Ship NPCs

A place to file suggestions that have been completed.

Moderators: Forum Moderators, Active DMs, Contributors, Suggestion Moderators

Locked
Red_Wharf
Posts: 192
Joined: Sun May 24, 2020 5:26 am

Ship NPCs

Post by Red_Wharf » Wed Nov 04, 2020 8:07 am

The ships have several NPCs on board, and some of them fulfill the role of guards, helping player characters fight hostile random NPC encounters at sea. Obviously they do not react when the ship is boarded by a hostile player crew from another vessel, because at their normal state they are just friendly NPCs. As far as I know, only the Timberfleet, the Penny Rose, and maybe the Troubadour don't have NPC guards.

At the moment, these NPCs will only react to hostile player characters if a DM literally possesses them, but for obvious reasons this has a very tiny chance of happening. I suggest a few things to deal with this:

Allow the ship guards to be recruited as Henchmen by whoever has power to order the Navigator around. The only restriction I would suggest, to avoid players renting ships like the Hrafnagar just to snatch away the NPCs on it, is that they are immediately removed from the player's control and returned to their original spots whenever they are led to an area outside the ship, unless this other area is another ship the player character is boarding, as if they were dismissed by the player. This makes sure the ship henchmen are kept exclusively for ship gameplay.

Otherwise, what I would suggest is making the ship NPCs react like certain guard NPCs in a few Andunor manors do, which I hear attack player characters if the quarter's owner hostiles them. If this is actually a thing, I think it would work nicely for the ships as well.

User avatar
ActionReplay
Project Lead
Project Lead
Posts: 1631
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 5:09 pm
Location: Sweden

Re: Ship NPCs

Post by ActionReplay » Wed Nov 04, 2020 9:52 am

Red_Wharf wrote:
Wed Nov 04, 2020 8:07 am
The ships have several NPCs on board, and some of them fulfill the role of guards, helping player characters fight hostile random NPC encounters at sea. Obviously they do not react when the ship is boarded by a hostile player crew from another vessel, because at their normal state they are just friendly NPCs. As far as I know, only the Timberfleet, the Penny Rose, and maybe the Troubadour don't have NPC guards.

At the moment, these NPCs will only react to hostile player characters if a DM literally possesses them, but for obvious reasons this has a very tiny chance of happening. I suggest a few things to deal with this:

Allow the ship guards to be recruited as Henchmen by whoever has power to order the Navigator around. The only restriction I would suggest, to avoid players renting ships like the Hrafnagar just to snatch away the NPCs on it, is that they are immediately removed from the player's control and returned to their original spots whenever they are led to an area outside the ship, unless this other area is another ship the player character is boarding, as if they were dismissed by the player. This makes sure the ship henchmen are kept exclusively for ship gameplay.

Otherwise, what I would suggest is making the ship NPCs react like certain guard NPCs in a few Andunor manors do, which I hear attack player characters if the quarter's owner hostiles them. If this is actually a thing, I think it would work nicely for the ships as well.
This is actually on the Todo list for future updates, thanks for the input though!

Locked