Guns in D&D - A Hot Take

@Celebrim

Wait, what? Longbow points go right through anything but double layer mail ('chain') without hardly slowing down. The rise of the longbow and the crossbow was a big reason behind the rapid development of plate armor. The longbow will absolutely penetrate a gambeson ('padded') without much difficulty. While a gambeson will dissipate a lot of the energy of the shaft, you're still going to end up with a barbed arrow sticking in you 4-5" deep. Remember, many 13th and 14th century knights would be wearing mail over a gambeson, the longbow would frequently penetrate the combination to a depth of 2-3" (driving cloth and broken rings into your body as well), especially at ranges under 75 yards. And given the rate of fire, once you started to get hit and were now in shock and debilitated, you'd quickly turn into a pin cushion.

Nope, it will not except eventually at point blank range and it just won't penetrate plate as many other weapons will not penetrate plate

The kinetic energy of a heavy crossbow (arbalest or such) is 2x or more than that of an English longbow so it might have somewhat better chances, but even the worst arquebus bullet will have kinetic energy 5x- 10x of a longbow.

As I stated the cause of death was often not the wound but an infection. So main purpose of medieval armor was not to get hit less but to not get hit at all

Why? Because of infection risk.

Of course in the beginning longbows would more often penetrate the lesser armor but as soon as good suits of full plate were available at least for knights and nobility they would only get taken our by a lucky arrow through the helmet slit or such, The hail of longbow arrows might be stressing or irritating and might kill their horse or their worse clad underlings but the knights were close to invulnerable.

I recommend you check up the vids of scholagladiatora on youtube this guy does talk a lot about all kinds of weapons and also missconceptions like longbow arrows or katanas cutting through hardened steel - they only do that in holywood.

@jasper matt Easton also did some videos on the battle of agnicourt and longbow use ethere and how it did affect various troops.

LuisCarlos17f said:

We can't avoid the classic confrontation about realism vs gameplay. The trouble is firearms are cheaper than magic...

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Are they really though? There isn't a lot of sign that being a wizard is more expensive than being a gunslinger.

and if gunslingers are allowed then they would replace the hand-to hand or no-ranged combat classes (paladin, monks or barbarians)

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It took a very long time in real life before armies without melee soldiers dominated battlefields.

I keep firearms out because I don't like what they do to low level play where firearms increase the lethality of the game in ways that aren't so great. But once the heroes are heroes, well a firearm isn't any bigger of a deal than a wizard with a wand.

My way of keeping things out is to point out that in a world with only four elements, there is no reason that chemistry works anything like our own. Anyone that decides to invent muskets, usually discovers that in a world with a 10,000+ year written history, this has been tried several times in the past and never works out right. The most stable known explosives are about as stable as raw nitroglycerin. They don't like shock. They don't like heat. And they have a tendency to get very touchy after a few days. What generally happens with any would be army of musketeers is that something happens to one of them, which sets off their explosive powder, and that causes a chain reaction that kills or cripples the whole army. Often they are dead before they even get into battle, but if they aren't, one or two spells sets off the entire bunch of them.

So firearms are considered something of a joke weapon - the classic pursuit of the mad and foolish.

Tinker's Firearm List

Simple Weapons
-Pistol (3d6)
-Musket (smoothbore) (3d8)
-Rifle (3d10)

If you fail a save vs fire damage all ballistic weapons on your person discharge. Once discharged it takes 1 minute to load or 30 seconds if you have martial weapon proficiency. If a ballistic weapon is submerged in water it cannot be used again until you spend a short rest cleaning it. The pistol can be fired with one hand at disadvantage. A bayonet can be added to treat a rifle or musket as a d8 piercing melee weapon.

The 1 minute loading time means they are essentially once-per-encounter wands. My game is low magic and low wealth so this seems like a good way to give the players something hard to abuse. General expectation if a party member ever buys one (prices being comparable to plate armor) is firing on the first round and then switching to their normal weapons. Good for hunting, good for commoners, bad for high-level bosses without having your sidearm at the ready.

Sacrosanct said:

I am with you and agree 100% with you up to here. But this is where you're mistaken:



Shotguns were not far more effective and used than pistols in the wild west, and people didn't grab them first. Only if you were a bartender and needed something to sweep up the entire room or a stagecoach guard--both cases designed to shoot someone within a few dozen feet. Pistols were much more common and used, between military issue, and in fights. All of the famous gunslingers used pistols over shotguns (like Wyatt Earp's Single Action Colt to Wild Bill's Navy Colt). People used shotguns because pioneers could only afford one gun, and the versatility of the shotgun is what made it popular. But in combat? Pistols were used way more than shotguns. Calvary men didn't have shotguns, they carried pistol sidearms. After the Civil War, many of these men kept their sidearms and used them rather than go out and get shotguns instead. You're also mistaken about the range and accuracy. The Colt Walker Revolver for instance had an effective range of up to 100m. Of course accuracy isn't going to be very good that far, but a shotgun looses all velocity after a few dozen meters, so even if you got hit by one, it wouldn't stop a man at that range. And shotguns didn't have as many shots before reloading. Hollywood glamorizes a lot, I'll give you that, but fact is, is that pistols were used extensively in the wild west, much more than shotguns.

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Are you sure this is the real reason? I've done my fair share of shooting and I'd basically never choose a pistol over a shotgun at a long range. My thoughts would be the popularity of pistols has a much better reason and that reason is also the same reason for the popularity of swords: They are easy as heck to carry. In a medieval war you should always have a sidearm if your spear breaks and that's where the sword comes in; same goes for modern warrior.
D&D doesn't account for this sort of thing; the average person can carry a cast-iron cauldron above their head all day with zero negative effects. I encourage everyone to check out the scholagladiatoria video 'Weapon & armour carrying when adventuring' and compare that to what's on your character sheet.

I do disagree [MENTION=26510]SAN[/MENTION]crosanct. Any revolver (other than those specifically designed to be used for hunting) has an actual effective range of about 20 meters.

A quick google search turned up this:

The revolver was designed for close-quarter fighting. An experienced gunman was considered proficient if he could hit what he was aiming at in a distance of fifteen yards. Since the rifling in the barrel twisted to the left, the bullet would also drift some 30 inches in 300 yards no matter how good the shooter was. Its maximum effective range was 75 yards. At fifty yards it was considered good shooting to group the shots in a six-inch circle. But it could be effective at long range. The army tested the Peacemaker and found that by allowing for trajectory, the point of aim at 150 yards should be 4 feet above the target and at 200 yards one had to line the sights up 8 feet above the target.

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Sure, officers were issued pistols, but, rank and file weren't often. They were using rifles and other long guns. And always did. I'm really not sure why you would think that pistols were more commonly used. Than shotguns? Sure. They didn't issue shotguns. But, if you were pulling out your pistol in a fight, the poop had already massively hit the windmill.

I'm going to stand by my statement that in the wild west, you'd see far, far more shotguns being used than pistols. But, pistols, like the sword before it, has the air of romance about it that makes it seem so common.

In the city a gun is easier to carry, but in the country or a wild zone a rifle could be used most of times to hunt animals or to kill predators.

In a fantasy setting cannons aren't necessary if giant crossbows with (alchemical no-magic) explosive arrows could be used in the battlefield. And the the lich could curse all this dungeons with an area effect what doesn't allow firearms to shoot. In a city a gun would be too noisy when a little hand magic crossbow what reload itself (like the spell "ghostly hand") is more inconspicuous.

LuisCarlos17f said:

In a fantasy setting cannons aren't necessary if giant crossbows with (alchemical no-magic) explosive arrows could be used in the battlefield.

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Such a crossbow had to be gigantic to have the same force of a cannon and thus basically immobile.

And when you already have very advanced warheads you switch to blackpowder rockets and not to cannons anyway.

Hussar said:

I do disagree [MENTION=26510]SAN[/MENTION]crosanct. Any revolver (other than those specifically designed to be used for hunting) has an actual effective range of about 20 meters.

A quick google search turned up this:



Sure, officers were issued pistols, but, rank and file weren't often. They were using rifles and other long guns. And always did. I'm really not sure why you would think that pistols were more commonly used. Than shotguns? Sure. They didn't issue shotguns. But, if you were pulling out your pistol in a fight, the poop had already massively hit the windmill.

I'm going to stand by my statement that in the wild west, you'd see far, far more shotguns being used than pistols. But, pistols, like the sword before it, has the air of romance about it that makes it seem so common.

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You can keep thinking that, but you’re wrong. Our targets on the pistol range for qualification in the military were 25 meters away, and you had to have your shot group in a tight center mass grouping circle to qualify. So I have no idea where you’re getting your 20m figure from. Making it up, I’m guessing. Even your own citation gives a six in grouping at 50 yards.

You’re also wrong about the usage of pistols vs shotguns. There are many reasons, but the bottom line is pistols were used exponentially more often then shotguns in fights. We have pretty extensive historical records of this. You can’t just go rewriting history based on your false assumptions.

Celebrim said:

Just curious, but how would you go about doing that? And which mythology do you have in mind?

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I think this is kind of the $64K question.

For me, "default" assumptions about the D&D mythology is that guns don't fit, ergo, they aren't relevant and this is a pointless conversation.

That said, I've realized it actually depends on the game's tone and/or setting. Being a political geek, I'm reminded of polls that show, say, Trump (used for convenience because it's current) winning or losing against "generic Democrat". The truth is that there's never a "generic Democrat" -- there's an actual race. (Please don't take the political bait. I tried to stay neutral, really.)

The same is true for guns in a D&D game. For me, they always "lose" in the context of "generic fantasy". They just don't fit my image of it. If you want to do Deadlands -- which could be considered fantasy -- that's totally different. They should probably be somewhat scary for even a 1st level "wizard", but a "gunslinger" class should be downright deadly and have scaling damage to show their badass-itude. Urban fantasy (WoD) usually comes along with some level of resistance, or just "magic is cooler", so we're back to "don't overdo it".

If the question is about simulation, then my answer is to try a different system. D&D sucks at simulation. It can do a fair nod at verisimilitude or can give a hand wave to suspension of disbelief, but not so much on actual simulation. Just looking at the fact that hit points are an abstraction that even includes outright missing but burning through the target's luck, you could say that rudimentary firearms do d6 damage not because every "hit" draws blood, but because that simulates the relative lack of accuracy combined with shock and awe when used against a peasant with 4 hit points -- either you miss (on the die), "miss" but make them wet themselves, or punch a fist-sized hole through their mid-section.

There are firearms in my world, however, the players have never used them due to maintenance and stealth. The only exception was during a mass combat when the thieves thought it would be fun to turn a cannon on an enemy formation and fire a charge loaded with the utensils taken from a cook's wagon.

For effect I treated it as a blade barrier that moved in a line through the formation. The thieves now have a personal enemy they call Captain Fork in the Eye. Who has come back to haunt them due to one thief treating his "apprentice' like a bag of (insert colourful metaphor).