Let me first start this off with a simple statement:
Large scale ANYTHING is a pain to say the very least.
Now lets elaborate some on this.
Last week, after a bout of end of semester finals (our psych major having to go through a stretch of presentations and thus indisposed) combined with fuel problems for some players, meant that no one really knew enough after a longer than a month break outside the GM that it was time to start over. So the great question was put forward, what do you want?
It is amazing how this question can drag an entire group to a dead stop. Shocks me every time. I guess coming from the point of view of being a long term GM, I always have a clue on what I want but I also know the pain of trying to run what I want and getting no tangible reply from the players, who are mostly just treading water till something grabs there attention. Too many years of just through the storytelling equivalent of a commercial fishing drag line of plot hooks out has taken it's toll.
So, the five of them are staring at each other and then look right back at me. With the eyes that say 'Tell us what we want...'. Well, I was not going to do that this time for them. I have done that for them for years upon years and the campaign that was supposed to be my vacation collapsed so it fell back on me to run something. This time, I wanted their opinion. We all sat there quietly for like an hour... oh, there was chatting and some music playing to keep the mood positive but no gaming was discussed.
I partially blame that on the fact that I am very punctual and have a very strict time table and we were going to see the Hobbit so the moment I have my pocket watch out, it means we are have an agenda... so it derailed some of the planning. In the waning hours before departure, talks finally broke out.
So what did they tell me?
They wanted a Renascence/Age of Exploration sailing/pirate game. And they wanted it with DnD (Pathfinder actually but same genetic lineage here). With airships and floating islands and black powder because... well... they know I like steam punk and Napoleonic/Victorian era type things. Literally, half my gaming miniatures are pirates or people in Victorian/Napoleonic garb or specific NPCs in the past with very little in the area of the general traditional fantasy game roles. So they know I like and that is ships and particularly the age of sail.
So here I am, scrambling to get something put together and I try to get an idea of how to really make the Age of Sail interesting. To try and recreate a right and proper frigate or a galleon or ship of the line.
That is when I realized... even the best rules in DnD (or any of it's derivatives) are sub-par the moment anything like a vehicle shows up.
What if I do want to recreate an engagement along the lines of USS Constitution vs HMS Guerriere. It becomes quite a pain to really recreate a roughly 205' (175' at the waterline) x 45' with four decks and all it's rigging. Mind you, I know the numbers are off of Constitution (it is a nice middle range heavy frigate with well documented stats) but I rounded to easy to grid out for a game map 5x5 squares. A first Rater wouldn't be much bigger than Constitution (Victory being only 225' long and 50' wide if I rounded to use a simple game mat) but with so many many more guns.
Okay, that is good for the big navy guys... you know, the 'good guys' or major villains. But my players want to be pirates. So that means Sloops and maybe something a massive as say The Queen Ann's Revenge. Still mind boggling compared to the average dnd ship in scale. 105' (103 actually but rounding, remember) by 25' (24.5' but again, rounding here). 3 decks not counting cargo hold. All that rigging. Plus the 30 guns.
Okay, they can't always have the Queen Ann's Revenge... so we go to the 3 masted sloop. Still 100' in length and 30' wide. Only really the upper deck, the gun deck, and the cargo hold with only 16 guns now. Okay, starting to enter the range of ships that the game can FINALLY recreate without becoming cumbersome
Yeah... and they want these things to fly... They want a Skies of Arcadia-esque game.
Joy.
Oh, how I long for a good game of Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, or Castle Falkenstein now.
