Ship Combat

One of my challenges for this quest was coming up with a sea battle between my PCs’ frigate and a pirate frigate. Sea battles are one of the areas where I wish WOTC would iron out and have a set of rules and stats for. Since there are no 5e rules, at least at this point, for running ships I had to come up with my own. I devised an AC and HP for each ship and came up with ballistas and their stats. My PC’s decided they didn’t like the ballistas because they had to roll a strength check to load them and then make an attack roll to try to hit anything. So when the pirate frigate approached they choose to lob spells until the ship was close enough for boarding. I felt the strength check was necessary because Omar’s PC was a halfling, who obviously did not have the strength to load the huge ballistas on her own.