Let's recap and see if we can get everyone on the same page.
Elf Witch's original question is about how to add guns to a D&D-style fantasy game.
My first response is that early guns were considered, by soldiers of the time, as roughly comparable to crossbows, so you can simply use hand-crossbow stats for a pistol, light-crossbow stats for an arquebus, and heavy-crossbow stats for a musket, while remembering that guns are noisy and smoky.
(Early guns, by the way, were cheap and easy to shoot -- if not so easy to reload quickly in combat. So the typical response of making guns super-weapons, but super-expensive and requiring an exotic weapon proficiency, is almost exactly backwards.)
This brings up the issue that crossbows aren't handled all that well in D&D, either:
The problem with reskinning crossbows is that they never go up in damage. So you end up with the issue I see with bows and crossbows in DnD and that is at higher levels they are no threat at all.
Now, you can make the case that
no weapon is handled well in D&D:
There's nothing different from an arrow attack.
That's HP, not guns. And again, that's a feature, not a bug. It may not be a feature you like, but it is a feature. If you want Rolemaster, you know where to find it.
I actually don't disagree with that notion that
no weapon is handled well in D&D, but I feel that some kinds of combat are handled better than others.
For instance, in a sword-fight between two knights in head-to-toe armor, it does not strain credibility that they exchange multiple blows before one of them lands the telling blow, and that even the winner is rather beat up by the end. That seems realistic, and it matches the fiction; go back and read
Le Morte D'Arthur for countless examples. Is it a perfect model of knightly combat? No, but it works, because we expect most sword blows against armor to be less than final, and because we expect the fighters to be worn down over the course of the exchange.
For other kinds of fight, the system does not match expectations nearly as well. As I mentioned earlier, in a samurai movie, we expect a fight to be settled by one decisive hit. Hit points can handle this well, I suppose, as long as no one has enough hit points to survive a single katana-stroke. In such a hyper-lethal system, no one would survive a
second hit.
Western gun-fights tend to follow the same pattern as samurai-movie sword-fights, where a quick-draw is vital, because the weapons are hyper-lethal. Plot-protection rarely comes in the form of withstanding many hits, but rather in not getting hit: spotting the ambush just in time, shooting the attacker just before he shoots, etc.
A more realistic gun-fight would involve less-lethal guns, but not less-lethal in the D&D sense of causing no real harm until the
nth hit. A .22 pistol, for instance, can kill you dead in one shot -- or not:
Point of reality fact; the .22 automatic lost a lot of it's popularity when a homeowner shot a burglar 8 times at point-blank range, and then the burglar proceeded too beat the homeowner to death.
I think this quality of "it
could kill you" plays an important role in the feel of a Western, which should be full of gamblers pulling derringers, gun-fighters dueling at high noon, etc.:
But there is an aspect of DnD HP system that does bug me a little and that is the idea of heroes being surrounded by the town guard with more than a dozen crossbow bolts or say rifles pointed at them and they don't surrender because they know that even if every crossbow bolt or bullet hits them and they take maximum damage they are not going down.
D&D, by default, conflates toughness, fighting skill, and luck into its hit points, which makes it hard to tease out one element from the others:
Oddly enough, Kevin Sembieda- of RIFTS fame- first articulated in his game something I've seen other GMs do: 100% suicidal acts get rewarded by death.
To put it in context, he had heard stories about PCs in his game doing things like putting guns in their mouths and pulling the trigger to impress/intimidate someone because they knew the damage wouldn't kill them.
He said "No- this is wrong- the PC should be dead." he then talked about the abstract nature of HP, and how being THAT meta should be penalized by he death your PC courted.
Similarly, in a current 3.5Ed campaign, the DM has a little house rule: if a foe "has the drop on you", he will be able to act before you, and if he hits, it will be treated as a maxed-out crit. So far, I'm the only one this has happened to- I rolled a 1 for my stealth check and a modified 7 for my listen... Never heard the guy 'till the crossbow was inches away from the back of my head.
I opted to be taken prisoner.
If you have one trait for toughness, one for skill, and one for luck, it's much easier to say, "No, you can't use your luck points to intentionally strain credibility."
Anyway, how would you like your Western hero to deal with a dozen armed men? If the answer is
not "get shot repeatedly, but win anyway," then D&D-style hit points aren't quite the right fit.
The problem is not that the high-level character is too
awesome; it's the
way he's awesome. And the in-game consequences. For instances, when you're going up against the toughest
hombre in town, the obvious answer is... to bring a Buffalo rifle, because it does the most damage, and soaking up damage is what "tough" guys do, right?
