Why DON'T people like guns in D&D?

[Dannyalcatraz]

That said, core D&D seems to be all over the place when it comes to weapons, technology, and mythology. (We have bronze age slings next too late medieval long bows. We have monster out Greco-Roman myth next to the clerics loosely inspired by medieval religious orders.) Therefore, fitting gunslingers into D&D could be done without too much problem. It would be a different type of fantasy, but it would not be any less "realistic" than the "baseline" assumption of D&D.

Just an observation: we have that kind of situation in the real world.

When the European empires were all over Africa, you had warriors with assegai and leather shields facing regiments with firearms...just as the American West featured Native Americans fighting gunpowder-wielding settlers and scouts with tomahawk, bow, club and javelin (at least at first).

Watch video of street fights in the Middle East of today and you can see people using slings in skirmishes with police or soldiers armed with submachine guns or even APCs & Tanks.

Just because a weapon is "obsolete" doesn't mean it disappears from the battlefield forever, all over the world.

 

[Starbuck_II]

I agree the specifics are what really matter here. But if you have a guy with an axe and a guy with a gun squaring off, my money is on the one with the gun. My guess is at point blank range, you are likely going to be shot multiple times, not hit by a single bullet. All things being equal, I do think a gun is by far the more effective weapon. Though I can see how there would be specific circumstances where an axe may be preferable.

Guess you never saw the Patriot starring Mel Gibson: He kills 4 men with a axe + dagger when they got guns in one scene.

 

[Dausuul]

I agree the specifics are what really matter here. But if you have a guy with an axe and a guy with a gun squaring off, my money is on the one with the gun. My guess is at point blank range, you are likely going to be shot multiple times, not hit by a single bullet.

That depends on the gun, doesn't it?

If we're talking a modern automatic pistol, or even a 19th-century revolver, then I agree, the guy with the gun has the edge.

If we're talking a 17th-century flintlock pistol... not so much. The guy with the pistol gets one shot, with a weapon of limited accuracy and dubious reliability. If he doesn't kill or disable his foe (and his odds are not good--even with the best modern guns and plenty of training, people often miss at very short range), he'll never have the chance to fire another. His head will be rolling on the ground long before he can reload.

That's not to say the flintlock pistol wasn't a useful weapon, but outside of mass combat I'd expect it to serve the same function javelins do for a 4E fighter; a one-shot ranged option for use at the start of combat. If you get lucky and take the enemy down, great, you win. If you wing him, or force him to duck and cover, you've gained an advantage in the ensuing melee. If you miss, well, nothing lost by trying.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

That depends on the gun, doesn't it?

It doesn't. Watch.

But if you have a guy with an axe and a guy with a gun squaring off, my money is on the one with the gun. My guess is at point blank range, you are likely going to be shot multiple times, not hit by a single bullet. All things being equal, I do think a gun is by far the more effective weapon. Though I can see how there would be specific circumstances where an axe may be preferable.

If you have an armored guy with a spear and a guy who's completely unarmed, my money is on the guy with the spear. But in D&D, it doesn't work that way - the unarmed guy might VERY easily overpower and take down the armored guy.

This is a game where people can punch through armor. Realism does not, and has never, applied. Effective weapons have never mattered in D&D - this is the game with the double axe for crying out loud.

 

[Dausuul]

If you have an armored guy with a spear and a guy who's completely unarmed, my money is on the guy with the spear. But in D&D, it doesn't work that way - the unarmed guy might VERY easily overpower and take down the armored guy.

This is a game where people can punch through armor. Realism does not, and has never, applied. Effective weapons have never mattered in D&D - this is the game with the double axe for crying out loud.

In which case, guns are exactly as effective as the designers choose to make them, no more and no less. They could be as bad-ass as the greatbow or as wussy as the sling. No way to know until we see the stats, so there's no point speculating.

Unless you want to speculate on what guns should be like, in which case either we're back to discussing what's realistic (if going the verisimilitude route), or we're discussing what's balanced (if going the gameplay-first route).

 

[Salamandyr]

It doesn't. Watch.

If you have an armored guy with a spear and a guy who's completely unarmed, my money is on the guy with the spear. But in D&D, it doesn't work that way - the unarmed guy might VERY easily overpower and take down the armored guy.

This is a game where people can punch through armor. Realism does not, and has never, applied. Effective weapons have never mattered in D&D - this is the game with the double axe for crying out loud.

More like...if you have a fighter with a spear, and an unarmed monk, then the unarmed monk might overpower and take down the fighter.

D&D is designed to have very specific departures from reality. Outside those departures, reality is generally intended to hold forth. In general, in D&D "people" CANNOT "punch through armor", but a "person" might have a specific magical ability that allows them to punch through armor.

Just as in reality, we might say "people can't fly" while recognizing that, they can, if they have access to an airplane...if in D&D a bunch of peasants suddenly take to the air, we know something is very strange, because in D&D people can't fly, absent some outside agent like the Fly spell. Otherwise mundane NPC's who show a magical ability clues us in that something unusual is going on, to look for the hidden wizard, to check if they are possibly disguised fae, etc. If D&D was "unrealistic", we would have no basis for deciding if a given situation was unusual or not.

As to the double axe, it's neither an iconic D&D weapon, nor does it appear prior to 3rd edition. In 3rd it was considered an exotic weapon, requiring special training to use effectively, which I think is at least a nod to the idea it is not a plausible weapon.

 

[CleverNickName]

This is a game where people can punch through armor. Realism does not, and has never, applied. Effective weapons have never mattered in D&D - this is the game with the double axe for crying out loud.

And don't even get me started on that absurd spiked chain.

I've never had a problem with guns in my D&D game...I remember houseruling them into my BECM games back in the day (a double-damage crossbow that took 2 rounds to reload.) I like the new-world, swashbuckling flavor that they bring to the game.

Cannons and muskets? Yes please.
Dragonborn and warforged? Thanks but no.

 

[Stoat]

More like...if you have a fighter with a spear, and an unarmed monk, then the unarmed monk might overpower and take down the fighter.

D&D is designed to have very specific departures from reality. Outside those departures, reality is generally intended to hold forth. In general, in D&D "people" CANNOT "punch through armor", but a "person" might have a specific magical ability that allows them to punch through armor.

Kinda. If an unarmed 5th level fighter goes up against a 1st level Fighter with a spear, the 5th level fighter will win nearly every time. An unarmed 10th level fighter will murder a 1st level spearman.

D&D combat is quasi-realistic. It's built to model heroic fiction and action movies.

I like firearms mostly for flavor reasons. I'm more interested in running games set on the frontier of larger, civilized, pseudo-renaissance empires than I am in running games set in less civilized, "points of light" pseudo-medieval kingdoms.

Also, its fun to give goblins kegs of gunpowder.

 

[Salamandyr]

Kinda. If an unarmed 5th level fighter goes up against a 1st level Fighter with a spear, the 5th level fighter will win nearly every time. An unarmed 10th level fighter will murder a 1st level spearman.

D&D combat is quasi-realistic. It's built to model heroic fiction and action movies.

I like firearms mostly for flavor reasons. I'm more interested in running games set on the frontier of larger, civilized, pseudo-renaissance empires than I am in running games set in less civilized, "points of light" pseudo-medieval kingdoms.

Also, its fun to give goblins kegs of gunpowder.

But that's just the same thing holding true. Certain, exceptional people can do improbable things, but they can't do impossible things without some outside agency that allows it. An unarmed man defeating an armed one is improbable, but not impossible. Police, martial artists, and such all train on how to do just that. Punching a hole through full plate armor, or flying requires magic though.

I don't really care about guns in d&d one way or the other, they don't fit into my preferred campaign milieu because technologically it's more dark ages/fall of Rome than high Renaissance/Enlightenment. Rules-wise, I've never run across a game that really made firearms feel like a fun addition. They've just sort of been tacked on, crossbows with bigger dice.

For 4e, I'd probably handle them as an extra encounter power that does 1d10 per tier+Dex, modifiable as per a ranged basic attack, with an Effect:target grants combat advantage until the end its turn, to represent ducking/flinching.

 

[Desdichado]

While people do survive gunshots daily, if you look at ER & domestic violence stats*, you'll see that gunshots ARE deadlier. Its a lot easier to deliver a fatal blow with a single gunshot than with a single stab or slash.

Then again, not much domestic violence happens today involving swords, does it? Also, modern guns are not equal to the kinds of early firearms that people generally think of when they talk about adding firearms to D&D. I think we're talking about piratey flintlocks and Dumas' muskets, not AK-47s and SiGs.

Be that as it may, I'm not interested in real world statistics about domestic violence with guns and how that impacts my D&D games. My D&D games are about emulating action movies and swashbuckling fantasy stories, and in action movies and swashbuckling fantasy stories, getting shot isn't any more or less lethal than getting slashed with a sword, on average.

I think all this detailed historical analysis is a bit of a red herring for most people actually. D&D isn't about emulating reality, it's about emulating a genre of fiction. Granted, it's grown beyond that, and picked up all kinds of weird stuff from other genres while it's been at it, but at its heart, that's what D&D tries to do. Why people suddenly abandon that and start talking about all kinds of real world details when firearms come up is a disconnect for me. To me, with or without firearms, D&D still does basically the same thing. It emulates swashbuckling sword & sorcery action-oriented, pulp-aesthetic fantasy.