D&D 5E Why do guns do so much damage?

[jasper]

I'm bringing this all up because I'm considering using firearms in my campaign setting... but literally just making them into Crossbows for mechanical purposes.

Hand-Crossbow for Pistol. Heavy Crossbow for Rifle. Complete with the Crossbow Expert feat, because I sincerely feel like the amount of damage they do to a person is quite similar.

Plus I love the image of a swashbuckler with rapier and pistol because c'mon... that's -classic-.

You should have OPENED with this. I think my magical musketter from 3 E should still be here some where.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Because it is game about sword and sorcery not gun smoke and gallows.

Well said! But in that case...just don’t have guns/gunpowder around. Done and done. Seems simpler than trying to mount some YouTube-fueled counteroffensive against history, historians, and physics.

 

[Cadence]

As a tangent, Scott Lynch's "The Effigy Engine: A Tale of the Red Hats" short story involves mixing guns and magic, and I keep meaning to go back and re-read it (along with the other short stories in the Anthology "Fearsome Journeys").

 

[Doug McCrae]

Plate armor was generally between 1 and 3 mm thick?

The Knight and the Blast Furnace (2003) Alan Williams has a section on armour thickness:

There is a continuous production of armour from the mid-15th to the mid-17th century of fairly constant thickness. Breastplate thickness between 1.5 and 3 mm corresponds of course to an armour of comfortable weight. The limbs would have been protected with thinner armour. For example, most infantry armour comes into this category, except that some is made of thickness up to 4mm in the later 16th century.

Secondly, there is a steady rise in the maximum thickness, from around 2mm in the 15th to around 6 mm which is regularly found by the late 16th century, and even including some astonishing examples at 8mm). This suggests that while many customers may have preferred armour of the accustomed thickness and weight, there was a growing market for bulletproof armour, nothwithstanding its greater weight.​

He provides a chart comparing breastplate thickness of many different armours in museum collections, from c.1470 to c.1685:

 

[jasper]

…..Logan story short: game designers need a diet ….. I need a diet too. Less Mountain Dew more celery sticks and water.



…My issue with D&D renaissance firearms is that they're absurdly fast to load…. Crimson I talked with some of my gin nuts friends. We decide to D&D guns were breach loaded similar to a double barrel shot gun. Open, Load, Aim, Fire, Eject and repeat. And it really didn’t matter since some pcs were pumping out more arrows in 6 seconds than we could do in time fire of a short bow under 50 pds.

 

[DammitVictor]

That said, I've been and still am of the belief that early firearms and swords cause similarly serious injuries. The average person receiving an injury from either is much more likely to lay down and cry than to do anything productive.

A big part of our problem is that when we talk about weapon damage, we talk about fatigue and wearing a combatant down until the one crucial strike that turns their birthdays off-- and whether we're talking blades or bullets, armed combat just doesn't work that way. If a knife fight or a gunfight somehow lasts longer than six seconds... well, there's the shots/strikes that end the fight and there's the shots/strikes that don't matter.

Brain, heart, lungs, spleen, liver, kidneys, spine... those will end the fight immediately, maybe lethally. Major arteries in the shoulder and inner thigh, you're dead within a minute, but you're still fighting that whole time. Bladder, bowel, intestine, those will kill you in three or four days with only a marginal decrease in your ability to sustain a firefight. (I would imagine the pain would be more of a hindrance to melee, but...)

But the defensive wounds you get all up and down your hands and forearms from a prolonged knife fight? They're not what's slowing you down. Long, shallow cuts along the outside of your forearms will never kill you, and they'll only have a serious effect on your ability to keep defending yourself if they catch the tendons in your wrists, or if you're not wearing gloves when the blood starts flowing. It's the effort of defending yourself that wears you down, and from personal experience-- years and years of personal experience-- there isn't that much difference between stiletto fighting and flamberge fighting because they're all wrestling anyway.

If you take one bullet in a vital region, you fall down and stop fighting and probably die. If you take one bullet in a non-vital region, you keep fighting and you go to the ER afterwards and... there really isn't a whole lot of in between as far as gunshot wounds go. If you take thirty bullets in non-vital areas, and nothing touches the birthday control centers, you walk to the trauma surgery yourself and you're home in time to get enough free drinks to offset your hospital bill.

D&D combat most resembles a boxing match, and the reason boxing matches last as long as they do is that the rules don't allow the means to end them faster. You can't land a knockout punch on a well-trained and well-prepared opponent until you've compromised their ability to resist you, until they can't get their hands up or their chin down fast enough to stop you.

Ironically, in the d20 Modern rules, they took the one thing that the D&D combat system actually represented well... and made it use a wholly different subsystem.

In short, can we please have class-based weapon damage rolls?

Does it really change anything, though? Whatever the class values were, they'd still have to be adjusted to compensate for weapon special properties and handedness

2) If they are pulling a gun on you, they mean to kill you. Calling off your attack likely gets you shot while you stand there.

That's why if I'm ever challenged to a duel and forced to choose weapons, I have two options in mind: if I actually want to hurt the son of a bitch, I'm pretty confident in my prowess with the Italian smallsword. And if I'd rather not have to fight the duel at all, I'm pretty confident nobody's ever going to be mad enough at me to follow through with a duel after I've chosen the flammenwerfer.

Yeah so I’d handle black powder weapons like so:

1. Simple weapons to reflect their ease of use by even farmers
2. Lower costs for ammo than other ranged weapons, however a powder horn is also needed (a separate piece of equipment)

Problem is that AD&D, 3.PF, and 5e have all, frustratingly, done the exact opposite of this.

Pretty much this. If anything melee weapons and especially swords are overvalued in D&D,

And shields, shields are dramatically and tragically underrated. As long as your enemies are in front of you, a good stout shield is better than head-to-toe maille and gives you the option of trading your arming sword up for nice hammer or axe.

Against someone in plate armour a sword is nearly useless. You are better off to use it as a makeshift club or a lever for grappling than as a sword.
And against a giant, dragon or other garagantuan enemy a normal melee weapon would be night useless as even when you drive it into the monster up to the hilt you have only penetrated the skin and outer fat and muscle layer without reaching any vital organ. Its like fighting a human with needles.

Worth noting that AD&D considered fighting humans by spitting needles at them to be a perfectly cromulent fighting style.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Plate armor was generally between 1 and 3 mm thick?

Williams has this chart detailing the energy needed to defeat armour of a particular thickness:

Which can be supplemented with this chart about armour quality:

The most powerful handheld musket in the tests conducted in Graz, Austria delivered under 3800 J at close range so, extrapolating, it would seem that 8mm thick armour would easily be able to protect the wearer, in fact it would be far more than was needed. Perhaps the wearers were concerned about more powerful weapons such as anti-personnel swivel guns and cannon?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Kinetic Impact is Speed and Mass compared to Resistance. I actually mathed out the Joules of a Lead Ball from a Flintlock Pistol at around 400 while a longsword hits at about 300, in the thread. So it's really not -that- different. But the PSI -is- different, at a whopping 60 compared to about 10. Which means the Flintlock ball is going to pretty much pass through you while the sword will stop due to resistance and drag. Which means the sword imparts more of it's kinetic energy (All of it).

British Flintlock Balls were 10.9mm in diameter and weighed 1.3g. They also traveled a lot slower, as the muzzle velocity for a Flintlock is around 253m/s while a 9mm (only slightly smaller and infinitely more bullet-shaped) can clock in at over 400m/s.

Well, y'know. He was in Canada. They'd have just made him wait a bit longer and probably bleed out.

You know, I've always found it very funny how, as soon as guns are discussed in an RPG context, everybody pulls out the history and science, usually for the purposes of making them less effective. You don't see this sort of thing for swords and bows nearly as often. I think a lot of people just don't like guns in D&D, and the "realism" argument is just an excuse.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Of course, the fact that it's impossible in 5e to incapacitate an opponent without hacking through their hit points and bringing them to death's door with any weapon is also an issue.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Of course, the fact that it's impossible in 5e to incapacitate an opponent without hacking through their hit points and bringing them to death's door with any weapon is also an issue.

Countdown to someone replying with some set of homebrew rules for knockouts in 5e, while also praising the system for not including them in the first place.