A shipwrecked cleric provides some healing, but also extends your range by purifying old rations and desalinating water. A rescued wizard joins the crew, giving everyone proficiency with Arcana and readily available Identify while on the ship, as well as the occasional Fog Cloud. Being able to add NPCs to the crew as quest/encounter rewards.Obligatory encounter that originally feels like they're being attacked at night, but actually the Helmsman got really drunk and made a mess of things.Social Encounters between the crew and the PCs.
#Dmg 5e ship rules generator
In addition to smoothing over the various proficiency and stat issues, it also gives you the DM a "wandering encounter" generator that don't require them to be always beset by terrible weather, sea monsters, pirates and the occasional flying shark: If they're not coming ashore, they're all amalgamated into 'the crew'. This also saves you from being required to stat out Steve the helmsman, Serena the Quartermaster/carpenter, and Hanna the Navigator.
High wisdom, low intelligence crew may be able to survive well, but get lost easily. Wisdom & Intelligence not only could indicate the magical abilities of the crew (such as the wizard example above), but also how bright the crew are as a whole.However, you can keep track of the benefit of the crew by using modifiers for Int/Wis/Cha and keeping all the proficiencies in one place. Ships, being inanimate, only have Str/Dex/Con scores. One way to easily track that sort of thing is actually on the GoS Ship stats. Another way to expand on the UA/GoSm is by having the ship & crew kind of run as a single unit.