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<blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 7607689" data-attributes="member: 6993955"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Fenris-77, post: 7607689, member: 6993955"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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