Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6952880" data-attributes="member: 4937">The best treatment of firearms in a D20/D&D context is by the author Ken Hood.  I managed to snag a beta version of his Firearms rules, which so far as I know was never really published.  However, they are awesome.The first thing to understand is that primitive firearms, that is basically any firearm up until the 18th century when rifled flintlocks started appearing, is going to be basically balanced with advanced melee and missile weapons.  The primary advantage of primitive firearms over slings and longbows, lances and pikes, is the simplicity of employing the weapon effectively.  It's far easier, quicker and cheaper to train a large number of musketeers than it is to train a large number of longbow men.  A primitive matchlock or even wheel lock weapon is really not that much more effective than a modern crossbow.  In terms of balance, you can safely introduce firearms into a fantasy campaign without wrecking it.You will have to deal with two consequences.  First, firearms are a powerful force multiplier for low skilled armies.  It's much harder to be heroic in a world of firearms, and as such NPCs benefit from realistic firearms far more than PCs do.  A force of musket armed goblins is potentially quite formidable to low level PCs.  Secondly, you have to deal with the far more consequential impact of gunpowder on your world, which in quantity will wreck your game far more thoroughly than firearms ever will.   One of the most difficult and most frustrating things that a DM has to deal with is terrain destruction.  A DM soon learns to not build the dungeon out of anything flammable, because the time invested in creating the dungeon will be wasted effort if the PC just burn the thing down - which they inevitably will try to do, thinking that they are being really out of the box rather than really obvious and often counterproductive (no treasure for them).  Even experienced DMs will make this mistake and rue it.   Imagine how worse the problem gets when the PC's can tote around barrels of gunpowder, and fill up portable holes with the stuff.If you are willing to forge ahead despite those two problems, a few important things to note about implementing firearms:1) Realistically, firearms lived alongside armor for centuries.  Realistic firearms don't ignore armor.  They do ignore lighter armors, but they still have difficulty penetrating say plate or other advanced armors.  You can model this with some sort of penetration mechanic which reduces the effect of armor to some degree.  You can either have armor/natural reduced by a couple of points, or you could in the context of D&D say, "Light armor is ignored."  Either way, this is a bonus to hit only when targeting creatures in armor, but not as great as ignoring armor completely.2) The biggest reason firearms will be balanced until rather late in their development is their very slow rate of fire.   Most of the improvements in firearms between their introduction in the 14th century and their dominance in the 18th century was in rate of fire and reliability, with a lesser but important improvement in range and accuracy.  Depending on what century you model your technology on, you'll have a reload time between 9 rounds (14th century) and about 2 rounds (17th century), with pistols generally being slower and more complicated to reload so that they were generally treated as one shot disposable weapons during battle.  Only attacking every 3rd to 10th round isn't exactly game breaking.  As such, these aren't going to be weapons that anyone with the possibility of multiple attacks per round are going to rely on commonly, and indeed they are mostly going to be weapons used only in the first round or so of combat before closing to melee.   As such, they are slightly better heavy crossbows with slightly longer rates of fire and poorer reliability especially in wet conditions.3) Catching the flavor of a firearm is mostly a matter of overcoming the player's need to see getting hit by a firearm as something more traumatic than getting hit by a crossbow or a battleax.  In other words, you need to narrate most cases where someone is shot the way you'd narrate most 'hits' in D&D as being grazing, glancing, superficial wounds.   Being hit in D&D with a weapon doesn't mean that the weapon solidly connected, only that it in some way touched the target.  At least in the case of humanoids, only with a critical or after hit points are whittled down do weapons start to solidly connect.  One concession you can make to this is making the critical from a firearm being more effective than is usual for the critical for other weapons.   For example in 3e, I used a critical of 19-20/x3 for firearms, which nicely captured the expectations of being shot without making them grossly overpowered.  Similar adaptations of being slightly better when a critical hit is earned could be used in 5e.Much of this is dealt with in Ken Hood's work if you can find it.As a last caveat, the other big problem with endorsing technology in a fantasy world is you are thereby endorsing science and technology, and with it opening yourself up to metagaming as players use their knowledge to increase the pace of technical advancement in your world.  In other words, given matchlocks, you are likely to have players wanting to invent rifled flintlocks and eventually repeating weapons ASAP.  Don't let them do that, as even if you tolerate the metagaming to some extent, advancing technology is a process that requires master craftsman with years of time on their hands - not something that PC's can do just because their players already know the details.</blockquote>

Verification