D&D Professional Skills

From time to time the DM might need to determine if a NPC professional succeeds at a difficult technical skill or craft - does the blacksmith make a suitable masterwork weapon on the first try, can the sage answer an obscure question, that kind of stuff.  As I collate notes for my future (Caribbean-based) saltbox setting, this extends to solving for skills like sailing, navigation, and gunnery.

I've seen the simple 2d6 reaction chart from classic D&D turned into a skill resolution chart.  It assumes a modifier scale of -3 to +3 using ability scores.  (Historical note: Charisma was capped at +2 in the Moldvay rules, but this was changed for Mentzer and the Rules Cyclopedia).  For professional skills, I'm using the following descriptors to determine appropriate "ability modifiers":

Professional Experience:
Skilled:  +1
Expert:  +2
Master:  +3
Unskilled:  -2

Unskilled characters may not even get a roll in some cases.  The basic reaction chart goes like this:

Skill Resolution (roll 2d6):
2  serious failure
3-5 failure
6-8 partial success
9-11 success
12 great success

An example usage: if the players hire a skilled navigator instead of a master navigator for their ship, they'll pay less in salary or shares, but there's a higher chance of getting lost on the way to that hidden island.  As I develop the nautical rules, I'll work on specific guidelines when hired experts would make checks and how the dice results translate into specific outcomes.

For basic D&D, I like decoupling professional skills from the class and level system and treating them as background skills for NPCs; it keeps the major emphasis for class advancement on adventuring and developing adventurer capabilities.  Nonetheless, I can see the players asking if they can develop any degree of professional skill (especially these nautical skills) if they spend enough time on a boat.

This post from an older blog (Skills: The Middle Road) provided some recommendations for education around professional skills, so I'll use those values as a starting point and will see how it goes:

Learning a Profession:
Skilled - 1 month, 1000gp
Expert - 3 months, 3000gp
Master - 6 months, 10,000gp

If a player character commits to spending time in the rigging, learning how to furl and unfurl the sails, close-haul a ship, tie the right knots, swab the deck, and so on, they can be a skilled sailor after a month of effort and a bit of money on the side.  (For sailing, assume the money goes to gambling, carousing, repairs, clothes, basic gear, dues, and so on; ordinary folks pick up the same skills at a slower pace without all the money spent).

Alternatively, I can look at a hybrid game like ACKS, that bolts a new-school inspired feat and proficiency system onto the old school chassis.  Navigation and Seamanship are already represented as choices in ACKS, and Gunnery is easy to add.  ACKS also addresses when someone would be qualified as a "master" by stacking extra picks on a proficiency.  I'm not sure the high-fantasy tone of ACKS is what I'm going for, so the actual decision on rules flavor is for sometime down the road.

Towards Simple Naval Combat

There are already RPG games that focus on swashbuckling campaigns.  They're lighter in tone, and feature the cinematic action, or perhaps a bit of politics and intrigue.  I'm coming at the pirate genre from the perspective of horror fantasy; ghost-haunted ruined Spanish castles on lonely promontories; dank swamps with zombie masters, jade idols, and mindless undead hulks; fallen jungle ruins with blasphemous temples and a fortune in gems.  The idea is to make a large wilderness hex crawl, a "saltbox" instead of a sandbox, with the sailing vessel as the primary conveyance.  The mode is D&D style play, exploration seeking  after treasure, but with the chance for a bit of opportunistic piracy on the high seas (both for and against the players), and some rowdy carousing back in Port Royal or Tortuga.

The challenge is to build simple, abstract, flavorful nautical rules that capture situations during the Age of Sail without requiring a lot of nautical interest to enjoy the style.  So far, the ship combat rules in Flashing Blades: High Seas (FBHS) strike a good tone of abstraction and flavor when compared to the fiddly bits in competing rules sets, but there are a few things to change and/or add, to adapt them to D&D style play.

Skills
First thing to add is some basic skill resolution for professional skills - unskilled, skilled, expert, master - for specialized (non-adventuring) skills like sailing, navigation, and gunnery where resolution is going to matter.  Plenty of OSR types have adopted 2d6 skill systems modeled after the reaction roll chart.  Player characters can gain knowledge of professions over time, but the system is mainly for determining how hired experts contribute during a conflict.

Evasion
An important segment of a nautical encounter is when sails are spotted on the horizon, quickly followed by a decision to evade or give chase; the zoom level of FBHS is a little too tactical (yards instead of miles), skipping the whole dynamic of evading until night fall to escape the pursuer after dark, or using fog and foul weather, for the same.  Should be simple to extend the FBHS process a bit.

Maneuvers
When a ship has successfully overtaken another, there's the opportunity to maneuver.  FBHS has solid maneuvering rules, covering positioning for broadsides, chasers and stern guns, crossing the T, etc, and suggesting how to use ship handling and a bit of piloting skill; players don't need to know about the wind gage or leeward approaches, it's abstracted into fairly simple skill rolls once they decide on a broad strategy.

Combat
I'm a big fan of the humble d6 when you need to roll a ton of dice - too many years of Axis & Allies.  Batteries of cannons should be resolved with a handful of d6's.  Some of the rule sets involve calculating a ton of d20 modifiers and rolling dozens of times for a broadside on the d20 scale.  Meanwhile, FBHS has a single die roll for an entire battery, which isn't ideal to me either, so I'll adjust to include chucking handfuls of d6's and adding up hits.

Regardless, the strength of historical buccaneers was their crack shots with the musket, so there need to be adjustments to the combat approach to account for actual historical strategies like picking off helmsman, suppressing gun ports with withering fire, and otherwise clearing the deck with small arms while closing the gap to board.  The type of buccaneer ships in the game are typically lightly armed (unlike the 3-4 mast monsters used by pirates in the later age).

Reactions
There are a number of points at which a merchant ship's reactions (or morale checks) are critical; when spotted (to determine if they lay to, evade, or come about); when they’re overtaken - do they fight or roll over; when they're boarded, do they surrender, defend the decks, or set traps and retreat to closed quarters.  Reputation for the buccaneers and pirates will be a factor influencing morale checks.

Boarding
FBHS has fast, abstract rules for handling the boarding - although, like I mentioned above, the assumption seems to be two heavily armed ships slugging it out with broadsides, movie-style, and not fast rovers raking the decks with small arms and then quickly overwhelming with a boarding action.  It also omits grenades, a practical weapon, albeit one you usually don't see in the swashbuckling movies, either.  Otherwise, the FBHS rules feature a simple d6 system that would work well with the Axis & Allies style mass d6 rolls.

Ship Stats
It'll be important to define some standard ship "types" that make sense to me, by my understanding of the ships of the period; number and types of guns are important, structural hit points, handling ability (for maneuvering), typical crew sizes, and I'll even have to solve the cargo management problem (without having to micro-manage every single item loaded onto the ship).

I plan on yoinking some firearm rules from AD&D's A Mighty Fortress (although I assume the LOTFP gun book will be available long before this campaign is ready) and I'll be scanning Backswords & Bucklers again for ideas as well.  I also need to pick up Flashing Blades sometime, I really like the approach in the nautical supplement.

So that's a statement of purpose.  More to come.

D&D Pirates and the Sandbox Engine

A number of posters have recommended Savage Worlds, and a Savage Worlds licensed setting, Pirates of the Spanish Main (POTSM), for the nautical weird fantasy campaign I've been discussing here lately.  After many such recommendations, I picked up the POTSM book last week - it does a really great job of laying out a Caribbean setting, using the ships and characters from the old POTSM miniatures game of ship combat.  I'm really enjoying it a lot (thanks for all the good suggestions, fellows!)

Old School D&D isn't the best game for a nautical setting, since its early editions omit the kind of skill systems and professions that would help adjudicating action on the high seas.  However, it's the ideal system for running a plotless sandbox game.  The key game conceits for the sandbox are Class Level = Power Level, and XP for Gold.

Class Level = Power Level means that much of the gratification for playing comes about when your character goes up in level, gaining survivability or the option to do new and cooler things.  In other words, regardless of which fiction you drape over the game world, no small part of why players enjoy playing the game is because their characters get to level up.

XP = Gold means that gaining money through adventuring is the best way to gain those levels.  These two factors(Levels and the need to acquire Treasure) create an underlying engine that drives the sandbox game forward without requiring any plot or emotional attachment to a story.  As long as sandbox preparation involves seeding the world with lucrative and interesting opportunities, the player's ambition and the game engine does the rest.  Players choose their own adventures to ensure they'll get money and make their characters cooler.

To keep the sandbox engine moving forward, many DMs also add things that drain party gold - taxes on player wealth like upkeep rules, carousing requirements, things like that.  Seems to me the old Sci Fi game Traveller always did a good job of making sure the players were eager for the next employment, because Traveller characters had an expensive starship to maintain.  Provisioning supplies for a sailing ship, sharing out wealth with the crew, and keeping it maintained ought to do the trick in the pirate sandbox.

These days, I'm (obviously) really enjoying the sandbox approach to running a campaign and focusing on tools and techniques to help in the running - the Black City has been a really successful experiment.  After trying a horror sandbox earlier this year using Trail of Cthulhu - which was more work than the payoff - I stepped back and came to appreciate that campaign structures are a matter of finding the right tool for the right job.  In other words, there are good reasons to use game systems that use plotted adventures.  But for a player-driven sandbox game, D&D has a powerful reward and incentive system that is unmatched in other games - as long as the players buy into playing rogues, treasure hunters, and scoundrels.  In other words, PIRATES.

Challenges of the Saltbox

The archetypal D&D game, where a beginning group of adventurers meet in a tavern and head out to the local ruins, doesn't necessitate skills beyond those inherent in the class descriptions; fighters are already good at fighting, magic users cast spells, clerics can affect undead, and so forth.

Not so when you consider staging a maritime adventure.  The roles on a ship demand specialized skills - navigators need to read charts, calculate dead reckoning, mark soundings, and take latitude measurements; crewmen need to know the proper rigging of the sails and ship maintenance; gun crews need to know the elevation and targeting of cannons and the measurement of charges based on range and shot.  The captain is perhaps the most knowledgeable and experienced sailor on the ship, as well as requiring a strong personality and commanding presence.

Old school (rules-light) D&D doesn't provide much support in the rules for adjudicating these situations.  Which is fine, the game is Dungeons & Dragons, not Sloops & Sailors.  I imagine one reason many campaigns don't feature significant ocean travel is precisely due to discomfort by the DM.  If you're going to run the saltbox, you need a plan.

Hiring Experts
The by-the-book answer is to require adventurers to hire navigators, a captain, gunnery crew and sailors; there's no real provision for player characters to have said skills (unless perhaps the DM is using background professions or something like the 1E DMG).  This is fine if the ocean travel is a means to an end, like getting to the Isle of Dread; not so much if most of the campaign will revolve around the sea.

How would you handle this in an old school game?  Hybrid systems that split the new/old school line (like ACKS) have a proficiency based skill system, so player characters could add specific skills over time.  Alternatively, the DM could rule that characters spending enough time ship-board could learn these professions after a sufficient period as on-the-job-training.

Hack n Slash pointed readers towards an old post on A Rod of Lordly Might that broke professional skills down into categories of unskilled, skilled, expert, and master, and provided ideas on costs and times to pick them up (outside of the class and level system).  I like the idea of requiring experts initially, but letting the players add the skills as professions if they really want to allocate time and effort in game to pick them up for their characters, too.

Adjudicating Skill-Based Situations
In the dungeon environment, rules-light skill decisions on the fly are handled through a negotiation; the player describes what they want to do, the DM comes up with a success chance, the players think of ways to enhance success, and we either agree on a ruling or a roll that needs to be made and move on.

In a situation where specialized knowledge affects frequent encounters and combat, I'd like to push more of this resolution towards a defined system of rolls.  Can the crew get more speed out of the ship in a pursuit and evasion situation; can the captain's maneuver to get into a broadside position succeed; was the grappling and boarding attempt successful; did the navigator succeed in guiding the vessel to that remote island across the trackless ocean?

Looking through the BX rules, there are some guidelines for adjudicating these types of maneuvers, but they don't have a variable element for individual skill.  So one approach is to elaborate these generic guidelines for solving common situations, like pursuit, maneuvering, boarding, and navigation, and then apply modifiers based on player choices at the table.

An alternate approach is to add appropriate individual skills to the mix - use something like ACKS's proficiencies, extend the LOTFP d6-based skills to include some nautical skills, or use professional descriptions like unskilled, skilled, expert, or master to provide some common modifiers.

Agency and Autonomy
I've talked about this in the past, that playing crewmen on someone else's ship doesn't provide a lot of agency and authority to the players - they take orders, they don't give them.  As such, maritime adventures are postponed until the group has sufficient wealth to hire and outfit their own ship.

For a low-level campaign, I like the idea of the group starting with vessels small enough for them to afford, or ensuring one of the earliest adventures puts them in ownership of a suitable vessel.  Lots of real-world pirate careers started with canoes and pinnaces, trading up over time to progressively bigger vessels.  I've been working on a kick-off adventure for such a campaign, where the characters start as conventional adventurers, and gain an opportunity to seize an appropriate vessel and become privateers by the end of the adventure.  I'd use privateers because  I tend to think my players would rather be 'legal pirates' with patriotic targets, rather than murderous, indiscriminate raiders.

A useful thing about the 16th and 17th century colonial waters, the Spanish Empire of the time can be portrayed as universal, unsympathetic villains, the way early 20th century films frequently demonize Germany.  The destruction wreaked by the conquistadors was widespread and massive, dimmed only by 5 centuries.  But that's grist for another mill.

Anyway, that's where I'm at - gathering ideas for resolving common maritime problems, consulting what's been done in BX and AD&D 1E while looking at other game systems (currently looking at how Flashing Blades: High Seas handles similar situations).  James at LOTFP threatened to develop a maritime supplement at some point, but I don't see it on the near horizon (though hopefully the LOTFP guns supplement is inching closer...)

I'm also considering how player characters can gain some professional expertise in these non-dungeoneering professions, if desired.  Not only would this stuff be necessary for a Spanish Main setting, it'd be useful in the Black City - in another couple of months, the Spitsberg Pirates will be ready to buy their own longship or knarr and going where they will.

Game masters that have run a heavy nautical campaign seem few and far between; it's an idea that's occasionally discussed, but infrequently executed.  But if readers have suggestions on these issues, I'm thankful for any insights!