Firearms

[Kobold Avenger]

The Modern Firearms table is based off of D20 Modern, see how that table from the DMG closely resembles the tables on Handguns and Longarms. They're meant for another system that was sort of compatible with 3.5e. If there's ever is a 5e D20 Modern or a Gamma World revision, I'm sure we'll see a bunch of these revised for the fact that there's less range increments, Dexterity Modifier adds to ranged attack damage rolls, feats such as Double Tap being optional instead of essential to certain builds, and all weapons have the same critical hits modifiers.

I feel the Renaissance weapons table is serviceable, in that they at least gave it more thought than copying and pasting the table from D20 Modern.

 

[Satyrn]

I bet you they just copy/pasted those from D20 Past.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I bet you they just copy/pasted those from D20 Past.

They didn't D20 Past used the 2 Die damage values for all Firearms. While I can't provide a link since it seems they were never made part of the SRD, they follow under the similar patterns as the standard weapon values in D20 Modern.

 

[Imaculata]

I think I'd disagree. A lot of players spend significant time eking out even a minor advantage based weapons and combos. If your firearms are even slightly superior then everyone will use them unless "story reasons". So sure. I think balance is way more important than selling the idea to the players.

The reason I disagree with you, is because I feel firearms should be the first and obvious choice for the players, and melee should be their backup weapons. As I said, I run a pirate campaign, and if all my players still ended up using bows and swords, then I'd feel like I had failed at establishing a pirate campaign. Historically guns were more deadly, so they should be a lot more powerful than any other weapon in the campaign.

If guns only did slightly more damage, that would not be enough to pursuade all players away from their default D&D weaponry. The best situation for me is one where there's plenty of gun-use, and the players are occasionally forced to fall back on melee (due to a misfire, a gun being empty, running out of ammo/powder, or a gun getting wet.) Because this allows me as a DM to set up interesting encounters where getting their precious guns wet is a high risk, and where enemies are trying to force them into a melee. This makes positioning extremely important in combat.

 

[Fenris-77]

The reason I disagree with you, is because I feel firearms should be the first and obvious choice for the players, and melee should be their backup weapons. As I said, I run a pirate campaign, and if all my players still ended up using bows and swords, then I'd feel like I had failed at establishing a pirate campaign. Historically guns were more deadly, so they should be a lot more powerful than any other weapon in the campaign.

If guns only did slightly more damage, that would not be enough to pursuade all players away from their default D&D weaponry. The best situation for me is one where there's plenty of gun-use, and the players are occasionally forced to fall back on melee (due to a misfire, a gun being empty, running out of ammo/powder, or a gun getting wet.) Because this allows me as a DM to set up interesting encounters where getting their precious guns wet is a high risk, and where enemies are trying to force them into a melee. This makes positioning extremely important in combat.

I think you're under-estimating how motivated players are to min-max combat damage. Given the choice between, say, 1d8 from a longbow and 2d6 from a gun of some sort, a huge percentage of players will take the gun and the better damage just on spec. Even the difference between a d10 and a d8 is enough to get that job done generally. So long as the right firearms weapon proficiencies get added to the character classes you're fine. If you need another little boost, you can change the rarity and cost of some of the alternatives to make them more expensive and harder to find (they're antiquities or whatever). That and make sure the firearms have the same suite of feats and whatever to build skill trees and do funky combat stuff. Essentially, so long as everything else is equal, the damage will be the trump for most players.

The problem you're going to run into if you make firearms more than a die better is that it throws the balance of the whole combat system off. If you introduce a class of weapons that do significantly more damage you have to change a whole host of other rules. Of maybe more immediate import is that you have, by default, made the characters themselves less survivable, assuming that their humanoid enemies are also going to be armed with firearms. Plus you've put your thumb on the scales when it comes to magic, because the damaging spells are scaled against melee by level (mostly). My point is not to make a huge list here, just to point out that when you change something like basic damage potential too much you end up having to change a bunch of other stuff as well just to maintain balance, and now we're talking about the kind of game design that doesn't come with a manual and which can be very hard to get right. Hey, if you like that sort of thing then go nuts (really), but redesigning great swathes of the game is not what everyone wants to do. But if you keep the damage more or less inside the current ranges then the rest of the game should continue to work just fine.

On a separate note, you're the GM, so if you tell your players "hey, this is a pirate campaign, so we're using firearms unless you have a marvelous story reason not to" that should be enough regardless of the rules in question.

 

[Celebrim]

The reason I disagree with you, is because I feel firearms should be the first and obvious choice for the players, and melee should be their backup weapons. As I said, I run a pirate campaign, and if all my players still ended up using bows and swords, then I'd feel like I had failed at establishing a pirate campaign. Historically guns were more deadly, so they should be a lot more powerful than any other weapon in the campaign.

This is an example of how different persons can have very different perceptions of what makes sense and feels right. For you, owing to the power of firearms, pirates need to leap on to the decks of other ships armed with all manner of firearms, and to treat swords as a backup weapon. For me, I'm perfectly happy to have a band of cutthroats be mostly armed with all manner of stabbing and cutting implements, and to treat wheellock pistols as an expensive, somewhat unreliable, backup weapon - leaving most of the actual musket and blunderbuss fire to the moment before the pirates go swarming over the decks.

My suspicion is that if you make firearms slightly better than say a crossbow, but with a realistically long loading time (depending on the century you are importing your firearms from, 1-3 rounds), you'll roughly emulate actual tactics of the era, which consisted of basically one of two strategies - either form a defensive wall behind which your musketeers can reload safely and wait until the volleys of musket fire become unendurable to your opponent, or else, fire off a volley and then charge directly into melee. PC's might equip themselves with a brace or even half dozen pistols, but they'll still want something stabby for close quarters.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

The reason I disagree with you, is because I feel firearms should be the first and obvious choice for the players, and melee should be their backup weapons. As I said, I run a pirate campaign, and if all my players still ended up using bows and swords, then I'd feel like I had failed at establishing a pirate campaign. Historically guns were more deadly, so they should be a lot more powerful than any other weapon in the campaign.

If guns only did slightly more damage, that would not be enough to pursuade all players away from their default D&D weaponry. The best situation for me is one where there's plenty of gun-use, and the players are occasionally forced to fall back on melee (due to a misfire, a gun being empty, running out of ammo/powder, or a gun getting wet.) Because this allows me as a DM to set up interesting encounters where getting their precious guns wet is a high risk, and where enemies are trying to force them into a melee. This makes positioning extremely important in combat.

I think that Fenris-77's point is that you probably don't have to move the balance point too far to get the optimisation-minded players to embrace the superior weapons. However, if you are indeed trying to persuade all players away from the default cutlasses, knives etc, bear in mind that there are players who value theme or standing out over mechanical maximisation.
While you might be trying to encourage a playstyle involving standing behind barrels and sniping once the players' ship has come alongside their enemies, there are always going to be some players wanting to swing aboard and start laying about themselves with a cutlass even if you have designed the game to make mixing it up with blades and pistol less optimal than standing in place and shooting.

 

[Fenris-77]

Even in a Victorian era steampunk setting you are still going to get players who want a sword cane, or whatever, yeah. And that should be fine with most GMs. So long as most of the players are toeing the line you should get what you want as far as gameplay goes. If you're doing a pirate setting then you should also be embracing the cutlass and dagger as they are as iconic and emblematic of that era as the flintlock pistol.

 

[tglassy]

Here’s another reason to just leave the rules as how it was written: the DM should not have an opinion on how the players play the game. The DM should not have an opinion on whether or not the players should be using guns first and melee as a last resort. It is not the DM’s job to have an opinion, really. The DM is just the computer in the video game console. He generates the world, the NPC’s, and arbitrates the rules. The DM gets to decide the setting, sure, so if you wanna run a game on the high seas, that’s wonderful if you can find a group that wants to play that. But saying “I really want everyone to mainly use guns because that’s the kind of game I want to play” isn’t up to the DM. If you wind up with a crew who all like to just use daggers, then that’s on them. The DM puts up challenges, not solutions.

Now, you can have guns be an effective solution, but how to solve a problem and what tools the players decide to use to do so should be left entirely up to them, not based on what the DM wants to play as if the DM were playing the game. That’s part of the fun being a DM. You get to see how your ragtag group accidentally circumvents the huge trap you spent an hour developing in thirty seconds because one of them had an item you forgot about.

 

[Celebrim]

Here’s another reason to just leave the rules as how it was written: the DM should not have an opinion on how the players play the game. The DM should not have an opinion on whether or not the players should be using guns first and melee as a last resort. It is not the DM’s job to have an opinion, really. The DM is just the computer in the video game console.

None of that is true, and I think you'll find very few DMs agree with any of those claims.

Fundamentally, your opinion seems to continually come down to, "You shouldn't do things that way because I wouldn't do things that way." There are always going to be DMs that do things differently than you do and have different priorities than you do. That's OK.

The DM does have a referee hat to wear. But if the DM is just a computer in a video game console, then you should just play video games and not bother flesh and blood DMs.