Gunpowder, fantasy and you

[SKyOdin]

My quote you used actually said I might find gunpowder a greater suspension of disbelief which contradicts your statement right there. In context, it would mean I could find it a greater suspension than magic which certainly varies more greatly from reality than gunpowder by any assessment.



I suppose you could conduct a survey to see if you are right but you seem to be presuming a great deal.

Per point #1, a more neutral way might be to say many fantasy fans prefer a different, gunless aesthetic. I've said that clearly myself as have others on this thread so if you rephrase to avoid the somewhat perjorative "comfort zone" no arguments there.

Per point #2, I couldn't speak for the "many" but as an engineer and an amateur military history buff, I feel I have a reasonable understanding of the capability of gunpowder.

First off, I would like to say that it was never my intent to spin the preferences of people who don't like guns in a negative light. My point was simply that "suspension of disbelief" is often more related to what people find cool or familiar than it is based on logic.

Let's look at a World of Warcraft as an example. World of Warcraft's world of Azeroth is currently one of the most popular fantasy settings in the world, and it contains guns. Moreover, it doesn't just include gunpowder, it has steam-powered flying machines armed with machine guns and bombs. However, it also still has traditional Edwardian fantasy castles and fortresses. There is no attempt at all made to build on the logical consequences of gunpowder in particular or the other forms of crazy steampunk technology in the setting in general. Yet, fans of the game and the setting don't seem to mind this.

I think the disconnect between fans of settings like Azeroth and fantasy fans who can't accept guns at all can only be explained by differences in taste brought about by the differences in what pieces of fiction they have experienced and enjoyed. That is what I was trying to get at earlier. In my case, I grew up playing videogames, and the first console RPG I ever played included a space-ship that took you to the moon, dwarven tanks, and a giant doomsday robot. I think that makes me more inclined to enjoy stranger forms of fantasy.

 

[Brutalskars]

Here is my take on the issue.
Look to games like Warhammer and Warcraft. Then take traditional fantasy and look over to DnD: Ebberron.

In Ebberron, the tech is built with magic.
Instead of saying that science will do away with the magic or be too strong. Scale your technology with the magic of the setting. For example, Warhammer is a dark fantasy, or gothic fantasy, so the firearms and such are more gritty, and primitive.
Then look to Ebberron, it has airships and submarines using magic engines using bound elementals.

But the real big jump is into the realm of Warcraft, massive battleships like the Skybreaker float in the sky armed with massive earthshaking cannons. And there are train like underground tunnels between the capitals of the humans and the dwarves.
Many of the guns are fantastic, since Warcraft is of heroic, flavor heavy of action combat. Rapid fire, innacurate weapons of very small caliber. Then things like the wolfslayer sniper rifle, a long rifle that fires two rounds at a time, it has a revolver like build that holds 12 shots, or 6 double taps effectively.
Then we get to magic floating fortresses in Outland, with devices ment to gather magic essence from the world as fuel, or currency for the species called the ethereals. And there are even massive robotic things made by the Burning Legion, a faction of demons. These machines made from demonic metal, powered by pure demonic fire.

So?
As we can see, technology does have a place in fantasy if you give it one. As I see it, one can also look to Privateer Press, with Hordes and Warmachine. Then take what they wish from that as well. Undead enchanced with metal and clockwork parts. Unhol machines ment to reap the living. All the way to primitive salvaged weapons used by trolls and boar-men.

Examples of what I have done in homebrew gaming in random fantasy worlds made with myself and my players. Alchemy, engineering, magic and martial all are able to find homes.
We have lizardfolk with towers using mages that channel light spells into prisms and mirrors to create blazing beams of light.

We have firearms that find more use to players, multiple barrels to do away with reload times for a short moment. But when reloading it still takes awhile. We go to real world examples, how flintlocks glance off plate, platemail was made around the same time as flintlocks and those firearms. We take the terms heroic fantasy, gothic fantasy, and traditional fantasy and slam them together to get a great balance between the magic and the arteficial.

One of the players in my group is an artificer, and he made a new arm for the fighter of the group. Because it was cut off by a cursed weapon that stopped it from ever being healed. So, science found a use.

Give it room to interact and find balance. And then make basic rules for gameplay.
Bows and crossbows find equal use in our games even by NPCs compared to guns.
Mini-bombs like fist sized smoke bombs are fun, even if not practical.
Remember guys, dragons are not practical either.


Take the excuses and throw them away, give your -fantasy- room to grow and be fantastic.

 

[Haltherrion]

First off, I would like to say that it was never my intent to spin the preferences of people who don't like guns in a negative light. My point was simply that "suspension of disbelief" is often more related to what people find cool or familiar than it is based on logic.

Fair enough. And there is certainly a large aesthetic component, both the immediate sense of whether folks see fantasy as allowing gunpowder and the aesthetics of how much you like your settings to be consistent and where your suspension of disblief boundaries lie.

Let's look at a World of Warcraft as an example.

An interesting example. I played WOW for years and enjoyed it although it wasn't because of their stellar, consistent setting The appeal was gaming when I wanted to and the mechanics of combat. Didn't find it very RP heavy as implemented (that has nothing to do with gunpowder, of course). The steampunk side of it was never my favorite aspect, either. It seemed casually tossed in there but was entertaining enough.

Firearms seemed poorly integrated. For one thing, they acted pretty much like bows and crossbows. Same damage, similar rates of fire. The gun was just a different 'skin' on the same mechanism although at least they did take different ammo. On the plus side, the engineering profession did allow characters to create explosives

Perhaps you wouldn't be surprised to hear that my hunter never used firearms My good gaming friend, and RL hunter, never used firearms on his hunter either...

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I think the disconnect between fans of settings like Azeroth and fantasy fans who can't accept guns at all can only be explained by differences in taste brought about by the differences in what pieces of fiction they have experienced and enjoyed. That is what I was trying to get at earlier. In my case, I grew up playing videogames, and the first console RPG I ever played included a space-ship that took you to the moon, dwarven tanks, and a giant doomsday robot. I think that makes me more inclined to enjoy stranger forms of fantasy.

Sounds like reasoning from too narrow a sample, to me. Heck, I just started playing WoW again (casually) after a three year absence. None of the guns or tech bother me in WoW. But then, WoW is totally incoherent when viewed at that kind of level. That's not the point of WoW. So it's ok. But not in a million years would I run a game set in Azeroth. I might play in one, on a lark, with the right DM, though it would have to be more character-driven (in the literary sense) than the online game.

See, three different reactions to the same setting from a single person? Aesthetic tastes are seldom as straight-forward as you are arguing them, and context matters a lot.

There is also who you play with. I can imagine running a fantasy game with gunpowder where half the players didn't take it as a huge red flag to make the campaign about rapid technological change. Maybe I could even get a group to sign a pledge to that effect. But as it is, I'm quite happy playing with the same 10-11 people year after year, and we have about three core things that we all like to do, and never get tired of. So mostly we do those. Gunpowder seldom makes the cut.

When you read, it's just you. I read a wide range of stuff, and a great deal of it sounds reasonably interesting, theoretically, to run a game about. But the other 11 people read overlapping but different stuff. They have their own preferences. The intersection is pretty small.

 

[Brutalskars]

As for World of Warcraft's "guns are treated just like bows and the like" that is only true for the game play of the MMO.
In the d20 rpg guns are superior in damage, but have drawbacks like enhanced fumble chance and long reload times. And as for role play in the books, dwarven, goblin and gnomish firearms are role played as to their creators.
Goblins -> high damage, low reliablity weapons. Comical, or very deadly
Gnomes -> low damage, low caliber, less failures, better aim. Precise, calculated
Dwarves -> medium damage, medium reliablity and overall better combat weapons.


Then other guns exist in the demons, and humans. As well as the orcs.

Orcish guns tend to be loud, heavy of damage, very bad aim, put as much ammo near the enemy as possible. And shrapenal. Orcs though seem to use these weapons only on certain occassion, preferring axes, crossbows and the like.
Humans are much like the dwarves and gnomes in their practice of gunpowder weapons, but they seem to prefer them only as support. In favor of bows and traditional weapons.

Demonic guns fire demon fire/blood infuesed ammunition. These weapons instead of using gunpowder, most likely run off a magical, demon based projection of blasts.


But comparred to warhammer. It seems warhammer uses firearms very similar to the dwarven design in warcraft, but the skaven(rat men) seem to lean towards pseudo-energy weapons using lightning and crystal made magic fire that is highly unreliable. But horrifyingly deadly.


So it kind of all goes back to the fact that, it is story, role playing. Do you want overpowered, unrealisticly overused flintlocks with horrible reload times? Or do you want small differences in anged weapons, making them mostly ascetic?

My idea even for 3.5 DnD is to go to 4th edition with the weapon trait, -Brutal-

Say the common flintlock rifle or matchlock is 2d8 with brutal 2. Meaning if either die rolls a 1 or 2 the dice are rerolled.
But then give it a full round or so reload, with a fumble rating of 2-5 or so. THis means you just have an even higher chance of missing. And if you wish throw away the fumble chance at point blank, and give bonus to hit?
Whatever you think is good is what you should work with.

But it is an idea, it all can be reworked depending on what you want.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Firearms seemed poorly integrated. For one thing, they acted pretty much like bows and crossbows. Same damage, similar rates of fire. The gun was just a different 'skin' on the same mechanism although at least they did take different ammo.

I know you are not talking about D&D here, but these same comments have been used time and time again to talk about potential D&D gun mechanics, so I thought I may as well comment on them.

Honestly, I don't understand how having guns be "re-skinned bows" is actually a problem, especially for D&D. Generally speaking, the D&D ruleset doesn't have the granularity to describe even fundamentally different weapons in anything but the most limited of terms. A dagger, an axe, and a spear are all very, very different weapons, easily as different as guns are from bows, yet the only degree to which they are separated mechanically are damage values and a few added properties. Most people seem okay with that. I don't see why it wouldn't be okay to take the exact same approach regarding the mechanical similarities of guns to bows. If a different proficiency bonus and damage value is good enough to differentiate a sword from an axe, why isn't is good enough to differentiate a bow from a gun?

To get any more meaningful differences between bows and guns, you would probably need to change the way D&D actually handles the differences between all weapons. At least, that is the only way to do so and avoid adding often onerous rules like gun-specific failure rates and smoke rules. I would love to see a ruleset that made swords and axes feel very different mechanically, but until that happens I see no need to make bows and guns very different.

 

[Haltherrion]

I know you are not talking about D&D here, but these same comments have been used time and time again to talk about potential D&D gun mechanics, so I thought I may as well comment on them.

Honestly, I don't understand how having guns be "re-skinned bows" is actually a problem, especially for D&D. Generally speaking, the D&D ruleset doesn't have the granularity to describe even fundamentally different weapons in anything but the most limited of terms. A dagger, an axe, and a spear are all very, very different weapons, easily as different as guns are from bows, yet the only degree to which they are separated mechanically are damage values and a few added properties. Most people seem okay with that. I don't see why it wouldn't be okay to take the exact same approach regarding the mechanical similarities of guns to bows. If a different proficiency bonus and damage value is good enough to differentiate a sword from an axe, why isn't is good enough to differentiate a bow from a gun?

To get any more meaningful differences between bows and guns, you would probably need to change the way D&D actually handles the differences between all weapons. At least, that is the only way to do so and avoid adding often onerous rules like gun-specific failure rates and smoke rules. I would love to see a ruleset that made swords and axes feel very different mechanically, but until that happens I see no need to make bows and guns very different.

It begs the question, why have them at all if they aren't actually treated differently? Especially since some players will ask legitimate questions as to why they aren't treated differently and why they can't use gunpowder itself for other purposes.

Why not have laser rifles that are also treated exactly like a bow? Why not have a PAK 88mm that is treated like a ballista? Why stop there? Why not a full salvo of an M270 MLRS treated like 12 slingers?

I assume at some point you'd find modeling advanced weapon systems as the equivalent of much simpler systems inappropriate. It would seem I find find that point earlier on the technology spectruum than you do. Are you right and I'm wrong? I wouldn't think so any more than the converse can be stated. But am I unreasonable for not liking them to be treated that way? I don't think so. Am I unreasonable for avoiding games that don't meet my needs as gamer? Again, I don't think so. We all invest a lot of time in a campaign; why invest it in one that is continually offending the suspension of disbelief you are willing to accept?

As for the game mechanics, I believed I offered my opinion on this exact point some pages ago in this thread, IIRC: the D&D game system isn't designed to span a wide range of weapon capability. I personally don't think it is well designed to handle firearms all that well as do my other players, who as I've said before include a high proportion of engineers and a hunter.

If it works for your group, that's fine but this whole thread was about whether one personally likes firearms and gunpowder weapons. I don't and I've tried to give reasonable reasons for it without simplifying or belittling the contrary viewpoint.

If you see nothing wrong with treating the firearms as equivalents of non-firearm weapons in your game, go for it. No doubt the firearms you use are considerably more primitive than my examples weapons; they were selected to make a point that there is a spectruum of weapon capability and as setting designers, you have a choice on how to model them and how, if at all, to distinguish them.

To recap my own issue with firearms, they introduce some reasonable questions and expectations from the players. If you aren't going to address them, why bother having them? If you do address them, as many have made clear they do in their own settings, and I assume Eberron does as well, then cool. It's purely a matter of aesthetics at that point.

 

[Haltherrion]

Sounds like reasoning from too narrow a sample, to me. Heck, I just started playing WoW again (casually) after a three year absence. None of the guns or tech bother me in WoW. But then, WoW is totally incoherent when viewed at that kind of level. That's not the point of WoW. So it's ok. But not in a million years would I run a game set in Azeroth. I might play in one, on a lark, with the right DM, though it would have to be more character-driven (in the literary sense) than the online game.

Good points regarding the thread topic and LOL on WOW being incoherent. As a setting, I'd have to agree. Was a lot of fun for me for a long time, though, but it wasn't because of the setting.

Talk about suspenion of disbelief: how about the gnome wielding the sword that is three times longer than he is tall and probably weighs twice as much?

It was fun for quite a while but eventually I couldn't face the gear treadmill. It was all about gearing, and the re-gearing when the next minor patch came out. Plus putting up with more ill-behaved people than I care to.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

To be honest - guns don't need to be reskinned bows to be used in the game.

For early unrifled guns their inaccuracy is best handled by a sort range increment. I typically go with 30 ft. increments for short barrels, 40 ft. for muskets.

They pack a hefty punch - 1d10 or 1d12 is reasonable. They have a good critical multiplier - x3, but are no more likely to cause a critical than most weapons - they do a lot of damage but lack precision.

They do not pierce armor better than either the longbow or the crossbow - so that can be left alone.

Contrary to popular opinion they are faster to load and fire than a heavy crossbow. Since putting crossbows at their proper speeds would make them pretty much useless to players I suggest just giving guns and crossbows the same nowhere-near-slow-enough reload speeds. However they also need cleaning - every shot past the first without cleaning adds 1 to the chance of misfire. (Just a fumble chance, nothing fancy, on a confirmed fumble you need to spend d6 rounds clearing/cleaning your gun. Guns blowing up really is not that common.)

Powder and shot is cheap - I run half the price of a crossbow bolt, if I am feeling lazy. If not feeling lazy I use some price lists from various countries during the 16th or 17th century. (Pain in the arse - prices in general, not just for powder, vary wildly from place to place. Generally, I am lazy. )

Powder can go *boom!* if you are carrying powder and are hit by, say, a fireball then the container takes damage, if it fails then the person wearing the flask takes 1d6 for every five shots they are carrying. (Having your powder horn blow up is painful, but seldom fatal, the fireball is likely to do more damage.)

Barrels of gunpowder are a different story - with fresh dry powder being far more explosive than powder stored in a dank damp dungeon. Typically I go with 1d6 per pound of powder, with a +1 per die for well stored powder, -1 per die for poorly kept powder, and half damage from damp powder, if it goes *boom!* at all.

The Auld Grump

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

It begs the question, why have them at all if they aren't actually treated differently? Especially since some players will ask legitimate questions as to why they aren't treated differently and why they can't use gunpowder itself for other purposes.

I think the reason people are trying to come up with a way to integrate gunpowder despite not wanting to think too much about it is that somewhere else someone else has asked why it isn't existing in settings that have other technology from the same era. There seems to be a continual cycle of questions as soon as one person bothers to suggest any setting element that isn't precisely accurate.

(Sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you, there's nothing wrong with your specific question.)