Combat in D&D is probably its most polished set of rules. There can be a lot of wiggle room outside of initiative regarding several features of the game, but there are a combat is pretty regimented and consistent, rules-wise.
Indeed, one of the things about D&D design is that any character is meant to function well in combat situations. I've played RPGs where a character might be best served by simply ducking out of the way and waiting for the fighting to be over, but D&D's class system really ensures that everyone is going to be able to contribute something to a fight.
As such, I think a lot of players, DMs, and I'd guess even game designers are hesitant to introduce a bunch of new rules for combat systems.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh primarily served as an update of a bunch of older, maritime-themed adventures, but it also had an appendix with a lot of interesting ideas about how to run nautical adventures. This included rules for building around the party effectively being the primary officers of a ship. This included a lot of magical upgrades a ship could get as well as rules surrounding crew morale and also ship-based combat.
Critical Role actually played around a little with these rules in Campaign Two. But aside from that, I really haven't seen many people talk about them.
Given the apparently high likelihood of a Spelljammer sourcebook coming out some time this year, I'm curious to see if we'll get another crack at ship-to-ship combat.
One of the issues with tacking on a system like this is that characters don't tend to have a lot of avenues to play into their roles on a ship. There is a simple "Water Vehicles" proficiency that Sailors and some of the backgrounds in Ghosts of Saltmarsh get, and you can also possibly use things like carpenter's tools proficiency, but most characters would likely find themselves somewhat like the Maester character I made in the Song of Ice and Fire RPG whenever a fight broke out - just trying to stay out of the way.
As one of the other D&D-like RPG systems I've read, Starfinder has an interesting take on its ship combat - it's written into the core rulebook, and works differently than "on-foot" combat. But that also benefits from the fact that a lot of character skills were written to be useful in such situations - there's a piloting skill, an engineering skill, even a computer science skill for inter-ship computer hacking in the midst of a fight.
Of course, I haven't actually run a game of Starfinder yet, and I don't really know first-hand how it feels.
To an extent, I think that there's a real question of buy-in here. Most of (maybe all) of the people I play D&D with are primarily interested in the game from a role-playing point of view. As such, when I've floated just the idea of trying out a new game system, several of my players have balked, and a lot of them don't want to try to pack in new rules and expectations when they're struggling to hold 5th Edition in there.
I think, therefore, that I'd prefer to see a ship-combat system really tie itself into the normal D&D combat system. Each character should have their own initiative place, and they should have their normal suite of abilities. Having the Sorcerer toss fireballs at the other ship would give players something familiar to do.
But, on top of that, I would like to see a kind of weight toward making "ship actions" more powerful choices in combat. I think it's generally good game design to reward players for exploring new options, and I think that if you've got some massive piece of equipment like a ship, its benefits should feel significant.
I actually think that the Infernal War Machines rules in Descent into Avernus felt a little closer to what I'd go for, though I know there were issues there as well. In this case, the issue might primarily be movement - vehicles should probably go a lot faster than characters can move, but you also don't want to wildly shift the distances between characters on those vehicles.
I don't really have much of a solution here, to be honest. But I'm hoping that if we get Spelljammer next, we're going to see another iteration of this kind of combat, and one that is fun to play and not too difficult to learn.
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