Pirates vs. Vampires: Ship Combat

Before Christmas, I noted that I'd be heading over to RisusTalk to seek advice on how to handle ship combat for my Pirates vs. Vampires game. Having actually run a session that employed ship combat, it seems that I have made a choice. And my choice is this: I'm going with standard Risus (no fancy house rules) with the majority of ships and crews being treated as Tools of the Trade.

I quickly discarded the idea of using house rules (such as a flavorful ship combat system similar to Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies). This was partly out of a desire to stick more closely to vanilla Risus this time around and partly because I was too lazy to writeup and test a new system. And after writing my article On Artifacts and Gadgets, I realized that Risus was more than up to the task of handling everything I needed.

As I mention in that Gadgets post, there are essentially four ways to handle gear (including vehicles) in standard Risus (two of which appear as options in the Risus Companion). What I don't think I mentioned is that none of these approaches exclude any of the other approaches within the same game. I think the default approach (which we are using right now) is to treat ships as Tools of the Trade. There is no reason why the party couldn't come into possession of a new ship that grants a bonus die in ship combat, or that includes nautical Questing Dice, or that is described by its own cliches, or that simply does extra cool magical stuff like sailing over land.

In the three ship combats that we enacted last session, the captain rolled against a cliche in which command of a fully armed frigate was assumed (Tool of the Trade). Given that the captain was an NPC, the player characters were encouraged to team up with their ship combat cliches. On the other side, each Unholy Black-Sailed Galley (4) fought as a single unit, even though they did include Lucky Shots/Questing Dice in the form of a collection of magical artifacts.