I'm generating interest right now for an IRL pirate game. Some minor house rules like crossbows are reflavored and buffed slightly to be guns, and everyone can take ranks of Use Rope, Climb, Balance, Profession Sailor, and Swim. Other than that, though, it's really pretty much open ended. I'm kind of hoping that everyone will go into full blown pirate theme and have characters with eye patches and scars and parrots, but I'd be fine if that doesn't happen.
I'm looking for general advice. In your experience, at what level does ship travel become inviable, and which classes should I ban/nerf to make the pirate motif more believeable, if at all? I'm not exactly dealing with genius optimizers here, and in fact I'd be handing out build advice like candy, but I'm just wondering if there's anything that I should look out for that will ruin the pirate mood if a player were to use it. I think that a ship would outweigh the abilities of a teleportation circle because it allows you to take a ton of stuff.
Also, anyone have good pirate adventure hooks? Stormwrack is going to be used extensively and there will obviously be a tavern or two, but is there any other pirate booty in terms of adventure hooks that I'm not looting?
One problem I've encountered is determining who is captain of the pirate ship. Solution: Slightly more powerful but still defeatable captain NPC to govern the PCs. If they want to take over, then they can mutiny/buy him out/I'll have him die, but they would have to agree on a leader beforehand. If nobody can agree on a leader, then I guess that the crew would have to help the captain out in the fight. This seems like a bit of a railroad to me but if the PCs got into fights over who were to be the leader it would stall the game dead. To avoid leading them around, I'd have to send the PCs to find adventure hooks in the port towns they visit, and report to the captain the ones that they like most.
This is starting as a one-shot which may go somewhere. Starting level could be anywhere from 2 to 5. I really really hate level 1, by the way.