D&D (2024) Firearms to be made a fixed part of the game, new Weapons Rules

[Emberashh]

You can't give a random, easily replaceable peasant the ability to cast fireball or 3000 years of elven archery. You can give them a musket and point them in a direction for massed fire.

Sure, but then you have to explain why warfare progressed to using peasants instead of knights, gentry, nobles etc.

In real history that came about as a result of crossbows and, eventually, firearms, but real history didn't have better alternatives.

And as Ruin noted, thats assuming warfare even resembled the medieval period in the first place. I personally think it would have, but even that would still have negated the concept of a firearm taking hold just because the context would be so different for what war is like, even if it'd otherwise resemble real life.

 

[Emberashh]

LOL this is amazing. I'd never heard this. Certainly it does seem like the slow-casting and limited magic of the HP series would be dealt with pretty swiftly by repeating firearms. You'd need something more dangerous, like Grishaverse Small Science to deal with gun.

Also gives a pretty dark twist to why the Killing Curse is so unlike most other magic in the series, which while it can be deadly often takes a while to get there, which makes the development of an insta-kill spell all the more prudent when you're dealing with guns.

Timelines don't really match up though, but it makes for a vastly more interesting worldbuild than what the author gave us.

 

[Vaalingrade]

and that right there is the death of creativity and progress...

Not really. I mean to be honest, I'm pretty sure the 70% threshold is there to make sure that most of what the designers want will get through while filtering out what would be financial suicide and probably should have been caught by the twelve year old with an internet connection every company should have on hand to point out the obvious bad ideas.

 

[Horwath]

It can also be said however that innovation doesn't normally result from purposeless diligence. As long as something works, there generally isn't a real drive to innovate, but at the same time if some newfangled thing appears that isn't terribly good, then theres little value in trying to improve it either when theres already alternatives.

Firearms in fantasy settings, logically speaking, probably wouldn't ever be invented, and would probably never catch on even if they did, just because it would take a couple of centuries of constant innovation before they weren't hot garbage compared to a fireball spell or an arrow from an Elf that spent 3000 years practicing.

That being said though it does introduce a pretty peculiar chance at a different intepretation, where firearms are actually superior to magic.

Theres a fan theory out there for Harry Potter that suggests the Wizards are in hiding because the Muggles won some unspoken of war in the past, and the Wizards basically gaslight themselves into thinking they're the superior ones.

The idea here being that the war likely happened around the time Muggles started using guns, and so Wizards, having otherwise human reflexes, couldn't keep up even with magic.

But that takes us down a road in fantasy that even the world that inspired the thought doesn't really go down.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

It's funny how it's always "creativity and progress" when someone likes the thing that loses the popularity contest, and "just reflecting what people want" when they don't like it lol.

yeah good thing I keep the same energy for all popular vote creative purpose... I just like the end result more when it goes my way, not that I think the method is better.

I mean, I don't disagree that the 70% method is dumb, but it's what they're doing, and if that's why there's no psionics, well, frankly guns can eat it (or not) for the same reason.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Not really. I mean to be honest, I'm pretty sure the 70% threshold is there to make sure that most of what the designers want will get through while filtering out what would be financial suicide and probably should have been caught by the twelve year old with an internet connection every company should have on hand to point out the obvious bad ideas.

I disagree it gives the knee jerk reaction against a much bigger boost then the 'lets see how this works'

 

[Oofta]

That kind of assumes there are big, slowly-manuevering open-field battles going on though, and I'm not sure that's a sound assumption if fireballs and so on are going off.

Also it seems like developing a spell to detonate gunpowder at range would be literally the first thing a Wizard would do when muskets got on the scene.

Detonate or just dampen. Imagine a "soggy" spell that caused all enemy guns to become unreliable and make the amount of time when you lit the fuse to when it actually exploded uncertain. That, or perhaps things like fire newts think gunpowder is a delicacy and will do anything to get it. I do something similar with steam engines, it attracts steam mephits like moths to a flame.

All assuming, of course, that the chemical reactions work like they do in the real world.

 

[JohnSnow]

Just to toss something into this, magic in the Dresden Files series is not totally dissimilar to 5e (his spells are a little less D&D-ish, but Harry is basically a bog-standard D&D Wizard living in 21st-century Chicago), and Harry pretty much admits that in many ways, technology beats magic. Which is why he carries a revolver as one of his sidearms.

Sure, there are things magic can do that technology can't, but firearms are devastatingly good at what they do, and basically the entire magical community acknowledges that mortals could overwhelm them with a combination of superior technology and numbers.

Jim Butcher has actually thought some of these things though to a degree that Rowling simply never did.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Detonate or just dampen. Imagine a "soggy" spell that caused all enemy guns to become unreliable and make the amount of time when you lit the fuse to when it actually exploded uncertain. That, or perhaps things like fire newts think gunpowder is a delicacy and will do anything to get it. I do something similar with steam engines, it attracts steam mephits like moths to a flame.

I love all of this and may well steal it for future!

 

[Tonguez]

Just to toss something into this, magic in the Dresden Files series is not totally dissimilar to 5e (his spells are a little less D&D-ish, but Harry is basically a bog-standard D&D Wizard living in 21st-century Chicago), and Harry pretty much admits that in many ways, technology beats magic. Which is why he carries a revolver as one of his sidearms.

Sure, there are things magic can do that technology can't, but firearms are devastatingly good at what they do, and basically the entire magical community acknowledges that mortals could overwhelm them with a combination of superior technology and numbers.

Jim Butcher has actually thought some of these things though to a degree that Rowling simply never did.

Tim Powers On Stranger Tides utilises the concept of cold iron dampening magic, so itvwas the widespread adoption of Steel that lead to loss of magic in the old world (Europe). Magic users in that setting mush be careful to avoid iron - including iron pots and pans

Guns are interesting in as much as when fired they become hot iron then deliver cold shot to the target