A risky Idea for balancing guns?

[Puxido]

Hello. I'm new to tabletop rpg's and gm'ing, and I have an idea on balancing out guns in Pathfinder. It occured to me that the problem may be equivalent to a real life balancing problem with guns. Bullets just do too much damage to armor, like butter. Though I was looking through a article on anti-bullet armors, and came across Ned Kelly. He wore a suit of armor, iron, quarter inch thick. It was overbearingly heavy but it did its job, stopped bullets. I was thinking of implementing it into my pathfinder game! The concept is for latter game, called the Kelly sets. Made from a custom material which I would refer to as a "Technical Material", which would be "Thick Iron" or "Thick Steel". The only difference would be increased hardness and protection, and it could not be used to make weapons, its a technical material and uses the same materials to craft as its thin counterpart, just more of them. But then it ocured to me that the possibility of better guns (with better ammo) for later levels so that gunslingers can get back in the game. My general rule was going to be that the material for ammunition must be a grade lower then the gun material (Ex: iron barrel guns aka basic guns would only shoot lead, Mythril guns only shoot adamantine and lower, ect.) then it dawned on me, at one point they would be using armor that was so heavy/big that in-game they would be looking like War hammer 30K soldiers and most if not all their stats would have to go into strength unless they were going to be a gunslinger. My solution to this was engineered/magic armors which were much lighter, but expensive.

Is this just game breaking, or can I make it work with a bit of fine tuning?

 

[gamerprinter]

Honestly, while the gun seems overpowered, especially with its touch AC at the first range increment - any attempt to take that away from the gunslinger makes it so guns don't even matter. You cannot take the touch AC ability away, unless you want to totally gimp gunslingers. On the other hand, gunslingers and guns aren't necessarily all that over powered. I had some misgivings on the concept until I started playing guns in the game, but all that went away when I saw them in play. Guns are cool, but not overpowered as you might think.

Using thick iron armor is both kind of stupid, especially with how heavy and useless any attempt to move around or attempt to do skills while armored, and tries to take away the touch AC of guns, which is already discussed above. I wouldn't recommend any attempt to negate the touch AC ability - allowing thick iron armor is pretty much negating touch AC (don't do it).

Really if gunslingers lose the touch AC ability (or gimped with iron armor on the opposition), gunslingers become totally useless in game.

 

[garrowolf]

I think that the problem is that the game system doesn't model bullets very well. They should do about the same as an arrow, depending on the caliber, but penetrate much better.

On the other hand, full armor was invented to stop hand cannon balls. The view of the full plate mail knight comes during the late middle ages when cannons and hand culverins were in use.

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

Gun LOOK overpowered, but the gunslinger and guns in general are actually gimped unless you follow a very specific feat chain.

If anything, I thought you were trying to make them pretty worthwhile.

A dedicated archer can actually put out more damage than a gunslinger at equal levels at about 10th level.

 

[Celebrim]

Implementing guns correctly requires some granularity that 3e doesn't usually bother with. Given Pathfinder's extreme reluctance to worry itself about balance, I'm not sure that my suggestions should be taken as any sort of balancing suggestion in context. In fact, I'm sure it would be grossly unbalancing in context, which is why guns are generally not merged into a medieval setting.

1) Weapon speed - The granularity of weapon speeds in 3e just simply doesn't have the breadth you need to distinguish between a wheel lock pistol with a loading time in minutes, and a semi-automatic handgun with a loading time in fractions of a second. At the low end, you have weapons that vary from hand gonne's to rifled black power weapons that require one or more full round actions to reload even if you are proficient with the weapon, making them miserably slow compared to something like a longbow. At the high end, you have various repeaters (revolvers, lever actions, etc) and semi-automatic weapons that can be fired multiple times per attack action - making the longbow miserably slow compared to advanced weaponry. And even further out you have fully automatic weapons that are basically best handled as shapeable area effect weapons that can 'spray' large areas.

2) Weapon Reliability - Hitting things with a stick is pretty darn reliable, and any reasonable set of rules for fumbling when hitting things with a stick either ignores the possibility of a fumble or makes it really rare. The same is largely true of modern advanced weaponry, which usually only goes bad either in the very long run or when not in the best condition (dirt, etc.). But early black powder firearms are anything but reliable, especially in poorly trained hands.

3) Penetration - This is probably the most salient aspect of firearms that systems have problem with. In truth, firearms don't make touch attacks. They can't penetrate everything they hit. Worse, they penetrate better than they inflict damage. It's not that a gunshot does more damage than being hit with a battle axe. But it does put a hole in a wall or a steel plate more easily. To make guns work, they need a penetration score which is the amount of armor that they ignore for the purposes of hitting things. In D&D 3e terms this means that the total bonus to AC due to armor, shield, and natural armor bonuses is reduced by the penetration score, but never to below zero. For low values of armor and low penetration scores, this means effectively a touch attack. But for high values of armor and low penetration scores, say full plate or dragon’s hide versus a matchlock musket, this is equivalent to only a bonus to hit – the armor is at least partially effective.

4) Recoil – Recoil doesn’t matter much when you are dealing with a weapon that can only be fired every 30 seconds, but it is a really big deal when you are trying to fire off 3 (or 12) shots in quick succession. Each successive shot without pausing to reaim is reduced in accuracy compared to the prior shots. Effectively you get a cumulative penalty to hit if you try to take more than single shots with a weapon.

5) Accuracy – Recoil aside, bullets travel at 3-10 times the speed of more primitive missile weapons. This flat trajectory and high speed makes them far easier to aim and use than weapons like a longbow or sling. You tend to hit what you are looking at. Effectively most firearms more advanced than a hand gonne have an inherent bonus to hit.

6) Technology – Up until the end of the 18th century, a long bow expert could compete on almost equal terms with a typical musketeer. The main difference between the two weapons was that the musket was a simple weapon and the longbow or sling was an exotic weapon. As you move through the 19th century, guns just start completely outclassing anything that has ever come before in terms of penetrative power, accuracy, range, lethality, and rate of fire. Eventually you get to the point that a 1st level fighter armed with modern hand weaponry is like CR6. Reasonably competent fighters would be even worse.

If you do firearms right, you don’t need a special gunslinger class to do them. You could create one that used the standard rules but got various advantages in using them, but it wouldn’t really be necessary except to keep guns out of the hands of 1st level fighters and so wrecking balance somewhat. I don't see really anything inherently necessary that the Pathfinder class does that couldn't be handled through more generic rules.