Changing firearms to martial weapons

[Elephant]

Every weapon is much deadlier in real life than in D&D -- when it hits. But hitting people is much, much harder in real life than in D&D.

Good point. However, firearms should still be simple weapon proficiency to model their ease of use to the poorly-trained peasant. There also needs to be some factor to make it better than a crossbow...

 

[TheAuldGrump]

In the real world, firearms were less expensive than bows. From Infantry Missile Weapons in the Renaissance:

Relatively speaking the arquebus was cheaper than either the longbow, which had to be meticulously handcrafted from yew, and the crossbow, which required equally meticulous workmanship and rather expensive steel as well. The arquebus could be mass-produced by a foundry in fairly cheap cast iron.​

(Note: That's an excellent article, but the author made a numerical mistake in the table of weapons, their "muzzle" velocities, etc.)
Reasonable, except that I'd expect magical armor to stop bullets at least as well as it stops magical swords that can slice through rock.

And the large, slow, soft bullet of a Renaissance firearm really wasn't that great at penetrating armor.

For my campaign I treat masterworked solid metal armors (Plate, breastplate, and a few variants) as granting full protection against firearms, all others grant half. Chainmail grants half, but increases the damage by one point as the rings are driven into the flesh of the target. Awl point arrows and crossbow bolts are treated the same way as bullets.

*EDIT* Masterworked armors are called 'proofed' in the campaign, they have a lead splotched ding from where the armourer fired a pistol at it from 20 feet to show that it can stop a bullet.

One factor against firearms is that if they are not cleaned after every shot they can become fouled, and malfunction. The Brown Bess did so about one out of sixteen shots in battlefield conditions. Maintained between shots that would drop to just about zero. (I have fired a Brown Bess more than any other type of gun. Simple and reliable, I have seen one that saw more than a hundred years of service - first in the British Army, then in the British Navy, then in the Spanish navy, then in Mexico... When it went to the British Navy they shortened the barrel and flared the muzzle, reloading on a ship has its difficulties.)

Malfunctions include hangfires (potentialy dangerous to the user), smoke shots (the bullet does not leave the barrel, and must be removed in order to reload the weapon) and weld shots (gas escaping around the bullet and wadding welds the soft lead bullet to the inside of the barrel). Guns blowing up in the user's hands was extremely rare. Cannons that aren't allowed enough cool down time on the other hand...

And yes, matchlock and later the snapaunce and flintlock were cheaper than a good crossbow. A wheel lock on the other hand could be very expensive.

The Auld Grump

 

[mmadsen]

You just have to watch out for the resist energy protected guy that throws around big barrels of gunpowder.

A barrel of gunpowder shouldn't do energy damage. It's not an incendiary device; it's an explosive device. At any rate, make sure to include fumble rules, so our bombardier can get hoist by his own petard.

 

[mmadsen]

I am thinking of using simple single-shot firearms for an Eberron adventure. My idea is that a wizard or a fighter could keep a pre-loaded weapon that can only be used once. So they fire the weapon as opportunity presents, but the rest of melee is with standard swords, clubs, and spells.

I think that makes perfect sense, and it fits the heroic fiction describing 16th-19th-century warfare. Soldiers fire a volley, then charge. Also, it wouldn't be out of character for the PCs to horde loaded pistols. Pirates and pistol-cavalry alike might go into combat with a half-dozen loaded pistols. (Common troops couldn't afford that kind of hardware.)

 

[barsoomcore]

People in my homebrew Barsoom campaign have been shooting each other with gleeful abandon for ages now. I use the Iron Kingdom rules which include a skill check (Craft: Small Arms) in order to reload, that cannot be used untrained. Which works out great. The DCs are low enough that you can succeed taking 10, even if you're not very good, which to my mind is a pretty good representation. Once you've been trained, it's a mechanical process.

Michel Foucault wrote a pretty cool book called Discipline and Punish about how many of our modern ideas of how to organize society grew out of the gunpowder age and the need to synchronize masses of people without actually teaching them skills -- you can get people to load their guns en masse without them really understanding what they're doing or how the device works, just by turning the reload process into a set of mechanical actions. His thesis was that this is where much of our "mechanized" society comes from.

Anyway, Barsimians have been firing at one another for years and I never had any problems. But then Barsoom bears only a passing resemblance to D&D anyways, and if there are balance problems they're swept away in my constant willingness to just DM fiat everything so it turns out cool.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

What I do in my game is to allow a couple of common fighter variants where they give up heavy armor and shield proficiency in order to get firearms as a martial weapon.