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

[W'rkncacnter]

One of the things I really liked was when 3e tried to expand alchemy into other areas. The PHB had alchemist fire, acid, tanglefoot bags, etc. Eberron added alchemist frost and alchemist spark (doing other elemental damage). The problem is that alchemy doesn't scale and quickly becomes obsolete to magic, but the idea would be interesting if they could somehow fix the scaling issue...

tie dcs to an ability modifier, make them simple weapons instead of improvised, and let them be deployed in place of an attack. that seems like problem solved to me.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

If the industrial revolution had started in D&D multiverse the main factories would be in the plane of mechanus. The handicap would be the transport of products toward far zones.

Another possibility is that this technology has already been discovered but is relatively prohibitive due to patent fees, and the spellcasting guilds have gone to great lengths to ensure that this remains the case.
And we don't talk only about firearms but also giant crossbows shooting explosive arrows in the bastlefield.

Firearm malfunction - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

If magic could cause "squib loads" in enemy machine guns then can say goodbye to these.

Maybe there are magic zones with a "watering gunpowder" effect. The ritual to casting this could be really slow but if it in the building of a stronghold then the inversion is worth. The war deities could gift magic banners that cursed all the firearms in the nearest area.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But in D&D 5e 2024 it's a LOT of labour (Thinkerer): 50gp for the tinker's tools, 250gp for the musket materials, and 400 hours of work making one. Based on our 40 hour working week, that would be two and a half months of work, or maybe 5 muskets per year per Thinkerer. Of course the Thinker would need 300gp up front for tools and material, not to mention working space, and board/food for those two and a half months... With only a day off per month, you would maybe get seven muskets per year per Thinkerer.

A guild, noble, king might hire a Thinkerer for 2gp/day, paying for the workshop, the Thinkerer tools, and the musket component prices. They hire a hundred Thinkerers for a year and spend 180,000gp plus the price of a workshop, armory, guards guarding that, etc.

Now imagine a thief with a Bag of Holding (or ten = 4,000gp) stealing those 500 muskets (worth 250,000gp)...

Imho the only reason why Gith (pirates) have muskets and pistols at all is because they kick in a thief with two Bags of Holding (only 800gp), drag all the muskets, pistols, and ammo into a 10' radius, 'detonate' the Bag of Holding inside the other Bag of Holding in the middle of the pile and get dragged into the Astral plane, where their buddies pick up the goods with the thief... No need to exit at all...

Not in D&D, in D&D a musket and pistol are martial weapons, while a light crossbow is a simple weapon. What people keep forgetting is that we're talking D&D and not RW...

That's because most people overvalue what a firearm can do, and undervalue what a simple knife can do... Hence they assign far more damage to a firearm then to a knife.

I refuse to even lightly engage with posts that posit that the world of dnd works literally according the rules as if the phb is a physics textbook for dnd worlds.

The conceptonly has value as a joke.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

not the near-instants-fatality machines they are IRL.

Most gunshot wounds where medical attention is readily available are survived. Like the overwhelming majority.

Even gunshot wounds to the head are often survived, which surprised me.

Really, no small arms are "near-instant-fatality machines IRL.
meanwhile, major stab wounds (ie with a blade bigger than a switchblade used to stab the target in the torso or head) kill people about as high a percentage of the time.

Firearms are deadly because you can walk into a building and shoot 13 people in one quick go before anyone can react, and because you can shoot from cover, and because of the effective range, and lots of other reasons, but it is mostly stuff that dnd doesn't model anyway.

 

[WhammeWhamme]

Right, by having firearms frozen at a particular low point and by underemphasjzinf how they would impact combat. But modern D&D combat is about vibes, not war game simulation.

War games have no trouble including plate armour and guns side-by-side. Bullets are good but people do survive getting shot, and plate armour actually does help against most bullets.

Guns changed warfare on a logistical level. European armies ballooned in size because guns are great for conscripts, not because they're impossible to defeat with melee weapons.

Colonial era warfare was generally, up until quite late stages, a matter of larger European armies defeating smaller armies possessed by economically weaker polities. These large, cheap armies were because a random commoner given a musket was a lot more affordable to a modernizing nation state than a well-trained elite melee warrior was to a less-modernized nation.

Like, okay, against a civilization that doesn't have bows either, introducing ranged warfare at all makes a huge difference, and artillery makes an enormous difference when it allows you to bombard the enemy from outside engagement range in a naval context (where you can't actually charge their position because they're on a boat), and there is a tipping where guns essentially outstrip melee weapons completely - but that point is well past the invention of the bayonet, and is over half a millennia after the basic invention of firearms.

It's not "frozen" to portray a world set in a centuries-long swathe where guns exist but are not dominant - and far more so when there's competition from ranged magic.

Most gunshot wounds where medical attention is readily available are survived. Like the overwhelming majority.

Even gunshot wounds to the head are often survived, which surprised me.

Really, no small arms are "near-instant-fatality machines IRL.
meanwhile, major stab wounds (ie with a blade bigger than a switchblade used to stab the target in the torso or head) kill people about as high a percentage of the time.

Firearms are deadly because you can walk into a building and shoot 13 people in one quick go before anyone can react, and because you can shoot from cover, and because of the effective range, and lots of other reasons, but it is mostly stuff that dnd doesn't model anyway.

This, very this.

Armed soldiers with any kind of weapons can do horrendous things to civilians. That's the nature of weapons. There's a reason why sword control laws were a thing in the Medieval era and before (really). Julius Caesar's assassination was made complex because people had to find a way to smuggle knives into his presence.
Modern spree shootings sometimes get stopped by unarmed people. Guns are lethal threats, but actual hit rates with them are pretty terrible (realistic gunfight rules for modern-era RPGs are incredibly whiffy and thus kinda frustrating) because adrenaline and stress janks up aim.