D&D 5E Guns with a kick! Effect on game world?

GameOgre said:

Actually guys I'm not REALLY looking to make guns more lethal. That might be a side effect of what I'm looking to do though.

What I want is for armor to become (or start to become) more obsolete and to advance technology past the medieval era.

To give it a more renaissance feel.


Realistic was not the right word. I don't give two #$#$ about realism. What I am looking to do is advance things along to a later type time period than medieval.

Click to expand...

So what sort of changes do you want to evoke? Are you trying to advance one of the existing settings, or is it a homebrew?
What sort of thing is a "renaissance feel" for you?

Changes in the social laws and structure might do what you're after better than rules changes. Making it illegal (or even worse, a social faux pas) to wear armour, large shields or military weaponry in towns and cities would create the right feel; more people using civilian weapons like rapiers and light or no armours. In times of war of course, and possibly when adventuring outside civilisation, people would still strap on a breastplate and military sword if they owned one.

Increase the size of cities so there are room for several noble houses, and impose law by the ruler to prevent them from openly warring and you will get them feuding through covert actions and a duelling code.

Regarding firearms themselves:
Renaissance era musket balls are still stopped by armour. Indeed armour was "proofed" by firing a shot into it at short range. They are also often less accurate, and very much slower to load and fire than even crossbows, let alone longbows. The reason that they were adopted by almost all of the militaries was their capability for large-scale and sustainable warfare.

Both bows and crossbows require ammunition that is hand-made by a skilled craftsman. Iron or steel tips by a blacksmith, quality, straight wooden shafts, carefully aligned flights etc. These craftsman must be supplied and supported as part of the army and the components of the arrows or bolts bought, made and paid for - all for money that could otherwise go to more soldiers.

Gunpowder and musket balls can all be made cheaply in large quantities by relatively unskilled labour. This allows many more soldiers to be equipped and fielded in an army. With capability to march becoming more important, and all of a soldier's equipment being provided, armour for foot troops stops being common. With more emphasis on fighting at range, cavalry becomes a fast and mobile flanking unit rather than heavy elite shock toops, and so the requirement for armour for the upper classes reduces as well. A breastplate heavy enough to stop bullets that can be made to standard patterns to fit anyone replaces the full suit of plate and chain.

What I've been trying to figure out is how to have firearms be relevant alongside crossbows in a setting where firearms are rare but are not rare enough to be considered artifacts. I don't know about merely giving them more damage as the DMG seems to suggest. I read somewhere that someone gave firearms "exploding dice"---did lower base damage than those in the DMG, but if they rolled the maximum value on their dice (i.e. A 10 on a d10) they get to pick up the dice and roll once more.

Maybe look to Warhammer games to see how they balanced firearms etc in their fantasy game.
I would probably make the standard Dwarven Rifle a weapon with short bow range, maybe long bow damage and an extra long reload time. Make it a weapon typically used from afar in volleys or something you fire off and then close to melee.
But that's just spitballing.

Space Jockey said:

What I've been trying to figure out is how to have firearms be relevant alongside crossbows in a setting where firearms are rare but are not rare enough to be considered artifacts. I don't know about merely giving them more damage as the DMG seems to suggest. I read somewhere that someone gave firearms "exploding dice"---did lower base damage than those in the DMG, but if they rolled the maximum value on their dice (i.e. A 10 on a d10) they get to pick up the dice and roll once more.

Click to expand...

Really depends upon how you want them to be used. Adventurers probably have more use for pistols than long muskets.

A professional, well-trained soldier could get a musket shot off once every three rounds. Because the designers know that players don't want to be stuck doing nothing two rounds out of three, they fudged things a bit. Adventurers who specialise in ranged combat would probably use a bow for preference over a musket because it can still be fired faster.
Depending on how good you want muskets to be compared to bows, you would have to up the damage be a lot to make them good enough to compensate for that. Exploding dice aren't reliable enough to make up the difference generally.
An alternative would be to skip several centuries worth of R&D and jump straight to guns with multiple chambers or cartridges that would allow faster shooting.

Pistols however have an advantage in that you can carry several and use them as fire and forget weapons that you just reload after the fight. They should deal considerably more damage compared to their closest equivalent: the hand crossbow.

Hi [MENTION=57914]GameOgre[/MENTION], welcome to the internet!

Yes, firearms helped drive armor from the battlefield in real life. This is a well-established fact that, like other well-established facts, people like to dispute. Now, limited armor did persist because non-fire-arm weapons continued to be used, especially by cavalry, but it was a niche thing.

Yes, and more importantly, bypassing armor is an interesting way to distinguish firearms from other weapons. Otherwise they are just alt-crossbows and kind of pointless. You have to decide how: ignore X amount of armor, attack vs. dex save, attack vs. dex save with a bonus for really heavy armor, or something else.

NOW, what are the game implications? Combat gets deadlier and faster, which may also fit the flavor you want. Or, you give a bonus to non-armored or lightly armored defense (prof bonus, for example) that can partially offset that.

There will still be melee weapons, longbow fetishists (see previous post), and crucially, monsters! So still a reason to wear armor, at least for some characters.

As for monsters, its probably easiest to treat more mundane ones as armor wearers, and more mythic ones as bullet resistant, at least to the extent that they are resistant to anything.

Hope that actually helps.

I'd say D&D tech is already pretty Rennaissance. I think FR was described as about 16th Century in terms of tech. Remember stuff like the Three Musketeers was long past the Renaissance. Full plate, two handed swords, halberds, and rapiers, among other bits of anachronisms are not exactly Middle Ages tech.

That aside, if you want a game where armor plays less of a role, redefine what armor is. Light armor is light armor for the period; Heavy armor is whatever is heavy for the period. In my Greek myth D&D game, full plate is basically full Hoplite panoply, and light armor is a linen or leather aegis.

For your Enlightenment/Reformation era D&D game, just list light armor as a jack, medium armor as standard Infantry attire or brigandine, and Heavy a cavalryman's cuirass and call it a day. No reason to assign Full plate as the highest AC if nobody wears full plate in your game.

BTW, firearms removing of armor from the battlefield is considerably overstated. Here's some plate armor from the mid 17th Century. And the Polish Hussars were not the only ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars#/media/File:Polish_Hussar_half-armour_Winged_Riders.jpg

You might want to look at the Lamentations of the Flame Princess firearms rules. I think they have more of the feel your looking for, and would integrate pretty easily with 5e.

In my experience, one big barrier for in-game firearms using the DMG's Renaissance firearms rules was how expensive they are. Players just didn’t want to shell out the gold for that when they could just get a bow or crossbow.

In my campaign I use flintlock pistols. But I wanted to make sure that there was a good reason to use a pistol over a bow. So I gave flintlocks higher base damage and crit damage (X3 on a critical, which I think is reasonable given the damage they could do in real life), and allowed feats and special abilities to make better use of them.

Flintlocks have the advantage that they can be preloaded. So you can have a bandolier of several preloaded pistols. If you combine this with a special ability to quickly draw multiple guns in one turn, then you get really close to how real pirates fought in the day. This ability to make multiple attacks in a row, without having to spend a turn to reload first, is what I felt was essential to give guns that extra edge that makes them better than a bow.

Then there's also the Holdout Pistols that I added to the system. A Holdout Pistol can easily be concealed, unlike a bow. But the range suffers for it, and there are higher risks on a 1 (it could deal damage to the user if it explodes). For formal occasions where you are forced to disarm, a Holdout Pistol is an excellent solution to smuggle a weapon in. You can't do that with a bow.

Lastly there are special pistols, such as the Duckfoot Pistol (which fires multiple bullets in an area). Multi-barrel pistols, which can fire 2 to 4 bullets in a row, Pepperboxes which can fire between 4 to 10 shots without reloading, and heavy weapons such as grenade rifles and the Blunderbus.

Cap'n Kobold said:

Depending on how good you want muskets to be compared to bows, you would have to up the damage be a lot to make them good enough to compensate for that. Exploding dice aren't reliable enough to make up the difference generally.
An alternative would be to skip several centuries worth of R&D and jump straight to guns with multiple chambers or cartridges that would allow faster shooting.

Click to expand...

A breach loading rifle with a paper cartridge soaked in nitrates will burn nearly completely (the rest gets blown out the barrel with the rounds) and were a thing, very very briefly before brass cartridges were invented.

Pistols however have an advantage in that you can carry several and use them as fire and forget weapons that you just reload after the fight. They should deal considerably more damage compared to their closest equivalent: the hand crossbow.

Click to expand...

I'm always fond of a brace of pistols a la Pirates of the Caribbean. Seriously, those movies are actually pretty well structured for a D&D game.

If you want to reduce armor usage, then change the game rules around armor. Currently a low dex character has no choice but to wear armor, because it has a big upside (you don't die) and no downside (it weighs a bit and you are worse at stealth).

You can either more heavily penalize heavy armor (The stealth penalty also applies to other skills, certain weapons penetrate armor, social faux pas type stuff), but I personally think that just serves to make certain characters untenable. It stops you from having anyone with a low dex in a combat role, and boosts the power of dex beyond it's already pretty powerful state. That might be what you want if you would like to see duellists in leather wielding rapiers and zero two-handed weapons though.

I'd prefer something to make light or medium armor competitive with heavy armor on a character with mediocre dex. Strip the dex bonus to AC for light and medium armor and bump light and medium armor ACs up to match heavy armor ones (possibly excluding full plate). At that point heavy armor gains you nothing except a penalty to your skill checks. Job done and you don't force every character to boost dex just to survive.