D&D 5E Guns and D&D - are we doing it wrong? An alternative

[Minigiant]

Look at many series.. . Most shots just miss the main persons. So depending on interpretation, HP could be seen as plot armor. Grazing shots at best. Sometimes they still act nearly healthy after being seriously shot after a short breather.

So it is never: shoot = dead. In most cases it is the last after many shots.

Ooooh there are many fans would hate the idea of PCs having raw plot armor.

But you could probably get away with 80s/90s Action movie "shot in the shoulder, bandage it up" for most people.

No more sillier than 10 goblin arrows in your back.

 

[Yaarel]

Guns - how to incorporate them in a D&D game?

(for clarity, this is for low tech guns - muzzleloaders, not modern metallic cartridge weapons)

So far the approach has been to have them be a bit like an "extra" crossbow - even more damage, even slower rate for fire. But then people want to shoot their guns all the time so there are feats/ways to load them faster, and now there are potential balance issues. Other ways include adding them some kind of armor piercing bonus, something that is easier to do in some rulesets than others (3.x did it well, 5e would be more clunky).

I've never been fully satisfied with this state of affair. On one hand, the rate of fire often becomes rather ludicrous compared to historical weapons (given the short 6 second rounds). On the other hand, the extra damage often isn't... that much more, for balance reasons. Having a gun pointed to your head is not much more threatening than a bow. So how do we make them "better", more... gunnish?

I think the answer can be found in an element of 4e. Guns are encounter powers. D&D battles are not the long, slow battles where ranks of gunners shoot at each other from a fairly great distance. They are intense, close combat skirmishes that go fast. So a gun using PC would fire a pistol or two at the start of a fight, then switch to other weapons. Because they are used once, rate of fire issues go away. And because they are used once, they can do more damage without being unbalanced.

I'm not sure how to balance this exactly, the devil is in the details, after all. But I think this would be a much more satisfying way to incorporate guns in a D&D game than the current approach.

The bullet piercing thru the body is moreorless the same as an arrow piercing thru the body or a sword piercing thru the body.

It isnt heavy damage that makes a firearm distinctive, it is its ability to ignore armor.

To ignore armor, the firearm can use the mechanic of a Save, not an Attack.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Now I remember an episode of the teleserie "Castle" with the title "the duel" where the weapon used in the crimen could be an acient gun, and the (funny) scene of the tests showed its aiming couldn't be very precise.

And if the players want modern firearms the DMs could create homemade catrips what would create little pieces of ectoplasm to block mechanisms.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Ooooh there are many fans would hate the idea of PCs having raw plot armor.

And yet pretty much every game with appreciable combat has hit points, which are exactly that.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Let's remember in the real life firearms require daily maintenance,

So do bows and swords. Why should guns get versimilituded into being more difficult to use in-game?

 

[Minigiant]

And yet pretty much every game with appreciable combat has hit points, which are exactly that.

D&D HP isn't plot armor. It's excuse armor. There's always an excuse why you don't die when you take HP damage in D&D.

Pre-Industrial weapons always had enough in-universe excuses to why they're weapons did not kill. Mostly being that

1. The weapons could be parried
2. The weapons could be dodged
3. The weapons could be blocked
4. The weapons could be tanked
5. The weapons could not be parried, dodged, blocked, nor tanked only killed if they hit major organs.

Guns get wonky because depending on genre they ignore these excuses more than Swords and Arrows. And then you have to rely on actual plot armor, luck and divine protection, more and more.

And genre is the biggest fracture in the D&D fanbase.

 

[M_Natas]

I think the biggest problem is, that People forget that D&D is a magical setting which offers different solutions to real world problems.

Every (arcane) caster has literally a gun at their fingertips with firebolt or Eldritch Blast, so a logical implementation would be thenatically more like the artillerist artificer subclass Eldritch cannon.

Why would you work with unreliable dangerous Gunpowder (or even invent that in a setting where magic is in abundance) when you can have reliable magic.

So let's get to it:

One Shooter:
Common magic item, magical gun

The most basic of magical guns. It is basically a tube with a magical trigger and some runes etched into it.

Charges: 1
Regenration: Long Rest
Activation: One Action to pull the triggers, uses up the 1 charge.
Effect: Make one range weapon attack (you are proficient with it) (so it uses your stats). Range 15/30ft. Target: One creature. On a hit: 3d4 force damage.
If you are wearing other magical guns on your person that still have charges, roll a d10. On a one, the other guns get triggers by the triggering of this weapon. You take 2d4 force damage per weapon and those weapons loose a charge.

Design intent: That is the One-Off Gun similiar to pirates giving off one shot before using the sabers. It has a high chance of killing a commoner and is a danger to first level characters, so it can be a go to weapon of intimidation for thugs, bandits and pirates. But higher level adventures don't really need to worry about that weapon. It's relatively high damage output and low range can be explained ingame that the enchantment is quite crude and basically just pushing raw magic at somebody.

Two-Shooter:
Uncommon magic item, magical gun

Two of the most basic of magical guns tied together. It is basically two tubes with a magical trigger and some runes etched into it.

Charges: 2
Regenration: Long Rest
Activation: One Action to pull the triggers, using up one or two charges
Effect:
1 charge: Make one range weapon attack (you are proficient with it) (so it uses your stats). Range 15/30ft. Target: One creature. On a hit: 3d4 force damage.
2 charges: every creature in a 15 foot cone in front of you must make a dex saving throw against DC 13 or take 3d4 force damage and be knocked prone. On a save they only take half damage.
If you are wearing other magical guns on your person that still have charges, roll a d6. On a one, the other guns get triggers by the triggering of this weapon. You take 2d4 force damage per weapon and those weapons loose a charge.

Design intent: What happens if we tie two together? More boom of course!

Force thrower
Rare magic item, magical gun

The first reliable and more advanced magical gun.

Charges: 7
Regenration: Long Rest
Activation: One Action to pull the triggers, using up 1 charge.
Effect: Make one range weapon attack (so it uses your stats, counts as a martial weapon). Range 30/60ft. Target: One creature. On a hit: 2d4 force damage.

Design intent: a typical more reliable magical gun. The fire is more focused so the range is longer, it can hold more charges and doesn't just throw all the energy at once, so the damage output is a little lower but can be done more often.

Even more guns ...

And now one would add feats and subclasses that improve on the guns.

Like a fighter subclass- the magical gunslinger. Features: the gunslinger can trigger a magical gun whenever he can make an attack, so extra attack allows him to make more attacks, can recharge the weapons on a short rest, can overload magical guns like the force thrower ect.pp.

So that was just a quick and dirty idea.
Picture were made with Bing Copilot.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

Why would you work with unreliable dangerous Gunpowder (or even invent that in a setting where magic is in abundance) when you can have reliable magic.

for the exact same reason guns replaced bows in real life: logistics.

even in settings with reliable magic, the general assumption is that learning magic is really hard and takes a long time (kind of like training to effectively use a longbow). learning to use a gun is neither.

now, learning to make a gun? that's a bit of a tossup, but i think it's relevant to note that gunpowder was (allegedly) originally created as an attempt at an elixir of immortality (i.e. a failed alchemical experiment). that sounds like classic wizard/artificer shenanigans to me. my guess, though, would be that making normal guns would probably be less difficult and expensive then making rune guns (and, by the stats you've given for them, absolutely more efficient - 7 shots a day max without specialist attendance is flat out pathetic, even for an arquebus or hand gonne).

or, you know, you can go the zeitgeist route and say "because COUNTRY SIZED ANTIMAGIC ZONE!" that works too, i guess.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Magic is too expensive to be used in the battlefield, but magic could create ectoplasm to water gunpowder and then this couldn't work rightly. Or an area spell with teletransport effect to defflect bullets.

Why not explosive arrows, or crossbows with a motor to reload itself? What if a player wants a pump-action shotgun?

Maybe firearms could be allowed but with a condiction, they are as expensive and rare like magic weapons +1, or said with other words, "no-magic" firearms would be banned.

If it was so easy, we had seen some UA for a future Gamma World sourcebook.

The battle of Bicocca is a clear example of how the firearms can change radically the battlefield.

Battle of Bicocca - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Vaalingrade]

D&D HP isn't plot armor. It's excuse armor.

It's plot armor. We just don't say so because we as a gaming culture are way too self-serious to accept that.