Ship Combat: Montage Edition

A small merchant ship appears in the distance. Typically, you would not waste your crew's time on such small pickings. But you've heard rumors in the criminal underground that this ship might be carrying a few very rare items instead of the usual shipment of goods. You hope your sources are correct or your crew is gonna be a mite upset. You let out a sigh of relief at the same time as a shout rings down from the crow's nest, "Two bodies on the whale!" This merchant ship has two guard ships protecting her, meaning she isn't holding just any old goods. Time to play, you think with a smile as your first mate cries, "Hoist the colors and full speed ahead!"

I want to talk about ship combat in Draw Steel. I have a montage idea that I'm running with for now, but I am most interested in what you folks think, especially whether there are any tweaks you would make to the system I'm using. At the end, I share some thoughts on what I think will make ship combat work as actual combat.

Ship Combat as a Montage

I chose montages over regular combat for two reasons. First, making a full ship combat system seems like it would be a lot more work (at least with how I think it would probably need to run to be in the spirit of Draw Steel).

Second, players spend a lot of time building their heroic characters—and in a lot of TTRPG ship combats, they don't get to use their abilities. Instead, they get stuck running a different set of ship abilities (typically less interesting ones).

A montage allows us to have a quick (quicker than combat, anyway) cinematic moment that gets back into the meat of Draw Steel: Role-playing or entering combat as the situation calls for it.

I was struggling to combine ship combat and montages—it felt like the enemy never got to attack since in a montage, bad stuff only happens if players fail a roll. As with the heist montage my players recently went through, it could be a cakewalk if they roll high the whole time.

Then, I came across a montage variant called Malicious Montage by JamesTorres on the MCDM Discord—you can read about it here. It's simple enough: You add the malice system from combat to a montage.

Malice allows the Director to spend malice points and activate certain abilities from a list. The Director gains malice at the beginning of each round and when players fail or experience consequences. Using this variant, the Director can always do something during the montage even if the players are rolling well. You can also choose to wait and build up the tension if the players' rolls aren't as favorable.

This seemed like a great idea, but I still wrestled with developing generic obstacles and abilities that could work for ship combat. It took me way too long to realize that was the wrong way to go. None of the montage examples in the core Draw Steel book are super generic.

Draw Steel does not lend itself to oatmeal, as they like to say, so there shouldn't be too many random ship combats with interchangeable obstacles. The challenges should be part of the story; there should be a reason for them. Some ship combats might share a few of the same obstacles and ways to overcome them, but overall, they should be unique and interesting.

I also made an addition to the variant that I think will be interesting to experiment with. Now, if certain malice abilities trigger, they can create new obstacles for the players to overcome. My hope is that this gives the montage/ship combat more of a back-and-forth feel. So, for your entertainment, I have written up a sample ship combat montage using the scenario from the beginning of the post.

Setting The Scene

You and your crew have set up an ambush among a cluster of islands, waiting for the merchant ship Windspirit. She appears on time, with two guard ships (Shield of Coin and Ironwake) as escorts. You will need to take the guard ships out or disable them before you can chase down the Windspirit and claim the booty.

Difficulty

This could be either a medium or hard test, depending on the characters' level and what kind of ships are involved—whatever makes sense in the story. I'm setting the difficulty at medium for this example, so the players have to get 5 successes before they fail 3 times (for 4 players).

Outcomes

Total Success: You take down the escort ships and board the Windspirit, claiming the valuable loot as your own. (There's probably some cool magic item tied to the story, or items for all the players. Alternately, you could allow their wealth to increase by 1 if the loot is valuable enough.)

Partial Success: You are able to board the Windspirit but must fight off the sailors and guards who survived the initial assault (the amount probably depends on what challenges were overcome, i.e., whether the players destroyed one or both escort ships.)

Failure: The Windspirit gets away, and maybe you and your crew are taken captive by the guards on the escort ships to receive judgment when you get to port.

Challenges

Sink/Disable The Shield of Coin!
The Shield of Coin is angling its path to catch you in a barrage of cannon fire. Evade their attack and make them regret their life choices.
Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Reason
Suggested Skill: Sail (Drive), Alchemy

Sink/Disable The Ironwake!
The Ironwake turns, hoping to catch you in a full on broadside attack. Dodge it and return fire!
Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Reason
Suggested Skill: Sail (Drive), Alchemy

Motivate the Crew!
The crew is flagging; encourage them to give it their all!
Suggested Characteristic: Presence
Suggested Skills: Lead, Persuade, Intimidate

Lose the Weight!
Get rid of unnecessary cargo to increase your speed/evasion! (No, this does not include that annoying NPC.)
Suggested Characteristic: Might
Suggested Skill: Lift

Intimidate the Windspirit
Let the Windspirit know you mean business, be it by cannon fire or a threatening yell!
Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Presence
Suggested Skills: Alchemy, Intimidate

Take Them by Surprise
Dive below another ship's line of sight then rise up next to them, catching them off guard.
Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Reason
Suggested Skills: Sail (Drive), Sneak

Malice Influenced Challenges

Patch the Hull
The Shield of Coin's attack has damaged your hull, causing the ship to slowly list and sink!
Suggested Characteristics: Reason, Might
Suggested Skills: Endurance, Carpentry

Fix the rigging!
The Ironwake's attack has ripped your rigging apart! Someone needs to climb up there and fix it before the sail tears off!
Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Might
Suggested Skills: Climb, Gymnastics, Jump

Malice

Turbulence Ahead! (Malice 2)
- Bane on all Agility Tests for one round.

Evasive Action (Malice 2)
- Triggered Action
- The Windspirit takes evasive action; the player must roll again and take the new result.

Shield of Coin Broadside (Malice 3)
- This action cannot be used if the party has overcome the Sink/Disable The Shield of Coin challenge.
- Fire the cannons! Heroes take 10 damage
- Add Patch the Hull Challenge and suffer a bane on all rolls until fixed

Ironwake Broadside (Malice 3)
- This action cannot be used if the party has overcome the Sink/Disable The Ironwake challenge
- Fire the cannons! Heroes take 10 damage
- Add the "Fix the Rigging" challenge and suffer a bane on all rolls until fixed

Crossfire! (Malice 6)
- This action cannot be used if the party has overcome either of the Sink/Disable challenges
- Both ships fire! Heroes take 10 damage
- The players' ship is in shambles; they take a double bane on tests for rest of the montage.

So, what do you think about about this take on ship combat? Let me know in the comments—I'm eager to hear whether it seems interesting or if if you have any tweaks that you might make.

The one issue I still have is the fact that I wanted to have ship upgrades. Certain upgrades might give players new ways to overcome challenges. Something like retractable side sails (wings) could make it possible to do a drop maneuver to avoid cannon fire, for example.

I'm not sure if upgrades would work or not. I could always shift my approach and treat them more like upgrades for a stronghold or base. Let me know what you think. I would love feedback!

Ship Combat as Actual Combat

A Draw Steel take on ship combat could be awesome. I've already been thinking about what might make it work. As with most systems' ship combat, you can create roles for the players—with a few twists.

I don't think the roles should be positions, like helmsmen, gunner, and bosun. That really pigeonholes what players can do. But they could be things like Maverick, Rig Runner, or Bastion. (Now that I am writing these out, they sound a lot like kit names. Maybe Ship Kits should be a thing? Something to explore in another post!).

These roles should provide a group of abilities and level up with the players, similar to how a subclass would. I could see there being 3-6 abilities depending on the levels. Maybe these roles level up at each echelon (levels 4, 7, and 10).

Having this second "subclass" is a must for successful ship combat as combat. If players are going to spend any sort of time away from their main characters' abilities, then those abilities need to be replaced with something nearly as awesome. This is, of course, assuming ship combat will be an important part of the campaign. If it's only going to happen once or twice to change things up a bit, then you can probably get away with something simpler.

So, what do you think? What would be needed in a Draw Steel ship combat encounter? Should we put our heads together and create one or wait a few years for MCDM to make a ship combat system when they release their Timescape setting?