What skill do ships' crews use?

[Brootse]

Shiphandling seems to be a skill that only the deck officers use, and Boat seems to be used only in boats that have a crew of 1-2. So what skill is used by the common sailors and rowers?

[Sumath]

I'd say that sailors would also use Shiphandling - it reflects the knowledge needed to sail and navigate a ship, which is the same whether you're giving the orders or tying off sails. A ship's captain needs to know everything that a sailor knows and more besides, so they'd have the skill at a higher percentage than a sailor, having worked their way up to that level of competence as part of a crew.

[soltakss]

Also, bear in mind that ships in Glorantha are less complex than later ships in the real world.

I am not a sailor, so this is probably rubbish, but ...

In all ships/boats, you have to keep them clean, maintain the shells and keep them watertight.

In ships/boats powered by rowing, you need to maintain the oars, benches and the holes the oars go to.

In ships/boats powered by sail, you have to keep the sails intact, maintain the rigging and keep the masts intact. 

All those things are covered by Shiphandling.

Everything else can be done by the Captain, Steersman and so on, they use Shiphandling.

 

[GAZZA]

I see one possible problem with saying that all sailors use Shiphandling: Shiphandling is a base 0 skill. That means the classic case where thugs bash drunk blokes over the head and they wake up chained to an oar at sea is futile, since they would require (in RQG) a season's worth of instruction before they could help at all. (Though I'd freely admit that's probably taking game-mechanics-as-simulation to an extreme).

I wouldn't think it takes any particular skill to row; champion rower teams are usually about coordination and physical prowess rather than masters of an arcane skill. (I've never rowed for Oxford, feel free to correct me on this). The old stand by of some dude drumming while another cracks a whip ought to be enough to get even Joe Dimwit rowing, if not optimally, then at least sufficiently well.

Similarly I think you could probably swab the deck without any particular knowledge of Shiphandling, and there are probably other mindless drudgery tasks too. Of course Shiphandling is going to be the right skill for something like trimming sails, or navigating, or figuring out the best way to tack into the wind. (I watched the America's cup back when the Aussies briefly won it, I haven't really followed sailing since).

There are also plenty of other skills you'd need on board a ship I'd think. Lore skills to know where you're going, Climbing skills to get up to the crow's nest, Scan skills for ye olde "Ship Ahoy!" checks, and of course combat skills for when the pirates board - but while I agree professional sailors doubtless have Shiphandling, not everyone on board would necessarily have or need it.

I'm not sure the same can be said about Boating; presumably if Boating includes rowing (which I imagine it does; as far as I know the distinction between "boat" and "ship" is that a ship can carry boats, but I don't think that's the usual distinction; I think RQ in particular assumes that small waterborne vessels are boats, and large ones are ships), then it wouldn't necessarily be unreasonable to require those on board a ship to make Boating rolls occasionally.

[M Helsdon]

1 hour ago, GAZZA said:

I see one possible problem with saying that all sailors use Shiphandling: Shiphandling is a base 0 skill. That means the classic case where thugs bash drunk blokes over the head and they wake up chained to an oar at sea is futile.

In terrestrial history, and, I suspect, Glorantha, the oarsmen are rarely slaves, because it requires skill, especially in a vessel having multiple banks of oars such as a trireme or bireme. One oarsman mistiming their sweep can disorder an entire side of a vessel as oars become fouled. This isn't something you'd want to happen when in battle or cruising under oars. In the Athenian navy, rowers received good pay, and each owned their own cushion.

If you want to break down shiphanding, then there are specialist roles such as rower and steersman. Other deck crew probably simply have shiphanding, and the lookout needs to have very good vision, not just to perceive things on the horizon, but changes in water color and movement which might indicate underwater shoals and reefs.

[soltakss]

4 hours ago, GAZZA said:

I see one possible problem with saying that all sailors use Shiphandling: Shiphandling is a base 0 skill. That means the classic case where thugs bash drunk blokes over the head and they wake up chained to an oar at sea is futile, since they would require (in RQG) a season's worth of instruction before they could help at all. (Though I'd freely admit that's probably taking game-mechanics-as-simulation to an extreme).

That is what happened, at least in the Age of sail. Those press-ganged were taught the ropes very quickly and had to learn to be sailors.

If you have oarsmen you probably need to treat them as a whole unit, rather than having them make individual Shiphandling rolls. You would give each unit a Skill, based on the average, and some kind of Morale, Discipline or Effectiveness. So, when they work together you make one roll and a unit of experienced rowers is more effective than a starting unit of inexperienced rowers.

4 hours ago, GAZZA said:

There are also plenty of other skills you'd need on board a ship I'd think. Lore skills to know where you're going, Climbing skills to get up to the crow's nest, Scan skills for ye olde "Ship Ahoy!" checks, and of course combat skills for when the pirates board - but while I agree professional sailors doubtless have Shiphandling, not everyone on board would necessarily have or need it.

You could use the augmenting rules for this, so someone with Climb could be better in the rigging than someone with a bad Climb. An acrobat with Climb 90% and Shiphandling 20% isn't going to be as much use in the rigging as a sailor with Shiphandling 50% and Climb 20%.

4 hours ago, GAZZA said:

I'm not sure the same can be said about Boating; presumably if Boating includes rowing (which I imagine it does; as far as I know the distinction between "boat" and "ship" is that a ship can carry boats, but I don't think that's the usual distinction; I think RQ in particular assumes that small waterborne vessels are boats, and large ones are ships), then it wouldn't necessarily be unreasonable to require those on board a ship to make Boating rolls occasionally.

Yes, in essence, a boat like the ones used in the University Boat Race is essentially the same as a galley, you have a team of rowers, someone to steer them and someone to keep them in time. 

[dumuzid]

3 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

That means the classic case where thugs bash drunk blokes over the head and they wake up chained to an oar at sea is futile.

This 'classic case' wasn't actually so: this anecdote here conflates two very different forms of involuntary sea voyaging, from pretty distant times.

First, the 'thugs bash drunk blokes over the head' bit.  You're referencing 'pressganging' here, a specific practice of the colonial-era British Royal Navy.  The idea wasn't primarily that they grabbed any old fool off the streets, though that could sometimes happen.  The waterfronts of Britain's 17th, 18th and 19th century port cities were ringed with boarding houses, taverns, brothels, and plenty of establishments that blended all three services.  Sailors come in from a long haul, pocket full of money after months at sea, and they spend with some abandon.  A lot of them spent themselves broke and ran up debts with the places they stayed.  When it came time to pay up, and they couldn't, the sailors were sent to the local gaol while their fate was decided.  The Royal Navy had the right to conscript able sailors through a number of means, including agreements that let them buy out the debts of the sailors and take them directly from the gaol to a waiting navy hulk.  In the late 18th/early 19th the Royal Navy also started abducting British-citizen sailors on interdicted vessels from the newly independent United States, which was one of the causes for the United States to briefly and disastrously enter the Napoleonic Wars.  Private British shipping companies and ship-owners involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade had near-identical deals with harborside gaols, to buy out sailors' debts and force them to work under indenture on the long, dangerous slaving routes.  On many slaving voyages the only truly free people on-board were the captain and officers, everyone else were indentured sailors or slaves chained in the hold, and some of those ships saw the sailors mutiny, kill the free officers, and let the slaves out on a beach before turning pirate.  In both cases, gaol-purchasing and sea abducting, the British weren't looking for any old whoever, but already trained sailors they could force into service.  Mechanically, all people with some level of Shiphandling.  I could see a lot of Third Age Gloranthan societies finding pretexts to pressgang sailors with riverine shiphandling experience to crew their new naval fleets, particularly just after the Opening reaches them.

Second, the "chained to an oar at sea" bit.  This did happen, but not often in the ancient world.  As M Helsdon describes, in the Mediterranean world of the Bronze and Iron Ages galley rowers were free professionals, well-paid and in high demand.  There are very few known instances of ancient galleys using slave rowers, despite most ancient Mediterranean societies practicing one form of slavery or another: one of the few examples is when the Athenians, facing an imminent naval threat, offered freedom to every slave who volunteered to join an emergency galley crew for the fight.  It wasn't until much, much later, when Mediterranean galley fleets returned to prominence in the late medieval and early modern eras, that the stereotypical galley slave finally appears.  Medieval religious warfare in the Middle East involved significant amounts of slave-taking and -selling by all sides.  One of the causes for it, especially as those religious wars moved out from the actual Holy Land and onto the sea and coasts in the 15th and 16th centuries, was the nature of their ships.  The maritime cities of Italy and the Middle East revived galley-building in this period, but their populations and economies were no longer structured to supply the thousands of paid professional sailors that made up an ancient fleet's rowing base.  This is where the idea of galley slaves comes from.  The only alternative to free rowers was unfree ones: sometimes condemned prisoners, but far more often slaves captured in naval raids on territories espousing the opposing religion.  When the collapse of the Crusader States forced the surviving holy martial orders to set up new headquarters on Mediterranean islands like Rhodes, the Knights of St. John became some of the most notorious slavers of their age by attacking Muslim shipping and raiding seaside settlements for slaves to sell or power their own galleys.  The need for galley slaves was ravenous too, because conditions down in the rowing banks were hellish.  Rowers were really chained in place for their work, which was back-breaking, in near-lightless, filthy conditions.  Naval galleys burned through human beings like steamships through coal, which ensured a constant demand for fresh captives to replace the dead.    In those conditions in a Runequest game, I'd argue most rowers would simply use STR or CON attribute rolls; the people with Shiphandling involved in rowing a slave galley would be the officers responsible for directing the slave-rowers and keeping them in time with drums, whips etc.  Fonritian galleys probably use a system like this, in which magic may or may not mitigate the high mortality rate among rowers.  Certain cult elements of the Lunar imperial navy may as well (Danfive Xaron penal triremes).  The Kralorelans apparently use a variation on this system, but with magically animated corpses rather than living slaves manning the oars.

Edited April 21, 2020 by dumuzid

[GAZZA]

Come for the RQ stuff, stay for the schooling - very interesting stuff there.

[Lordabdul]

My understand of the skill descriptions in the rulebook is that:

• Shiphandling is for the officers on a large ship. It's a Knowledge skill so it's really for knowing what orders to scream at the crew, managing everything, and taking correct decisions in the heat of action.
• Boat is for handling an entire small boat yourself. This is mostly a physical skill because you're doing all the work, but it's a skill nonetheless because you need to know how to do it.
• For everybody else on the ship, it's just CON, STR, Climb, Scan, etc.  Although for a campaign entirely dedicated to sailing, I could see introducing a few new professional skills for specific positions (Knot Tying!).

Remember that, in most circumstances (i.e. "everything's fine"), you can get +40% or more for rolls, so even a skill with a 5 or 10% default, plus skill modifier, looks OK at first glance. It's when a storm picks up, or you get attacked, that suddenly it doesn't look so good anymore.

Edited April 22, 2020 by lordabdul