Quote:
Originally Posted by David L Pulver
For a historical (or fantasy) pirate game where the PCs the leading crew of a pirate ship with 50-100 pirates aboard vs. a similar sized enemy ship crew, is there any RPG that does a good job of handling the resulting close gunfire and melee action in a way that allows the PCs, as commanders and leading heroes, to all participate in melee in a way that lets every player stay involved and still hack and slash away without undue abstraction, and also preserves distinctions of equipment and quality, etc. for the crew, so that the PCs have trained and equipped their henchmen? And without having to generate a full miniatures war game battle on the tabletop...
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Green Ronin's
Skull & Bones has a ship-to-ship combat system that abstracts much of the details of attacking, ramming, and boarding, but it accounts for crew quality (from rabble to expert, based on seamanship), and allows crew members who are not actively engaged in maneuvering the ship or firing its weapons (like, say, the PCs) to fight normally.
S&B is based on the D&D v.3.0 rules, but with changes to better reflect the historical age of piracy. For example, D&D classes are replaced with more nautical classes, and magic is limited to bardic music, voodoo practitioners, and (very rarely) Christian relics. The book also contains a good deal of useful information about crew roles, dueling codes, the Caribbean circa 1700, generating plunder, the loa, etc.