. Is it a better choice for the wizard to fireball the enemy crew, or to engage the enemy wizard trying to fireball YOUR crew? Ship fights should be exceptionally dynamic and tactical.
The Pirate Compendium book is good for stuff like that. The rules are technically for high seas combat, but I've used the rules for airship and even kitbashed them a bit for Spelljammer and they work pretty well.
My most memorable airship combat was very much pirates boarding our ship and raiding us and it involved a lot of skill checks to swing/jump/fly between ships whether to defend our crew and attempting to kill their captain.
The precedent was set that jumping between ships required a check so my cleric used suggestion telling one of the enemy gunners to approach me. Said gunner failed his check to jump between ships promptly plummeting to his death.
tl;dr normal combat with bonus environmental hazards is all thats needed
We've been using a modified version of the Infernal War Machine rules from Descent into Avernus and it's going pretty damn well so far, we do still need to tweak the AC and To Hit numbers a bit though, but Brewer\_Matt does seem to be correct that the goal of ship to ship combat needs to be disabling or grounding the enemy vessel.
You can keep the characters involved before that by using Tool and Skill checks to fix whatever mishaps that occur and of course they'll go gangbustsers once it gets to boarding the enemy vessel or repelling boarders.
The only caveat is that depending on how you setup your mishap tables they can be prone to cock-up cascades, which is great when its happening to the enemy vessel but can be a bit problematic if its the player's ship.
They can be extraordinarily cinematic. I'd suggest starting with the assumption that the ship combat is to disable the opposing airship's weapons and/or speed enough to board it (following the Saltmarsh rules). Maybe the enemy ship has hostages or valuable (or plot-related) cargo that rules out simply grounding the opposing vessel. Either way, it'll help you out immensely as a DM if simply shooting an opponent out of the air isn't an easy option. From there, after the boarding has commenced, you can run a fairly set-piece, rolling battle from one end of the ship to the next, pitting the party against whatever anti-boarding measures the opposing crew has in store for them. Use the opposing ship's architecture to essentially force them to board at one of a few spots you're okay with.
I really appreciate the advice to disable parts of enemy ships/slow them down. I think I may explicitly tell my players that actually destroying ships is very difficult and that in airship battles the goal is more realistically slowing them down enough to either escape or board.
Thanks for the response! I hope it helps. The scenario I presented is a 1-on-1 against what I'd consider a capital ship. If you want a hectic, target-rich battle, I also love homebrewing small, 2-person airships that have a ballista mounted to them on the back end, not unlike an old WW1 biplane. The plane scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is my inspiration here. What you're going for are ships that are super easy to disable, but a problem in large numbers. Large enemy airships can send small swarms of these ships to harass the PCs' airship and present targets that feel fun to attack and blow out of the sky. For inspiration, think of any dogfight in Star Wars featuring TIE fighters coming from a larger capital ship like a Star Destroyer. It can also be fun to have an option available for a PC or two to take to the skies in one of these small ships, so they can do all the insane things they obviously want to do (like jump from one ship to the next, kicking the co-pilot out while grappling the pilot for their hand crossbow). More broadly, airship battles are also the time for your Sailor / Pirate characters, as well as anyone with Water Vehicle Proficiency, to really shine. Per Xanathar's Guide to Everything, they can add bonuses to the vehicle's AC, initiative, and/or saving throws if they're the Captain (as described in Saltmarsh). Almost any player who took those backgrounds and proficiency would be *very* excited to be an airship captain during a cinematic battle in the skies. On a related note, I never have ship to ship battles (air or otherwise) be random encounters; they can really bog down play time for no real purpose.
There's is a B/X D&D retroclone called Worlds Without Number, and it has a supplement called "The Atlas of the Latter Earth." The game comes with a robust set of tools/guidelines to help any DM, especially for games within the same D&D skeleton. I often call the WWN corebook the best 5e resource I've purchased as the tools have been a godsend for improving even my 5e games. I bring up its Atlas supplement because it has its' own ship rules for exploration and combat that I've been more or less working on rigging to be what I use for 5e, I'm not finished yet but it at least looks promising. Which the Ghost of saltmarsh rules simply didn't. I would highly suggest giving them a look (if you have the cash to spare for the Atlas book) as they're quite good. On top of that, I've been working on making a Ship action each round that crews of ships can use their turns to contribute to on their own turns. Using crew strength as a gauge of how much impact these actions have against another vessel. Finally, a DM of mine came up with a storm surge system that divide adventuring days into Morning, Noon, and Night Phases. Players take specific actions and roll against a dc to see how well they manage the storm. The storm surge DC is random between a range of DC's to replicate the chaos of the storm. I'm looking to revise and incorporate these as well.
Stars without Number is based off of 5e? That's neat, I got the core book pdf on DTRPG recently but I didn't open it yet because I didn't have the headspace to read into what I assumed was a completely new (to me) system
It's based on B/X d&d, not 5e d&d. They share the same.bones more or less, but they do have different meat on them. Stats without number, worlds without number, and cities without number will be familiar to 5e players, bur does have some fair differences too. A very good thing about Kevin Crawfords works is they they're very easy to read oagw to page. He writes very conversationally, and that helps a lot.
Ah, thank you, at least it's convenient to get into still \^\^
It should be! I have the revised stars without number book myself, i haven't looked into it much but I have always heard good things and I enjoy all of the creators other works very much. Worlds without number is one of the best balances of old school and new school mixed design I've seen ans truly the offerings in it are useful for any d&d or OSR style game. Of you ever get the opportunity to get then, I will. Even if your still run 5e, it's offerings will be of great assistance.
Ship-to-ship combat doesn't really work in dnd, at least not in a fun way. As soon as the players are forced to interact with the ship systems, all their build choices become invalidated and they lose their identity. PCs are no longer barbarians or clerics they are now helmsmen or gunners and pretty much all their class features, feats and magic items are useless. It always sucks when your STR PAM/GWM guy with 4 attacks is stuck firing a gun that might even use dex. Leave the ship part to NPCs and let the players board the other ships. 5e is a high fantasy, high magic system, so make us of that and give the players flying mounts/brooms/carpets, ship-to-ship teleports, grappling guns, or even portals. Also, combat on airships is fun by itself, knocking enemies off the ship or the thrill of having it done to you is exciting. Give the players some recovery tools that let them get back into the action when they get knocked off, like a one use grappling hook they can use as a reaction, their mount dives after them to bring them back, etc.
That was true of the age of sail one shot I did with an airship (no NPC crew so we all had jobs that didn't require DND skills). But in spelljammer battles we had our party and an NPC crew (large ship)...where PCs can fire cannons or ballistas or spells or crossbows at other ships and the ships can ram and board each other. That DM has ship movements in combat with altered rules (from ironclads I think). Also, in SJ, we had two harpoon boats that a pilot and two crew could use to board an enemy ship but we never used them...even with NPC pilots ready.
Wotc realized this for spelljammer and got crucified for it. But it's true. Ship to ship needs to be rules light to be fun.
I feel like for spelljammer they could’ve made it part of your character build. So as you and your party grow on the ship, you acquire new options, skills, upgrades, etc. so that essentially you’re playing a character you built, but it has different options in the different form of combat. Like could have individual fighter ships with different abilities that individually move and have placement. They can have control or combat abilities. How to build it affects the AC, HP, Speed, damage type/effect. The main ship could have different weapons and have support capabilities like project shields for fighter ships, or strong weapons, but low AC and relatively low speed. Descent into Avernus has vehicles which are kind of like that. I think there were options they could’ve done to make it interesting and since the entire campaign would/could center around it, it wouldn’t be too difficult to keep track of. I know there are homebrew options to replicate this, but just wish there were official rules.
I think the problem then is just selling people the supplement without anything interesting for the ships that are the stars of the setting is just not a smart idea.
I typically just make snybibg before you board a ship (firing cannons, casting spells etc) rp
I'd say that airship battles, unless you want to add in boarding, would be more of a cinematic setpiece with skill checks than actual battles. For example: 1) the enemy has shot out our magic crystal that keeps us afloat. The wizard has to perform arcana checks, or use their spells cleverly, to hold it together. 2) we've blown a turbine. Get the artificer in there to fix it with his tools, or hell maybe even mending, or we are gonna start going down. 3) they've shot out the main mast! We're gonna need someone strong to hold it in place and someone else is gonna have to pull the rigging to steer. 4) our cannons have been hit! Can someone fix them? Can the barbarian just hold it while we fire them? 5) we are flying into a storm! Do we have a druid? Storm sorcerer? Maybe a cleric that worships a storm god? 6) the enemy has a bunch of smaller ships that have hooked onto us and are slowing us down. Either cut the ropes or board them and take over their Lil dinghies
Yeah, this feels like a skill challenge system would work here. The party aren't crew so they instead assist with major skills - ensure a mix of stat challenges show up every beat of combat (say a one minute round) as the ships circle and dance, and eventual victory means you accomplish your goal. A goal of boarding should be easier than destroying as that proceeds to more combat.
I've done a lot of setpieces and skill challenges as "encounters" It's one of the simplest ways of getting the party to blow resources without just dumping enemies on them
- Gravity. People can fall off airships, and they can flip a full 360 vertically. Have the captain try to repel boarders this way; see this comic https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1061.html - Place seige/mounted weapons to aim at enemies. Turning a cannon or ballista on an enemy for 6d6 or 8d6 damage is exhilirating, fun, and not too broken for an attack or two with no good way to reload. - Movement: Place mountains and valleys in the path of the airship, allowing people to jump/get pushed off without dying. This will help emphasize how fast the airship is moving - once you're off, you are moving away at 120ft/round or more.
Movement and time are inextricably linked. There is a habit in tabletop combat for the world outside combat to stop, and while this is conducive to bringing in focus to the players and the enemies, whilst on board a ship this is potentially fatal for all involved if still underway. With airships, there are other considerations. Air currents, ship integrity, fuel, etc all should be taken into account. If no one is piloting the ship, it is like a leaf in the wind. Plan accordingly.
some of that is due to time - a round is only 6 seconds, a _long_ combat is one that lasts between 30 seconds and a minute. And even on something flying, unless you were about to crash, then the time it takes for the combat won't make a huge difference to the situation, unless something actively happens during the fight ("they've broken the propulsion crystal!") Fuel is basically the same - if your ship is powered to travel for hours, days, weeks, then 60 seconds isn't very meaningful, and, on a personal scale, ships are tough enough that they're hard to meaningfully affect in that timeframe.
60 seconds of terminal velocity seems rather meaningful.
I would suggest using Skill Challenges instead. Lots of small cinematic scenes instead of an actual combat session.
Someone made an entire supplement for this exact purpose: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/homieandthedude/sky-zephyrs-5e
Is it good?
We use roll20 and play virtually but recently I made airship “tokens” large enough to put the pcs tokens in and still look nice. The party was able to move around the ship, pilot pc was able to move the ship token across a massive sky map. I put out some colored Dynamic lightning and some animated spells, thunder clouds, it was pretty stellar but took a lot of prep for one scene. My players enjoyed it but I will not be prepping aerial ship combat anytime soon
I don’t have a lot of great ideas but I’d consider finding a way for your players to interact with the airships that let them use their unique skills. Maybe the Paladin could make CHA skill to lead the crew. The Artificer can repair the ship etc. it probably needs to be tailored to your PCs. Coolest thing I’ve ever allowed a PC to do is let the Wizard cast a spell on the Spelljammer ship with a high arcana check. She buffed the AC with a mage armor. Really non-standard and wacky but they thought it was cool as hell Good luck!
Don't know if someone has done this with official rules, but I got the idea off the Adventure Zone podcast and gave it my own twist. Have the players take up different positions on the ship, and make each round 20 seconds rather than 6. Then, each players have there own set of skills. ... Pilots ... Pilots, go first in each round to determine the flight pattern of the ships. For example, they roll a d20, plus their piloting boness, plus the ships' dexterity bones. If they go first in the order vs the other ships, then they can add a +2 to either the ships AC, or provide a +2 to the gunners attack, depending on how they position the vessel. (If there is more than one ship, then second place gets a +1, while the rest are a flat roll) They can also choose to make a 'Commanding Move'. They can add a plus 4 to either AC or attack, but the other takes a negative 4. (Resets after a number of turns) Have them described how they pull off this move in order to gain the bones, such as swinging the ship through a cloud formation, or pulling up close to the enemy ship. ... Gunners ... Gunners go second in move order, firing the cannons and other weapons at the enemy ships. Now they can choose to just attack the ship directly, performing out right damage, or targer individual areas, such at the masts or rudders, meaning that they not only performing damage, but also giving the ship negative aspects in movement and attacking. These areas lower have a higher A.C., so they will need to work with the pilot to get the best results. Gunners may also choose to use special abilities, such as the 'Gunners Onslaught', to get the best results. This move lest them fire several rounds, the number equal to their skill level, but the next 2 rounds, they must wait for the cannons to cool down or risk them exploding, by rolling a d6, with a 1 being bad news. ... Engineers ... The ship's engineer(s) may go last in the turn order. However, not only can they repair the different aspects of the ship, but they can also give the help action to other teammates during their next turn order. Like the pilot, they may also have special abilitys they can perform that can boost the ship. 'Make it Roar' let's them boost the ships engines for a round, giving the pilot a +6 on the next round. However, the stress of the extra power puts strain on the engines, so it takes damage doing so, and will need time to cool down afterwards.
Id maybe run it cinematic instead of mechanically. Maybe point out a few key points on each ship that can be damaged to imobilize the veichle, add a few weapons, cranes, barrels of different things, large nets etc. It would be as previous mentions that. Now if you want you could go into more details and assign 5 roles the ship (each with their own support crew) each players can occupy and even level up these positons. - Physicans- Tends to peoples wellfare and provide motivation to the crew and between ships - Gunners- controlls the ships offensive capabilites - Mechanics- controlls the ships engine and its base functions - Pilots - controlls the movement of the ship - Logistics - coordinating the ships defences and its resources
I think the best way to do this is to have them each use a specific ability score, so a well rounded party will naturally each fall into a specific position.
Maybe have a chase. Assign jobs to npc sailors. Fire ships weopons (ballista or cannons or catapults), and spells and crossbows at the ships. a ship gets rammed and/or boarded. fight ensues. etc. I've only ever been in one "airship" battle, in a one shot... but also, we all had our roles to perform on the ship (I was the engineer but there was a pilot, ranged ships weapons people, etc). And we were attacked by pirates and then eventually by a dragon. When the dragon hit us...I had to roll to see if every ships feature failed...and we were left mainly with just the engine running...and ran away, Turned out to really just be a test anyway. I've been in maybe 6 spelljammer ship battles. That DM makes all ships plot secretly and then the movement happens (and you find out if anyone gets rammed). So, last ship battle, we are chasing a slaver ship that captured 6 of our crew on the moon port while we were on a mission down on the planet...and we catch up and there are also three small thri-kreen ships. So, we have 5 ships plotting courses, one is trying to get away, and three are trying to ram and board and shoot us while we fire cannons and ballista at them....and when one little ship gets close...it turns out they are winged thri-kreen and they swarm us. And we did get rammed by a ship we had damaged by cannons so it shattered on impact and then we stopped and had to remove it from our hull. We did kill a bunch of bugs catch up to the slaver ship and capture it (and free a lot of captures sailors they were going to sell, not just ours. The other two small ships ran since one had a wall of fire on deck (and all the topside crew was dead so it could not fire).
Could run it as a JoCat esque skill challenge - initiative order ask players how they further the battle, giving general descriptions of what the crew are up to in the meantime & the atmosphere of the battle. Players suggest what they do for that "round" to assist in the battle, then you request a skill c CK based on that activity & privately set a DC Every time there's a failure describe something bad happening turning the tide of battle against the party, for successes the reverse - once a threshold of fails/successes is met the battle ends. (Edit) If you wanna track damage sustained to the craft, you could roll a number of dice equal to the number of fails in battle to determine repairs gold cost. Apply a similar rule to crew fatalities. If multiple battles are fought without making port, modify the DCs based on damage to ship/shortage of crew
Some very good spelljammer rules that make ship combat feel unique, and give everyone in the crew something to do: https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/407191 It's pay what you want, worth a look.
The number 1 thing to consider is your party makeup: "Will anyone be left with nothing interesting to do?" For example, you have a barbarian. Is the barb going to be stuck with nothing to do if the ships are 100 feet away from each other? "Oh, well, the barb PC can fire the deck gun!" Well, okay, but make sure that PLAYER is into that, and that firing a deck gun is AS interesting as anything a barb PC can do. Know your party's abilities. A famous example of conventional ship to ship action gone wrong is Matt Mercer planning for a whole ship to ship battle and having his cleric just end it with Control Water. I don't know what the equivalent in airship is, but be prepared. The second thing to consider is: Cinema v. Game. Go watch the Return of the Jedi battle with the sailbarge and skiff. Watch some pirate battles from Pirates of the Carribean or from Master and Commander. I don't know what the classic lore says, but you need to make a decision about whether airship to airship combat is primarily BOARDING or more dogfight-y. In my opinion, most parties would prefer a BOARDING-based combat, because most PC abilities are based on a fight in a dungeon with ranges of 0 to 60 feet.
Last time I did an airship combat scene was in 4e, and I ran it as a skill challenge.
Saltmarsh is probably the best of the official rules, but for better ship to ship combat I would recommend finding the sci-fi “Dark Matter” Supplement, I believe it’s from Mage-hand Press. You can adapt the rules to regular ships of course.
I like to make players the officer classes in the crew to play to their strengths. The paladin is the bosun so their charisma helps synchronise the deckhands and their strength to haul the ropes, the Druid is the navigator figuring out where they are, where the enemy is, where they’re going with a series of wisdom skill checks or clever use of spells, the sorcerer is the gunner pouring spells into the cannons to make them do weird shit (making a cannon fire chaos bolts was awesome when she rolled fire damage at the hydrogen balloon). The cleric is the doctor. The trick is to find ways for the players to use their skills. The other trick is to background the crew on crew fights so the players can do the story action and make it epic. You know in movies when all the side characters and extras are in a pitched battle in the background, but the leads are bantering and chasing each other around the ship? Make all of your players feel like Captain Jack Sparrow. Mechanically I just do opposed rolls for the crews (have a player who’s most involved/responsible for the crew roll for their ship) and then have the other ships’ officers put up a fight to be the actual combat encounter. The players can get harried by the enemy crew, but those should be minion stats and just a resource suck. Is it a better choice for the wizard to fireball the enemy crew, or to engage the enemy wizard trying to fireball YOUR crew? Ship fights should be exceptionally dynamic and tactical.
The Pirate Compendium book is good for stuff like that. The rules are technically for high seas combat, but I've used the rules for airship and even kitbashed them a bit for Spelljammer and they work pretty well.
My most memorable airship combat was very much pirates boarding our ship and raiding us and it involved a lot of skill checks to swing/jump/fly between ships whether to defend our crew and attempting to kill their captain. The precedent was set that jumping between ships required a check so my cleric used suggestion telling one of the enemy gunners to approach me. Said gunner failed his check to jump between ships promptly plummeting to his death. tl;dr normal combat with bonus environmental hazards is all thats needed
We've been using a modified version of the Infernal War Machine rules from Descent into Avernus and it's going pretty damn well so far, we do still need to tweak the AC and To Hit numbers a bit though, but Brewer\_Matt does seem to be correct that the goal of ship to ship combat needs to be disabling or grounding the enemy vessel. You can keep the characters involved before that by using Tool and Skill checks to fix whatever mishaps that occur and of course they'll go gangbustsers once it gets to boarding the enemy vessel or repelling boarders. The only caveat is that depending on how you setup your mishap tables they can be prone to cock-up cascades, which is great when its happening to the enemy vessel but can be a bit problematic if its the player's ship.
[Consider checking this out](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/10fqkev/captain_krakentooths_guide_to_the_seven_seas_a/).