D&D 5E (2014) Let's Talk About Guns in 5E

[Remathilis]

When it comes to preferences, or verisimillitude if you will, it's best not to look too closely at the logic. It's like asking why someone prefers chocolate to strawberry ice cream. I am in full agreement with you in regards to D&D's devotion to medieval accuracy. Plate armor was worn in the same battles with cannons and soldiers wielding matchlocks. But the introduction of firearms in D&D kind of takes me out of the fantasy. I can live with it when it's silly little additions like the Greyhawk god who was a cowboy with two six-shooters or Expedition to Barrier Peaks, but overall I just prefer my D&D style fantasy to be a gun free zone. (That might have been the least American sentence I've ever typed.)

That said, as far as rules are concerned, there shouldn't be able problem dropping firearms in the game. They won't be especially disruptive. Just pattern them off of crossbows and bows and you're good to go.

The Renaissance firearms in the 5e DMG/5.5 PHB work great in my experience for most fun using characters. No special rules, damage is good but not insane, they fill a certain fantasy niche that might not be appropriate for everywhere, but fits a lot better than you would think. Just a sample of the gun using characters I've seen:

• A drow elf swashbuckler rogue who was part of Jaraxle's crew in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
• A giff first mate on a Spelljammer vessel
• A stranded half aquatic elf pirate bard who had Jack Sparrow "one shot" left for his rival.
• A Dr Frankenstein mad scientist artificer from Lamordia who used it as his personal protection
• A gunslinger archeologist exploring the Wild West of Droaam in Eberron.

To me, they were no more disruptive than a character playing a samurai or a warforged. Not appropriate for every setting, but nothing inherently wrong about them as an option.

 

[VashVet]

Currently playing a custom gunslinger build for our Shadow of the Weird Wizard campaign and it plays very nicely.

My GM and I came up with the following:

• 3d6 damage plus one boon when firing at normal range (5 yards)
• 1d6 damage at higher ranges
• only 1d6 damage when using dual weapons (my PC uses a sword and gun combo)
• 1 shot per round unless taking extra attacks via standard rules.
• Ammo is 6 shots and reloading takes a minute. This diverges from the rules single shot flintlock style mechanic, but we’ve noticed no real negative impact in game.
• Crit fail results in a misfire (standard rules).

Basically, it wasn’t about simulation of every aspect of the gun but more making the fantasy vision on the character work within the rules and I think we nailed that so far.

 

[CreamCloud0]

All of that grousing being said, I'm trying to introduce magical firearms in a campaign I'm working on.

Instead of being slug throwers, they are magical in nature. I have a gameplay loop I want, so the weapon mechanics are based on that gameplay loop.

i agree making them magical in nature is probably one of the better solutions to the problem of them not feeling 'realistic', they can deal force damage and avoid all the fussing about how 'real guns would deal more damage' or issues with gunpowder schemes.

i also feel that guns would be a good avenue of giving martials access to AoE damage and saving throw attacks, STR, DEX and CON targeting ones at least, and would differentiate them in a way from other weapons,

make a basic pistol and shotgun simple weapons then you can perhaps make some more interesting designs under martial guns.

 

[bsss]

IME, 95% of the time a player wants a gun in my fantasy games, going back decades and not specific to D&D, they want a ranged weapon and a vibe. Maybe some different bullet effects too, but mostly just a cool concept of "master artificer" or "gnome who was told it couldn't be done" or "man from a different technology level in a strange land", not anything inherently different from a rules perspective.

Ranged weapon + minor masterwork/whatever effects are completely in the games' wheelhouse. I don't include guns by default due to my taste, but if someone wants one, it's a ranged weapon with stats probably identical to what's in the game. Done.

Disclaimer: I often play games where the equipment list is abstract anyway.

 

[Remathilis]

i agree making them magical in nature is probably one of the better solutions to the problem of them not feeling 'realistic', they can deal force damage and avoid all the fussing about how 'real guns would deal more damage' or issues with gunpowder schemes

I automatically dismiss any argument about lethality and "real world" weapons when it comes to D&D as nearly every D&D weapon is wildly impractical for adventuring. You needed large open areas to swing a greatsword, polearms are useless in the front line, firing a longbow into melee abilities should be pointless and there is absolutely no way to dual wield two quarterstaves. But D&D combat is extremely abstract when it comes to that and I see no reason to make firearm that different.

 

[Indagare Nogitsune]

This has come up as a side discussion in a few threads, so I wanted to start a dedicated thread to dig into the subject. Note that I don't think there is a hige difference between how guns would work in 5E 2014 vs 2024, so the 2014 tag is just to try and limit this discussion to various 5E versions of the game and rules.

Anyway -- it seems some people have strong opinions about the way 5E is built with relation to melee vs ranged combat, and especially with regards to the viability of firearms. I honestly do not understand the arguments. 5E is not particularly "melee locked" in my opinion. Lots of classes have access to spammable ranged attacks and perform fine. In addition, I do not think firearms should be treated as a different class of weapon from arrows or eldritch blasts. Nothing in 5E is remotely realistic or simulationist, so why would we try and make firearms (or lazer, mazer or plasma cannons) "realistic"?

the 5E engine is primarily focused on action adventure combat with Hollywood physics and John McClane style protagonists who get bloody but rarely fall down. Guns fit fine into that paradigm.

The sniper rifle argument is an interesting one, though: what do you do when your PCs want to use super long range, high caliber weapons to take out their targets instead of risking themselves? My answer is simple: don't put those things in the game. Don't give the players a "finger of death" gun if you don't want them to use it. But I know that will be unsatisfying to some folks.

So now that I have said my piece (peace?), what do you think? Do you think guns are a problem in the 5E rules? Why, or why not? Have you played a contemporary or sci-fi game with the 5E rules? If so, how did guns impact play?

Fire lances were used by the Chinese from the 10th to 12th centuries which were effectively flame throwers with the option to do shrapnel damage (probably the equivalent of burning hands in terms of fire damage + some piercing damage if someone fails a DEX save). By the 13th century there were hand cannons around (probably the equivalent of catapult).

By the 14th and 15th centuries arquebuses and muskets started appearing. Their ammo would probably also do the damage of catapult but with a smaller delivery mechanism.

For reference (though folks here probably don't need it): the "Medieval Period" is generally considered to have occurred between the 5th and 15th centuries, with the Early period being between 5th and 10th, the High period being between the 10th and 14th (the Black Death of 1347 is usually considered the end mark), and the Late period being from then to the 15th century.

This, of course, is assuming that somehow a setting where magic exists is going to look like anything in Europe in the "Medieval Period" with the lack of waves hand at everything that happened in Europe. For functional purposes most settings are Renfaire, so the inclusion/exclusion of fire arms is much more a personal choice than anything that could be historically justified.

Seriously, settings seem to have this thing about not having magical innovations unless they're Eberron which makes no sense whatever.

 

[AlViking]

...
Seriously, settings seem to have this thing about not having magical innovations unless they're Eberron which makes no sense whatever.

I don't disagree with anything else you said but I don't assume that magic is just another type of technology. Another view is that magic suppresses technological advancement. If magic can, at a cost, transform lead into gold it explains why the currency is gold instead of silver. But it also means that there's less need for experimentation and attempts to transfer lead into gold using chemistry. Because those experiments didn't happen, knowledge of chemistry doesn't advance. We don't get advances in firearms because the early firearms would be inferior to magic in just about every way. Diseases? Well, some diseases are supernatural in nature and there are magical elixirs that work so why fall back on inferior medical practices? The best and the brightest are going to focus on magic as a solution because it works.

Then there's the flip side. Perhaps magic just has hard limits that technology eventually would have surpassed if advancements had not been cut off at the early stages. It took centuries of development to get to the level of technology of flintlock firearms that most people associate with black powder weapons. Who is going to invest in a steam engine when there are semi-autonomous golems running around? But there's no reason to believe that magic could have gotten past the level of effectiveness that we see in the PHB. There may be no way to manufacture large quantities of wands or harness elementals to run your train like Eberron.

When magic can literally do miraculous things, why would people work on creations that will never rival the proven abilities of magic in their lifetimes?

 

[Remathilis]

Seriously, settings seem to have this thing about not having magical innovations unless they're Eberron which makes no sense whatever.

Even so, the best Eberron does is create a world where magic replicated turn of the century technology. The ability to move heavy vehicles across wide areas quickly is possible with magic and the best Eberron sought to do was make a train. It's a functional limitation of our imagination (commonly called versimulitude) that we tend to believe stuff that feels close to what we know. The farther you go from that, the less "believable" it becomes.

As such, we want a world where things look similar to what we know and will gladly ignore the cognitive dissonance that layering fantasy on top would produce. It's why dragon's don't ruin the local economy and ecology with their hoarding and diet, people still insist on burying the dead in a world where necromancers roam, and where a torch even exists when the light cantrip is available and continual lights are a thing. And it's why a magical bloodline focused on speed and teleportation would use that power to... Build a train. Because we want the world to still look like ours.

 

[Indagare Nogitsune]

I don't disagree with anything else you said but I don't assume that magic is just another type of technology. Another view is that magic suppresses technological advancement. If magic can, at a cost, transform lead into gold it explains why the currency is gold instead of silver. But it also means that there's less need for experimentation and attempts to transfer lead into gold using chemistry. Because those experiments didn't happen, knowledge of chemistry doesn't advance. We don't get advances in firearms because the early firearms would be inferior to magic in just about every way. Diseases? Well, some diseases are supernatural in nature and there are magical elixirs that work so why fall back on inferior medical practices? The best and the brightest are going to focus on magic as a solution because it works.

I don't really follow this. I said "magical innovations" not "technological innovations". I know perfectly well that if given one solution that's known to work (magic) it's not very likely that other solutions (chemistry/medicine/etc.) are going to be looked at quite as seriously. However there is a Medicine skill, which implies people at least know enough non-magical healing for it to be a viable option. There are also regular tool proficiencies, which implies people don't see magic as a solution for everything.

Plus there are people who study magic: Wizards (especially Order of the Scribes) and Artificers. While 5e seems to be very unfriendly towards the creation of new magic items, from an in-world perspective there ought to be quite a lot of study on the matter. Armors were developed to counter various types of weapons: weapons various types of armors. People are constantly looking for ways to get the upper hand in battle scenarios.

Since at least the Industrial Revolution, there has been a tie between military advancement in tech and the eventual use of that tech in civilian life. Now, a magic Industrial Revolution (similar to Eberron) might not happen, but people would indeed be using magic as a solution and probably try to be innovative with it.

Then there's the flip side. Perhaps magic just has hard limits that technology eventually would have surpassed if advancements had not been cut off at the early stages. It took centuries of development to get to the level of technology of flintlock firearms that most people associate with black powder weapons. Who is going to invest in a steam engine when there are semi-autonomous golems running around? But there's no reason to believe that magic could have gotten past the level of effectiveness that we see in the PHB. There may be no way to manufacture large quantities of wands or harness elementals to run your train like Eberron.

That's also true, and this can be very campaign-dependent. However, there's also not really any good reason it couldn't either. The trick, mostly, is figuring out what exists and how it works. The mass manufacture of items is certainly where the limitation comes in. If it becomes quick and easy to create magic items then it also means the costs of those items go down. The balance issue becomes one of dealing with folks who have what they need for most scenarios rather than the starvation rations that is more typical of D&D.

When magic can literally do miraculous things, why would people work on creations that will never rival the proven abilities of magic in their lifetimes?

So, I gave examples of spells that would likely give the same effects as the weapons in question both to show that (from a game perspective) they don't have to be over-powered but also that there are already spells that could give the same effect. I don't think firearms (as we recognize them) would be developed because there are already spells that do the same thing. However, that doesn't mean they couldn't be developed. The Artificer (Artillerist) comes immediately to mind for this.