Re: Critical Hits

> I've been thinking about critical hits lately and I thought it was
> > strange that a medium catapult shot ship shaken has the same
> > effectiveness against a mosquito as it does against the spelljammer
> > itself! (or even just an armada for that matter).  Now obviously
some
> > critical hits (hull holed, lost crewmember, possibly even sj shock)
> > make equal sense regardless of the size of the vessel (though is it
> > fair that a vipership manned by just the helmsman has an equal
chance
> > of losing a crewman as an ogre mammoth stuffed to the gills with
> > thousands of kobolds?).  Ones like loss of maneuverability and ship
> > shaken, however, seem like they'd require more than just a good
> > catapult/ballista/bombard shot to take effect on a vessel as large
as
> > an armada (and for the maneuverability loss for a ship with such
huge
> > rigging).  What do you guys think?
>
> I was thinking that a system where d20 (or something) was rolled and
the
> damage from the weapon was added. The critical table would start at
21+
> (each number being a specific result) but specific ships would have
> ship-specific criticals that would occur if a 19 or 20 were rolled -
thus a
> scorpion ship would have a unique critical of 20 - claws are disabled.
>
> The number of unique criticals would me a measure of the ship
qhality -
> classic designs like the Hammer or Squid ships would have no
additional
> criticals (that's why they're classics) while at the other end of
the scale
> Gnomish ships would have lots of potential results (eg. Hamster
Overboard)
> and possibly even some, like Spring-Speed-Steering-Regulator-System #1
> damaged, that would even improve the ships performance.

Well, improving a gnomish device is always critical!  I like this
idea.  If you come up with any preliminaries I'd like to see them.

Another question to add:  how do you handle a fire critical hit on a
ship with no lit lanterns, torches, etc. such as one in the flow?
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