Sparky McDibben
Adventurer
Now that's my kind of player!
Agree!
Alright, y'all, it's the MAIN EVENT!!!! The FLINTLOCK FESTIVUS! The BLACK POWDER BONANZA!!!! It's....the FIREARMS RULES!!!!!!!
And fortunately, y'all can follow along on this one! See, since they published the Core Rules, the dev team has kept iterating on the Firearms Rules, so they posted the updated rules on their subreddit. There's a GMBinder link in the post, so if you want, you can take a gander. For that reason, I'm not going to go into my usual depth on this, simply because you guys can go and look.
So basically, firearms do a ton of damage, but you don't get to add your Dex mod to the damage, and you have to spend some time reloading (see the Prime & Load action on page 4). You can use an attack to reload, per these rules, so a fighter after 5th level can fire with their first attack, then reload, but you can't move on any turn you've reloaded.
So what this does is create an interesting dilemma for the PCs. You can get a truly bonkers first salvo off, but then it's a decision point - do we switch to melee and wade in? Or draw a backup pistol and keep to the edges? Or chuck a grenade? Even better, each character will have a different set of incentives weighing on them. And your kit really matters in how you approach combat, too.
Now, firearms have several different properties which help balance them out. Let's run down a few of these:
Bayonet: You can use a bonus action to slap a big ol' pointy piece of metal on the end of it and stab a fool. The damage of the bayonet is listed in parens, and having a bayonet on something gives you disadvantage to ranged attacks with it
Capacity: How many balls does it hold (no, not bullets; bullets haven't been invented yet)
Misfire: The real controversial one. Every blackpowder weapon has a misfire score, expressed in numerically in parentheses. If your roll is under that misfire score, your weapon suffers a misfire. Note that misfire scores are either 1, 2, or 3, and a misfire simply means your weapon needs to be cleared with a tinker's tools check (DC 8 + Misfire score). Failing that check means your weapon is busted.
Misfires, then, are a way to balance out the intense damage of musketry by giving the player a gamble: You're betting that the really good damage from a blackpowder weapon is worth the small chance that the weapon might go off.
Now, the typical feedback on misfire mechanics is that they punish characters who use those weapons more than others (so fighters, for example, who with Action Surge at level 5 can potentially make two attacks with a musket). But you're not taking damage, and remember how there's a built in tension about what to do after your first volley? You can always switch to a backup weapon and go to town, and even better, that backup weapon can be another blackpowder weapon (though usually you can only get one long weapon).
So the devs balance out the misfire penalty on multiattack users by simply giving them more options than to keep attacking with a risky weapon.
There are also several weapons designed to be used in close combat - including shotguns with the Spread and/or Point-Blank properties. Note that unless you have the Quick Flint fighting style, you still have disadvantage to use these weapons when an enemy is within 5 feet, which means that those weapons are maximally effective only if you have taken that fighting style.
And that's really it for firearms - it's a pretty simple hack of the 5E rules. Instead of doing 1x damage every round, you're doing 2.5x - 3x damage every other round, with potentials for misfiring helping the dice keeping things interesting.
There are still several different subsystems we haven't gone over, like Wargear, armor, tools, and grenades, so let me cover these in brief.
Wargear is an interesting system whereby you can pick up extra bits of gear that give you specific, small bonuses. There are five "slots" for wargear: head, shoulder, chest, waist, and feet. Each has four options, each one giving bonuses that range from character-enabling to neat.
For example, the head slot could be taken up by a fur hat, which gives you advantage on saves to ignore the effects of weather. Or you could take the tricorne, which gives you +CHA modifier to your hit points. There are so many options on for these that the mix-and-match options are great. Even better, it's difficult to see someone being able to mix-and-match in a way that the resulting character looked strange, instead of cool. It's a fun little system and I love it.
Armor is mostly unchanged from 5E. The plate armor equivalent is a steel cuirass, which is the only heavy armor available. The game expects you to go for medium or light armor.
Tools are mostly unchanged as well, but there a few new items. One is a vent pick, which is really just adventuring gear. It lets you take a bonus action to try clearing a jammed weapon. Another is the munitions kit. This lets you manufacture your own ammunition and grenades, and there is some ambiguity here. If I'm running this, you need powder and lead to make ammo with this thing - no free reloads! Otherwise, this is a really cool way to ground a resource into the character's inventory. So if you really need to put the screws to the PCs, let them sacrifice their munitions kit to avoid damage...and then realize they can't reload until they replace it. Cue the Evil DM laugh...
There are like five kinds of grenades, everything from a regular grenade (portfire) to smoke grenades, to gas grenades (stinkpot), flashbangs (flash bombs), and incendiary (firepot). These all have Misfire scores around 2 (the smoke grenade's is only Misfire 1), with the portfire having Misfire 3.
The last thing are the artillery rules, and, well...who needs dragons? These bad boys will do up to 18d6 ballistic damage, and ballistic damage is not reduced by regular resistance to weapon attacks. So, uh, wish the barbarian "good luck," I guess! Even better, the PCs can take over artillery and start trying to use it. Don't get attached to your villains, folks!
Alright, next time we'll check out Gambits, the spells that are not spells!
