On Sailing

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Quidix
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On Sailing

Post by Quidix » Sun May 01, 2022 2:29 pm

I like sailing a lot, but I’m no expert. As the system has now been around a time, I thought it useful to get a discussion going. I have two points to make myself:

Lack of ships in the UD: Currently there is the Dreadnought (6 crew) and a small rental. UD would greatly benefit to more small and mid-sized ownable ships to make sailing more feasible. I think this would also make sailing more fun for the navies as there will be more bad guys to hunt.

Reliance on bards: Bards are close to a necessity, and it would be good if it was a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘must have’. I’d suggest toning down Sea Shanties, introducing a craftable potion that is as strong as the bard song for the sail skill and / or making the sail bard sail buff self only.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Babylon System is the Vampire » Sun May 01, 2022 3:02 pm

I'm fairly certain that a lot of people agree with point two, and steps will eventually be made to make it so. I don't know if the answer is weakening sea shanties, or adding ways to boost your sail score through other means to get you closer but not as good to having a bard on board.

As for the underdark, I would actually rather see some underdark sea content added before the boats get crazy down there, but thats just me.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Wings of Peace » Tue May 03, 2022 12:23 am

Babylon System is the Vampire wrote:
Sun May 01, 2022 3:02 pm
I'm fairly certain that a lot of people agree with point two, and steps will eventually be made to make it so. I don't know if the answer is weakening sea shanties, or adding ways to boost your sail score through other means to get you closer but not as good to having a bard on board.

As for the underdark, I would actually rather see some underdark sea content added before the boats get crazy down there, but thats just me.
I just wanted to mirror a lot of the sentiment here as far as the ud but I do think the private boat situation in the UD could be better. I think thematically it makes sense that most boats are on the surface but the only private boat in the UD is tied to district auction mechanics. It'd probably be okay to give the ud at one private vessel that didn't have a bunch of extra strings attached.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Babylon System is the Vampire » Tue May 03, 2022 5:39 am

Wings of Peace wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 12:23 am
Babylon System is the Vampire wrote:
Sun May 01, 2022 3:02 pm
I'm fairly certain that a lot of people agree with point two, and steps will eventually be made to make it so. I don't know if the answer is weakening sea shanties, or adding ways to boost your sail score through other means to get you closer but not as good to having a bard on board.

As for the underdark, I would actually rather see some underdark sea content added before the boats get crazy down there, but thats just me.
I just wanted to mirror a lot of the sentiment here as far as the ud but I do think the private boat situation in the UD could be better. I think thematically it makes sense that most boats are on the surface but the only private boat in the UD is tied to district auction mechanics. It'd probably be okay to give the ud at one private vessel that didn't have a bunch of extra strings attached.
I'm working on making shorter posts, but perhaps my view on underdark ships could have been explained better. If the dreadnaught comes up, its a thing or at least should be. Navys will likely want to go out and hunt it. And the dreadnaught is built for that, as its arguably the most powerful ship there is.

Now, if you add a new underdark ship, its probably not going to be the dreadnaught 2.0. Especially if its privately owned. All the top tiered ships are tied to a settlement on the surface, so it makes sense that that would continue. But since its going to be the second underdark ship, its likely going to be treated with the same hostility as the dreadnaught.

Now, ultimately boom bashing against other pc ships is what we all dream about. But building and maintaining a crew is probably the most difficult and time consuming thing you can do on Arelith, and you are going to want to be able to do some chillaxing against the AI content while you find your groove. And this is where I think a small bit of underdark sea content can come in real handy for the boats down there, since even with the dreadnaught its been pretty quiet since "Jam the Ham" was terrorizing the seas. And I think not having a place to chill and get your feet wet (literally and figuratively) plays at least a small role in that.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by AstralUniverse » Tue May 03, 2022 7:55 am

just fyi, it is possible to reach +50 soft skill cap on Sail without bard song, on several different builds, so with that in mind I'd say bard *is* indeed in "nice to have" state and not in a must-have.
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Re: On Sailing

Post by Babylon System is the Vampire » Tue May 03, 2022 3:40 pm

AstralUniverse wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 7:55 am
just fyi, it is possible to reach +50 soft skill cap on Sail without bard song, on several different builds, so with that in mind I'd say bard *is* indeed in "nice to have" state and not in a must-have.
You're not wrong, and it's the same point I made when I was still on the "its fine how it is" side of this debate. You take gift of sail, a few loremaster levels for gift of the explorer, and find some of the rare sail gear* that gives more than +2 and you can hit the 50 soft cap more than likely. You could also make the point that 40+ wisdom based characters, while not able to hit the 50 soft cap without loremaster levels, could hit the more important sail score threshold. You get a team with three to six of that sort, make sure they are on EVERY TIME you want to sail, and you can compete without a bard.

What convinced me to change my mind however is that in both of those instances, you are one of those builds or a passenger unless there is a bard on board. And I agree with those that changed my mind, that's not a good place to be for what is arguably the best part of the server. And for that reason I am now firmly in the camp of "having a bard on board should be better then not, just not 20 points better". Unfortunately, just lowering the boost from sea shanties turns around and makes the builds in the first paragraph the new bards because of that sail score threshold I mentioned, so it likely needs a more nuanced solution then that. Finding a bard to come sailing with you has already been a challenge for some, finding 3-6 of those builds to run your ship would be nigh impossible.









*The sail gear is not easy to find. The coat I am wearing on my bard was bought from a shop for 1 million coins, it's that rare. And we are talking about something that is essentially an enchanted silk shirt that gives a low level spell once per day and has a sail bonus higher then +2.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by -XXX- » Tue May 03, 2022 4:19 pm

The thing is that even though there are alternative avenues for reaching the skill cap, they affect only a single member of the crew.
Sea shanties affect the entire crew, which essentially makes them 4x better than any of the alternatives (unless you're sailing around on the Penny Rose or whatever).

Furthermore, unless literally every other member of your sailing crew is reaching the skill cap on their own, they likely need a bard anyway, rendering all the effort that you put into your sail skill cap build pointless.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by VibeKings » Tue May 03, 2022 4:47 pm

I don't think gear should count toward the DCs, and the DCs ought to be collectively lowered by 22~ to compensate. The gear wall is obnoxious and tedious and doesn't have any real reason to exist. God help you if you're a mundane with UMD and want to sail. Inventory space to spare will be a thing of the past.

Sea Shanties too is simply ludicrously good, and bards are already in a state of "close to mandatory" due to how strong they are at everything else. That being said, a song about sailing is pretty thematic... maybe it should have some other kind of more niche sailing bonus, but I can't think of anything that isn't too convoluted.

All of the "ocean" content should probably see a move to distant shores. One of the big contributors to lag per Spyre is a lot of people in one area, thanks to how NWN calculates actor distance/location. Ships are... one area, usually with a number of people on them, on what's by far the biggest server out of the 5.

Lastly, the sea feels lonely sometimes. And it feels hard to get involved with sailing as anything except a subordinate to someone else. There should probably be way more ships to play with, especially rentals and ones not owned by a settlement.

Even so, sailing is a ton of big character mechanics investment for what's a (very deep) niche of the server. Whether that's a good or a bad thing, I'm not sure.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Mike_mohawk » Wed May 04, 2022 7:27 pm

I am not smart enough to comment on the second point about bards. But I do know that the whole "skill hoarding" makes people go all in, and getting people on board for sailing becomes exceedingly difficult when they have to do a big skill dip and also invest in enchanted gear.
To add to that, you basicly need a bard with shanty and appraise to get the most out of sailing, which is hard to come by.
So a lot of "eggs in one basket".

To the first point. We need a UD ship. Badly.

I have, with my limited time, tried to get sailing going in the UD, way back before the navy under Jhaamdath was demolished. But since the only ship available is a ship so small, that even with 4 people, you're tripping over eachother.
You can't bring people who are simply interested in sailing. You can only bring 4-6 INTENSELY dedicated people into it.

To add to that, the little boat, can't toggle it's dark cloud, so you'll be targeted by the surface navy's INSTANTLY.

Trying to grow a sailing culture with the small boat is exceedingly difficult, and getting the dreadnaught running is afaik, very costly.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Scurvy Cur » Sat May 07, 2022 8:19 pm

A few friends and I have been playing with the system a bit myself lately. The following is a summary of our thoughts on the system as is:

1) All or Nothing Skill, and that's bad As other people have mentioned, you either need a bard or a highly specialized gear set (and sometimes class choices with suboptimal selections like the loremaster exploration secret) for a lot of the content. For some of it, hitting the +50 soft cap seems non optional.

I personally don't think every skill needs to scale hard to 80+. Sometimes it makes sense. Often it doesn't. and currently Sail feels like one of the worst offenders. The only thing presently that saves it even a tiny bit is that, if you make the mistake of thinking that buying a little sail with your spare points will make your ship experience more comfortable, you can -relevel those points away.

Suggestion: Make sail scale solely off of ranks, feats, wisdom. If shanty is retained as a sail affecting ability, reduce shanty to +5 sail, capping at a fairly low bard level, and instead give some bonuses to melee combat while on the deck of a ship that scale with bard level. Then tear out every current DC and rescale it for a world in which most people are going to have between 32 and 48 sail.

2) Related somewhat to 1, the scaling seems wacky. I've been tossing points in as I level and poking around with ships. I felt very strongly like sail didn't meaningfully change my experience until I got 35-40 scraped together. This poses two problems. First, it makes sail largely inaccessible to low/mid level characters. They'll struggle to do even basic content, even if they've been keeping the skill maxed. Second, for most characters this is going to mean full ranks and some gear, or don't even bother being on deck unless you're part of a large crew. Problematically related to 3 below.

Overall, the numbers for sail seem to have been selected by asking what it's theoretically possible to achieve, not what represents a reasonable investment.

Suggestion: reduce the checks/engagement DCs on some of the easier content to make it accessible to casual sailors trying to figure out if they like the system, or simply to those not yet fully leveled.

3) Ships are too tied to settlements or being a pirate, but I'm not sure that adding more of them will help, unless we add so many that they're simply not worth hoarding on the same character that never logs on except to keep the ship tied to a faction. Rentals help significantly with this, but it means that the personalization/upgrade side of the system will just never be seen by most players. This is relevant to 2, because small groups using a rental are much more likely to find themselves in a position where everyone needs to have sail. Being a pirate remains a bad deal.

Suggestion: add so many ships that they become no longer worth hoarding. Add more temp ships that are able to do ship combat, and are more friendly to solo/small groups; most of the ones that currently exist on the surface require a crew that has all invested sail, or can't mount weapons in any capacity.

4) Ship to ship combat abilities scale too well with sail. While I believe sail should absolutely be the governing skill in ship to ship combat, right now the differences that accrue to 20 or even 10 points of average crew skill are so great that the better crewed ship ought never lose, if both ships are fully manned. Because the encounters are highly abstracted, there isn't a lot of room for offsetting an inferior crew. Both ships will certainly be as upgraded as possible at this point, and since the minigame is just trading numbers back and forth until one side loses, there's not really a lot of room for outplay. When I've sailed with a deeply invested crew with a shanty bard, every engagement has felt like a free win. When I've sailed against a deeply invested crew with a shanty bard, it's been a total noncontest.

Suggestion: Reduce sail scaling and/or cap the amount of sail that contributes to ship combat. Increase relevance of upgrades, but limit the number of total upgrades a ship can have, so that ships will need to prioritize various systems, and you'll never be quite sure what you're running against, or how best to fight it until you're engaged.

5) Wiki states: All Sail Skill checks are transparent and will be displayed in your console showing your roll and the DC using the Ship Mechanics. Like regular skill checks rolling 1 is a critical failure, 20 critical success.

Suggestion: please either actually make sail skill work like regular skill checks (i.e. no auto success or failure), or delete the line from the wiki that states that it does.


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Re: On Sailing

Post by Party in the forest at midnight » Sat May 07, 2022 8:24 pm

It would be nice if there was a rental boat with the diving bell too.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Mattamue » Sun May 08, 2022 12:48 am

Scurvy Cur wrote:
Sat May 07, 2022 8:19 pm
5) Wiki states: All Sail Skill checks are transparent and will be displayed in your console showing your roll and the DC using the Ship Mechanics. Like regular skill checks rolling 1 is a critical failure, 20 critical success.

Suggestion: please either actually make sail skill work like regular skill checks (i.e. no auto success or failure), or delete the line from the wiki that states that it does.
ActionReplay wrote: - All Sail Skill checks are transparent and will be displayed in your console showing your roll and the DC using the Ship Mechanics. Like regular skill checks rolling 1 is a critical failure, 20 critical success.
FYI for #5. Its on the wiki because its in the updates. I understand your point that regular skill checks do not have critical fails and successes. Its up to a dev to clarify if the sail skill actually has critical fails and successes or not.

Who is the audience for this post?


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Re: On Sailing

Post by -XXX- » Sun May 08, 2022 11:58 am

Scurvy Cur wrote:
Sat May 07, 2022 8:19 pm
stuff
Sailing is an all or nothing skill because if we rolled the clock five months back from now, players insisted for this to be treated as a competitive activity rather than just a minigame back then.

The novelty of sailing seems to have died down since then however and many of those players moved on with their characters, so now we're here.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Scurvy Cur » Sun May 08, 2022 5:57 pm

There's no reason it can't still be "competitive" without being in "get sail to 100 or go home" territory.

Nerfing shanty to +5 sail, and adjusting the DC of sail checks would be a good first step. In the alternative, so would making the shanty bonus only apply to encounter evasion and travel speed checks. This is just a quick acknowledgement of the fact that, presently, bard is the only alternative to finding between 3 and 6 people who each build for sail to the exclusion of everything else (I think Astral is the only person that thinks it's reasonable to find a crew of 6 exploration gift loremasters to run your boat, if no shanty bard is available).

Removing gear from the equation would be another good step. Yes, everyone can gear 22 sail and enough wisdom to cap with a pot. Yes, everyone that's serious about sailing currently does that. No, it's not really difficult to do. And that's part of the issue. If everyone is using sail gear (and indeed must use sail gear if they want to do high level pve or pvp boat content), then functionally the only thing the gear does is inflate checks, force people to gear swap any time they want to sail, and punish those who don't like swapping gear. You could remove 22 DC from every check and remove gear from the sail equation, and it would save people from needing to swap gear sets every time they get on a boat. This would immediately improve the QoL for everyone that gets on a boat.

I also think some effort could be extended to making the system more casual friendly by applying some sort of captaincy bonus based on the highest skill present on the ship. I could see a system working roughly as follows:

Whoever has the highest sail skill on the ship gives a bonus equal to a fraction of their sail skill (let's call it 1/3 for now, just to make the math easy) to every other player, not to exceed the skill of the highest sail skill party member. So for example, on a ship with 3 crew members, having 60 sail, 50 sail, and 0 sail, the captaincy bonus would apply up to 60/3 = 20 sail to the other 2 crew members, not to exceed 60. In this example, the guy with 0 sail would get a +20 bonus, the guy with 50 sail would get a +10 bonus, and crew would then be treated as having 60, 60, and 20 sail. This would have a little of the feeling of having a shanty bard along, but instead of "could you find a bard to go sailing with you?", it asks what is probably a better question for the system: "How good is your captain?"

This way, the most important aspect of running a ship would be having one member with a very high skill. They could then safely bring their less-skilled (or completely unskilled) friends on the ship and still get along pretty well. Imo, this would address one of the big problems with the system as presently implemented: even if you personally invest fully, you either need to find a couple other invested people (or a bard and some other people that have a set of sail gear, either or).

And that's one of the big woes of trying to do sail stuff right now. As someone commented to me recently: [These people] want to go do sail content. Their build is all about sail. But they can't use their primary ship until everyone is online.


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Re: On Sailing

Post by Eyeliner » Sun May 08, 2022 8:04 pm

Using dex as well as wisdom (whichever is higher, not combined) would go a long way too and seems appropriate to me for rigging the sails and so on.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Babylon System is the Vampire » Sun May 08, 2022 8:27 pm

I love the captain idea. Something similar to it came up in conversations like this once or twice before, and I think it has a lot of potential. Keep the ideas like this flowing, sail is worth getting right. I've called it the best system on arelith a few times, but have only given one reason. Let me go over all of them real fast.


1) the one i always mention, you can loose in pvp and not have to worry about the fact that you came back to life after being murder bashed, and the awkwardness that comes with that.

2) It creates a more unexplored pioneer type environment on arelith, wheras the enitre big island seems settled and civilized for the most part.

3) There is generally enough time between events to get some roleplay in, so people get to know your characters a little better. It doesn't always play that way, but the potential is there.

4) It makes an easy target for a one shot adventure for dms, and they can do whatever out there because its unlikely to effect the stability of the setting no matter what happens.

Some things to keep in mind however:

1) having it only hard ranks, feats, and wisdom is not a good idea. I get it, less gear switching and i am 100% sympathetic to that. I have a page and a half worth of alt gear. But lets do a quick comparison. I'm a rogue willing to gimp my build hard to get 16 base wisdom. I'm a pretty good sailor, and im ok but not great at everything else. Then I meet joey the caster cleric. He not only has 5 points minimum more then me in sail based on his wisdom score, all he had to do to get there was swap something like epic disc for epic sail. A slight nerf for pvp, but certainly not game breaking like it was for me the rogue.

2) This ties into one, but the 100 threshold was a happy accident. It was initially rolling over like search does at 100, but AR made it so any score over 100 just counts as a 100. Or maybe a 99, but same difference. This means that anyone willing to put the work in can contribute to hitting that threshold, especially with a bard on board. Which brings me to number 3.

3) Gimping bard song is not the answer necessarily, because of the above mentioned threshold. First off, you probably got to start with +10 not +5, because the baseline song gives +10 to all skills and it seems silly to just have sail be 5...and complicated to code. When you add sea shanties on top of that, it gives another +10. You could make the case that it could be lowered a little, but personally I would rather see other things, like the captain idea, boost the score to make up that difference then lowering bard song just because of threshold concerns.

4) And yeah, you could say "you don't need to have the best score to go sailing". I wish that's where we were. But just like people obsess about being the ulitmate pvp build for whatever build they are playing, people are going to be the same way about their sail score. Especially if its their boat. Because, and this is probably wrong but its a rarity thing, sinking ones boat is more of a heartbreaker for that person then killing them in pvp. This is the result of too much pvp kill bashing combined with not enough boat battles, since if kill bashing was rarer then getting sunk the reverse would almost definitely be true.


Just one note to finalize on, a bit of a suggestion if you will. I can see how Astral thinks that its easy to get a group to sail, he likely either played a pirate or in one of the other big crews that have existed. Just last night I pinged a private pirate discord I am in about going to the new island and within 20 minutes we had a crew of 7 that was capable of getting to 84 sail before i applied sea shanties. This is due to the fact that you can assume 95%+ of the folks at least have a pirate they play from time to time in said discord, and all pirates invest in sail. This is not true for any other small group discord, and as such I think having a "looking to sail" tab in the main discord may be a good idea for the rest of the server. At the very least, if you are trying to put a crew together make a discord or a tab in your settlement discord that you can use to get folks together at the right time. The interest is out there, its just gotta be reeled in.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by -XXX- » Sun May 08, 2022 9:55 pm

Removing sail skill from items doesn't seem like a good solution to me.
Yes, hindsight is 20-20 and we can now probably say that the sail skill should never have been made available as a basin option, however unless it gets completely decoupled from any core stat, the need for sailing gear would still remain - people would simply be required to make a +1 WIS set instead of a +1 WIS +2 Sail set (not mentioning those people who used masterwork runes to add sail on their actual gear already).
Babylon System is the Vampire wrote:
Sun May 08, 2022 8:27 pm
3) Gimping bard song is not the answer necessarily, because of the above mentioned threshold. First off, you probably got to start with +10 not +5, because the baseline song gives +10 to all skills and it seems silly to just have sail be 5...and complicated to code. When you add sea shanties on top of that, it gives another +10. You could make the case that it could be lowered a little, but personally I would rather see other things, like the captain idea, boost the score to make up that difference then lowering bard song just because of threshold concerns.
Gimping the bard song is absolutely an answer! That +10 that you mention? That goes to the entire crew and so equates to one person having their sail skill 40 ranks higher than everyone else on a crew 4 bardless vessel.
Last edited by -XXX- on Sun May 08, 2022 10:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Quidix » Sun May 08, 2022 10:01 pm

I agree with Scurvy - remove the impact from gear and buffs. If that makes it lean too much towards wisdom builds, then just make it highest of wis and dex or even just remove the impact of stats.

Having 1 bard is equivalent to 4-6 other people doing a dedicated sail build with ESF Sail and LM's exploration secret. That's not a fair comparison in terms of effort.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by AstralUniverse » Sun May 08, 2022 11:04 pm

Scurvy Cur wrote:
Sun May 08, 2022 5:57 pm
(I think Astral is the only person that thinks it's reasonable to find a crew of 6 exploration gift loremasters to run your boat, if no shanty bard is available).
I didnt know that was the case and perhaps I should have just said nothing. All I really meant is that for one character in a vacuum it is possible to reach +50 soft cap without bard song.
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Re: On Sailing

Post by Babylon System is the Vampire » Mon May 09, 2022 5:02 am

-XXX- wrote:
Sun May 08, 2022 9:55 pm


Gimping the bard song is absolutely an answer! That +10 that you mention? That goes to the entire crew and so equates to one person having their sail skill 40 ranks higher than everyone else on a crew 4 bardless vessel.
I don't know if you don't get what I am saying or I am reading your position wrong. Bard song is the savior of the sail system as it works now though. Without it the dominate sailors would be wisdom based caster classes and lore master dips. Bard song helps everyone get to the threshold of the low to mid 90s you really want to hit as a group, not just those classes. If you want to make sailing more exclusive, then yes removing bard song and doing nothing else would be the answer. But if you want to make it more open, which I thought you did based on what you have said before on this, Bard song is the glue in the current version of Sail. Its what allows you to take that mid teen leveled sailor out with you, or the guy who has some gear and 33 ranks but didn't want to use a feat on epic sail with you as your fourth - sixth crew member.


That being said, I am more than certain that sail will continue to be tweaked and improved going forward, which is why these conversations are important. And I am 100% behind making bards less of a must have, I think everyone is at this point. Its just a lot more nuanced then just nerfing bard song and calling it a day.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by -XXX- » Mon May 09, 2022 6:02 am

Babylon System is the Vampire wrote:
Mon May 09, 2022 5:02 am
Bard song helps everyone get to the threshold of the low to mid 90s you really want to hit as a group, not just those classes. If you want to make sailing more exclusive, then yes removing bard song and doing nothing else would be the answer. But if you want to make it more open, which I thought you did based on what you have said before on this, Bard song is the glue in the current version of Sail. Its what allows you to take that mid teen leveled sailor out with you, or the guy who has some gear and 33 ranks but didn't want to use a feat on epic sail with you as your fourth - sixth crew member.
The mandatory mid 90s sail skill is an issue no matter how much you turn it around. Bard song enables this.
Let's face it - most sailor characters get their sail to 73-79 and rely on bard song too. Why not have sail operate at those values instead and ax anything that pushes it higher?

Bards are a requirement for high end sailing atm. - even for a specialized crew. It's annoying.

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Re: On Sailing

Post by Babylon System is the Vampire » Mon May 09, 2022 7:08 am

-XXX- wrote:
Mon May 09, 2022 6:02 am
Babylon System is the Vampire wrote:
Mon May 09, 2022 5:02 am
Bard song helps everyone get to the threshold of the low to mid 90s you really want to hit as a group, not just those classes. If you want to make sailing more exclusive, then yes removing bard song and doing nothing else would be the answer. But if you want to make it more open, which I thought you did based on what you have said before on this, Bard song is the glue in the current version of Sail. Its what allows you to take that mid teen leveled sailor out with you, or the guy who has some gear and 33 ranks but didn't want to use a feat on epic sail with you as your fourth - sixth crew member.
The mandatory mid 90s sail skill is an issue no matter how much you turn it around. Bard song enables this.
Let's face it - most sailor characters get their sail to 73-79 and rely on bard song too. Why not have sail operate at those values instead and ax anything that pushes it higher?

Bards are a requirement for high end sailing atm. - even for a specialized crew. It's annoying.

Caster cleric/druid/maybe shaman
33 ranks
3 sf
10 esf
15 wisdom mod (or 16 if they push for 42 wisdom)
40 toward the soft cap, between gear and the gift. it will take you finding a goodie or two to get it up this high on this build, but it will likely exceed this number eventually.

101 total sail score.

26/4 swash/loremaster
33 ranks
3 sf
10 esf
5 wisdom mod (assuming you boost your 8 wisdom up to 20, which you should when sailing)
50 soft cap hit no problemo between gear and gift/gift of explorer.

101 sail score.

Those are the monsters of sail, because they are both competitive builds that don't have to do anything beyond shifting some gear around on a boat, or in the case of the caster cleric squeeze in the skill focuses. You can make the case that something like 25/5 fighter loremaster has enough feats and doesn't mind going to 16 int where it doesn't cost them much to go the lm route, but its definitely not as good as the swashlm everywhere else. You can also play pvp gimped builds to get those numbers, since loremaster is open to anyone with 16 intelligence technically, but those two would be the meta for sail builds without bard song and eventually the standard. Once one ship has the required number of those builds in their crew, everyone is going to want that too to try and compete.

So yeah, lets find a way to make it so bards are not as important to sail. But lets not do it in a way that actually narrows the content.

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-XXX-
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Re: On Sailing

Post by -XXX- » Mon May 09, 2022 9:44 am

Bard song is currently the greatest offender. ATM you're more likely to sink a ship because its crew couldn't get a bard on board and decided to sail anyway, than you are to rule the seas with an all-star crew constellation of seafaring bookworm shamans.
Which doesn't mean that those are OK - stuff like swash or explo secrets should probably be providing an alternative to the SF/ESF/Gift combo, rather than straight up stacking with it. WIS is super narrow and should likely be replaced with something more generic like CON (Wise man of the sea? How about a tough crew?).

helitron
Posts: 140
Joined: Wed May 02, 2018 5:09 pm

Re: On Sailing

Post by helitron » Mon May 09, 2022 10:16 am

Very good points discussed in this thread. Some have been discussed already in older threads, but never hurts to rethink and discuss things again.

On "everything is based on one skill" - In my opinion, adding different skill requirements for different sailing-related content would be nice (e.g. spot/search for using the spyglass, climb for rigging, lore for navigating, etc..). However, relying everything on one skill keeps it simple since it's always sail vs sail that is compared. If additional skills were introduced, this would probably complicate the game even more and will be even harder to balance when it comes to ship to ship PvP and other DC calculations. At the moment, the devs and everyone involved have done a great job in balancing the content around the sail skill (e.g. stronger ships require more crew, NPC and encounter DC is good at the moment).

On the bard song. At the moment it's a must, especially if a crew wants to hit 100 average sail. Removing that song bonus all-together will make it even harder and would push for the sailing builds mentioned in the post above. However, it also makes bards too essential for the sailing game. Maybe changing the sail song to give the skill bonus from the base song to everyone and the additional sail bonus to the bard only could be a solution. The later would help to increase the bard's own sail skill to a level that contributes to the average crew sail.

If I would change anything, then it would be to cap the max average sail per ship to 80 (from 100). This way, it will be easier for non-sailing invested PCs to get to some reasonable numbers that are in a more competitive range. E.g. 32 sail + 5 wis + 22 gear = 59 for a random sailor without WISinvest/SF/ESF/gifts, which would be close to 80 (than to 100). A bard on top would boost this even further. Invested sailors that have over 80 sail skill would also contribute stronger to pushing the average score towards 80.

Rolled characters:
William Bones; Durk Rotgrun; Hector Bartholomew; Rali Runehammer; Daris Blake; Nathaniel Silvers; Mordarok; Guy Silvers; Shayleth Shadowblood


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