Ship-to-ship (was: Sorcerers and Helmsmen and 3e)

Greets,

In our last episode, Leroy Van Camp III said:
>> Without ship-to-ship all we have is a bunch of odd races sailing around on
>boats.
>> Am I the only the one who thinks that?
>
>I wouldn't go quite that far, but I do mostly agree.  Things like skills,
>racial writeups, new feats and so on are relatively easy, plus they
>are the kind of thing that make it easy for several people to get it
>done. Pick the lizardman writeup from Author A, the Astrogations skills
>from Author B, and so on.

        Would people be into doing that?  I could make up a layout for
races/monsters, skills, feats and so on.  Then we could start posting
things here, discussing 'em, and once we're down to a few versions that
people can't decide on, the council will take over and make something
good out of it. :)

>Ship combat, though, can be difficult.  The again, there is nothing
>stopping someone from simply using the current system with the
>minor tweaks.  I mean really, most people seem to be in discussion
>of a major overhaul, including myself. But there is no reason why
>it has to be this extensive. The old system works rather well, IMO.
>Just change the numbers for hitting and AR, find some sort of
>solution for timing differences, create some new feats for heavy
>weapons, and your about done.  Perhaps what we need is something
>like this for the time being.

        I agree.  A good quickie conversion of existing stats to
something usable seems like a good bet.  Until I get the layots for
the other stuff, this would be the perfect thing to discuss.  In
fact, I have a possible solution for the timing issues... :)

        As we've all seen on BtM, there's an article called "Tactical
Movement Varient" by Staffan Johansson (which can be found at
http://www.darkwoodforest.com/rpg/btm/lore/rules/tactical_movement.html).
It breaks up ship movement into convinient, segment sized chunks.  It
will create a bit more book-keeping, but if we follow that, and keep a
ship's manueverability (how much it must move before changing direction)
to minutes instead of rounds, everything will be fine.  We'd only have
to go into this "high-fidelity" mode when when PC actions are involved.
Otherwise, we can use normal rules.  For heavy weapons, we can use the
reload times from the DMG, and I think we're set.

        Comments?

-Static

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