Making guns palatable in high fantasy [Design Theory]

[Fanaelialae]

Yes, they actually did have an advantage - they were much quicker to load.

I wish folks could find some crossbows with detachable cranquins, just so they can see how long the danged thing takes to load. No to mention that it is actually fairly hard work to get the bugger cranked up.

Even a hand cannon will get in at least three shots to every two with an arbalest. Four with someone who knows what they are doing.

Don't get me wrong - I would still rather have a crossbow than a handgonne, but the matchlock was really where the deathknell of the crossbow began as far as war was concerned. For hunting, the crossbow remains a better choice, at least until the wheellock (though wheellocks were much more complex and expensive), the snapchance and the flintlock made guns cheaper as well as faster than the crossbow.

My own favorite period for gaming is c. 17th century. Printing presses, religious turmoil, the dissemination of improved mining technologies, and, yes, decent guns....

The Auld Grump, oh, cursed be the locksmith, that made me old gun,
For I've shot my own true love, in the rue of a swan.
She had her apron wrapped around her, and I took her for a swan.
But alas and alack, it was she, Polly Vaughn....

Actually, that's why I specified it should be a duel. I might be mistaken, but my impression of ye olden duels was that if the first volley missed, there were extra loaded pistols on hand for them to try a second round, rather than becoming a contest of reload speed.

IMO, it would be insanity to attempt to reload a musket or similar firearm during a typical D&D encounter (at least if one uses realistic reload speeds). You'd likely be cut down before you could finish. That's why I wanted to exclude reload speed from the equation.

I was referring merely to the deadliness of the two weapons, under circumstances where reload speed is negligible. I presume that a crossbow bolt has a similar effectiveness to a musket ball for inflicting injury and death?

Regardless, thanks for the informative response!

 

[Glade Riven]

*sigh* This has really spun off into which real world analogues are best in a fantasy world argument..oh, the monsters we create.


Oh, well, moving on.


I'll slap "gun rules" for my campaign setting into "some future add-on splat" built around Mad Science. Nice and Pulpy and optional. I'm now thinking of standard, bore loaded muskets and pistols as a baseline, with full round action for loading. Masterworked versions are breach loading (standard; rapid reload shifts it to a move). For simplicity's sake, gunpowder and ball are "pre-packaged" in a cloth or paper cartredge. Magefire pistols can handle fancy magic ammunition. There's only a few technological bastions that know how to make them, anyways - one most consider to be religious nuts, and the other most people just consider nuts (half-elves are considered...weird on Phaetos). When I get down to the details, I'll be posting them in the Pathfinder forum (as it is a pathfinder compatable campaign setting).


D&D following the medieval romance hits a speedbumb when it comes to age of sea and sail (aka pirate romance). Swashbuckling adventures seem to get a little awkward (outside of Eberron) without some of the standards of age (Imperial/Victorian romance, and D&D/Pathfinder does try to include a lot of Victorian influneces). It just isn't the same without having my flint lock "glock." Eberron worked around it. Iron Kingdoms embraises it (one of many reasons I love the setting).

I'm guessing that musket wounds to extremeties were far nastier than a "clean" hit from a crossbow bolt (so long as it didn't hit an artery) - but then, there's loads of details from the US Civil War on rifle wounds shreding limbs. It's a few centuries after what we're talking about, though. Never heard anything on similar types of wounds from crossbows.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I was referring merely to the deadliness of the two weapons, under circumstances where reload speed is negligible. I presume that a crossbow bolt has a similar effectiveness to a musket ball for inflicting injury and death?

Regardless, thanks for the informative response!

Not so much similar as just 'different' - those big, fat, slow, soft lead balls did not so much break bone as pulverize it.

But a square headed crossbow bolt could penetrate armor that a bullet would mash itself flat against.

I just run with a short range, high damage, 20/x3 crit for guns. No funky rules.

The Auld Grump

 

[Herobizkit]

I'm with the AuldGrump on the mechanics of Guns.

For myself, I up the die of damage by one for guns when compared to the weapons below. x3 damage on a crit, only on 20.

I may try an experiment in 4e where a crit causes a Bleed for 1/round.

Hand crossbow = pistol or revolver
Crossbow = Rifle
Repeating Xbow = Repeating Rifle
Heavy Xbow = shotgun, as per flaming hands 3.x, or a Close Blast 3 in 4e.

 

[Vael]

One of the issues with adding firearms is that the mechanics of the game seem at odds with the expected lethality of guns. A game with guns isn't really about trading sword blows in the middle of a 10ft room, it's about moving from cover to cover, using suppression fire and such. The tactics of DnD don't seem like a good fit with modern firearm based tactics. Just looking at 4e, you'd have to reevaluate roles ... Defenders would now be ranged fire suppression and covering fire guys, Strikers are more like snipers, Controllers would be a bit like Defenders with added terrain alteration effects. Cover and concealment would create heavier penalties to attackers, I'd probably reintroduce penalties for firing into melee ... in other words, I think modern firearms can't just be treated as a third ranged weapon to work with bows and crossbows.

 

[cattoy]

Absolutely, it's the core design feature of escalating HP that makes guns mechanically incompatible with D&D.

In the modern world, we all have this knowledge that every human being, no matter what class or level, is one (un)lucky bullet away from being a collection of donor organs. This does not mesh particularly well with PCs who can swan dive off of 100' towers and get up and sprint away from the impact crater.

You can implement something you call guns in your D&D game. You can call it whatever you want, you can fluff it however you like. But in the end, they won't be guns as we know them. Unless they are ridiculously unbalanced (a problem in and of itself), PCs won't react to them in any way we would recognize as sensible.

So, the final question remains - if guns are introduced to D&D and they aren't lethal, and they aren't instagib, then what does D&D gain?

 

[Derren]

So, the final question remains - if guns are introduced to D&D and they aren't lethal, and they aren't instagib, then what does D&D gain?

The same thing D&D gains from (cross)bows? They have the same problem as guns. And a single good sword or axe hit is also pretty lethal.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

The same thing D&D gains from (cross)bows? They have the same problem as guns. And a single good sword or axe hit is also pretty lethal.

D&D gains non-magic ranged attacks. (Insert something about Robin Hood, Legolas, etc. Not that said archetypes are cooler than a gunslinger, but more fit medieval fantasy.)

It's an expectations game. It doesn't matter that a sword, axe or a crossbow is lethal, many people just won't accept them being as deadly as guns in-game or capable of "going through armor". We're more familiar with people being shot at than being chopped at with machetes.

Also, for whatever reason, people want guns to be realistic, in a game system where no form of combat is. People will accept that a 20th-level ranger can walk around with his bow strung all day, even in the rain, then fire off four aimed shots in less than six seconds, despite the need to restring the bow, use wax, etc, as we're not familiar with shooting longbows, and even those of us who are usually use modern "easy" bows that require less maintenance, less strength and aren't actually used to kill people. People will accept that a crossbow can be reloaded, aimed and fired in less than six seconds (I believe a light crossbow can be reloaded as a move action in 3.x)... I don't know if that's possible and frankly I don't care. It's a game. But the moment you bring out guns there's talk of caliber, foot-pounds, muzzle velocities, temporary wound channels, permanent wound channels, hydrostatic shock, model (matchlock vs arquebus, or are those the same thing?), the ability to dodge "triggers" or run zig zag patterns vs the inability to actually outrun a bullet, ease of use versus longbows, rate of fire, recoil, smoke causing concealment, pinning fire, whether you aim in small squad combat versus shooting at a massive block of opponents you can barely see, gun expense, bullet expense, how they compare to magic, what year and what country/empire/state used which weapons when, high crits, special armor-penetration rules, wet powder (deep breath) all impinging on game balance, flavor, understanding and fun.

Even the seemingly simple strategy of having guns being a single "one-blast" thing doesn't work. You could argue that spending a feat to be able to use a gun, which is just a single powerful shot you can use once per encounter, is balanced. PCs will do what people have done for hundreds of years - get multiple guns and hang them from their hips. Of course, you could nerf guns, in which case why bother going to all this trouble?

 

[KidSnide]

One of the issues with adding firearms is that the mechanics of the game seem at odds with the expected lethality of guns. A game with guns isn't really about trading sword blows in the middle of a 10ft room, it's about moving from cover to cover, using suppression fire and such. The tactics of DnD don't seem like a good fit with modern firearm based tactics. Just looking at 4e, you'd have to reevaluate roles ... Defenders would now be ranged fire suppression and covering fire guys, Strikers are more like snipers, Controllers would be a bit like Defenders with added terrain alteration effects. Cover and concealment would create heavier penalties to attackers, I'd probably reintroduce penalties for firing into melee ... in other words, I think modern firearms can't just be treated as a third ranged weapon to work with bows and crossbows.

That's how modern firearms would change the game. Most of this thread is directed towards much earlier forms of guns. Before the machine gun, closing to melee range was a reasonable strategy -- and the D&D rules would be a reasonable medium.

As someone who runs a game where guns are prevalent, I agree with the sentiment that you need to first decide what genre conventions you want and then design gun rules to meet those genre conventions. For example, I don't care whether guns are unusually lethal (to my eyes, a bullet is no more or less deadly than a sword blow), and I do care about whether guns can be used by PCs effectively in a "standard 4e" method. Accordingly, I provide long reload times for NPCs and non-gun-specialist PCs, but specialist PCs get magically reloading guns that lets them use their bard or ranger powers with the standard degree of effectiveness.

I expect that other GMs will have different priorities and reach different results.

-KS

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Seriously though, I think Umbran nailed the real issue back on page 1.

However, on a more general point, it might be instructive to investigate and compare the relative lethality of spears and bullets, for instance.

The challenge isn't the actual lethality of the weapons in question, but the perceived lethality. There's this Hollywood-induced perception that modern projectile weapons are one-shot-one-kill wonder weapons, which while occasionally true isn't generally the case. But people expect firearms to be significantly more lethal on a single-shot basis, and then get disappointed if you don't play them that way.

In one of my prior jobs I was involved with a detailed scientific study of the lethality of modern small caliber firearms (which incidentally led to the development of the new M855A1 rifle round the US Army is now using, but I digress ...). We did a lot of gel block shots in the early part of the study, with a lot of modern ammunition. For fun, some of the guys at the lab pulled out some older weapons ... and we started using .50 musket balls, Minie balls, and older weapons -- even bayonets -- on the gel.

Here's what we learned: the older weapons -- knives, bolts/arrows, musket balls -- generally caused equal or greater damage, given a hit, than modern weapons. The reason for the ultimate widespread adoption of firearms is that you can dramatically increase probability of hit, at longer ranges, with significantly less training, with a modern weapon than you can with prior generations. So muskets replaced bows and crossbows, which were in turn replaced by rifled weapons, which increased in range and rate of fire ...

It stands to reason -- look at hunting. Hunting a deer with bow or crossbow can be just as effective as with a muzzle loader or .306 rifle, but does take greater skill and occurs typically at much shorter ranges.

For game purposes, I'd suggest that you can use the existing mechanics for bows and crossbows, but giving the firearms slightly longer range increments (which IME doesn't really come up much in play anyway). Easy to do and it makes firearms a flavor choice rather than a mechanical one. But frankly by doing this you'll just start arguments at the table with folks who have watched too many movies and may not get anywhere. Best of luck.

(Incidentally I'm of the "gunpowder firearms don't fit in my fantasy", but that's just me. If Gygax didn't have a problem with it -- Murlynd, et al -- who am I to judge? There's a long history of guns in D&D.)