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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 5549178" data-attributes="member: 1165">I think guns should only be used where appropriate. Not in a "standard medieval western Europe fantasy"* but in a 1700s pirate game? Sure.Guns have less mystique than swords or other weapons. Guns are technical. They come in specific sizes. They come in specific types (shotgun vs SMG). Hell, they come in specific models (Desert Eagle vs Glock). And unlike swordplay, you can learn a lot about them just by reading Wikipedia. Or Google. Or Jane's. Or going to the range. Or getting a job as a police officer...I used to visit the d20 Modern boards at WotC's forums all the time. There were constant complaints about how 10mm guns were statted the same as 9mm guns (but had less ammo, creating imbalance). D20 rules were (are?) just too coarse for that kind of realism. There were facts (and, of course, "facts") thrown around about how many foot-pounds of damage a 10mm bullet would do, the size of the permanent and temporary wound channels left behind by an 11mm shot, why hollow-points are good and/or suck, etc.Last time I checked, a DnD longsword is a longsword, regardless of whether it is 3'7" long or 3'9" long, no matter what the handle is made of, and the bonuses are hugely expensive and/or level-dependent, since (beyond masterwork) all bonuses are magic. It's almost like they were designed for balance and playability first and realism far behind, from 1e to 4th, to Warhammer and many other settings.Gun knowledge hit my own campaign. One of my players (in real life) practiced kendo for years. He knows a lot about swords. He's used (wooden) ones in actual practice. Turns out he knows guns too. He pretty much never discusses sword knowledge in my 4e campaign but in Modern... guns all the time. And another player has ambitions to design heavy weapons in real life. *Sigh* I was constantly having to restrain their in-game ambitions in order to keep the scale down. (You can't carry heavy weapons in a big city.) It's a bit difficult when there are real-life guns that are clearly superior to other real-life guns, and the players and I know that. (Yes, AK-47s are reliable, but they bend when they heat up. And apparently there's this shotgun that's "easy mode", which I actually learned about from my gaming group...)So I found myself learning about real-life gun tactics (pinning fire, cover fire, firing mortars... I used those in a few encounters) but I kept coming up with overly complex rules, no surprise since I was (subconsciously?) trying to copy reality. So IMXP, don't do that.I would personally not allow guns in any fantasy campaign I'm in with these players, as I have another player who knows everything you care to know about blackpowder weapons, including actual loading times (which would be horribly unfun to write rules around).Did I forget to mention I live in urban Canada? I have my own tendencies in these regards (I've pretty much memorized the statistics of all American military aircraft in use up to the First Gulf War, especially the Warthog and Spectre, which incidentally means I'd never try to use those things in a campaign). I don't know what it is about modern technology that does this to people. I need to follow the advice of the writer of Neuromancer, paraphrased as "the reason I can write about computers so well is because I know nothing about them".So IMO don't do real-life guns in fantasy. Make them magic. Even if you're doing Pirates of Penzance. That way you can make them cool, or not, balanced ... or, if you really want to, not. The DM can control them that way.Now that you've decided to make guns magic,** good luck writing rules about guns that are fun and balanced. Moving away from realism will at least make that possible, although there will still be a ton of work required to write a good set of rules. I've never seen it done well, although to be fair, after seeing a few sets of gun rules, I've become so exhausted by them I suffer measurable penalties to Int and Wis (IRL!) when exposed to them.*I know Western Europe had "hand gonnes" as far back as the Hundred Years' War, but they were rare, probably expensive, seen as curiosity pieces, and they'd probably be impossible to balance in-game due to their rarity. (Once a PC has a gun, there's one in every encounter.)**I have mind control and predictive powers over the internet. Well, not really. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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