Level Up (A5E) Lets talk firearms

[tetrasodium]

I have a player very excited about the possibility of using firearms and to my surprise find that I don't hate the firearms because it's easy enough to refluff gunpowder to magically treated crystals or whatever. Following the dirty feeling of that admission there are a few issues with firearms & I want to try getting some discussion started to improve them. In no particular order I'll go over them & use an ordered list for easy referencing

1. I love that pistol & shotgun have sane ranges & that it's not trivial for players to use long range without penalty
2. The carbine on AG316 has no listed range. It should be 20/60 or 30/90 like the pistol or shotgun not 60/180 like revolver & musket.
3. As far as I know carbine implies multiple rounds in the weapon, it doesn't mention how many either.
4. The revolver & musket both jump to 60/180 range. With musket being a heavy two handed (single) shot loading weapon that makes some degree of sense but as a 2d6 loading but 6 shots per load weapon that seems beyond odd for revolver to gain so much range over pistols
5. As written, crossbow expert does not apply to the reload on the (single shot?) pistol or shotgun. That's an ok thing since the shotgun is kind of unique in function & the revolver exists, but applying it to pistol could also apply it to the 2d8 60/180 musket & that seems like it would be problematic

I know that a gun-fu archetype/prc got noted as in the works for the zeitgeist book, but given my excited player has anyone noticed any abilities specific to firearms in the AG that I should be aware of before I do any tinkering? I ask since I don't recall noticing any on my readthrough.

 

[Mike Myler]

Carbine range is 50/150 (in the edits file!)

The rare weapons aren't all necessarily appropriate in the same campaign setting—if there are revolvers chances are good most people able to afford them use those instead of pistols, and spiked chains are pretty easy to manufacture for a Conan-style swords and sorcery campaign where assassin's gauntlets and boot daggers wouldn't make so good of a fit.

Because rare weapons are not assumed to be in play in all games (like simple and martial weapons are) they aren't referred to in the rules text elsewhere (class features, magic items, feats, etc.) so it's at the Narrator's discretion if they can be substituted for various mechanics like Crossbow Expert. For now, anyway.

The ZEITGEIST book has the same core statistics for firearms but also other properties, so I'd keep that in mind while tinkering or at least be ready to evaluate those when that book comes out.

 

[Steampunkette]

Hmmm... Maybe we could talk about publishing the edits file as an Errata Blog post?

 

[Mike Myler]

There'll be a changes log for anything that would affect character creation for folks that started gaming as soon as the PDFs went out. Don't know if it'll be a blog post or just in a Kickstarter update though.