This page isn't finished yet. I had a terrific breakthrough on the subject material today, mostly because I was under fire to get something in order before my game party sailed off. Before I go any further, I want time to think and I definitely want to get Sterling's response to it; Sterling is our local sailing guru, this being his main occupation. I haven't heard from him for a while, which usually means he's at sea right now.
The complete page, such as it is, can be found here.
The breakthrough was to measure the ability of the character to sail, not upon what they knew of sailing (I myself know zip; I've never actually been aboard a moving sail boat, but like Spiderman I've seen a lot of old movies), but upon the weather. My approach is to say that sailors of varying skill can handle a boat without any problems up to a specific point where the weather gets worse ... whereupon, rolls have to be made or bad things happen.
I've done my best making a list of "bad things." A sailor could probably create a list of about 250 things, which would be fantastic (Sterling) if every one of those bad things could be defined as an in-game consequence, and the % chance of that bad thing could be established into a table of sorts.
I know the system here is a terrible oversimplification; but that's not really important. Everything about D&D is an oversimplification to some degree. All I really want is for players to feel there's a "game" in choosing whether or not to take sailing skill as their option, whether or not they want to take other skills that will allow them to train other sailors, and whether or not they want to risk three hours of bad weather to get to their goal. It's not a game if there isn't a chance of risk, and that risk has to be something that players without any understanding of sailing (or any other subject) can still comprehend for themselves and mess with.
The weather being changeable, I think it is more than enough to say, "Okay, you leave port today, it's a beautiful day, you don't know what it is like tomorrow." This makes it spectacularly valuable to have "predict weather" as a spell, particularly if you know that you are absolutely going to be able to sail a particular kind of climate without fail. And since I use real world climate data for my game world, IF you know the climate of an area, then you can be really quite certain that the chances of a bad storm in this season and this part of the world is almost unheard of ... just like a real sailor would know.
I really like that as part of the ability's construction. A lot of players won't go to sea because the chances of getting caught in a storm and sinking are "random" and impossible to manage. Here, this system says, "If it gets super-stormy, and you are of this skill, and your crew is of this skill, then you'll come through under all but the very worst conditions." In short, you could sail in anything less than a full-on violent storm or hurricane, and know ahead of time that you can do it.
In addition, the system shifts the survival of said storm from "the condition of the ship" to "the ability of the crew." This argues that the ship's condition is what it is BECAUSE of the crew, and therefore only the crew needs to be rated.
P.S.,
Where the amount of wind on the wiki page is described, this refers to the "Beaufort" scale. I haven't added the page for the Beaufort Scale to the new wiki (though you can find it on the Control Weather page), so I'll repost it here. I have posted it to this blog before (I love this image).
