Eberron Airship Battles

[aspekt]

Anyone know which, if any, of the Eberron books might cover airship combat?

And/Or a good d20 resource for this?

[Tvtyrant]

Anyone know which, if any, of the Eberron books might cover airship combat?

And/Or a good d20 resource for this?

I would treat it as a mount with it's own initiative.

[Hecuba]

Explorer's handbook covers Airships in some detail, and a significant portion of the airship crunch from it was released by WOTC on their site as a preview before it came out. Other than the small bits in the base books for the setting, it is the only place I know of with explicit mechanics on the subject.

It is worth noting that the rules given therein are not especially consistent with the portrayal in the Eberron novels and some rules have logical problems in relation to other related sources (i.e.: if soarwood can keep aloft without the elemental to provide lift, how do soarwood water vessels work and why do airships ever go down).

[WeaselGuy]

You could probably look in Stormwrack for information regarding naval warfare, and just use airships in place of water ships.

[aspekt]

Thanks for tips everyone!

[Tommy_Dude]

Oddly enough there is a free Paizo supplement called Skull & Shackles Players guide which has a simplified system for ship to ship combat. It is a free download so no cash required. *shrug* pretty easy to port over.

[Doctor Awkward]

Eberron Airship Handbook (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=14914.0)

And like Weasel suggested, I'd also check Stormwrack for general ship combat related things, under the pretext of "Ok. This, but in the sky."

[KillingAScarab]

Chapter 3 of Arms and Equipment Guide covers vehicles, including stat blocks on hang gliders, zeppelins and dirigibles. It's a 3.0 source book, but from a quick glance nothing in that chapter seems particularly out-dated. For attacking the vehicle, different ACs are given for a section versus overall. For controlling an air vehicle, Profession (pilot) checks are required, with a table of DCs towards the beginning of the chapter. I haven't ever tried to use these rules.

[Fizban]

As mentioned above, the rules for ships are in Stormwrack (updated from Arms and Equipment Guide). Stormwrack also has a more abstract "narrative" battle system that lets you use your piloting skills instead of tracking the exact position of the ships, which would be an excellent idea since most people aren't going to be able to pull off an interesting three dimensional dogfight with pen and paper rules on a flat grid.

If you can't find a copy of Stormwrack I'll summarize narrative combat here: everyone crewing/piloting/commanding the ship spends a standard action each round. At the start of the fight commanders roll profession: sailor+shiphandling vs each other to determine who's got advantage, and the winner keeps it until his ship gets messed up/he messes up a combat maneuver/the loser spends a turn rolling a new check and winning. Advantage gets to declare movement and maneuvers second when the ships move at the end of each round and instead of tracking positions and angles and all that you just track how far apart the ships are. While Stormwrack has maneuvers for grappling to board or shear off their oars, I imagine the signature airship maneuver would be raking them with your elemental ring. You could also do "flying out of the sun" (penalizing their attack rolls by making them squint through the sun behind you).

That minmaxboards link is interesting, though it's part common sense and part nonsense. DnD doesn't use a 5,280' mile, the people writing the statblocks obviously didn't notice ships only move once/round so they cut the speeds in half assuming ships "double move," an airship's effective strength score doesn't exist so there's no point in calculating it (the cargo capacity is exactly what's written and speed should be reduced by 1/3 when cargo passes 50% of maximum), the DM will have to decide what sailing checks translate into what piloting checks, and Explorer's Handbook is the only book that came close to statting it's vehicles properly so you'll have to make up or finish deriving stats for the rest (which apparently often think they're creatures).

He also missed a significant discrepancy: regardless of the possible lighter-than-air properties of Soarwood, the airship from Explorer's Handbook is not the size of a sailing ship at all, it is in fact ridiculously huge. A standard sailing ship from Stormwrack is approximately 60'x20'x20', while the given airship is 300'x90'x40'. That's 45 times the volume. The explanation for this, and everything else is quite simple: none of it was ever planned in the first place. I can't say exactly where he drew the numbers from, but 20 mph and 30 tons of cargo isn't too far off from actual early airships. The speed's a little low (or the cargo capacity's a little high) since we had gas engines by that point but otherwise good. The pricing seems pretty obvious to me once you notice it: exactly the sum of a Galleon and a pair of Wings of flying, 40k + 52k, biggest ship in the DMG+the only constant flight item in the DMG.

The rest is bologna: since the setting focuses on magical guildhouses the airships are made of parts from different houses even though the magic item creation rules say you only need one person with one feat end of story. Fire elementals can barely run at 20mph for a couple minutes at a time and it's only by coincidence that an air elemental can hustle that fast (for a few hours, it'll die of exponential damage after 8-11 hours depending on healing), but bound elementals sound like a good substitute for engines. Even though is says right there that Soarwood still weighs 75% of normal wood (which is more than DMG Darkwood), having a material with flight in the name makes the punk airship feel more justified. The dimensions in Explorer's Handbook are again simply derived from elsewhere and used arbitrarily: twice the dimensions of a Greatship from Stormwrack (give or take 5'), nevermind the fact that a Greatship made of Soarwood would cost 120,000gp and still be 1/8 the volume of that monstrosity*. It is then assigned the only hard values from ECS, 20mph and 30 tons of cargo, while everything else is taken from the Greatship (seaworthiness/shiphandling, watch requirement, and double the original ram damage because lol airship is x2).

*Ironically, if we instead assume Soarwood is lighter than air then the whole ship is basically the balloon of an actual airship (a little on the small size for 30 tons but there's no gasoline engine to lift) and it almost makes sense. Another coincidence I think.

That's my rant on Eberron Airships: of course they don't make sense, they're made of plot and priced and statted by fiat so obviously none of it's going to match up between multiple books with multiple writers, it's only by coincidence that some of it can be twisted to make sense. You and/or your DM are allowed, nay, encouraged to re-write anything and everything until you like it. I personally like the simplicity of the Galley+Wings of Flying model, with the arbitrary speed balanced by arbitrary piloting requirements, just cut the dimensions in half back to a normal giant ship and remove all references to Soarwood.

[Doctor Awkward]

That minmaxboards link is interesting, though it's part common sense and part nonsense. DnD doesn't use a 5,280' mile

Uh, yeah... the author of that articles knows.
D&D uses a 6,000 ft mile.

This is evident due to how the math works out with the movement and distance table (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/movement.htm) that's all over the core rules.
The article was pointing out that the same ratio present in the calculations of creatures and overland movement is also present with airships and overland movement, as evidence that they are treated as creatures.


the people writing the statblocks obviously didn't notice ships only move once/round so they cut the speeds in half assuming ships "double move," an airship's effective strength score doesn't exist so there's no point in calculating it (the cargo capacity is exactly what's written and speed should be reduced by 1/3 when cargo passes 50% of maximum)

That is, of course, unless the intent was to treat airships like creatures, and apply the same rules. Seeing as how nicely the math lines up and all.



the DM will have to decide what sailing checks translate into what piloting checks, and Explorer's Handbook is the only book that came close to statting it's vehicles properly so you'll have to make up or finish deriving stats for the rest (which apparently often think they're creatures).

This is one of several area's where the Explorer's Handbook directly contradicts the Eberron Campaign Setting. The sidebar Controlling an Elemental Vessel, ECS pg 267 makes it quite clear that in order to maneuver an elemental bound vessel, the person at the helm must establish control via a Charisma check every round. A member of House Lyrandar with the Mark of Storm touching a Wheel of Wind and Water does this automatically. The only other explicit method is through casting Charm Monster.
And the Explorer's Handbook simply copied the stat blocks from Stormwrack when presenting airships.


He also missed a significant discrepancy: regardless of the possible lighter-than-air properties of Soarwood, the airship from Explorer's Handbook is not the size of a sailing ship at all, it is in fact ridiculously huge. A standard sailing ship from Stormwrack is approximately 60'x20'x20', while the given airship is 300'x90'x40'.

Incorrect. The 60 ft x300 ft indicated under the heading of "Space" is to account for the the elemental ring, which is 110 feet across. Also noted in Stormwrack is that the Space heading indicates the area taken up by the ship, not the exact dimensions of the ship itself (in the same way that creatures of medium size and smaller take up a 5 foot square). The Height block is normally the distance measured from the main deck to the water line. However, since there is usually no water in the sky, the EB could just as easily have plugged in the distance from deck to keel. Or they didn't completely understand the meaning of the stat block and measured the height from the top of the castle
If stats presented in the book were the actual ships dimensions, and since every ship in Stormwrack is presented the same way (and EB copied that books stat blocks exactly), the airship would be 60 feet long, by 300 feet wide, and 50 feet in height. That is patently ridiculous. Even the largest cargo container ships in the world today (which are over a thousand feet long) only have a beam of about 160 feet. Airships are still expected to float in the water if something prevents flight.


That's 45 times the volume. The explanation for this, and everything else is quite simple: none of it was ever planned in the first place. I can't say exactly where he drew the numbers from, but 20 mph and 30 tons of cargo isn't too far off from actual early airships. The speed's a little low (or the cargo capacity's a little high) since we had gas engines by that point but otherwise good. The pricing seems pretty obvious to me once you notice it: exactly the sum of a Galleon and a pair of Wings of flying, 40k + 52k, biggest ship in the DMG+the only constant flight item in the DMG.

I don't... what are you talking about "actual early" airships with gas engines?
Are you talking about dirigibles and blimps?
Because the statistics on those aren't even close. The USS Akron was massive, almost the size of the Hindenburg, and it could reach speeds of about 75-80 mph (cruising somewhere around 60), and had a useful lift of over 160,000 lbs, most of which was accounted for in her crew of 70, the thousands of gallons of fuel for the eight engines, oil, and water ballast. The five little Sparrowhawk planes she carried, as well as the launcher mechanism for them, which is the only thing that could count as "cargo" accounted for another 21,850 lbs, or just under 11 tons, on top of what the ship needed to stay in the air.

And the point that the article was making is that an Eberron airship with the listed statistics is absurdly undervalued at a mere 92,000 gp. Deriving a cost from creating a soarwood vessel, and having 92,000 be the additional cost of binding the elemental to it is much more sensible.


The rest is bologna: since the setting focuses on magical guildhouses the airships are made of parts from different houses even though the magic item creation rules say you only need one person with one feat end of story. Fire elementals can barely run at 20mph for a couple minutes at a time and it's only by coincidence that an air elemental can hustle that fast (for a few hours, it'll die of exponential damage after 8-11 hours depending on healing), but bound elementals sound like a good substitute for engines. Even though is says right there that Soarwood still weighs 75% of normal wood (which is more than DMG Darkwood), having a material with flight in the name makes the punk airship feel more justified. The dimensions in Explorer's Handbook are again simply derived from elsewhere and used arbitrarily: twice the dimensions of a Greatship from Stormwrack (give or take 5'), nevermind the fact that a Greatship made of Soarwood would cost 120,000gp and still be 1/8 the volume of that monstrosity*. It is then assigned the only hard values from ECS, 20mph and 30 tons of cargo, while everything else is taken from the Greatship (seaworthiness/shiphandling, watch requirement, and double the original ram damage because lol airship is x2).

*Ironically, if we instead assume Soarwood is lighter than air then the whole ship is basically the balloon of an actual airship (a little on the small size for 30 tons but there's no gasoline engine to lift) and it almost makes sense. Another coincidence I think.

That's my rant on Eberron Airships: of course they don't make sense, they're made of plot and priced and statted by fiat so obviously none of it's going to match up between multiple books with multiple writers, it's only by coincidence that some of it can be twisted to make sense. You and/or your DM are allowed, nay, encouraged to re-write anything and everything until you like it. I personally like the simplicity of the Galley+Wings of Flying model, with the arbitrary speed balanced by arbitrary piloting requirements, just cut the dimensions in half back to a normal giant ship and remove all references to Soarwood.

...yeah, I'm gonna point out now that I don't believe in coincidence.
At all.

Also I don't think an Elemental suffers overland travel penalties from being made to hustle all day like normal living things do. I mean, if you want to make the argument that fatigue and exhaustion aren't included in the immunities list in the Elemental type stat block, I'll respond with "Creatures suffer penalties after the second hour between sleep cycles. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/movement.htm#overlandHustle) And elementals don't sleep. Or eat. Or breathe."

And the math for your projections doesn't hold up at all to anything similar to the real world. A helium blimp 300 feet long, with a 60 ft, diameter, would be a little more than 1/3 the size of the Hindenburg, would be able to go far faster than 20 mph due to the reduced drag, and would still be able to generate nearly 80 tons of lift.

[radionausea]

Fire as she Bears by Frog God Games will work

[Fizban]

My apologies if the wall of text is hard to read, but this is a topic I wiki-researched a while back and it's rare for someone to actually engage over it so I've responded in full. I'll spoiler it so the thread isn't completely saturated. Enjoy!

That is, of course, unless the intent was to treat airships like creatures, and apply the same rules. Seeing as how nicely the math lines up and all.
If it's a creature then why does it have a ship's statblock? The only reason to think of it as a creature in any is because of the flimsy elemental fluff which is just fluff.

Incorrect. The 60 ft x300 ft indicated under the heading of "Space" is to account for the the elemental ring, which is 110 feet across. Also noted in Stormwrack is that the Space heading indicates the area taken up by the ship, not the exact dimensions of the ship itself (in the same way that creatures of medium size and smaller take up a 5 foot square).
Uh, the only thing under the Space heading in Stormwrack is, "the length and width taken up by the area of the ship." Ships are not creatures and do not move around in their spaces dodging attacks and facing all directions at once so that logic doesn't apply. Furthermore, as of 3.5 creatures always take up square spaces so by that logic it should be 300'x300'. If you look at the number of hull sections for each ship in Stormwrack you will find that it matches the number produced by a shape of the dimensions given (including both height and draft), thus a ship usually fills it's space exactly (maybe one or two don't, I'm not doing the math for all of them). And the airship statblock clearly states "1,000 hull sections," which while somewhat short of the 1,350 I would expect is still huge (probably accounts for tapering at both ends).

If stats presented in the book were the actual ships dimensions, and since every ship in Stormwrack is presented the same way (and EB copied that books stat blocks exactly), the airship would be 60 feet long, by 300 feet wide, and 50 feet in height. That is patently ridiculous. Even the largest cargo container ships in the world today (which are over a thousand feet long) only have a beam of about 160 feet. Airships are still expected to float in the water if something prevents flight.
As always which is more likely: that they gave a 300' width to account for a 110' diameter ring, or they mixed up the order and wrote it as width/length instead of the usual length/width. I actually feel it's more natural to list them in that order myself. You're putting more faith in the formatting than familiar numbers that have a picture on the next page. The picture clearly shows the airship is meant to be at least 300' long, while the long description states that the elemental ring is held 10' from the sides of the ship, adding 20' to the diameter: subtract 20' from the "fire ring has 110' diameter" line and you get. . . 90', as I expected.

I don't... what are you talking about "actual early" airships with gas engines?
Are you talking about dirigibles and blimps?
Because the statistics on those aren't even close. The USS Akron was massive, almost the size of the Hindenburg,
There are other airships besides the Hindenburg, it's not even close to what I'd call early. I went down the list of airships on Wikipedia (or at least I remember doing that, maybe I just hit all the hyperlinks in the history section) starting from the earliest: the Giffard dirigible in 1852 was 144' long and went 6mph on a steam engine. The La France in 1879 was 170' long and looks like it went maybe 15mph with an electric engine. The Santos-Dumont no 6. in 1901 was 72' long and went 25mph with a gas engine. None of these has a useful lift entry, but the Zeppelin LZ1 from 1900 does, with a "useful lift" of about 13 tons, at 17mph with a gas engine. After that, the Schutte Lanz and Perseval airship pages have long lists that you can compare as they improve over time. Either way, the Hindenburg and Arkon didn't show up until 1930, 80 years after Giffard's first dirigible, and 30 years after the first airships with gas engines.

And the point that the article was making is that an Eberron airship with the listed statistics is absurdly undervalued at a mere 92,000 gp. Deriving a cost from creating a soarwood vessel, and having 92,000 be the additional cost of binding the elemental to it is much more sensible.
Which is more likely: someone pulls an arbitrary but very specific 92,000 out of nowhere and says it's the full price when they actually meant you're supposed to add it to another number on another page (and where then do you find the price for an elemental-less lightning rail coach?), or they put two reasonable numbers together from the DMG and meant it as the final price? ECS pg267 is the origin point and makes no mention of Soarwood at all, everything in Explorer's Handbook is just fumbling fluff together and trying to make it sound like a magipunk craft, but they can't change the listed price. As for weather it's sensible, well just because other settings price airships at 400k+ doesn't make that sensible. You can easily buy multiple ships that will carry far more cargo over time for the same price, so the only benefit is more speed on smaller loads and moving over land. The Arms and Equipment Guide has a Zeppelin and Dirigible with reasonable stats (a little small though) for 35k and 60k, clearly inferior but not so much they couldn't exist alongside. Airships aren't a steal at all for adventurers, dealing in goods so small they don't need tons of cargo, with access to instantaneous teleportation and near-flawless magical fortresses for the same price or less, and with enemies that can destroy said ship more easily than an attended magic item. If you buy an airship it's not because it's good for adventurers, it's because you want an airship (maybe because you have followers or are working on a macro scale instead of the usual).

...yeah, I'm gonna point out now that I don't believe in coincidence.
At all.
Did you see how much bending I needed to even reach those coincidences? Using creature rules for running speed but then ignoring creature rules for dying of exhaustion on the first, using the Explorer's Handbook's lighter than air soarwood in direct contradiction of the ECS (and using the space=dimensions that you believe are incorrect) for the second. But hey, maybe 20mph did come from hustling air elementals. . . wait then how does a lightning rail move even faster, and how does a fire elemental maintain that speed for more than a minute? Because it was never about elementals, just a coincidence that the numbers can be made to line up if you bend and break the rules.

Also I don't think an Elemental suffers overland travel penalties from being made to hustle all day like normal living things do. I mean, if you want to make the argument that fatigue and exhaustion aren't included in the immunities list in the Elemental type stat block, I'll respond with "Creatures suffer penalties after the second hour between sleep cycles. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/movement.htm#overlandHustle) And elementals don't sleep. Or eat. Or breathe."
Yeah I'm gonna have to disagree. Being immune to sleep does not somehow make you immune to fatigue and exhaustion, no matter the source. A living creature that gets ridden like a horse dies like a horse if you ride it all day, even if it doesn't need to sleep.

And the math for your projections doesn't hold up at all to anything similar to the real world. A helium blimp 300 feet long, with a 60 ft, diameter, would be a little more than 1/3 the size of the Hindenburg, would be able to go far faster than 20 mph due to the reduced drag, and would still be able to generate nearly 80 tons of lift.
Again, there's more than one airship, and I didn't do any math because I'm not an airship engineer. The LZ1 was 420' long with a 38' diameter and a "useful lift" of 13 or so tons. Length 300/diameter 60 is maybe twice the volume and 26 rounds up to 30 tons just fine. I'm not calculating the lift of a helium balloon nor does it matter how much the engine weighs, just the expected size vs cargo with an arbitrary speed because magic. But again, which is more likely: that the people writing the Explorer's Handbook researched airships to figure out how much helium-wood they'd need to carry the 30 tons from the ECS, or that they took the numbers from a Stormwrack ship (which you've already agreed they did), and doubled some of them so it would look more impressive.
I actually quite admire the entry for the airship in ECS. I believe I'm right about the pricing and it's a beautiful, simple, elegant solution to the question instead of just slapping some ridiculous huge price on there (like Forgotten Realms), or pretending you've already priced the individual components and are witholding it for no reason: just put two good numbers together and go. The Explorer's Handbook tries to expand and retcon the magipunk fluff but is naturally bound by the initial ruling on price so it doesn't line up, but in doing so it messes up what would have otherwise been a similarly simple statblock of Greatship+flying. I give it points for effort.

Back to the initial topic of combat, it would help to know what all is actually involved. Do the airships have weapons installed, or are you just PCs trying to board an enemy ship? What level are the units on both sides of the conflict? Make sure you've decided weather or not Soarwood actually flies/what happens if you hole more than 25% of the enemy ship (even if Soarwood flies, losing a bunch from damage could still make you fall out of the sky). Consider the price of repairs. Decide exactly how many hull sections a fireball can hit by drawing some circles on your graph paper (centering it on an specific section should get you more hits as some around the edge are included even though they aren't fully covered). Also remember that cold damage deals 1/4 to objects, fire and electricity deal 1/2, sonic and acid deal full, and then you apply wood's hardness of 5 before actually dealing damage (unless the spell specifically ignores hardness, which not all sonic and few acid spells actually do). It actually takes multiple strong fireballs to take down a hull section, though the collateral damage will make widening the breach easier. On the other hand, an airship is not likely to have much water on board so the fire hazard will be way worse than a normal seagoing ship, probably with a higher DC to avoid and to put out.

And that's two hours, I really need to go to bed now.