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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9282457" data-attributes="member: 4937">If his point is that if you are only modelling a gun in your system with no plans for granularity between weapons, and if you then conceivably have a PC high enough level to do that with a crossbow (I'm not sure how viable crossbow guy is in 5e), then why care about realism?  Then fine I can see that albiet I'd still expect some distinction between guns and crossbows unless you just want a game that assumes guns as the standard melee weapon.But if you do differentiate between types of guns, early muzzleloaders are significantly slower than just about anything but a windlass crossbow.  It's generally equivalent to spending at least 2 and sometimes as many as 6 loading actions to fire one shot with the primary difference between hand gonnes, matchlocks, wheellocks, flintlocks and caplocks being just how many loading actions are needed to prepare a single shot.  But even with the idea that an 18th level fighter could shoot 9 shots in the time it takes a 0th level commoner to reload by acquiring some specific martial skills, that fundamentally doesn't change my point.  As I said in my post, it's that initial volley of fire that is game changing and its the presence of stable explosives that is game changing.  And if you don't have any of that, if guns are powered by magic or requires warlock pacts to function or if guns are not different in some quantitative way than crossbows or magic wands then you've got guns that aren't guns.And this gets back on topic, as it's this "Who cares about realism" that results in guns often just being kind of tacked on as slight upgrade to a heavy crossbow for balance issues.Pretty much every system I'm aware of has problems modeling bursts and auto fire.  There is a tradeoff between attempting to model every round and its kickback and speed of play at the table that just means either you have slow play or you have implausible results or you have both.  Often like with GURPS you have both.  All the simple solutions have problems and all the good solutions aren't simple and add a bunch of steps you don't have to worry about with any other weapon.  It's bad enough that if you did run a gunplay heavy system you'd probably want an app that fired the weapon for you and did all the calculations.I'm not sure what you mean by that.  I can give you reasonably good D&D stats and rules for just about any modern light arms.  It's not so much that they work poorly, it's that when a 2nd level fighter is wielding a scoped 12.7mm anti-material weapon with even fairly low verisimilitude (2d8+6 damage rather than say 4d20) you are still dealing with him having a weapon that in certain respects outclasses most magic and magical weapons and totally changes the threat that a low-level character represents.  And while that's a pretty extreme case, it's true of basically everything starting with flintlock rifles.   Granted 5e has notably less granularity between weapons than any edition since 0e, so having guns have granularity and nothing else is inelegant but I don't see what that has to do with the level-restricted framework.</blockquote>

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