FASA Games, Inc.

It almost feels, in one sense, that there are two things that need to be worked out here. (Talking in general.)

First, we need a good system for ship combat/interactions.

And then within that, we need to figure out the pieces where the "generic" numbers can be replaced by a Player Character.

For example (off the top of my head), a ship has a "pilot" rating that is used as a Step when making tests to perform maneuvers. If a PC takes over the ship, they use their Air Sailing (or whatever) in place of that.

Yes, exactly! I wanted to poll people on the number of attack rolls in the Assault Maneuver before touching on that, but that's exactly right. But if most rolling is just the individual character Steps, like the Captin's stats, you lose the differentiation of ships by type/class.

What I'm thinking is that (1)Ship Attributes replace a character's Attribute when rolling for the ship, or that (2)the Ship Attribute adds to the character's total Talent Rank.

So, for the first example, most Maneuvers using Maneuverability would roll Maneuverability+Air Sailing/Pilot Boat/Sailing, instead of the captain rolling Wil+Air Sailing/Per+Pilot Boat/Dex+Sailing. Or, second option we add the Ship's Attribute to the Captain's/other character's appropriate Talent Step, when the Archer takes over for a Weapons Officer, an Elementalist for the Riverboat Engineer, etc.

I kinda like just adding it all up (option 2), myself. We get to use more of the Step Table, and the Health ratings are also going to range up there once we work out individual Damage roll of Step 18 from up to 13 Fire Cannons against Armor (the "Cathay Behemoth" has a Firepower Damage of 25, minus 12 is 13 cannons).

Ok, third option. We retain rolling Air Sailing (etc) to boost the Ship Attributes, but that means rolling it every Rank 1-minute turns...... which seems to downplay individual characters.

For firepower, we'd need a system which does 3 things, in my opinion:

- easy to use when multiple ships are in the combat, so only one roll for the damage
- but, we need to be able to get PC to man one of the weapon, and change the impact it will have on the damage
- and mostly, we need a system which can force the players to make choices, especially on targeting which ennemy. As it is, the multiple targets system seems flawed. The same damage, even when you split half your weapons on a second opponent ?

As for the number of cannons on ships, the number you find by using the damage code is extremely low. Around 10-15 on a behemoth ? Even if you consider it's only for one of the 4 sides of the stone castle, that's still a joke. 40-60 cannons total on a "hundreds of yards long" castle ?

Let's look at real-life ships. Biggest ships in the 17th century, Man'o'wars, which should be the equivalent of the Earthdawn Galleons, were about 55-60m long (for 15 width), and had between 70 and 120 cannons (half on each side of the ship).

I tried to find a way to simulate a number of weapons which would seem plausible based on that, on which wouldn't change the damage codes too much. It's not very simple calculating it, but here's what we use for the moment (I don't think it's the best possible, but couldn't get a better idea):
You have a base damage code (7), then each weapon you fire after the first one add a little to that base (1 for fire cannon or spear thrower, 0,5 for catapults or balista). You then check how many weapons you allocate to each target, and roll one attack for each target. To limitate a bit, we've set a limit to 20 weapons allocated on a single ennemy (which pretty much only limits very big ships).
Military Vedette would be heavily equipped, with 9 cannons per side (Firepower 16)
Galleon & Kila would have 40 cannons per side, so 80 & 160 cannons total (Firepower 27 since there's the limit)

One of the problem of those more realistic values of number of cannon is the cost for player-ship. The number of kernel of True elements needed for firing is much more important, which can be problematic, as players don't have the logistics of a military nation to supply them with True Air & True Fire.

I'd argue that Earthdawn ships are more akin to ancient Greek or Roman ships than 17th century warships. As well, those ships had 3-4 decks of guns. I've never seen a drawing of an Earthdawn airship with guns anywhere except the main deck.

I don't think we need to worry about the number of guns.