Changing firearms to martial weapons

[Tzarevitch]

Heck, in some settings I'm tempted to make single-shot firearms Simple Weapons and autofire weapons into Martial Weapons. But it depends on the setting more than anything, and in these settings, obviously firearms supplant other ranged weapons rapidly.

I made most firearms simple weapons (rifles, shotguns, revolvers etc.). Machine guns and other autofire weapons remained exotic weapons.

Tzarevitch

 

[Dextolen]

One way to speed up the loading of black powder weapons is to carry a bandolier of 'apostles', several (12 traditionally) pre measured loads of powder in little wooden vials or leather bags, attached to the bandolier by cords. Rip them open and pour the measured powder in, saving 1 or 2 rounds in the reloading process.

http://www.bandoliers.co.uk/bando/bando.htm

 

[Tzarevitch]

Actually, they should be simple weapons. Historically, the real advantage of firearms was that you could put a gun in the hands of an untrained peasant (Commoner 1), send 500 of them at the enemy, and they could actually do some damage. This was quite a change from the previous model where peasant levies were little more than human shields.

Actually that is not quite true. Modern metal-cartridge ammo weapons ARE simple to use. Basically you load the shell and fire (with slight variations depending on the weapon). Percussion-cap and earlier weapons are actually quite hard to use. It is easy to fire them but they are extremely hard to reload if you aren't trained to do it. You can't just pick one up sight unseen and load and fire it. If you don't know what you are doing, it won't fire or you will injure yourself when it backfires. Even trained personnel of the time had difficulty with the loading process because it is rather complex.

Watch the History Channel. They demonstrate Civil War era and earlier firearms all the time. A couple of episodes had modern military personnel who are trained in firearms use trying to load Civil War rifles for the first time and they were having a devil of a time. Even at Gettysburg rifles were found with multiple bullets jammed into the barrels because in the chaos of the fighting the soldiers couldn't get the loading drill performed properly, and these were TRAINED soldiers.

I treated archaic firearms as simple weapons for the purposes of firing them, but they required a feat to properly reload them. That feat (Archaic Firearms Use) was treated as a Martial Weapon feat (i.e. any class with Martial Weapon proficiency was assumed to have the feat).

I treated Metal-cartridge weapons as simple weapons that didn't require a second feat to reload. Machine guns, flamethrowers, light mortars and grenade launchers and other exotica were exotic weapons.

Tzarevitch

 

[mmadsen]

Even at Gettysburg rifles were found with multiple bullets jammed into the barrels because in the chaos of the fighting the soldiers couldn't get the loading drill performed properly, and these were TRAINED soldiers.

Although blackpowder weapons are difficult to load in the chaos of battle, there's also reason to believe that many soldiers simply don't want to shoot people, so they mime all the actions of fighting -- particularly all the actions that don't draw fire.

 

[Tzarevitch]

Although blackpowder weapons are difficult to load in the chaos of battle, there's also reason to believe that many soldiers simply don't want to shoot people, so they mime all the actions of fighting -- particularly all the actions that don't draw fire.

I guarantee if you are so much as holding a weapon on a battlefield, much less loading one, you'll draw fire. Besides, they weren't miming. They were attempting to load the weapon and shoot before someone shot them first. In the chaos of combat however, they couldn't remember the steps needed to make the weapon shoot. When it failed to shoot, they'd try again and again until they were killed.

Tzarevitch

 

[Kobold Avenger]

For the campaign idea I have, a lot of firearms are divided between simple and martial weapons. I think I'm leaning to pistols and rifles which vary from 1d8 to 2d6 damage as simple weapons, with rifles and carbines (of military and repeating varieties) and shotguns which do 2d6 to 2d8 damage as martial weapons. Combination weapons like pistol/daggers might be martial weapons since they'd probably be more common than they were in RL.

Grenade Launchers, Hand Cannons and weird psuedo science weapons that more technologically oriented Artificers craft that do energy (fire, acid, eletricity, cold or sonic) damage as exotic weapons.

I see a lot of PCs with rifles using bayonets, but I haven't decided if it would apply a penalty to ranged attacks with a rifle like many other sources suggest, or whether it should do 1d6 or 1d8 damage.

 

[mmadsen]

I guarantee if you are so much as holding a weapon on a battlefield, much less loading one, you'll draw fire.

Not if you're in a trench. Or behind a wall.

Besides, they weren't miming. They were attempting to load the weapon and shoot before someone shot them first.

Again, there's plenty of evidence that many men in combat choose not to shoot at the enemy -- or choose to shoot over the enemy's head -- despite the fact that they are under attack. Soldiers are not robots, and they're not chess pieces, and most have an extreme aversion to killing.

You may want to read On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. Or you may want to read his short essay, Aggression and Violence for the gist. A sample:

Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his book Men Against Fire (1946, 1978) that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their own weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. Key weapons, such as *flame-throwers, were usually fired. Crew-served weapons, such as *machine guns, almost always were fired. And action would increase greatly if a nearby leader demanded that the soldier fire. But when left on their own, the great majority of individual combatants appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill.​

More:

Ardant du Picq's surveys of French officers in the 1860s and his observations about ancient battles (Battle Studies, 1946), John Keegan and Richard Holmes' numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout history (Soldiers, 1985), Holmes' assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War (Acts of War, 1985), Paddy Griffith's data on the extraordinarily low firing rate among Napoleonic and American *Civil War regiments (Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, 1989), the British army's laser reenactments of historical battles, the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations, all confirm Marshall's fundamental conclusion that human beings are not, by nature, killers. Indeed, from a psychological perspective, the history of warfare can be viewed as a series of successively more effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing other human beings, even when defined as the enemy.​

 

[Tetsubo]

Nobody will bother with a crossbow...though you could have magic ones from an earlier era, or make it easier to enchant bolts then bullets...if you care. But otherwise it is fairly balanced, as presented in the DMG that is.

People that can't afford firearms will still use crossbows. Or firearms could be restricted to the nobility or to a class of the society, i. e. Knights, Guards, Royal Men-at-arms, etc.

Back on topic I've always thought that firearms should be martial. I had planned on using that house rule when I introduced the PC's in my last campaign to them. But the campaign died early...

I would also rule that they are ranged touch attacks to better illustrate their ability to penetrate armour.

 

[mmadsen]

People that can't afford firearms will still use crossbows.

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.)

I would also rule that they are ranged touch attacks to better illustrate their ability to penetrate armour.

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.

 

[Wilphe]

Then let the enhancement bonus count; but not the intrinsic value of the armour itself.

So "+1 Full Plate" and "+1 Leather" are both Just "+1" v Firearms

The next stage is find some Mcguffinlike material which gives a full armour bonus v bullets.

Call it something like "Kevlarium" and make it woven from something hard-to-obtain and expensive, like hair from the Tarrasque's underarms or somthing.