Previous post on nautical cleric spells got me thinking about nautical wilderness adventures. It turns out that seafaring adventures address my concerns about attrition in the wilderness by adding a new resource which is non-recoverable in the field: the ship's HP. "Only half of all damage sustained by a ship can be repaired at sea by the crew. The remaining damage can only be repaired by facilities at dock." Such partial-recovery rules would be annoying to track for all the PCs and henchmen, but seem pretty viable when the party has only one ship.
Incidentally, re-reading the ship combat rules, it turns out that those giant catfish last campaign should've dealt a lot less damage to the party's canoes, because "giant sea monsters and magical attacks do 1 structural HP of damage for every 5 points of damage their attack normally does". I regret nothing; that would've been a very boring fight without the risk of sinking (I suppose I could've made it about risk of capsizing / being tipped out of the boat). Knowing that ships are five times as durable as we thought, however, might encourage their use.
To be fair, those canoes were whittled entirely out of greed and the most convenient wood we could find. I'm pretty sure a normal-sized catfish would have been able to damage them.
ReplyDeleteBut M, greed is one of the most powerful forces in the ACKS universe!
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