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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Modifying the light crossbow to be a gunslingers pistol.
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<blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 6992851" data-attributes="member: 5890"><p>My read of it has always been that the end result is incredibly similar to the battlemaster, but with some added balance issues.</p><p></p><p>The only real addition needed to the rules are guns which are balanced around having a failure rate. Giving a gun a % chance to jam and waste the rest of an attack action (and potentially need to be repaired as well) should be sufficient: you just need to work out how much damage that will waste on average.</p><p></p><p>Note that for the purposes of realism and avoiding abuse, I'm NOT going to use the attack roll to trigger the failure: you end up with odd things like "shooting in the dark makes guns more likely to fail" and "shooting when you have surprise makes guns less likely to fail". I also don't want to add an extra roll: so I'll focus on checking the <em>damage</em> roll to check for misfires. Personally I already roll damage at the same time as attacks, so this isn't an extra roll at my table.</p><p></p><p>We can leave hit chance out of the equation, because it's applied to both lost and gained damage.</p><p></p><p>So that leaves us with math:</p><p></p><p>if p is the jam probability (independant of a successful hit) and n is the number of attacks you can make, while d is the damage you deal and b is the bonus damage for being a gun, then we need to solve</p><p></p><p>n</p><p>sigma (d+b)(1-p)^x = nd</p><p>x=0</p><p></p><p>Interestingly enough, if we set p at 0.1, b = 2.5 more or less works for 2 or 3 attacks.</p><p></p><p>Which suggests that you can have a one-handed weapon that uses a d10, which fails to hit, uses up the rest of your attacks for the round and needs repair when you roll a 1 for damage, and it's roughly comparable to having an extra point of damage per round on a hand crossbow for 2 or 3 attack characters (or 0.5-0.3 damage per successful attack). I think that's reasonable given the extra expenses incurred.</p><p></p><p>For single attacks it pulls ahead (but at low levels you can make it prohibitive to carry spares, which increases the impact of a failure).</p><p></p><p>If you want to try two-handed weapons, then you can get something similar moving from a heavy crossbow at 1d10 to a gun that rolls 2d6 for damage and fails on a damage roll of 2 or 3. I think this one actually loses out if you have 3 attacks, which is a bummer. Taking it down to only failing on a 2 is a significant damage boost (2-4 points per round), but I suppose if you were to tack something like a minor action reload after 2 shots, that might be workable, but obviously good for certain characters and poor for ones that like their minor actions.</p><p></p><p>Note that any of these will be a minor power increase for characters at high level that only have a single attack, but it's on the order of a +1 to damage.</p><p></p><p>tl:dr version:</p><p></p><p>A one-handed martial weapon with range 30/120 that deals 1d10 damage, but deals 0 damage, wastes the rest of your attacks for the round and breaks when you roll a 1 on the damage die is more-or-less balanced.</p><p></p><p>A two-handed martial weapon with a range of 100/400 that deals 2d6 damage, but deals 0 damage, wastes the rest of your attacks for the round and breaks when you roll a 2 or 3 for damage is more or less balanced.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Saeviomagy, post: 6992851, member: 5890"] My read of it has always been that the end result is incredibly similar to the battlemaster, but with some added balance issues. The only real addition needed to the rules are guns which are balanced around having a failure rate. Giving a gun a % chance to jam and waste the rest of an attack action (and potentially need to be repaired as well) should be sufficient: you just need to work out how much damage that will waste on average. Note that for the purposes of realism and avoiding abuse, I'm NOT going to use the attack roll to trigger the failure: you end up with odd things like "shooting in the dark makes guns more likely to fail" and "shooting when you have surprise makes guns less likely to fail". I also don't want to add an extra roll: so I'll focus on checking the [i]damage[/i] roll to check for misfires. Personally I already roll damage at the same time as attacks, so this isn't an extra roll at my table. We can leave hit chance out of the equation, because it's applied to both lost and gained damage. So that leaves us with math: if p is the jam probability (independant of a successful hit) and n is the number of attacks you can make, while d is the damage you deal and b is the bonus damage for being a gun, then we need to solve n sigma (d+b)(1-p)^x = nd x=0 Interestingly enough, if we set p at 0.1, b = 2.5 more or less works for 2 or 3 attacks. Which suggests that you can have a one-handed weapon that uses a d10, which fails to hit, uses up the rest of your attacks for the round and needs repair when you roll a 1 for damage, and it's roughly comparable to having an extra point of damage per round on a hand crossbow for 2 or 3 attack characters (or 0.5-0.3 damage per successful attack). I think that's reasonable given the extra expenses incurred. For single attacks it pulls ahead (but at low levels you can make it prohibitive to carry spares, which increases the impact of a failure). If you want to try two-handed weapons, then you can get something similar moving from a heavy crossbow at 1d10 to a gun that rolls 2d6 for damage and fails on a damage roll of 2 or 3. I think this one actually loses out if you have 3 attacks, which is a bummer. Taking it down to only failing on a 2 is a significant damage boost (2-4 points per round), but I suppose if you were to tack something like a minor action reload after 2 shots, that might be workable, but obviously good for certain characters and poor for ones that like their minor actions. Note that any of these will be a minor power increase for characters at high level that only have a single attack, but it's on the order of a +1 to damage. tl:dr version: A one-handed martial weapon with range 30/120 that deals 1d10 damage, but deals 0 damage, wastes the rest of your attacks for the round and breaks when you roll a 1 on the damage die is more-or-less balanced. A two-handed martial weapon with a range of 100/400 that deals 2d6 damage, but deals 0 damage, wastes the rest of your attacks for the round and breaks when you roll a 2 or 3 for damage is more or less balanced. [/QUOTE]
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