Guns in D&D - A Hot Take

[jasper]

In the dmg Pistol d10 pierce Ammo 30/90 loading. Or you could reskin a hand crossbow and make it simple. I will worry about all the LOUD for reign sicks, ball lick sticks, and other stuff being accurate when I can get a job as the town's dragon poop scooper.
Sign Daf E Duck.

 

[Celebrim]

Mechanical realization:
Muscat 1d12
Pistol 1d10

Seems workable.

RoF 1/rd maybe a feat like crossbow expert.

Rates of fire that high weren't achieved until the mid 19th century. Depending on the ignition technology in use, the rate of fire might vary between 1 per 10 rounds and 1 per 3 rounds.

Ban all inferior ranged weaponry especially bows, you may keep crossbows though. Reason: They do not penetrate armor anymore.

Well, that's not a ban so much as a nerf. Are you suggesting that characters in the setting are prevented from picking up a sword or spear?

Otherwise you will have a conflict in dpr with bows which will turn out highly unrealistic

Well, the English did field a regiment of longbowmen at Waterloo, precisely on account of the longbow having a much higher rate of fire than any period firearm. The longbow managed to keep up with musket technology into the 19th century, when the rifled miniball managed to almost completely obsolete it by finally producing a firearm that could be more accurate at long ranges than the longbow without requiring nearly as much training. And, training (and logistics) were the real deciding factor up to that point. No nation of Europe could field longbowmen in Numbers except England and Wales. And to field them in large numbers required a massive cultural investment. It was estimated to require 10 years of weekly practice beginning in childhood to produce a longbowman capable of employing the bow with sufficient strength and skill to achieve the desired effect. Even for England, it was increasingly easy to levy and train an army in the use of the musket.

In my own 3.X inspired homebrew, longbows are exotic weapons, requiring a feat to employ proficiently. A musket is a simple weapon that even a peasant militia could employ.

The D&D rules are all wrong I think for making guns a weapon the PC's would favor. I think you'd have to turn D&D combat on its head to make firearms the weapon of heroes, but then again I've never seen a setting where firearms are treated remotely realistically where you can sustain a heroic narrative with lots of combat that is central to D&D's thing. The old saying goes "God created man and Sam Colt made them equal." The firearm has a way of leveling the field of battle in a way that was abhorrent to warrior castes that owed their dominance to superior training and armor. If you want to talk mythology of the firearm, Kirosawa's 'Seven Samuraii' would be one place I'd start.

 

[Sacrosanct]

And, really, it's the iconography more than physics that has driven weapon stats in D&D since day 1. Why is the long sword the best weapon in AD&D? Granted, that's arguable, but, largely, it really is - best damage for a single handed weapon, best weapon vs armor adjustments for the damage it does, most common magic weapon etc. Because, well, the game is based on fantasy genre works and everyone and their mother in the genre uses a sword.

Realistically, a longsword should be far, far less effective than it is presented. Your sword was your weapon of last resort, by and large with spears and various other weapons being employed first because they were far more effective weapons.

I am with you and agree 100% with you up to here. But this is where you're mistaken:

When we're talking about guns, the same thing tends to apply. Sure, if we're talking wild west, guns are popular. But, shotguns were far, far more effective and more commonly used than pistols which were wildly inaccurate weapons. It would be much more likely that someone heading to a gunfight grabs a shotgun than a revolver. And, really, shotguns would probably be more commonly carried as well. Pistols in the mid- to late 19th century were just not a terribly effective firearm. If I'm more than about 50 feet away from you, you might as well use harsh language because you're not going to hit me.

Shotguns were not far more effective and used than pistols in the wild west, and people didn't grab them first. Only if you were a bartender and needed something to sweep up the entire room or a stagecoach guard--both cases designed to shoot someone within a few dozen feet. Pistols were much more common and used, between military issue, and in fights. All of the famous gunslingers used pistols over shotguns (like Wyatt Earp's Single Action Colt to Wild Bill's Navy Colt). People used shotguns because pioneers could only afford one gun, and the versatility of the shotgun is what made it popular. But in combat? Pistols were used way more than shotguns. Calvary men didn't have shotguns, they carried pistol sidearms. After the Civil War, many of these men kept their sidearms and used them rather than go out and get shotguns instead. You're also mistaken about the range and accuracy. The Colt Walker Revolver for instance had an effective range of up to 100m. Of course accuracy isn't going to be very good that far, but a shotgun looses all velocity after a few dozen meters, so even if you got hit by one, it wouldn't stop a man at that range. And shotguns didn't have as many shots before reloading. Hollywood glamorizes a lot, I'll give you that, but fact is, is that pistols were used extensively in the wild west, much more than shotguns.


The most popular firearms of the Wild West era in terms of usage were:
Colt Single-Action Army.
Colt 1851 Navy.
1873 Springfield Trapdoor.
Winchester Model 1873.
Double-Barreled Shotgun.
Sharps Rifle.
Smith & Wesson Model 3.
Winchester 1886

 

[Coroc]

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] #62

You are right with your statements about Longbow RoF vs loadedweapons aka crossbow medieval gun etc.

What you do not take into account is that the Longbow is totally ineffective versus any sort of plate armor, mostly ineffective vs. chain and even with padded armor you would stand good chances to be unhurt if the longbow hit you on a covered body part.

Remember back then injury meant high risc of infection and people dying from arrows which according to some historians was the highest fatality cause in warfare back then died because of

a) The arrow caused a scratch which good infected

b) The arrow did lethally hit some unarmoured area of the body (only likely if there were many unarmoured troops or many arrows flying)

What they did certainly not die from was

c) the Famous English Longbow with a Bodkin arrowhead (surpassed in terms of penetration power only by the fanboi Katana with 5000 foldings of steel)
punching a hole in the (partially pistol bullet proof for later renaissance) plate armor and killing its owner. Nope that just did not happen, like never.

A bullet from a primitive firearm would do just that. As you state correctly, usable by a person with only little training.

So D&D combat is not very realistic also in terms of crossbow RoF.
Also there are balance issues and you got a round by round combat.
All of these lead to compromises somewhere if you try to integrate primitive firearms. Either you need at least give the m the highly unrealistic RoF of crossbows or some other gimmick. Would you just up the damage say they do 4d10 but need 4 rounds to reload, Then they will only be used as a opener for a first round of combat, because sitting out 4 rounds in 5e means the combat might be over already. So if you want to introduce them in a meaningful way, at least make them stand out in terms of usefulness versus other ranged weapons.
e.g. give them an advantage for the ini roll make them ignore armour, exploding dice etc.
If you do not care for this then the following might happen in your game:
Let us take a standard situation in many movies and put that on a RP base:
One guy threats the other with a loaded gun
It would be ridiculous to do this in 5e when the gun only did 1d8 on a standard attack Rolland then need some round or two to reload. Every level 2 and up PC would just ignore this threat.

 

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=4937]What you do not take into account is that the Longbow is totally ineffective versus any sort of plate armor, mostly ineffective vs. chain and even with padded armor you would stand good chances to be unhurt if the longbow hit you on a covered body part.

Wait, what? Longbow points go right through anything but double layer mail ('chain') without hardly slowing down. The rise of the longbow and the crossbow was a big reason behind the rapid development of plate armor. The longbow will absolutely penetrate a gambeson ('padded') without much difficulty. While a gambeson will dissipate a lot of the energy of the shaft, you're still going to end up with a barbed arrow sticking in you 4-5" deep. Remember, many 13th and 14th century knights would be wearing mail over a gambeson, the longbow would frequently penetrate the combination to a depth of 2-3" (driving cloth and broken rings into your body as well), especially at ranges under 75 yards. And given the rate of fire, once you started to get hit and were now in shock and debilitated, you'd quickly turn into a pin cushion.

Plate was designed to resist this, but it was itself also penetrable, particularly plate of the quality available to all but the most wealthy which would have gaps, thin flat areas, and lower quality steel. Coat of Plates ('Brigandine' in D&D parlance), which modern D&D doesn't really have, largely replaced mail coats in the infantry precisely because they would stop arrows from penetrating reliably and could be constructed cheaply. Plate over gambeson would likely stop arrows from penetrating, but needle point arrows designed for penetration still can punch through plate at close range - albeit likely without enough force left to seriously hamper their target and not consistently - an occasional scratch as you put it.

D&D hasn't attempted to model this at all since 'weapon vs. AC modifiers' dropped out of favor, which incidentally (moving back to some earlier comments) did attempt to model the relative futility of using an arming sword (D&D's inaccurately named 'longsword') against plate armor.

As for the primitive fire arm, you might be surprised that for all but the heaviest firearms available, the results would have been similar. Wheellock muskatoons and pistols had muzzle energy in foot pounds not that much higher than longbows (the pistol) and windlass operated crossbows (the musketoon), and plate armor of the period was designed to deflect these devices. Indeed, plate was 'proofed' by firing a pistol at the breast from point black range. The resulting dent proved to the customer that it could deflect a bullet.

Remember back then injury meant high risc of infection and people dying from arrows which according to some historians was the highest fatality cause in warfare back then...

In WW1 as well, for that matter. Almost everyone that is injured dies from one of three things, none of which is modelled by D&D (or any other commonly played RPG) - shock, blood loss and infection. Until your are modelling blood loss, either from obvious wounds or internal bleeding, and modelling infection you aren't really trying to be realistic. And RPGs, even those with pretensions of realism, really aren't trying to be realistic, because it generally doesn't make for a fun game.

All of these lead to compromises somewhere if you try to integrate primitive firearms. Either you need at least give the m the highly unrealistic RoF of crossbows or some other gimmick. Would you just up the damage say they do 4d10 but need 4 rounds to reload, Then they will only be used as a opener for a first round of combat, because sitting out 4 rounds in 5e means the combat might be over already. So if you want to introduce them in a meaningful way, at least make them stand out in terms of usefulness versus other ranged weapons.
e.g. give them an advantage for the ini roll make them ignore armour, exploding dice etc.

This decision, nominally motivated by realism, results in an ahistorical reality where the firearm obsoletes other weaponry in short order, rather than being one component of a combined arms force as it actually was right up until the late 19th century (though it would take many years before tactics on the battlefield would catch up to this fact). Hand gonners, musketeers, and fusiliers did not drive other sorts of troops from the battlefield immediately. The weapons those troops employed had many disadvantages. Typically what you saw developed was an assault force wielding firearms, protected by a screen of pikemen or other troops that could provide protection while the firearm wielders clumsily reloaded their slow firing and frequently inaccurate weapons.

If you do not care for this then the following might happen in your game: Let us take a standard situation in many movies and put that on a RP base: One guy threats the other with a loaded gun
It would be ridiculous to do this in 5e when the gun only did 1d8 on a standard attack Rolland then need some round or two to reload. Every level 2 and up PC would just ignore this threat.

Yes, but this example is ridiculous. While what you say is true, the same problem occurs with trying to model a movie scene where a man holds a knife to the other mans throat. A knife slitting your throat will kill you just as quickly and maybe more quickly than a gun shot wound, yet if you follow the RAW strictly this attack only does 1d4 damage and isn't necessarily lethal versus a peasant damsel.

The problem with your example isn't how the gun is modelled, but how damage generally is modelled. D&D's ablative hit points only conceptually work as a model if fortune is in the middle of the action/resolution cycle. The problem with things like falling, exposure to lava, and someone getting a drop on someone with a weapon is that we've removed ourselves from that model, and instead put fortune at the end. In other words, we have already set forth what happened and now we are trying to model it. But D&D's hit point model depends on modeling first and then only afterwards setting forth what happened. It simply can't deal with a process where what happened is known and we try to then simulate the results. Thus, D&D has always applied something like a 'coup de grace' exception to the rules, where if the outcome is actually known, the normal rules of damage simply don't apply - the character is simply dead. However, in the interest of not making this routine, the game typically does not apply many exceptions and makes achieving the conditions of that exception difficult.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I love guns and I love D&D but I hate mixing them, especially with D&D abstract HP mechanics which are quite honestly not very good at modeling the effects of deadly weapons past L1.

Though that holds for swords and bows so it shouldn't bother me more with guns.

 

[jasper]

[MENTION=6895991]Coroc[/MENTION] What you do not take into account is that the Longbow is totally ineffective versus any sort of plate armor, mostly ineffective vs. chain and even with padded armor you would stand good chances to be unhurt if the longbow hit you on a covered body part...
I was talking to my old buddy Henry while he was deep into a fifth. He said something about longbows and the French wines of Agincourt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We can't avoid the classic confrontation about realism vs gameplay. The trouble is firearms are cheaper than magic and if gunslingers are allowed then they would replace the hand-to hand or no-ranged combat classes (paladin, monks or barbarians).

Lots of time fans have forgotten the idea of enemies with firearms but not by the PCs, for example primitive tribe of na'vis living in a jungle and being invaded by goblins with their steampunk mechas.

Somebody could try to create low level tricks against firearms, for example a piece of ectoplasm to block canons or to water gundpower. And in a fantasy world some supernatural factions wouldn't want firearms by humanoids (giants, dragons, lord feys, war deities, knight orders..). The firearms couldn't work in the cities by a divine curse with an area effect. A war deity to punish firearms in the battlefield could summon an horde of petitioner warriors from the Walhalla with a bulletproof immunity, or to animate a squad of constructs only could be damaged by melee weapons.

 

[Sacrosanct]

We can't avoid the classic confrontation about realism vs gameplay. The trouble is firearms are cheaper than magic and if gunslingers are allowed then they would replace the hand-to hand or no-ranged combat classes (paladin, monks or barbarians).

Lots of time fans have forgotten the idea of enemies with firearms but not by the PCs, for example primitive tribe of na'vis living in a jungle and being invaded by goblins with their steampunk mechas.

Somebody could try to create low level tricks against firearms, for example a piece of ectoplasm to block canons or to water gundpower. And in a fantasy world some supernatural factions wouldn't want firearms by humanoids (giants, dragons, lord feys, war deities, knight orders..). The firearms couldn't work in the cities by a divine curse with an area effect. A war deity to punish firearms in the battlefield could summon an horde of petitioner warriors from the Walhalla with a bulletproof immunity, or to animate a squad of constructs only could be damaged by melee weapons.

I imagine the heat metal spell would have disastrous results to a firearm Boom!

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Let's imagine with only a simple catrip like a match in the right, or wrong, place, and then the powder keg, or the barrel next to the canon and....... BOOOOM! bye, bye, cowboy! Other options could be throw a stone with a magic rune of teletransportation to send squads, or animal packs, illusory magic to create lure, or screen as smoke grenades to hide soldiers.