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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6952141" data-attributes="member: 996">But of course there is!  Magic can do anything.  Want guns?  Boom! (literally & onomatopoetically)  Magic Guns.  Could just be wands of magic missiles, for instance.  Grenades?  Necklace of Missiles.  Light Anti-tank Weapon?  Javelin of Lightning.  Man-portable SAM?  Javelin of Piercing.  Meh.  If guns are common, simple weapons (which might not be unrealistic depending on the period you're drawing them from) then they're not going to overbalance any one particular sort of PC.  Much.  If go with a slow loading time - like a minute, so not practical in combat - how bad could it be?  <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=";)" />One thing to remember about hypothetical firearms in D&D, is that they're deadly weapons.  And so are crossbows and daggers.  We may be used to seeing people decorously fall over dead when shot in old westerns, but there's (ironically, considering my faux-rant, above) nothing magical about guns.  They fire bullets, bullets punch holes in things down range.  If that thing is a human heart, death.  If it's a human spleen, severe injury, but you might well survive. If it's the corner of your cloak, no big deal.  Your just as dead with an arrow through your heart, but the arrow doesn't need to d% damage or exploding damage or save-or-die to model that, it just does a die of damage, and you decorously drop dead like the baddies in the old movie if you happen to be low on hps...End of story.Guns could be d4 ranged piercing weapons and leave it at that, if you wanted.    If it's just a weapon, its really not going to be that interesting. Weapons aren't that interesting in D&D.  They might as well be sharp sticks for all the difference it makes. If you want them to be common weapons, not radically more rare, expensive, or hard to use than swords & crossbows or the like, yeah, just make them slightly-different crossbows.  They take longer to load, but are smaller (pistols downright concealable), while still doing as much or slightly more damage.  Smoothbore muzzle-loaders could be fired, by trained trooops several times a minute, so a full-round re-load or a heavy crossbow re-load time wouldn't be totally insane (the RoF of D&D crossbows is pretty high, 'realistically').  The revolver could be a special case.  A cap-and-ball revolver takes a long time to reload, so have it a load out of combat deal.  It can be more expensive.  It needn't be more damage than the regular pistol, but it'll be very attractive to more skilled combatants who have extra attack.Along with eventually rendering armor impractical (for a time), one of the popular impacts of early firearms was their relative ease of use by minimally trained troops.  Making them more attractive to low-level and ordinary-stat users could be a way to evoke that. Last time I used firearms in a D&D game, I made them alchemical items (called Thunderfire Rods, that looked like ornate wheel-locks) that had a fixed attack/damage that didn't use the proficiency or stats of the user.  That made them very attractive weapons for the minimally trained or ordinary person.  They also made good ranged weapons for PCs who otherwise sucked at ranged combat, so even a dedicated melee type could carry a brace of pistols like a good pirate, and touch them off when he couldn't engage for whatever reason.</blockquote>

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