Quote:
Originally Posted by Dalillama
Spelljammer ship to ship combat is designed to end in boarding actions or one ship escaping, after the fashion of most pre-20th century naval battles.
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When you have persons uninterested in capturing a ship (relatively intact or not) but rather only interested in getting past a guarding ship this design goal is unhelpful.
What happed in game was me looking at the NPC ship commander and noting he was arrogant and vengeful and had the natural power to teleport 2/day.
"Okay" I say to myself "How arrogant?". I roll a D20 to measure his arrogance and get a natural 20. That's pretty arrogant. So he ordered his crew to attack "that" ship and teleported onto the deck of "that" ship.
His Initiative roll was not equal to his arrogance and he went down before he could wreak the damage and confusion he intended. Meanwhile the die roll for his crew's comprehension of his last order was better than a natural 1 but not by much and they went and attacked a "different" ship.
I did make my PCs kill 2 dragons before they could reach the target Citadel but if I'd made them go through not only one but quite possibly more than one ship-to-ship battle we'd still be there. Or at least they would have run put of spells and died.