Firearms and the Campaign

[Jdvn1]

IME, firearms haven't been unbalancing -- although they have been very rare.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Solutions for game-world balance (always tricky)

1) gunpowder is susceptible to fire magic. This is my favorite option. It set up a nice magic-vs-technology theme.

2) Exotic Weap Prof route. I tried this. You end up with fighters and wizards with guns while rogues and bards tend to shy away from them. Then all you need is some history buff reading about King Henry VIII unit of guards that had guns built into their shields and it's all over. Plus, the guy who took the feat figure he's now Johnny Alchemist and starts building bombs. All this really does is encourage wizards to take a level of fighter. For world blancing it's a little weird because all the player wizards are encouraged to use a gun the way the rules are set up, but none of the NPC wizards will have them.

3) Simple Weap Prof with "to hit" penalty. This is a great way to include guns while discouraging their use. Players hate to hit penalties. A nice -1 hit penalty combined with a slow reload rate will reflect real-world concerns and make the longbow a more attractive option. Of course, in real life, people had to train for a long time just to be a bad shot with a longbow, but let's not go there right now. The penalties are reason enough for NPCs not to take the weapon seriously. If you go this route, you should rule that a natural 1 on an alchemy check to muddle with gunpowder sets the stuff off automatically. Then allow a feat with a prerequisite of five ranks in Alchemy to avoid this kind of thing from happening.

4) Wacko physics. I personally hate this option, but that's just me. Require that gunpowder requires, oh I dunno, fairy dust or whatever. This makes it more expensive to use. Great way to balance the game world. Only nobles and other wealthy folk will use guns. But this kind of thing drives me buggo. What's next? Water has a different boiling point? Bleah.

Just my two cents!

 

[Celebrim]

The issue at hand is my desire to integrate certain Steampunk elemnts into my campaign, centered around the technically-advanced Humano-Dwarven empire. While this won't include extreme steampunk (full-blown sentient Analytical Engines), this will include steam-powered vehicles (ships and trains, but to a very limited degree in the Renyan frontier) and, among other things, possibly firearms.

My question is: How unbalancing flintlock pistols/musketes are to the game world, and how deeply they ill effect warfare (i.e. how much weapons/armor will be outdated). I wish to create a feel similar to the later Age of Sail with the first few steps of the industrial revolution (and steampunk/clockwork tech) taking place.

First of all, I've played Great Age of Sail campaigns completely without gunpowder. If you are willing to suspend some disbelief, magonels make perfectly acceptable cannons and crossbows make perfectly acceptable muskets.

This depends entirely on how significant you wish to make firearms to the campaign when you model them. Firearms didn't obselete longbows until the 18th century. The main advantage of a firearm is that it didn't take a lifetime of training to get someone who had a reasonable chance of hitting the target. Firearms didn't obselete melee weapons until near the end of the 19th century (arguably during the American Civil war, though most commanders of the time didn't yet realize it and many European commanders wouldn't be convinced of it until well into WWI.)

On the low/simple side of things, you could make Firearms simply a slightly improved crossbow much in the way that bastard sword is a slightly improved long sword and dwarven war axe is merely a slightly improved battle axe. Simply make Pistol and Rifle exotic weapon proficiencies, and increase the dice of damage by 1 step. So a 'pistol' is a medium crossbow that does 1d10 damage, and a musket is a heavy crossbow that does 1d12 damage. If you like, you can make reloading these weapons full round actions. If you do this, not only will the presence of firearms not unbalance the campaign, but they'll likely be weak enough that no one in the party will use them.

More realistically, you can do the above BUT make pistols and rifle's simple weapons. This will make them ubiquitous in the campaign, but still won't imbalance it. If you really want to go this route and make the weapons common but not overly powerful, make longbows and slings into an exotic weapons to reflect the extra training that goes into using them. Now you'll have longbows and slings relatively rare, but everyone can tote around a musket.

Going further down this line, the real advantage of muskets over bows wasn't increased range - it was increased penetrating power. Allow firearms (and maybe heavy crossbows) to have a penetration score of up to +3 (at least in this period). The penetration score reduces the effective armor of a target by up to that number. For instance a target in chain (armor bonus +5) would have have an effective AC of only 14 vs a flintlock pistol or 12 vs. a flintlock musket, rather than the usual 15. Of course, you can only fire every other turn or three, but low level mooks get a big improvement in thier chances to hit armored opponents.

Going even further, firearms are easier to aim compared to bows, so you might add a +1 (for a musket) or +2 (for a kentucky rifle) accuracy bonus when firing a firearm.

Going even further, musket balls wreck havoc with living flesh compared to an arrow. You might make firearms have a critical range of 19-20(x3). By this time, firearms will have started to make your campaign far more lethal, but won't really have made things any better for your average PC's because the reload time makes them rather cumbersome for your average heroes. I've suggested a full round reload action, but in point of fact its probably closer to 10 rounds for most period muskets and _longer_ for most period pistols. You could have feats like 'Musketeer' to reduce the reload action by 3 rounds or so (never less than a round), or 'Veteren Musketeer' to reduce it by a further 3 rounds, or whatever but the point is that firearms are likely to remain primarily of benefit to the NPC's and not the PC's. A sqaud of 20 goblins armed with muskets is a serious problem, if effectively the goblins now have a weapon that gives them +4 to hit and does 1d12 damage with a critical range of 19-20(x3). Even if the muskets are dropped after one volley, the PC's have probably been blooded well beyond what 20 goblins would normally be able to do to them.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

The campaign I've been creating is based around the 19th century, taking a lot of ideas from the CRPG Arcanum. Most guns in this game are percussion cap, and I use some rules from D20 Modern with D&D. So I come up with quite a lot of different rules. Classes get defense bonuses, armor has DR as with the Unearthed Arcana rules, armor bonuses limit class defense bonuses up to max dex but stack with it, and firearms ignores some aspect of armor unless it was somehow made 'bulletproof'. Firearms range from 1d8 for holdout pistols to 2d10 for large bore rifles such as an 'elephant gun'. There's also pulp pseudo-science guns built with item creation feats, sort of like the ones in Arcanum which do energy damage (though they could be conceivably built more like rods and be less pulpish and more high-fantasy). This changes around the balance in different ways.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I've been using the Iron Kingdoms firearms rules (which can be found online at www.privateerpress.com) for the past year or so. I haven't had any problems with them being too powerful.

One thing I did (though no one has taken me up on it) is to allow a variant fighter that loses heavy armor and shield proficiencies and gets guns as martial weapons.