Where's The Pirate Profession For DF?

[scc]

For those who don't know Ninjas and Pirates don't get along.

Now DF has rules for letting you play a Ninja, contained appropriately enough in the volume entitled Ninja but it doesn't have rules for pirates. Sure there's Swashbucklers, but while some Pirates are Swashbucklers, not all are and not all Swashbucklers are Pirates and further Swashbucklers have nothing to counter the Ninja's array of awesome powers.

For a possible Pirate Power the limitation would be that if you go without doing Piratey things for a week or more you lose your Powers with 'Piratey things' being traveling on a boat, wenching, or finding hidden treasure. While this may not sound much, what with all the treasure delvers tend to find, it means you can't travel more then a week in land and still have your Power without an expensive rest stop of at least a day.

What Abilities this Power grants you is something that I have no idea on.

[Blind Mapmaker]

Probably only border-line relevant if you want to do Pirate powers and such, but both published DF Denizen volumes have variant templates that might be a starting point for the more mundane stats: Dungeon Fantasy Denizens - Barbarians (w23 page link) has Sea Raiders and Dungeon Fantasy Denizens - Swashbucklers has Buccaneers.

I have no idea what powers pirates could have since they are not generally portrayed as having any. Maybe a Detect for hidden treasures? In the meme, pirates mainly have guns that give them superior range. Maybe that could be a way to go instead of powers?

[Phil Masters]

Pirates are only really going to work in a game with a lot of maritime adventuring. But one thing they could be good at is intimidation — going “Yarr!!” In a scary fashion is suitably silly-stereotyped, and realistically, pirates do benefit from intimidating their prey into surrender without a fight.

I’d also be tempted to allow them access to more physical limitations than most delvers — One Leg and One Hand, mostly. And they might know a bunch of minor folk-magics, being superstitious sailors.

[Astromancer]

Instead of a Pirate class, we need a Pirate book. Go a Pirating! would give details on how to do DF at sea. Either seeking lost treasures at sea or pirate hunting or just being pirates/privateers. Note: This is fantasy so pirates attacking the shipping of an evil empire or dark overlord to finance the Rebellion isn't unrealistic. Remember, Han Solo is a smuggler/pirate type.

Each PC type can be optimized for a sea campaign. The book could give useful tips on this process. Variant monsters, magic items, and powers can be in the book as well. Example: Barbarians with a Walrus totem can swim for hours in ice cold seas.

A DF pirate campaign is a good idea.

[Dalin]

Possible cinematic pirate abilities off the top of my head with no fidelity (or knowledge, really) of any genre tropes:

• Improved improvised weapons. Perhaps anything vaguely resembling a weapon is considered a fine weapon of a similar type for a single battle. A rotting belaying pin is a fine club. A stretch of rope is a fine whip. A broken spar is a fine spear. Etc.
• Luck, serendipity, and gizmos.
• Maybe some water powers. In a cinematic DF campaign with ninjas versus pirates, I could easily imagine a pirate walking on water and using a water jet (or shooting water from his mouth) while the ninja leaps around in the spars, throwing shuriken.
• For a flying dutchman sort of theme, you could have a pirate necromancer who summons waterlogged zombies.

More later.

[Humabout]

There's a Buccaneer in a Pyramid article somewhere.

[Culture20]

My group has played exclusively pirate games several times. Quite fun. One of the keys was to remove the disad limit. 150 CP total, but when you’re a sot, wanted for murder, have a peg leg, a hook hand, one eye, odious personal habits, night terrors, etc. you can do some pretty cinematic things to balance oit to 150. The only real limit was what we could realistically keep track of. I don’t know what that would do for DF game balance.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by Humabout

There's a Buccaneer in a Pyramid article somewhere.

"Swords Against Evil" by Kromm in Pyramid 3/64 and reprinted in Dungeon Fantasy Collected. Pyramid 3/64's theme is "Pirates and Swashbuckers," and it has more than one article that might inform a variety of pirate templates for DF. (I somehow didn't have this issue in my collection. Just remedied that and can't wait to read it!)

[Gnome]

Pirates could be considered delvers whose dungeon is the sea, and building pirate characters is fairly simple, especially with a lot of published templates to work from (as mentioned upthread).
I think the hardest part would be figuring out how to play out ship-handling and ship-to-ship combat in a fun way. Spells that can repair a ship could become really important, and ships might need some cinematic switches turned on in order to survive.
I think GURPS Swahsbucklers for 3e might have had some playable rules for this kind of thing, but I can't remember.

[Anthony]

The nautical equivalent of dungeon fantasy mostly replaces 'dungeon' with 'island', though you occasionally have dungeons located upon islands. Pirates who actually engage in piracy, however, are more likely to be adversaries than protagonists, though you have plenty of pirate fantasy where the so-called pirates don't actually commit any acts of piracy.