Comment on “Hiring the Ship's Crew”

Great series Alexis. When the D&D work rolls around to improving these aspects (hirelings and naval combat) of my own game, as usual I'll have to come back and consider your approach at length. I especially like determining the crew independent of its members at first; I was thinking about that but didn't come up with anything that put the crew first, so was stuck on "how do I avoid crew quality being something like an average of member traits and thus more bland for larger ships."