D&D 5E (2014) Let's Talk About Guns in 5E

Remathilis said:

One of the things I really liked was when 3e tried to expand alchemy into other areas. The PHB had alchemist fire, acid, tanglefoot bags, etc. Eberron added alchemist frost and alchemist spark (doing other elemental damage). The problem is that alchemy doesn't scale and quickly becomes obsolete to magic, but the idea would be interesting if they could somehow fix the scaling issue...

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tie dcs to an ability modifier, make them simple weapons instead of improvised, and let them be deployed in place of an attack. that seems like problem solved to me.

If the industrial revolution had started in D&D multiverse the main factories would be in the plane of mechanus. The handicap would be the transport of products toward far zones.

Another possibility is that this technology has already been discovered but is relatively prohibitive due to patent fees, and the spellcasting guilds have gone to great lengths to ensure that this remains the case.
And we don't talk only about firearms but also giant crossbows shooting explosive arrows in the bastlefield.

If magic could cause "squib loads" in enemy machine guns then can say goodbye to these.

Maybe there are magic zones with a "watering gunpowder" effect. The ritual to casting this could be really slow but if it in the building of a stronghold then the inversion is worth. The war deities could gift magic banners that cursed all the firearms in the nearest area.

Cergorach said:

But in D&D 5e 2024 it's a LOT of labour (Thinkerer): 50gp for the tinker's tools, 250gp for the musket materials, and 400 hours of work making one. Based on our 40 hour working week, that would be two and a half months of work, or maybe 5 muskets per year per Thinkerer. Of course the Thinker would need 300gp up front for tools and material, not to mention working space, and board/food for those two and a half months... With only a day off per month, you would maybe get seven muskets per year per Thinkerer.

A guild, noble, king might hire a Thinkerer for 2gp/day, paying for the workshop, the Thinkerer tools, and the musket component prices. They hire a hundred Thinkerers for a year and spend 180,000gp plus the price of a workshop, armory, guards guarding that, etc.

Now imagine a thief with a Bag of Holding (or ten = 4,000gp) stealing those 500 muskets (worth 250,000gp)...

Imho the only reason why Gith (pirates) have muskets and pistols at all is because they kick in a thief with two Bags of Holding (only 800gp), drag all the muskets, pistols, and ammo into a 10' radius, 'detonate' the Bag of Holding inside the other Bag of Holding in the middle of the pile and get dragged into the Astral plane, where their buddies pick up the goods with the thief... No need to exit at all...

Not in D&D, in D&D a musket and pistol are martial weapons, while a light crossbow is a simple weapon. What people keep forgetting is that we're talking D&D and not RW...

That's because most people overvalue what a firearm can do, and undervalue what a simple knife can do... Hence they assign far more damage to a firearm then to a knife.

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I refuse to even lightly engage with posts that posit that the world of dnd works literally according the rules as if the phb is a physics textbook for dnd worlds.

The conceptonly has value as a joke.

Remathilis said:

not the near-instants-fatality machines they are IRL.

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Most gunshot wounds where medical attention is readily available are survived. Like the overwhelming majority.

Even gunshot wounds to the head are often survived, which surprised me.

Really, no small arms are "near-instant-fatality machines IRL.
meanwhile, major stab wounds (ie with a blade bigger than a switchblade used to stab the target in the torso or head) kill people about as high a percentage of the time.

Firearms are deadly because you can walk into a building and shoot 13 people in one quick go before anyone can react, and because you can shoot from cover, and because of the effective range, and lots of other reasons, but it is mostly stuff that dnd doesn't model anyway.

Parmandur said:

Right, by having firearms frozen at a particular low point and by underemphasjzinf how they would impact combat. But modern D&D combat is about vibes, not war game simulation.

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War games have no trouble including plate armour and guns side-by-side. Bullets are good but people do survive getting shot, and plate armour actually does help against most bullets.

Guns changed warfare on a logistical level. European armies ballooned in size because guns are great for conscripts, not because they're impossible to defeat with melee weapons.

Colonial era warfare was generally, up until quite late stages, a matter of larger European armies defeating smaller armies possessed by economically weaker polities. These large, cheap armies were because a random commoner given a musket was a lot more affordable to a modernizing nation state than a well-trained elite melee warrior was to a less-modernized nation.

Like, okay, against a civilization that doesn't have bows either, introducing ranged warfare at all makes a huge difference, and artillery makes an enormous difference when it allows you to bombard the enemy from outside engagement range in a naval context (where you can't actually charge their position because they're on a boat), and there is a tipping where guns essentially outstrip melee weapons completely - but that point is well past the invention of the bayonet, and is over half a millennia after the basic invention of firearms.

It's not "frozen" to portray a world set in a centuries-long swathe where guns exist but are not dominant - and far more so when there's competition from ranged magic.

doctorbadwolf said:

Most gunshot wounds where medical attention is readily available are survived. Like the overwhelming majority.

Even gunshot wounds to the head are often survived, which surprised me.

Really, no small arms are "near-instant-fatality machines IRL.
meanwhile, major stab wounds (ie with a blade bigger than a switchblade used to stab the target in the torso or head) kill people about as high a percentage of the time.

Firearms are deadly because you can walk into a building and shoot 13 people in one quick go before anyone can react, and because you can shoot from cover, and because of the effective range, and lots of other reasons, but it is mostly stuff that dnd doesn't model anyway.

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This, very this.

Armed soldiers with any kind of weapons can do horrendous things to civilians. That's the nature of weapons. There's a reason why sword control laws were a thing in the Medieval era and before (really). Julius Caesar's assassination was made complex because people had to find a way to smuggle knives into his presence.
Modern spree shootings sometimes get stopped by unarmed people. Guns are lethal threats, but actual hit rates with them are pretty terrible (realistic gunfight rules for modern-era RPGs are incredibly whiffy and thus kinda frustrating) because adrenaline and stress janks up aim.

If we are talking about pre modern guns, have no problem with those. It's just that they are subpar option. I liked them better in PF1. Damage wise, guns weren't better, but they targeted touch AC and had x4 crit modifier. And even then, it was subpar option. For slightly more money you could get wand of magic missile which has both range and it's autohit.

Modern guns ( as in, guns with cased ammunition, rifling) are different beast all together.

Hasbro would love D&D system allowed modern firearms with a right power balance because this could allow "collabs" or crossovers with no-fantasy franchises but the D&D classes weren't designed for encounters against gunslingers.

Magic is more expensive but most of D&D adventures would be willing for spending to buy a magitek ray gun instead an ordinary firearm with its risks of malfuction. And ammo may be very heavy if they travel toward far zones where they can't buy more bullets.

The great headache is to design a campaing where the PCs shouldn't get firearms easily but the main enemy faction could use them usually.

I'm reminded of the Guardians of the Flame series, where some college kids from Earth are Isekai'd to a fantasy world (long before Isekai was a well known term, because it's really nothing new, just as John Carter...) and eventually, the Engineering student was like "Hey, let's make guns!".

With their technological edge, they went to war with the entire institution of slavery in the world, but eventually the slavers got tired of it and went to some Wizards to come up with their own answer to guns- using magic to reinforce an iron sphere so it wouldn't break, they filled it with water and boiled it over a high flame and came up with some strange powder that exploded when it came into contact with water, so their "guns" would hit the powder with a squirt of water, of all things.

Anyways, I think it illustrates a good point. Any new innovation is going to copied, adapted, and defended against. Pathfinder 1e had spells and a few magic items that both supported and negated the advantage of firearms. Spells that could dampen powder, guns that produced their own ammo, and magic can already produce bulletproof barriers, so it's inevitable that enchanted flak jackets and bullet ward charms could go on the market. Sure, you could make better and better guns, but magic has far fewer limits than technology in games like D&D.

I think this is what probably happened behind the scenes in the Forgotten Realms- in early 2e, firearms were readily available and spreading. By the time of 5e, they've become rarely seen relics (I believe Dragon Heist offers the opportunity to acquire some smoke powder). Gond was chastised by his fellow gods for unleashing this technology sure, but once the secret was out there, it wasn't like you could put the genie back in the bottle. However, either because of their cost, unreliability, or other factors, up to and including adaptations to firearms (and possibly the fact you still needed magic weapons to harm certain creatures as the game slowly moved past foes with "+1 or better magic weapons to hit", to "DR/15 magic", to "DR/5 magic" to "resistant to non-magic weapons"), they just fell out of favor.

Because magic outpaces guns. A Wand is more lethal than a gun (There was a chapter in "Voyage of the Princess Ark" in Dragon magazine where the main character was, for all intents and purposes, challenged to a gunfight at high noon. He brought his Wand of Lightning Bolts. Guess who won?).

Even as Wands became less spammable (the old Wand of Magic Missiles went from having 5 charges to 7 daily), casters got cantrips, first piddly ones that did d3 damage, now you have Firebolts that can do up to 4d10, and let's not forget the Warlock's Eldritch Blast, to the point that a spellcaster would dominate any gunfight unless there was some kind of "null-magic" around to prevent it.

Huh. I wonder if that's why some people grumble about cantrips. It's too much like having arcane casters be gunslingers?

James Gasik said:

Huh. I wonder if that's why some people grumble about cantrips. It's too much like having arcane casters be gunslingers?

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of all the complaints about cantrips i've seen i can't say i ever remember that being one of the reasons given.

When we move away from mechanics and go into more setting/fiction part, guns have their place. It's mainly emulating swashbuckling era. Pirates with brace of pistols. Musketeers with pistols and muskets. Dragoons with pistols and carbines. But for all those archetypes, in fiction, guns aren't their primary weapons. It's their opener. One shot (or couple with brace of pistols) from relatively close range and then switch to the sword.

D&D is about small band of individuals fighting small band or just single individual. In that scenario, early guns aren't that great.

True power of muskets was in war. Single musketeer has one chance to hit enemy runing at him with melee weapon. If he misses (which he has good chance), he is done. No time to reload, either you have bayonet ready or ditch gun for sword. 100 musketeers, in 3 rows, firing volley after volley (one row reloads, one fires), that's scary. It's wall of lead incoming at you. And unlike sword of bow, you can train musketeer in weeks, not years.