D&D 5E House rule for Victorian era aesthetic - no armor

[RangerWickett]

How will you handle gun damage? HP always seems rather odd with the way guns work, IMO.

Guns are basically crossbows that deal a little more damage but require an action to reload, so usually you'll just fire once per combat.

The game's already fantasy. If you can survive dragon breath with hp, you can survive guns.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just a question: why change the rules? After all, in a Victorian setting, it isn’t like there’s going to be a lot of weapons floating around beyond small blades, coshes, brass knuckles, canes, concealed long blades and small guns.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Guns are basically crossbows that deal a little more damage but require an action to reload, so usually you'll just fire once per combat.

Nitpick: by the late Victorian era of Sherlock Holmes, they had perfectly serviceable revolvers and repeating rifles. Those fire much faster than a bow, to say nothing of a crossbow.

But if you want to go the single-shot muzzle-loader route, here's a cheap trick I used in a 4E campaign: make the reloads longer. Like, a quasi-realistic 1 minute. Then characters are pretty definitely not going to shoot more than once per combat, and you can balance guns as "encounter powers" that deal as much damage as a good solid spell.

Just make sure to impose reasonable limits on how many guns one character can feasibly carry. It doesn't work so well if somebody decides to haul around a sack of forty pistols.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Just a question: why change the rules? After all, in a Victorian setting, it isn’t like there’s going to be a lot of weapons floating around beyond small blades, coshes, brass knuckles, canes, concealed long blades and small guns.

Depends where you are. "Victorian" in Britain is "Wild West" in the US.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Depends where you are. "Victorian" in Britain is "Wild West" in the US.

I’m well aware. But even so, people weren’t walking around armed and armored. The typical weapon you’d encounter would be a knife, a piece of farm gear, or something improvised, like a bag of rocks or coins, a whiskey bottle or a handy fire poker. Most towns had sheriffs confiscating weapons while within city limits.

Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West

Contrary to the popular imagination, bearing arms on the frontier was a heavily regulated business

www.smithsonianmag.com

So, on an average day- even for an adventurer or lawman (who might have caught a bullet to the knee)- fists, boots, knives, bottles and the like are going to be the norm.

Which means most combats are not going to be lethal. And most lethal combats- read gunfights- will be short and deadly.

Did some people have reinforced leather dusters and the like? Sure. Most of the protective clothing of the era was hardly armor, though. You might turn a blade strike or two, but you’re unlikely to slow down a .45.

Did some people flout the confiscation laws? We wouldn’t have had the shootout at the OK Corral if they didn’t.

It just seems that with the setting conventions, putting a lot of effort to rules revisions is something of a waste of time.

 

[DEFCON 1]

But if you want to go the single-shot muzzle-loader route, here's a cheap trick I used in a 4E campaign: make the reloads longer. Like, a quasi-realistic 1 minute. Then characters are pretty definitely not going to shoot more than once per combat, and you can balance guns as "encounter powers" that deal as much damage as a good solid spell.

I agree with this. This is pretty much what I did in my Curse of Strahd campaign, where one of the PCs found the rifle in one of the tombs in the catacombs. I wanted it to be special and really damaging, so I basically made it mechanically the same as a wand of lightning bolts-- it did really good 8d6 damage on a hit, but also only had a certain number of "charges" per day.

Now granted, since I treated the rifle as a magic item I allowed it to be used multiple times per fight as you would any normal wand... but if you wanted guns to be a thing in the setting, do what Cosmic suggests. Make them one-shot items that do like 3d12 (with no ability modifiers added). And they can only be reloaded out of combat.

If you add in some roleplaying aspects as to why not everyone just overloads themselves with guns (exceedingly loud firing, only can holster one or two at a time, illegal to open carry, not thought of as a "gentleperson's weapon" etc... you don't have to worry about turning the game into a series of "shoot once, drop gun, draw another" repetitions for every PC.

 

[FrogReaver]

Easiest is to simply replace the armour table with weapon resistant fabric. Keep everything else the same and just reskin all the amours.

 

[bedir than]

Except that shoot, drop, unholster, shoot again was quite popular in reality

I agree with this. This is pretty much what I did in my Curse of Strahd campaign, where one of the PCs found the rifle in one of the tombs in the catacombs. I wanted it to be special and really damaging, so I basically made it mechanically the same as a wand of lightning bolts-- it did really good 8d6 damage on a hit, but also only had a certain number of "charges" per day.

Now granted, since I treated the rifle as a magic item I allowed it to be used multiple times per fight as you would any normal wand... but if you wanted guns to be a thing in the setting, do what Cosmic suggests. Make them one-shot items that do like 3d12 (with no ability modifiers added). And they can only be reloaded out of combat.

If you add in some roleplaying aspects as to why not everyone just overloads themselves with guns (exceedingly loud firing, only can holster one or two at a time, illegal to open carry, not thought of as a "gentleperson's weapon" etc... you don't have to worry about turning the game into a series of "shoot once, drop gun, draw another" repetitions for every PC.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

It just seems that with the setting conventions, putting a lot of effort to rules revisions is something of a waste of time.

I'm with you on the history but I don't follow your logic here. You say nobody is wearing armor during this period, which is true. So doesn't that increase the demand for a rules revision allowing for practical unarmored combat?

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Except that shoot, drop, unholster, shoot again was quite popular in reality

I mean, yes and no. The "brace of pistols" was a thing. But it was kind of... hardcore. Ideally the rules would allow for a PC to go that route and carry, say, four to six guns. But it shouldn't incentivize that as the normal best practice in combat, because it definitely wasn't.

I'm almost tempted to steal an idea from video games and introduce the concept of "weapon sets". The idea being you can only have so many weapons ready for immediate use at a time. Can't strap sixteen different swords to your belt, can't carry twelve holstered pistols. So maybe the brace of pistols guy can have two pistols in "set 1", two more in "set 2", and a final two in "set 3" that he got from a class feature or feat. But then that's it for him: no backup melee weapon feasible. In contrast, another PC might instead have one pistol in "set 1" and then a sword-cane and cape in "set 2".