Vehicles and vessels; Land, Sea and Air.

[SailorLovins]

Hello fellow gamers. Thank you all for your input on helping me create my featured class in my first FG module labeled "Skybound." I am now looking for a gathering of collaborative information with the goal of coming up with some idea on moving vessels such as Juggernaugts, Galley's, Man 'o War, and other sea faring vessels. I am aware of the precious few recourses out there already outlining this but I aim to unify it. Here are my questions to begin my notes and this is all opinion based. No wrong answers.

1) What statistics should be considered? (Speed, Turn Speed, Minimum Crew Size. etc)
2) How should ship armor class and hit points be determined?
3) Does a ship have encumbrance (Max tonnage) and if so how does this effect the ship?
4) How do you determine what features, equipment and weapons a ship is eligible to install or upgrade?
5) What are the benefits of having officers in certain stations? (Captain, Master at Arms, etc)
6) Any variable factors that may effect ship skill checks?

These are all I can think of at the moment. Any and all information is welcome. Thanks.

[Zacchaeus]

For what ruleset? Most of them will already have rules for this kind of thing.

[SailorLovins]

5th edition .For now the story will be that they went through some dimensional tear with this large tips.

[Zacchaeus]

There's some tables in the PHB starting on p155 with information on vehicles, which is expanded upon in the DMG starting at p117. Most of the stats that you've mentioned above are included for different vessel types and there's information on hiring crews etc in the PHB as well. There's also a section in the DMG about things like Ballistas, cannons etc starting on p255.

You should be able to use all of that as a basis and add in your own flavour if you wanted to. Experienced crew, such as a navigator or captain, might give advantage to ability checks to avoid getting lost or being able to travel faster, negotiate dangerous waters etc.

[SailorLovins]

Looking into it now! Thanks yet again buddy. I really appreciate the informative responses.

[LordEntrails]

One thing to point out about sea travel. "travel speed" (imo) should be very different than "top speed". Where "travel speed" is what would be used to calculate travel times between ports or geographic points. And "top speed" (or combat speed, etc) is the ideal best speed of a ship.

Because of winds, tides, weather, currents, and more, "travel speed" can be some tiny fraction of the "top speed". For instance, a sailing vessel might be able to move at 120 ft/round, but that doesn't mean that it can travel at (120ft/6sec x 60sec/min x 60 min/hr x 24 hr/day x 1mile/5280ft) 327 miles/day.

I've never seen a system try to address this, and it's probably out of the scope of what you are trying to define, other than I guess I'm suggesting any hourly or daily speeds be listed with some sort of caveat.