Firearms

[Tzeentch]

I agree it is unbalancing, I was thinking about introducing modern armout equivalents to compensate..

That's probably not strictly necessary, honestly. Trying to be too simulationist with firearms is either going to make them outright unbalanced, or put them in a position of being rather useless in a world where any shmuck can pick up a longbow and use it to full effect.

Flak jacket, Kevlar vest, Military gun suit, Power Armour. Somthing like that anyway.

Magitech golem armor Exalted and other games have pulled it off. If you have Iron Kingdoms (I keep bringing it up because it handles all this pretty elegantly in the background) they have steam armor rules in liber mechanika that could be adapted to 4e easily (I'll post an inspired adaption later).

I was thinking of expanding the feat gained powers to cover headshots and other fancy gun tricks as well as full auto bursts.

4th Ed has cut down on a lot of the rather useless or obvious uses of items and rolled them into other powers so requiring a feat to fire a gun full auto seems odd (although IIRC that's how d20 Modern did it).

Now that's a really good idea, maybe a kingdom using artificing and fire arms against magic users and monsters?

The trick is to make the differences flavorful enough to justify the introduction

I guess the hard part is deciding if you want to do a generic firearms supplement for 4th edition rules in general, or something that can be used as a plug-in for a points of light campaign.

 

[Exen Trik]

armor piercing

In 4e, the simplest implementation of this idea is thus: Armor Piercing is special property of guns to always target Reflex in place of AC.

 

[Raven Swords]

In 4e, the simplest implementation of this idea is thus: Armor Piercing is special property of guns to always target Reflex in place of AC.

I like that, I think it makes more sense for modern firearms which have the power to punch through armour to use dex vs reflex. More primitive firearms and low powered modern weapons would remain vs AC which has full effect.

EDIT: But then you fall foul of how modern armour works! maybe allows you to use AC instead of ref vs gun shots? I'm thinking a better choice might be damage resistance for modern armour vs fire arms.

 

[Exen Trik]

EDIT: But then you fall foul of how modern armour works! maybe allows you to use AC instead of ref vs gun shots? I'm thinking a better choice might be damage resistance for modern armour vs fire arms.

For an exception based system, bullet proof modern armor would have the Bullet Proof property, which allows it's a bonus against Armor Piercing weapons which varies from armor to armor. I could imagine some armors that actually give a better Ref bonus against gunfire than normal AC defense, the equivalent of a magically enchanted cloth armor.

This has the benefit of maintaining consistency in any situation your players (or anyone adapting these rules) may find themselves, such as fighting a medieval knight type with these weapons.


It may seem like it would be just the same to have armor piercing guns beat AC with a bonus, and modern armor give another bonus in turn, but it seems like a bad idea to have to calculate how much of an armor bonus you ignore has every time you shoot at a new target. Far easier to just use the defenses as is, and give "Bullet Proof +#" whenever it applies.