Guns as a touch attack?

[Nifft]

Simple vs. Exotic depends on the loading and firing mechanism, surely. A modern revolver would be Simple, IMHO.

What damage type would you call hollowpoint shots, anyway? AP and ordinary ammo certainly do piercing, but hollowpoints blow chunks out of targts. Should that be shoehorned into slashing?

Meh, no idea. It's effectively blunt internal trauma -- you're not piercing or cutting, you're punching a hole through. But that's contingent on the interior being wet, which is only true for some corporeal undead.

Maybe guns suck vs. all undead, so the sword-guy has something to do... at least until the chainsaw-guy shows up.

Cheers, -- N

 

[GreatLemur]

Maybe guns suck vs. all undead, so the sword-guy has something to do... at least until the chainsaw-guy shows up.

See, this just makes me realize we also need rules for shotguns. Part of me wants to see those statted up with narrow cone effects instead of attack rolls. No armor penetration, brutal damage at very short range (with a quick drop in effectiveness further away), possibly auto-hit with reflex save for half damage. Oh, and even slower to load.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I'd put hollowpoints as Bludgeoning damage, myself, sort of like blunt arrows.

As for the simple-vs-exotic? While it didn't require the long practice to aim well, an early muzzleloader required plenty of practice if you wanted to reload at a decent speed. The powder had to be measured out (pre-measured cartridges came much later), the shot had to be loaded correctly, and so on. Now, once you get to the breechloaders that used cartridges (basically what we do in the modern day), it's definitely not a complex weapon.

IMC, as I've mentioned before, we treat Exotic weapons as being simple or martial weapons that gain extra bonuses when you take the right EWP. So in this case, Firearms would be a Simple weapon with a 1-minute reload time, but that with the EWP the reload time drops to, say, 3 rounds.
I'm sure you could write up something similar that would fit into the core D&D rules. Take the Bastard Sword as a model; without the EWP it can be wielded as a martial weapon, just in a more limiting way.

And on the shotgun discussion: people ALWAYS overestimate the "cone" spread of a good shotgun. Unless you've sawed off the barrel and opened the choke the whole way, at the gun's extreme range, you're looking at MAYBE a spread of 10', and if it's spread out THAT much, your target's not going to be hit by many individual BBs, so at the maximum effective range the radius is even smaller. (And if you do saw it off, your range sucks.) I hunt pheasant, and if they're at anything other than close range, you're just not going to hit them enough to take them down; hitting with one or two BBs out of 300 isn't enough to stop them from flying away, usually.
The point is, that's not nearly enough to worry about as a "cone". What it does do, though, is improve your odds of hitting (in D&D terms, a flat attack bonus) as well as mitigating the effects of partial armor (some exposed spot WILL get hit), while being totally ineffective against full armor. D&D doesn't model this last bit well, so I'd just stick with a flat attack bonus, although I'd also say that anyone along the line of sight (including beyond the target) has a chance of taking damage as well. BBs ricochet really easily.

(Also: "slower to reload"? No. Modern shotguns have an internal magazine of 4-7 rounds. I personally prefer a pump action, which only takes a second or so to reload; my father uses a bolt action, which takes about the same; my grandfather preferred a semi-automatic. Yes, 4-7 rounds isn't a whole lot, but you can also reload quickly if you know what you're doing.)

 

[GreatLemur]

The point is, that's not nearly enough to worry about as a "cone". What it does do, though, is improve your odds of hitting (in D&D terms, a flat attack bonus) as well as mitigating the effects of partial armor (some exposed spot WILL get hit), while being totally ineffective against full armor. D&D doesn't model this last bit well, so I'd just stick with a flat attack bonus, although I'd also say that anyone along the line of sight (including beyond the target) has a chance of taking damage as well. BBs ricochet really easily.

A flat attack bonus sounds fine to me (although, really, not so flat once you factor in range penalties).

Alternatively, maybe shotgun blasts should be resolved as multiple attacks, like the D&D v.3.0 shuriken? It's kind of unwieldy, but it makes sense. Certainly, you wouldn't want to roll a separate attack for each actual piece of buckshot, but you could abstract it as about six rolls. With range penalties, fewer shots would be likely to hit, so you've got less damage at longer range built into the mechanic.

I just wish there was a decent mechanic in d20 for "accidental" attacks. I can't really decide what to do about potential targets standing behind the primary target. Raw d20 rolls with no attack bonuses?

(Also: "slower to reload"? No. Modern shotguns have an internal magazine of 4-7 rounds. I personally prefer a pump action, which only takes a second or so to reload; my father uses a bolt action, which takes about the same; my grandfather preferred a semi-automatic. Yes, 4-7 rounds isn't a whole lot, but you can also reload quickly if you know what you're doing.)

Yeah, but I'm thinking of weapons that you load with a funnel full of shot, not handy little cartridges. I mean, hell, if the pistols are taking multiple full-round actions to load, I imagine a blunderbuss-like proto-shotgun would be even worse.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Yeah, but I'm thinking of weapons that you load with a funnel full of shot, not handy little cartridges. I mean, hell, if the pistols are taking multiple full-round actions to load, I imagine a blunderbuss-like proto-shotgun would be even worse.

Well, if you're talking about that far back, then really everything was a "shotgun"; there were no rifles at that point. You're just talking about a difference in ammunition used, and buckshot's just as easy to load as a solid ball.

And pistols, in those days, were worse than the larger guns. Their refire rate was practically nonexistent, and their accuracy was horrible. Remember duelling pistols? Part of the reason duelling with pistols was so popular was that so few people ever got hit. It didn't matter if the people involved were experts; I'd shoot at you, you'd shoot at me, even though we're only a few dozen paces apart we'd both miss by a mile, honor would be satisfied. It's like duelling with swords to first blood, but even less painful.

Frankly, I don't like ANY of these technologies mixed into D&D. There's a reason that gun technology improved so quickly once it spread around the world; once you have the basics of mechanical engineering down, it's not difficult to spot design flaws and improve them. But this'd lead to a lot of other technologies as well; if you want breechloading guns, it uses a lot of the same shorts of machining used for hydraulics, clockmaking, etc. More importantly, it leads to a scientific/industrial revolution, with all that entails. Most of that wouldn't really fit into a static fantasy setting.

 

[Cyberzombie]

If you had a D&D game with only humanoids, having guns be a touch attack would be fine. But, as noted above, things start falling apart when you throw in things like dragons. Guns should not allow you to annihilate dragons; it doesn't fit the feeling of the game.

I think the idea of a "gun AC" would be the simplest. You could have gun AC have half the bonus of both armor and natural armor bonuses, and no shield bonus -- except for tower shields, which would have 1/2 normal bonus (it's hard to miss a tower shield, really). You could do many other things, perhaps more realistic, perhaps not, but that would be my gut instinct. It's a lot quicker to put into practice than many other options are.

 

[Darklone]

...

So I'm okay with saying that armor doesn't do squat against firearms.

19th century cavalry under Napoleon still wore cuirasses that were a pretty good protection against firearms except for very close distances.

Modern Firearms have changed peoples thoughts about how "useless" these things used to be more than 150 years ago... In medieval settings the fear effect of firearms was probably more useful than anything else.

Range, rate of fire, accuracy and "damage" was pretty sub par compared to crossbows and bows.

That's one of the reasons why I don't like guns too much in my settings. Canons I like. Mortars too. Guns, pistols? Scarcely.

It gets silly with gunpowder in a magic setting... I'd have wizards invent a level 0 spell "Ignite enemies gunpowder". Useful, flashy and at the same time a good reason not to use guns!

 

[Gerion of Mercadia]

Ok, a few notes:

The battle of Agincourt wasn't lost by the French solely because of the longbow. The ground was muddy and as a direct function of medieval tactics = fighting for ransom, much of the french army wound up in a "funnel".

The mud bogged down the full plate armor and the longbows did reasonably well against those individuals not in the expensive plate. This kept the "reinforcing" contingents of lighter armored troops from reaching the heavily armored french knights. The lighter armored english troops moved in, and simply cut down the french who couldn't move.


With regards to the house rule:

Firearms of the "Ball and Musket" variety had 2 limiting factors. The first of these was the inaccuracy and relative short range of the weapon. The second was reload times. Napoleonic warfare accounted for these tactics by using coordinated fire.

Napoleonic warfare down during the American Revolution and the French and Indian conflicts due to the use of small unit "terrain" tactics.

During the American Civil war and the prevalence of Rifled and(later) breech loading weapons the improvements in firearms essentially made armor obsolete because increasing the range also increased the "penetration" power of the round. The eventual mechanization of the breech loading process led to the "machine gun"... and in combination with the lack of tactical evolution the bloodbath that was WWI trench warfare.

Kevlar/bodyplate vests merely stop the penetrative power of the modern rounds. Getting hit can still crack your ribs (or skull) quite easily. For these rounds, If you want hyper realistic effects, I would actually consider making armor convert lethal to non-lethal "damage" as more representative of the effect.