Flamestrike
Legend
And that's with a solid hack, with a very sharp and reaaonably heavy sword, that hits the arm flush.
D&D 5E Why do guns do so much damage?
JiffyPopTart
Bree-Yark
If the sword guy is getting to dash in within a few feet and deliver a killing blow BEFORE they get shot by the gun guy...then the gun guy can also dash in and bear hug the swordsman while sticking the pistol in his gut and pulling the trigger...
Or maybe you just can compare how lethal something is IRL by limiting it to one very specific scenario and calling it a day.
My take on the OPs original question would be....why did the group of people in your world that invented firearms do so? If they are in all respects the same as the crossbow...why would I want to take all the drawbacks proposed to use one without any benefits to offset them?
In my campaign I have firearms. They were developed by gnomes to allow them to punch above their weight and thus do one die step more damage than the equivalent crossbow. The powder creation process is quasimagical and the results are only usable by gnomes (and hobgoblins because of campaign plot advancent reasons).
The actual impetus for me introducing firearms in my campaign was as an enticement for the players to pick a gnome as a martial character option.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Literally no group in the world is as accurate with firearms in a close up fight as you suggest...every beat cop is. And cops are...egregiously inaccurate in life or death situations. They mostly win shootouts by having more bullets, more shooters, and better cover. The firearm hit rate of the vast majority of humans in a fight is worse than the hit rate of first time shooters at a range.
And if someone gets their arm cut by a sword they just blocked or deflected with their arm...they aren’t shooting anyone in the following moment. Instead, they’re getting stabbed or cut again. And it’s not anywhere as hard to hit someone in the face with a sword as it is with a knife.
Range is the primary reason guns became effectively the only battlefield weapon. Even ease of use pales in comparison to being just as lethal hundreds of feet away.
And if your gunman is at the ready with gun drawn and aimed at the swordsman...you’ve skipped to the last moments of the scene, one way or another. You’re manipulating the hypothetical in order to aggressively miss the point.
I think the more nuanced question is.... why would adventurers use firearms?
The historical answer for why the world would is simple....firearms are easy. I can take a farmer and turn him into a soldier (aka a 0th level character can basically have an actual to hit bonus). In theory doing the same with bows would require turning them into a "leveled character" which in most worlds should be pretty difficult.
The other reason....is range. In a battlefield, range wins. Doesn't matter if the bow or crossbow is better....if I shoot first (because I have longer range) and kill you.... well then doesn't matter how much more damage or more accurate the xbow is....your still dead (because again this is an army of like 0th level characters with a few HP each).
But for adventurers its a whole different story, as rarely are adventurers having encounters at extreme ranges, and they are all highly skilled with weapons (even the book nerf wizard knows how to fire a xbow well). So for them.... honestly I don't think adventurers would want musket type weapons as their mainstays.... too much trouble. They are special forces, not mass cannon fodder troops, they would want to use the best weapons...and early firearms ain't it.
So if you want firearms to appeal to adventurers (and mainstay the really slow firing of an early musket)....than I agree damage is going to be your lever here. The party blasts with their musket for the big initial damage, than swaps out for other weapons. Not historically accurate, but if you actually want PCs to use muskets than that's the simplest way to do it.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Pretty much this. The arm probably isn’t removed, though, just disabled.
Defending against a sword with anything other than a shield or another sword is hard. Hell it’s hard to do with a polearm, one on one. You basically have to be a better athlete than the swordsman, and keep them at bay until they flag and you can get lucky. Assuming equal training and talent.
Someone who has trained to sprint and lunge at off angles, within about 20 ft or less of a gunman, both having to ready their weapon and go for the attack, both equally trained, at best the gunman has even odds of living or dying.
Hitting the object in someone’s hand, when they are trying to hold it still, is not that hard. I trained to do it with a practice sword as a party trick. Hitting a thing in an enemy’s hand aside then stabbing them is...sword fighting.
GreyLord
Legend
To add to this, not sure if many here have seen someone hit by firearms.
A small caliber weapon may not be all that damaging, but the bullet still can tumble if it does not exit. A tumbling round does a LOT of damage internally, probably FAR MORE than any hand weapon unless you can just stick it in and have long enough to cut someone from sternum to groin.
I think it was the tumbling weapon that caused so much damage on Reagan on the assassination attempt. The round not only hit him, it tumbled around in him. This is also another reason hollowpoints are normally outlawed, far greater chance that they explode on impact and tumble through a victim.
Now, in earlier times they actually used quite a bit of powder and the guns were pretty HIGH caliber comparatively. A high caliber "bullet" that is simply designed as such will go right through a person. This is true. The hole will depend on the Caliber.
More powder and larger ammunition brings devastating injuries. Ever seen a hand sized hole in someone...or an animal that you hunted. This of course is if you use a rather HIGH caliber weapon, but guns that are used by a person can do this far easier than carrying the equivalent weaponry that is not a firearm. Very few weapons will do that to someone as quickly or rapidly. You'd have to be a freaking he-man to get a hand weapon in someone and do that much damage in even half the time.
With the weapons of those times, you are probably looking at a hole that is maybe an inch in diameter. So...I suppose a similarity to a sword could be made. IF, that is, you are strong enough to actually shove that sword right through someone. That's not as easy as one may think. A high caliber weapon, as long as you aim it right, will do it every time...no effort beyond aiming and shooting. A sword...or any hand weapon...will take a little more effort.
One could call it about even in the 1500s and 1600s. Swords were still effective weapons to have around. Polearms were still effective.
Come better rifles and other weapons...guns became faster to fire, had far greater effective ranges for less training, and thus dominated warfare. IT was NOT just range, it was rate of fire and ease of use. A trained soldier with a revolver has a lot of shots they can unload very quickly and adjust for their misses. A rifle adds a LOT with it's range. There's a reason guns started to dominate warfare.
Just thought I'd toss this on your comments as I think you have made some really good points about firearms in your past few posts.
So I perused Quora, which isn't always the best for accurate info but you get access to a lot of sources that way. So a few points people made that are worth bringing in.
- Cover - In scenarios where cover is offered, this gives firearms a big advantage. It is hard enough to draw a bow properly, but very difficult or impossible while kneeling/prone. A musket can be fired from behind strong cover.
- Shields vs Arrows - While there was armor that still helped against firearms, in general shields (especially light thin shields) are still much better against arrows than bullets. They showed reports of American musketman utilizing shields against the native Americans, whose arrows had difficulty penetrating the metal. Meanwhile the American soldier could fire from safety behind these shield walls.
- One of the cooler reports I saw was the Qing Dynasty chinese, who experimented with both firearm and bow lines. Ultimately they actually developed a series of small light bows designed for rapid fire use (and that did not require great strength). Mainly because the musketeers stopped wearing armor, so the light bows had no issue penetrating, and were used for close quarter affairs.
- Cost - Lead and gunpowder was much cheaper to make then arrows which required more skilled craftsman. They are also bulkier than lead shot and powder.
- Fatigue: Several of the accounts noted that the range of archers would fall of greatly after a battle....so if you were engaged in continuous engagements or long engagements, the musket gained advantage.
- Bayonets: Firearms are also spears at the end of the day, two weapons in one.
Doug McCrae
Legend
The following passage is from the chapter 'Tactics and the face of battle', by Clifford J Rogers, in European Warfare 1350-1750 (2010):
Even mediocre plate armour was very tough to overcome with weapons powered by human muscle. Normal bows and light crossbows were practically unable to do it; in fact, the very definition of a quality suit of plate was that it had been tested with an arrow or a bolt and found to be 'proof' against it. Still, heavy crossbows and arrows loosed from the extraordinarily powerful English warbow could penetrate mild-steel plate – thin pieces like gauntlets, greaves, or visors fairly easily; thick breastplates or bascinet-tops only at close range and with an ideal angle of impact. Properly quenched high-carbon steel, with a Vickers hardness of around 350 (as opposed to around 150 for air-cooled medium-carbon steel) was another matter. It could successfully resist a weapon striking with double the kinetic energy required to defeat an old-style harness. It was nearly impossible for even the strongest longbow or windlass-drawn crossbow to cause serious injury through a breastplate of that sort, and only a lucky shot from a strong bowman would even be able to cause a limb wound worth mentioning. At Flodden in 1513, for example, English bowmen found that the Scottish pikemen were so well armoured that arrows 'did them no harm'.
Handguns, on the other hand, were not limited by the energy-producing capability of the human body. Modern tests have demonstrated that the very strongest archers (who had 'hands and arms of iron' and 'bodies stronger than other men's') could put a formidable 130 to 150 J of kinetic energy behind their armour-piercing shafts. A heavy steel-bowed crossbow produced somewhat more energy initially, perhaps up to around 200 J. But a well-charged 1.5 oz (42.52 g) musket-ball could leave its barrel with around 3,100 J, a 1 oz (28.3 g) arquebus-ball with around 2,700 J; even a cavalryman’s pistol could deliver over 1,000 J. It is not simple to interpret the implications of these numbers for practical effectiveness, because ballistics is a complicated subject. For example, round bullets in their flight rapidly lose energy to friction with the air, unlike streamlined arrows or modern bullets; and hardened steel arrowheads are far better suited for penetrating armour than are soft lead spheres. Hence, a pistol ball at 200 yards (182.88 m) could easily be stopped by even the cheapest vambrace, whereas a strong archer's war-shaft could still punch through the armour like a cobbler's awl. But if fired from just outside the reach of an enemy's lance, a pistol stood a fair chance of killing a well-armoured sixteenth-century man-at-arms, which an arrow or bolt did not. A musket-ball could penetrate a high-quality corselet at 200 yards (182.88 m), defeat an average one at 400 yards (365.76 m), and ruin an unarmoured horse or man even at 600 yards (548.64 m), a distance far outside the range at which even the best bowman could return fire. Moreover, the wounds inflicted by early-modern bullets were generally much worse than those caused by arrows. A bodkin arrowhead that pierced through its target might create a wound cavity of around 45 cm3; by contrast, modern testing suggests that at close range an arquebus-ball might blast a hole in a human body three times that size at 100 m, or eight times at 9 m. It was common for men wearing good fifteenth-century armour to suffer multiple wounds from arrows or crossbow-bolts and still to be able to fight. By contrast, Bayard was killed by a ball from a musket that struck him in the side, apparently penetrated his armour, and continued on to break his spine…
Hence firearms became, by the mid sixteenth century, the predominant shot weapon for European soldiers. To be sure, there were also many other reasons for the replacement of man-powered missile weapons by gunpowder weapons, ranging from cultural and dietary changes in England, to the accelerating urbanisation and monetisation of the European economy, to the declining price of saltpetre and the rising price of yew staves. Indeed, although rarely noted in the modern literature, the technical improvements of the weapons themselves (particularly lengthening barrels) contributed significantly to this development. But superior armour-piercing capability was integral to the replacement of traditional weapons by firearms.
Even mediocre plate armour was very tough to overcome with weapons powered by human muscle. Normal bows and light crossbows were practically unable to do it; in fact, the very definition of a quality suit of plate was that it had been tested with an arrow or a bolt and found to be 'proof' against it. Still, heavy crossbows and arrows loosed from the extraordinarily powerful English warbow could penetrate mild-steel plate – thin pieces like gauntlets, greaves, or visors fairly easily; thick breastplates or bascinet-tops only at close range and with an ideal angle of impact. Properly quenched high-carbon steel, with a Vickers hardness of around 350 (as opposed to around 150 for air-cooled medium-carbon steel) was another matter. It could successfully resist a weapon striking with double the kinetic energy required to defeat an old-style harness. It was nearly impossible for even the strongest longbow or windlass-drawn crossbow to cause serious injury through a breastplate of that sort, and only a lucky shot from a strong bowman would even be able to cause a limb wound worth mentioning. At Flodden in 1513, for example, English bowmen found that the Scottish pikemen were so well armoured that arrows 'did them no harm'.
Handguns, on the other hand, were not limited by the energy-producing capability of the human body. Modern tests have demonstrated that the very strongest archers (who had 'hands and arms of iron' and 'bodies stronger than other men's') could put a formidable 130 to 150 J of kinetic energy behind their armour-piercing shafts. A heavy steel-bowed crossbow produced somewhat more energy initially, perhaps up to around 200 J. But a well-charged 1.5 oz (42.52 g) musket-ball could leave its barrel with around 3,100 J, a 1 oz (28.3 g) arquebus-ball with around 2,700 J; even a cavalryman’s pistol could deliver over 1,000 J. It is not simple to interpret the implications of these numbers for practical effectiveness, because ballistics is a complicated subject. For example, round bullets in their flight rapidly lose energy to friction with the air, unlike streamlined arrows or modern bullets; and hardened steel arrowheads are far better suited for penetrating armour than are soft lead spheres. Hence, a pistol ball at 200 yards (182.88 m) could easily be stopped by even the cheapest vambrace, whereas a strong archer's war-shaft could still punch through the armour like a cobbler's awl. But if fired from just outside the reach of an enemy's lance, a pistol stood a fair chance of killing a well-armoured sixteenth-century man-at-arms, which an arrow or bolt did not. A musket-ball could penetrate a high-quality corselet at 200 yards (182.88 m), defeat an average one at 400 yards (365.76 m), and ruin an unarmoured horse or man even at 600 yards (548.64 m), a distance far outside the range at which even the best bowman could return fire. Moreover, the wounds inflicted by early-modern bullets were generally much worse than those caused by arrows. A bodkin arrowhead that pierced through its target might create a wound cavity of around 45 cm3; by contrast, modern testing suggests that at close range an arquebus-ball might blast a hole in a human body three times that size at 100 m, or eight times at 9 m. It was common for men wearing good fifteenth-century armour to suffer multiple wounds from arrows or crossbow-bolts and still to be able to fight. By contrast, Bayard was killed by a ball from a musket that struck him in the side, apparently penetrated his armour, and continued on to break his spine…
Hence firearms became, by the mid sixteenth century, the predominant shot weapon for European soldiers. To be sure, there were also many other reasons for the replacement of man-powered missile weapons by gunpowder weapons, ranging from cultural and dietary changes in England, to the accelerating urbanisation and monetisation of the European economy, to the declining price of saltpetre and the rising price of yew staves. Indeed, although rarely noted in the modern literature, the technical improvements of the weapons themselves (particularly lengthening barrels) contributed significantly to this development. But superior armour-piercing capability was integral to the replacement of traditional weapons by firearms.
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Doug McCrae
Legend
In a section of The Knight and the Blast Furnace (2003), Alan Williams considers some claims made by Humphrey Barwick in his "A brief discourse concerning the force and effect of all manual weapons of fire" (1590). (Barwick is also a reference for Rogers in my previous post.)
The stars * in the above passage refer to quality of armour. One star represents the lowest quality, and four stars the highest.
The two following excerpts from Williams present information about the energy delivered by various weapons.
Barwick makes four claims…
"Arrows cannot kill a man in pistol-proof armour at 120 yards".
Assuming that this meant defeating a 3 mm thick keeled breastplate made of *** steel, then an arrow would have required 470 J, unobtainable from any crossbow.
So his claim is correct.
A bullet, on the other hand, would require 2500 J, within the capability of a musket (but not a pistol) as discussed above in case 4. So his second claim is correct.
"Muskets could kill a man in proof armour at 100 yards, in common armour at 400 yards, and without armour at 600 yards". The third and fourth claims are more difficult to assess. For common armour, we may assume a similar breastplate made of * steel, which would require 1150 J to defeat it. But there is little evidence of shooting muskets at such extreme ranges. Charles V seemed to have taken his opponents by surprise at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547 by having his musketeers fire across the River Elbe, 200 yards wide at that point. Barwick probably did not intend any precise measurement of distance, but if the velocity of the musket ball has fallen by half, then its kinetic energy has fallen by a quarter, to 750 J, which might just be resisted by a "common" breastplate.
A man without armour would probably be killed or disabled by 100-200 J. A blow of between 25 and 40 J to the head in a car crash may be fatal.
Giving Barwick the benefit of the doubt over range, his other claims are probably valid.
"Arrows cannot kill a man in pistol-proof armour at 120 yards".
Assuming that this meant defeating a 3 mm thick keeled breastplate made of *** steel, then an arrow would have required 470 J, unobtainable from any crossbow.
So his claim is correct.
A bullet, on the other hand, would require 2500 J, within the capability of a musket (but not a pistol) as discussed above in case 4. So his second claim is correct.
"Muskets could kill a man in proof armour at 100 yards, in common armour at 400 yards, and without armour at 600 yards". The third and fourth claims are more difficult to assess. For common armour, we may assume a similar breastplate made of * steel, which would require 1150 J to defeat it. But there is little evidence of shooting muskets at such extreme ranges. Charles V seemed to have taken his opponents by surprise at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547 by having his musketeers fire across the River Elbe, 200 yards wide at that point. Barwick probably did not intend any precise measurement of distance, but if the velocity of the musket ball has fallen by half, then its kinetic energy has fallen by a quarter, to 750 J, which might just be resisted by a "common" breastplate.
A man without armour would probably be killed or disabled by 100-200 J. A blow of between 25 and 40 J to the head in a car crash may be fatal.
Giving Barwick the benefit of the doubt over range, his other claims are probably valid.
The stars * in the above passage refer to quality of armour. One star represents the lowest quality, and four stars the highest.
The two following excerpts from Williams present information about the energy delivered by various weapons.
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