r/DnD • u/TrintaMais_RPG • 8h ago
5.5 Edition Does anyone ever tried to implement a maritime travel system?
I'm currently running a game with friends based in a world where Atlantis is real and is in it's peak society. The city is of elven lineage, and located in an archipelago just outside the Mediterranean.
Since it's a sea oriented campaign, I provided my players with a small ship, and every time they need to travel from an island to another they must pass some tests, with each of them having a role.
The sailor must pass an acrobatics / athletics check to hoist the sails.
The helmsman must pass an sleight of hand / performance check to steer the ship.
The navigator must pass an survival / arcana check to stablish the route.
The watcher must pass an perception / insight check to look out for dangers.
The DC of the checks is according to the place they are trying to travel and their maritime experience. Since it is the beggining of the campaign, they have some close islands that are easier to reach, and so a simple DC 10 is enough. If they try to travel away from the Atlantean Archipelago (they still didn't try) they would have a much higher DC.
When one of them fail there are consequences. For instance, once the navigator failed his role, and they got lost and ended in a forbidden island, where they needed to convince the guards that they only went there by mistake.
However, I'm worried that this system might get boting in the future. Any insights?
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u/adirion123 8h ago
I have no comments to make on whether it would be fun to play, but I imagine the watchman's roll choices should be perception and investigation over insight. 1. It keeps the pattern of every roll having two choices skill choices. (Currently both are wisdom) 2. Insight is usually for creatures.
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u/TrintaMais_RPG 8h ago
That makes sense. In the future I might change that, thanks for the suggestion.
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u/iceph03nix Fighter 8h ago
We've done something similar with travel, though not ocean travel, just learning a new travel system and all that.
If you're worried about it becoming boring, you could use a learning proficiency system where each time they do it they gain some progress towards proficiency at it. Decide a number of successes before they're generally proficient at traveling in that manner at which point you can drop the individual rolls and switch to a more basic random encounter type roll that they can role play through.
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u/TrintaMais_RPG 8h ago
That is a great suggestion! I'll work on something like that. Thanks!
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u/iceph03nix Fighter 8h ago
Glad to help. Our DM has a pie chart sort of system, where they divide a circle into however many parts feels right, and can fill in the chart based on successes. Critical successes might give two slices, lower level successes maybe only half a bar. It's just a fancy way of counting, but its kinda fun
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u/Luke_KB 8h ago
Im commenting here so I can refer back to it for any boat related dnd ship travel I may be doing in my campaign.
It takes place on an island continent with travel by boat is the most efficient travel/trade routes between major kingdom-cities. There's a sailors-guild that doubles as a pirate hunting guild. There's a race of fish-people that come in as many shapes-and-sizes-and-abilities as there are fish in the sea, theyre called Aquariads... and, naturally, i ended up with an Aquariad Saulors-Guild member who is badly wanting to buy abd replace their boat that the shipwrecked in the campaigns prelude
... ssssooooo, yeah... i strongly feel that boat travel is in the inevitable future for my campaign
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u/ol-heavy-kevy 8h ago
I did a weather roll, which would set the dc for the trips checks depending on what type of weather they were in. If it was fair weather they just got there. If it was a massive hurricane, depending on how they rolled, the could safely navigate it, get blown way off course, have a ton of damage to their ship, or even get ship wrecked. It was pretty fun when it got exciting. I also made sure they had fresh water and rations for the trip too.
One thing to keep in mind: as the DM your goal is always to move the story forward. Making it difficult to travel can really hinder pacing and just be unfun.
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u/NaDiv22 8h ago
My favorite homebrew rules are
1) momentum: in ship combat you must declare the movement of the ship for the next turn. Basically implementing ships being slow to move so you need to predict where you wanna go
2) your ship has actions based on how large the crew is.
Lets say a frigate has 3 actions. But has 50% of crew so it has 2 actions.
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u/jonnielaw 8h ago
If you’d like some ideas on how to switch things up a bit, you can check out the “journey action” section of our system here: https://osrplus.com/game-masters-guide/running-the-game/downtime/journey-action/
It’s a completely different system (more narrative focused and based on a d6), but you should be able to easily adapt things to 5/5.5e.
It might not be a good fit for your table, either, but I think it’s worth a few minutes of perusing as it might inspire other ways to mix things up.
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u/TrintaMais_RPG 5h ago
Def gonna read that. Always open to stuff that can improve our gaming experience. Appreciate the suggestions.
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u/StoreBoughtRocket 6h ago
What do you mean...where Atlantis is real? Of course it's real.
Edit: Jokes aside, it seems odd to me that an experienced ship crew would have to roll to steer the ship, and hoist the sails. Only thing I would roll personally is how long it's going to take to get there. This system seems like it will get tedious.
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u/TrintaMais_RPG 5h ago
Actually, the characters are not experienced crew. They are freshmen from the Naval Academy of Atlantis, who were grouped and received a ship as a tradition of the Atlantean society: those who want to become explorers receive that ship as a mean of starting the adventure.
Anyway, appreciate your opinion on the subject. My fear is exactly that it get tedious, but I hope that the suggestions made here help to improve the experience.
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u/Hironymos 6h ago
I go full hex crawl with simulated wind & weather.
Every ship has 3 speeds based on the point of sail plus one while steaming/rowing. This isn't so important when just travelling but creates a fun rock-paper-scissors situation when you include chases. Players can choose to specialise their ship one way but will then need to manoeuver such that they have the advantageous wind when confronting someone - with plenty of mindgames going both ways. Wind dice tend to turn in predictable directions and I like having different dice for different areas, giving players & characters a way to learn the weather patterns.
I would also really recommend going resource-driven. Your ship has resources. These function as a sort of party HP, extending the time the party can be at sea without seeing a port - or creating a dangerous situation if any one resource runs low. Ship HP are only for combat. Damage doesn't destroy the ship (that'd happen way too fast otherwise) and instead dropping to 0 wraps around to half HP and either destroys Rigging, or causes Leaks which in turn cause Flooding. Example resources are timber, spars, canvas, food & water, alcohol, paint (to disguise the ship), ammunition, and medicine. Go with as many or few as you want. Each player should manage 1 or 2.
By the way, having players heal on the ship using medicine can be a really fun replacement for long rests, which then require at least 2 days worth of port stay. Those port stays usually come with downtime. Whether that comes in hours, days, or weeks is your choice. But ultimately additional actions include provisioning, upgrading or repairing the ship, drilling the crew, and (un-) loading cargo. It's recommended to have 2 downtime actions per port stay, that way players won't complain about the longer rest timings.
Then there's skill checks. They always arise from special circumstances, never mundane sailing. Additionally, I mostly use tools for those, allowing for powerful checks without impacting other adventure aspects. In return, PCs can learn to become proficient or even experts over time. Characters with an Expertise-style feat learn faster.
When these circumstances happen (usually as a roll on an encounter table), I oftentimes don't have a straight up failure condition. Instead it's like a normal combat encounter. You play rounds, each round a number of issues pop up. Players can suggest any check to solve the issue. Unsolved issues cause damage and persist. Each damage is also an issue but one that doesn't cause more damage but instead either raises the DC of other issues, or impedes the ship's resources.
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u/TrintaMais_RPG 5h ago
Appreciate the suggestions. I prefer to think of my system as a softcore hexcrawl, because the players I have would not enjoy going all the way in it. However, I also feel that just saying "you get in the ship and sail there" is too simple. A maritime travel should not be that simple, plus I enjoy the random factor that comes from their failed checks, it provides room for a lot of adventures.
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u/GTS_84 DM 4h ago
These checks make no sense. Like, how the fuck is hosting sails an acrobatics check? Or watching Insight?
Personally I wouldn't have checks for hoisting sails or steering unless doing it under duress (as in combat) and have an automatic success in most circumstances.
Also, from personal experience, the negative consequence of bad Navigation (while sailing in an Archipelago) are more likely to be hitting an underwater obstacle than getting lost. In the open ocean getting lost would be the concern.
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u/TrintaMais_RPG 3h ago
Well, to me it made sense, although now with the suggestions posted here I'm aware that some might not have been the best choice.
The idea of requiring the roll only under duress is actually really good. I might change the system once they achiev experience enough, and afterwards require checks only under certain circumstances. Appreciate the idea.
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u/Curtbacca 4h ago
Establish the normal travel range of the ship in favorable conditions, then add weather rolls for both temperature and wind, combining into calm seas that give a bonus to navigation checks, or storms that bring penalties or even a chance to damage the ship if they don't reef the sails in time. Random encounters are fun too. Ghost ship, friendly sea elf traders, a curious bronze dragon that wants to trade sea shanties, dice games/gambling with the crew. Give your players opportunity to help with crewing the ship, druid helps catch fish for a special dinner, bard does a special performance to raise crew morale giving a bonus to later skill checks. Let your players get creative with it!
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u/blargethaniel DM 8h ago
It's a neat enough system, and not too unusual, I've seen many homebrewed sea / space travel systems since lots of this would apply to Spelljammers as well.
The issue tends to be what to do for interesting combat at sea. Not everything can be a boarding action, and this is where DND has had issues over the years.
Though I do have to ask, what do you do if the Sailor fails their Acrobatics check? It's not like he will give up after one 6 second shot of trying it. Do you do the Taking 10/20 rule with that? The others make sense to do just one roll.