Pirates of the 3.5 (Skull and Shackles path)
Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2015 11:49 pm
So I got invited to play in a DnD 3.5 game. Turned out that we were playing a pirate-themed adventure path for pathfinder, but the rules are 3.5 only. Cores + Completes + Spell Compendium + various other books that are actually in the house we're playing at.
Our Cast Of Heroes:
So the structure is that the players get assigned positions on the ship, and each day you can take a day action during the day (while also doing your tasks) and a night action (while others are occupied). You can skip some sleep if you want to take extra night actions, but you'll get Fatigued. The actions are things like making friendly with other sailors on the ship, or trying get your stuff back (the quartermaster has it all, and will let you trade goods and services to get your stuff back).
There's barely anything even worth writing down during this part of the adventure. It makes the players feel like they're actually kidnapped and without options, which is cool I guess in some sense, but is also really disengaging. I found myself, saying "yeah whatever, what happens the next day then?"
Did I mention the days? Each day takes longer than a combat round to resolve, and the adventure expects you to spend like 5 days with no special events before the first interesting thing happens. It's terrible. One thing that saved some of it was the DM's take on one particular character. There's a drunken cook who is a bad cook that hands out hard tack and then just drinks rum most days. The DM voiced him basically like Tom Waits, and it was wonderful.
There's several sailors that hate you, and several that are indifferent that you can get on your side. The DM read us a long list of pirate names and what they were doing around the boat so that we knew who we could try and talk to. One of the sailors that you can get on your side is Mareem. Another player and I, upon hearing this particular name, immediately decided that he was clearly an arabic pirate, and clearly played by Alexander Siddig. Instantly we knew that we'd have to get him in our group and keep him alive. There was also a half-ogre or some other super strong sort of creature that the pirates kept chained up and not-well-fed. We decided to call him Babycakes. We also got him on our side, just by feeding him some food really.
So basically nothing much happened for four hours. Some of the pirates get uppity and try to fight you, you stab them back and they freak out. Some rats come out of the bottom of the ship, you cover them in a bee swarm until they all die. Normal things.
Eventually the Warlock gets on the bad side of some pirates and is assigned to clear out the lowest decks. She goes down with the other pirates, and before they can attack her she instantly swarms them. They all three end up dying, and she proceeds to move up a level and fight more pirates and for a moment it seems like we'll actually fight all the pirates that oppose us, a few at a time as they show up in groups, and then we'll get control of the ship and have a cool time.
Nope.
See, it was at this moment that it was revealed that the captain of the ship is some asshole 17th level Fighter/Rogue that's just sandbagging around with a crew of level 1s and a few level 2s and 3s. We thought the captain would be like, maybe a "5th level badass" guy that we'd be able to barely fight anyway by using a bat swarm to bleed/nauseate him and then running him around a lot until he died while the rest of us and our pirate allies ran melee interference... or whatever. But no, he's 17th level, so there's just no way to kill him. You can't do anything except get railroaded through the adventure. Pretty bullshit. So the warlock gets put in a small heat-box on the deck as punishment "to deal with later". At the same time a ship is spotted on the horizon.
End Session.
So the deal was that the ship spotted would be a day away, and so we had a day to do more stuff, and then the day after that we'd attack the ship. Also we leveled up to level 2 for having done pirate ship stuff a bit.
The pirates are assholes and even though our guys are the assault crew that's going to hold the wheel area and prevent people escaping on life-boats, they only agree to give us weapons, not even our own armor back. So some of us don't have armor. Also the warlock is locked in a box and won't be of help during the assault.
Before we even get our boat up to theirs, the NPC pirate alchemist we've got on the pirate ship does some sort of Control Weather to fill everything in fog. 20% miss chance at 5ft, 50% miss chance beyond that, like Fog Cloud. So a few bow shots launch between ships with basically no chance to hit. Except that one does hit from the enemy merchant ship, and it crits, and it deals 15 damage to the Catfolk Cleric (with 10hp). So he's instantly down on a complete fluke. I spend a turn to do Cure Minor Wounds on his bleeding body and we proceed onto the ship.
Before the fighting itself I'd cast Ram's Might on the Gorilla Scout, and then as soon as I climb up onto the enemy ship I use Aspect of The Wolf on myself. But I don't turn into a wolf of course, I turn into a 5ft tall floating sword that swings itself at things (link).
We crash our boat into their boat, get onto their deck, and start cutting down merchant sailors. Things go fine because the merchant guys go down in one hit. Eventually the ship is ours.
The pirates decide to send the captain and the main pirate ship off on the main thing they were headed for, and then the captured merchant ship would head back to where the pirates kidnapped us and sell the ship for huge piles of cash.
All the PCs get onto the captured ship, and we also get some of our pirate friends along with some pirate enemies, and the drunken cook (most important of all). The captain's 2nd in command is in charge of the captured ship, so we'll have to deal with him eventually. Also, the warlock picked up Shatter as her 2nd level invocation, so she shatters herself out of the box during the battle and sneaks on board the merchant ship as well.
End Session.
My spells cast so far (might as well keep a running total, data is fun)
Our Cast Of Heroes:
- Takeda Protagonist (Me) - Nezumi "Druid" that's a priest of the Lord of Swords. Blades of all kinds are his holy symbol, all spells are sword themed, etc.
- Lydia - Rilkin Warlock. Those "humans but with (reptilian) subtype and some scales on just their neck and wrists" people from Magic of Incarnum. She has the invocation that lets you summon a swarm of stuff. She summons a swarm a lot, as you can imagine.
- Hayden - Dwarf Fighter. I told him to look at Warblade, but he's just a Fighter for now. Doesn't like heights. Hits things with an axe. Standard sort of stuff.
- DK - Monkey-person-with-gliding-wings Scout. Some sort of gorilla with wings. I don't know the character's name or the player's name even, so I just think of him as DK and call him "The monkey man".
- Canis - Catfolk Cleric. Didn't have a class level at first level, just a Humanoid HD, when we got to level 2 replaced that with an actual Cleric level.
- Eric - Aquatic-Elf Ranger. Showed up to the first session and then was real-life sick for the next so his character was just seasick in game for a while. A sea-sick sea elf.
- Gary Fotter - Kobold Monk. Not at the first session but joined for the second, we decided that he had just been in the lower decks hiding the whole time. His explicit goal is to get himself killed off somehow.
So the structure is that the players get assigned positions on the ship, and each day you can take a day action during the day (while also doing your tasks) and a night action (while others are occupied). You can skip some sleep if you want to take extra night actions, but you'll get Fatigued. The actions are things like making friendly with other sailors on the ship, or trying get your stuff back (the quartermaster has it all, and will let you trade goods and services to get your stuff back).
There's barely anything even worth writing down during this part of the adventure. It makes the players feel like they're actually kidnapped and without options, which is cool I guess in some sense, but is also really disengaging. I found myself, saying "yeah whatever, what happens the next day then?"
Did I mention the days? Each day takes longer than a combat round to resolve, and the adventure expects you to spend like 5 days with no special events before the first interesting thing happens. It's terrible. One thing that saved some of it was the DM's take on one particular character. There's a drunken cook who is a bad cook that hands out hard tack and then just drinks rum most days. The DM voiced him basically like Tom Waits, and it was wonderful.
There's several sailors that hate you, and several that are indifferent that you can get on your side. The DM read us a long list of pirate names and what they were doing around the boat so that we knew who we could try and talk to. One of the sailors that you can get on your side is Mareem. Another player and I, upon hearing this particular name, immediately decided that he was clearly an arabic pirate, and clearly played by Alexander Siddig. Instantly we knew that we'd have to get him in our group and keep him alive. There was also a half-ogre or some other super strong sort of creature that the pirates kept chained up and not-well-fed. We decided to call him Babycakes. We also got him on our side, just by feeding him some food really.
So basically nothing much happened for four hours. Some of the pirates get uppity and try to fight you, you stab them back and they freak out. Some rats come out of the bottom of the ship, you cover them in a bee swarm until they all die. Normal things.
Eventually the Warlock gets on the bad side of some pirates and is assigned to clear out the lowest decks. She goes down with the other pirates, and before they can attack her she instantly swarms them. They all three end up dying, and she proceeds to move up a level and fight more pirates and for a moment it seems like we'll actually fight all the pirates that oppose us, a few at a time as they show up in groups, and then we'll get control of the ship and have a cool time.
Nope.
See, it was at this moment that it was revealed that the captain of the ship is some asshole 17th level Fighter/Rogue that's just sandbagging around with a crew of level 1s and a few level 2s and 3s. We thought the captain would be like, maybe a "5th level badass" guy that we'd be able to barely fight anyway by using a bat swarm to bleed/nauseate him and then running him around a lot until he died while the rest of us and our pirate allies ran melee interference... or whatever. But no, he's 17th level, so there's just no way to kill him. You can't do anything except get railroaded through the adventure. Pretty bullshit. So the warlock gets put in a small heat-box on the deck as punishment "to deal with later". At the same time a ship is spotted on the horizon.
End Session.
So the deal was that the ship spotted would be a day away, and so we had a day to do more stuff, and then the day after that we'd attack the ship. Also we leveled up to level 2 for having done pirate ship stuff a bit.
The pirates are assholes and even though our guys are the assault crew that's going to hold the wheel area and prevent people escaping on life-boats, they only agree to give us weapons, not even our own armor back. So some of us don't have armor. Also the warlock is locked in a box and won't be of help during the assault.
Before we even get our boat up to theirs, the NPC pirate alchemist we've got on the pirate ship does some sort of Control Weather to fill everything in fog. 20% miss chance at 5ft, 50% miss chance beyond that, like Fog Cloud. So a few bow shots launch between ships with basically no chance to hit. Except that one does hit from the enemy merchant ship, and it crits, and it deals 15 damage to the Catfolk Cleric (with 10hp). So he's instantly down on a complete fluke. I spend a turn to do Cure Minor Wounds on his bleeding body and we proceed onto the ship.
Before the fighting itself I'd cast Ram's Might on the Gorilla Scout, and then as soon as I climb up onto the enemy ship I use Aspect of The Wolf on myself. But I don't turn into a wolf of course, I turn into a 5ft tall floating sword that swings itself at things (link).
We crash our boat into their boat, get onto their deck, and start cutting down merchant sailors. Things go fine because the merchant guys go down in one hit. Eventually the ship is ours.
The pirates decide to send the captain and the main pirate ship off on the main thing they were headed for, and then the captured merchant ship would head back to where the pirates kidnapped us and sell the ship for huge piles of cash.
All the PCs get onto the captured ship, and we also get some of our pirate friends along with some pirate enemies, and the drunken cook (most important of all). The captain's 2nd in command is in charge of the captured ship, so we'll have to deal with him eventually. Also, the warlock picked up Shatter as her 2nd level invocation, so she shatters herself out of the box during the battle and sneaks on board the merchant ship as well.
End Session.
My spells cast so far (might as well keep a running total, data is fun)
Code: Select all
5 Goodberry
4 Purify Food And Drink
4 Cure Minor Wounds
2 Cure Light Wounds
1 Aspect of the Wolf
1 Endure Elements
1 Ram's Might
1 Vigor, Lesser