D&D 5E Guns in your world, and in mine!

[Caliburn101]

I might as well ask you for the D&D stats of a bodkin arrow if you want to nit-pick...

 

[Caliburn101]

Because the people in this thread advocating the usual application of AC vs. firearms want to evoke a reality check to 'prove' their contention that guns act just like more primitive weapons against medieval armours of all types.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

their contention that guns act just like more primitive weapons against medieval armours of all types.

Nobody here has said that.

 

[Caliburn101]

Nobody here has said that.

Don't split hairs on this eh?

Arguing that the AC contribution of physical medieval armours should make hitting a target more difficult with a firearm is supporting precisely this contention.

 

[Salamandyr]

Don't split hairs on this eh?

Arguing that the AC contribution of physical medieval armours should make hitting a target more difficult with a firearm is supporting precisely this contention.

It does.

Something you said earlier ". firearms want to evoke a reality check to 'prove' their contention that guns act just like more primitive weapons against medieval armours of all types."

They do. Physics is physics. Kinetic energy is kinetic energy whether created by physical or chemical means.

Firearms having more kinetic energy than a sword thrust argues for them doing more damage than a sword thrust, not for them ignoring armor. After all, the sword thrust of a Frost Giant has more kinetic energy than a the sword thrust from a man at arms, but AC doesn't change.

Armor Class & Damage is incredibly abstract and gamist. Trying to suddenly turn it simulationist where firearms are concerned just doesn't work. Armor doesn't make you harder to hit with a sword or a gun. It makes you harder to damage.

There are systems out there that accurately model how armor is less effective against firearms than sword thrusts. They have DR (damage resistance) systems instead of armor class.

 

[Salamandyr]

As a segue to the last post...this is a problem I've always had with the way D&D combat works at ranged.

The attritional, gamist nature of D&D works fits with our mental picture of how fistfights, swordfights, work in real life (based more on boxing matches, and action movies than actual real life). Two-or more-guys swinging swords or fists, battering each other, wearing each other down until finally a blow breaks through and ends the match. The idea of a sword blow crashing into someones armor, staggering them, weakening them, but not finishing them off (or noticeably stopping them from fighting) is something we've seen all the time, whether in the boxing ring, or in Excalibur and Beastmaster.

But, based on those same influences, ranged combat isn't attritional, it's binary. You're either hit, and thus you go down, or you're not, and you don't. You don't get a lot of bruising strikes with arrows. When somebody fights on with an arrow or bullet wound, we still know "wow, that's serious". But like in Star Wars, people are hit a lot less often with ranged combat (because if you get hit you go down) than they are by your average flying fist or swordblow against armor (which can be fluffed out as not that damaging).

So ideally, ranged combat would be low accuracy, high damage, when in D&D it's exactly the opposite. Ranged combat, especially in 5e is more accurate than melee, and in general lower damage.

 

[77IM]

Reminder: D&D is a genre emulator, not a reality emulator!

So whether or not bullets penetrate armor in real life is irrelevant. There's plenty of fiction in which early guns exist alongside heavy armor, and I've yet to see one in which the interaction between the two is explored or even mentioned. In other words, it won't really matter that much. So if you want the added complexity of letting bullets bypass armor, go for it; and if you don't, don't sweat it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Reminder: D&D is a genre emulator, not a reality emulator!

It's not really either. Or it's not very good at it. If D&D were emulating the S&S or High Fantasy or broader fantasy genres (at all well), it wouldn't have bandaid Clerics or Vancian casting (or possibly even PC casters), for instance.

But, yeah, not a reality simulator.

Firearms having more kinetic energy than a sword thrust argues for them doing more damage than a sword thrust, not for them ignoring armor.

Not so much. A human being, or even something a bit larger, can be transfixed by a sword, creating a through-and-through wound channel, just like a bullet might create. 'Primitive' weapons are plenty deadly. But pushing a sword through hardened leather or mail is no mean feat, while bullets won't have much trouble with that kind of protection (neither will heavy crossbow bolts, for that matter). 1e went there: it gave weapon vs armor type adjustments in detail, which'd also work fine to model firearms, I suppose. Going all the way to 'ignoring armor' is a simplification, and models a setting in which armor has been more or less defeated (there are times in history when armor is staying ahead of the weapons of the day, and times when it's been all but abandoned).

D&D's use of the AC abstraction argues for it modeling a time when armor is quite effective relative to the weapons available. Firearms could be introduced as an exception to that. It's more problematic the more heavily the system relies on armor to keep classes and combats 'balanced'/playable. An attack roll vs some sort of armor-ignoring 'touch AC' in 5e would be problematic. A firearm that forced a REF save vs a static DC would probably be fine, OTOH.

 

[Salamandyr]

What you are describing is a difference in degree, not effect. A bullet (at least a modern one) has a lot more kinetic energy than a sword thrust (at least one by a man, but not necessarily a frost giant), so it will penetrate more material than a sword thrust from your average human. There is some other stuff involved--relative material hardness, shearing effects, but from an eyeball perspective, it's all the same thing, kinetic energy applied to a specific point.

To the extent 1e was accurate, it was modelling how much kinetic energy could bring to a specific point--a war pick and a rapier are both piercing weapons (ie energy delivered to a single point)--but a war pick is swung, so it builds up delivers more energy to that point than a rapier. A swung sword has more energy than a rapier, but it's spread across a blade instead of concentrated on a point. A swung axe is able to hold more energy because it's heavier (or has the weight concentrated at the point of impact). A gun just has more energy behind it. And 1e also was woefully mistaken about the stopping effectiveness of mail.

But firearms, especially primitive firearms, are really easy to model. There's no swing versus thrust, they aren't a fine point attack. They are essentially a hammer blow (GURPS actually lists firearms as bludgeoning attacks-accurately in my opinion). A blackpowder gun of the 15th through 18th centuries also had some issues that mitigated its effectiveness. Its ammunition was a soft lead ball about 3/4 of an inch across. So the kinetic energy it was delivering was spread across a much wider area than a sword or pick point. Likewise, it was a lot softer than the armor it struck, so it had a tendency to deform, spreading out the damage even more. Which is the point of armor--to spread out the point of impact.

You are right; leather armor won't stop a musket ball, just like your average bulletproof vest today won't stop a high powered rifle. But in both cases they will slow the bullet down. A bulletproof vest will often turn a bullet that would be a through and through into a hit that stops in the body. Leather would do the same thing, even stop some bullets at the limit of their range.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What you are describing is a difference in degree, not effect. A bullet (at least a modern one) has a lot more kinetic energy than a sword thrust (at least one by a man, but not necessarily a frost giant), so it will penetrate more material than a sword thrust from your average human.

Point is there's only so much human to penetrate. Once you've created a through-and-through wound channel, you're done, the rest of your kinetic energy is spent down range.

Heh, /another/ thing 1e did: SM/L damage. A hypothetical 1e gun might do a lot more damage to large creatures for the reason you cite.

They are essentially a hammer blow (GURPS actually lists firearms as bludgeoning attacks-accurately in my opinion).

Well, it did in its first edition. It changed to them being their own kind of damage - that was more effective against armor than bludgeoning. FWIW.