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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Derren" data-source="post: 5375199" data-attributes="member: 2518">Can muskets work in fantasy? Considering that I recently read Temeraire (Napoleonic wars + dragons) it certainly can.Generally, "Fantasy" can pretty much mean anything so of course firearms can work with some of its variations.The question here rather seems to be "Can firearms work with D&D"? Well, they can, but not very well.D&D characters are very hard to kill because of the HP bloat and easy healing. That means that slow firing weapons like most firearms have a huge disadvantage as even with high damage they won't take out an enemy in one shot and by the time they are ready to fire again the enemy might have been healed.And, when addressing the 4E rules specifically, the enemies who can be killed in one hit from a firearm can also be killed by a hit of anything else. So again a fast rate of fire is prefferable to slightly higher damage (which, compared to the HP of the enemy is rather insignificant).The generally short encounter range in D&D also makes ranged weapons less valuable.That combined means that in D&D most of the time you can't kill enemies with ranged weapons before they get into melee range.In other systems were characters and enemies have less HP, muskets become a lot more viable while still being balanced as they are slow firing.When you want to add firearms to D&D imo the historic version works much better than the romantic one.The "romantic" image of firearms are slow firing, extremly dangerous (to both users), armor piercing superweapons.That leads to extremly long (for D&D combat) reload times, touch attacks, exploding criticals and pretty fatal misshaps. And that all combined means no sane person ever wants to touch a gun.Now historically, guns weren't better than bows for a long time till rifles came along. The reason why they still replaced them for mass combat was that they are very easy to build and use. If you use that rationale behind firearms in D&D they would be simple weapons everyone can pick up while crossbows would be martial and bows superior weapons.No special rules required except that muskets have a slight load time (move actions). That should work rather well when you want to add them to your game.If you still want to give muskets an extra punch, add a bajonett to them, so the user can decide to reload them or to charge without the need to switch weapons (or to enchant several ones).Oh, and by the way. Firearms existed as early as the 10th century in China. So actually most weapons already used in D&D are more "high tech" than early guns.And you don't want to know when rockets were invented...</blockquote>

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