Johnny Angel
Explorer
First of all, does it have to be a revolver? A pistol may comfortably accomodate two separate barrels with independant firing mechanisms, and the character could take the quickdraw feat if he needs more attacks per round than that. That was the old-fashioned solution -- carry more pistols.
In my campaign, which is already a burgeoning industrial world, gun technology is way behind everything else (except for examples that are dug up from ancient gnomish sites) but it is catching up quickly. I'm just now introducing revolver technology in two forms, flintlock and caplock. The trick with assigning technological levels is that most revolutionary technologies were based on a combination of other technologies that had already been available for centuries. The sequence of inventions we can trace through our historical record is by no means the only way it could have gone.
A flintlock revolver can be done, such as in the famous 1820 model by Eli Collier: http://roberts-model-ships-and-boats.com/collier2.htm
I'm looking at a picture right now of an English snaphaunce revolver circa 1650, from the book Firearms by Howard Ricketts. The snaphaunce is kind of between wheelock and flintlock in advancement. The advancement, by the way, is in simplicity, not complexity. A flintlock is superior to a wheelock not because it's harder to make, but because it's easier. It serves the same function while being easier to make and less likely to malfunction, because its operation is so much simpler.
Although I've never heard of a wheelock revolver, I don't see any reason why you couldn't also do one, since both the flintlock and snaphaunce systems have leant themselves to revolvers. The trick is that each bullet must have its own charge, otherwise you'd have to refil the pan everytime you fire. Prior to the advent of caplock technology, this was tricky to pull off, but it was done. Each barrel on the revolving cylinder had its own pan, where the powder goes. Arranging the mechanism to open one of the movable pans while the serpentine sparks against the frizzen is the tricky part, which is why they weren't made as much as single- or even double-shot models.
As to your specific questions:
> What would the Knowledge DC be to actually design such a weapon for the first time?
Near as I can tell, people have been working on revolver designs ever since they first invented the pistol. If guns are already around somewhere in the campaign setting, the idea of a revolver will already be floating around, and somebody will have already tried his hand at it. I wouldn't make it a knowledge check, I'd make it a locksmithing check. It was locksmiths who made the mechanisms in guns. Possibly it could be 25 or 30 to develop a design, but you could lower it if the character can correspond with other craftsmen who have worked on the problem. > What would the Craft DC be to make the gun?
There are three major components on the gun -- lock, stock and barrel.
The lock mechanism is on locksmithing. The PHB lists a lock as an example of an item that requires a DC 20 craft check. But it doesn't say how complex a lock you can make with such a roll. If you need that kind of check to make just any lock, that would mean that only masters can even begin to make locks, and surely they didn't call in masters to make those crappy locks on the chests you find in goblin lairs. I'd say that a straightforward flintlock would be DC 10, a wheelock DC 15. These mechanisms are not any more complicated than the ones in the toy guns we played with as kids. A revolver is more complex, though, requiring degrees of motion in more than one direction and probably some kind of cam. Still, it's not as complicated as, say, a combination lock. I'd make it DC 20 for flintlock, wheelock or snaphaunce revolvers, and a DC 15 for caplock.
The stock is just a piece of wood that gives you a handle for the pistol. A well crafted pistol should have a nicely carved stock for style, but it doesn't take much to make one that is simply functional. DC 5 woodworking. You can make it out of other materials, and use the appropriate skills instead.
The barrel requires blacksmithing. Makers of pistol barrels would proof them by testing whether they would rupture if filled all the way with powder and ignited. Your average shot doesn't require nearly this much explosive force. While a strong barrel is important, it is not by any means difficult to produce one. I'd call it DC 10 for one that will pass proof, with the difficulty rising trivially for decorative barrels or less trivially for rifled barrels that improve the range of the weapon.
If your world has a strong and specialized and guild system, as Europe did in the real world, then no one is likely to have all of these skills. Instead, gun makers would comission locks from locksmiths, barrels from blacksmiths, stocks from wood carvers, and they would assemble these to make pistols. But you could simplify it all and have it all be one skill called Craft (gunsmithing).
> What would the Craft DC be to Make Ammo for such a gun?
Trivial. If you can get the ingredients, which should be some of the most readily available alchemical ingredients around, you can train a monkey to pour them together and mix. It requires, by one recipe:
7 parts saltpeter @ 24gp/lb 5 parts charcoal @ 1gp/lb 5 parts sulfur @ 1gp/lb
The prices are given as per the 2nd Edition Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog. What it works out to is that it costs you about 10gp per pound for the ingredients. You make sure they're a fine powder by using a mortar and pestle, if your supplier didn't already do that for you, and you just mix them evenly. If you want to keep the resulting powder from separating during your travels, wet it and let it dry into cake, and then mortar and pestle it into a fine powder again. I wouldn't even make the player roll unless he was trying to do it in the middle of a combat.
The correct load can vary widely by the type of pistol and ammo, but to make it simple I assume 100 grains for a pistol load. That's about 1/4 oz. One pound of gunpowder, therefore, can fire 64 bullets.
The bullets are also trivial. You need lead, which Aurora's lists at 1 gp per oz. Funny, though, because sling bullets are made of pure lead and cost 1 sp per five pounds worth, going by PHB 3.5 116. Desperate characters can steal lead from roof gutters while in a town. Lead can easily be melted down over a camp fire in pans about the size of a teacup saucer and poured into a handheld bullet mold about the size and complexity of a pair of pliers. Again, if the character has access to trained monkeys, he may wish to consider delegating this task. I use a standard of 1 oz of lead per bullet, therefore 16 bullets per pound.
You could make the player also worry about a separate grade of powder for the actual firing pan, which is realistic, but I wouldn't bother unless you're the kind of GM who makes characters keep track of how often they rosin their bows and oil and hone their weapons.
Caplock revolvers, while they would require less complicated mechanisms, are more complicated to make ammo for. The bullets are the same, but instead of firing powder, you need to create a metal nipple full of fulminate of mercury. In a world in which alchemy can produce a powder that gives you darkvision, I shouldn't think this would be all too complicated, but I'm not sure what the process involves. I just set a price of 1 gp per cap to have a professional do it, but if you want the character to do it himself, I wouldn't go higher than a DC 15 alchemy check. That high a check will get you a hollow glass sling bullet full of acid, according to Arms & Equipment p. 33, and that strikes me as outright implausible. Wheras, in real life, firing caps were made by barely trained proles in factories.
The advent of firing caps simplifies the process, because it's easier to make a mechanism that just strikes the cap, rather than one that has to create a spark while it's pushing open a firing pan full of powder. But the caps are not as simple to make as the loose powder and the chunk of sparking material that previous designs were based on.
You can make the character sweat malfunction chances. If you want to do that, you might want to look into the malfunction rules in Deadlands d20. If you roll a 1 on a caplock or 1-2 on a flintlock gun, you then have to roll on the malfunction table. Our group has something like this for the sake of flavor, though I don't really like it because it's not as though bow users are ever harassed about the tendency for bowstrings to snap, nor repeating crossbow users about the possibility of those mechanisms jamming, both of which are realistic concerns.
Anyway, as to your conditions:
> A: All Ammo has to be made by him personally
No problem, except possbly for caplocks.
> B: All repairs have to be made by him personally
This seems arbitrary. There's no reason the work on individual parts can't be comissioned from craftsmen of the appropriate skills. Even if the world had never seen a gun before, the barrel is no big deal for a blacksmith, the lock could be complicated but not beyond the knowledge of a locksmith, and a guy sitting on his porch whittling driftwood can make the stock for you. All the technology has been available since antiquity. Once you know to put them together, it's not that big a deal to find somebody who could do so for you.
> C: Getting the weapon enchanted could prove to be a major headache.
There's no reason you couln't masterwork the thing by paying the standard price, and then it's just a matter of paying an enchanter the book price just as with any other weapon.
> D: And when all is said and done he's just creating a cooler Repeating Crossbow.
Cooler counts for a lot. Anyway, I'd do the stats as per the pistol in the DMG 3.5 p. 145 -- 1d10 damage x3 critical, 50' range increment. That makes it a different weapon right there. Plus, you could use the butt as a club.
In my campaign, which is already a burgeoning industrial world, gun technology is way behind everything else (except for examples that are dug up from ancient gnomish sites) but it is catching up quickly. I'm just now introducing revolver technology in two forms, flintlock and caplock. The trick with assigning technological levels is that most revolutionary technologies were based on a combination of other technologies that had already been available for centuries. The sequence of inventions we can trace through our historical record is by no means the only way it could have gone.
A flintlock revolver can be done, such as in the famous 1820 model by Eli Collier: http://roberts-model-ships-and-boats.com/collier2.htm
I'm looking at a picture right now of an English snaphaunce revolver circa 1650, from the book Firearms by Howard Ricketts. The snaphaunce is kind of between wheelock and flintlock in advancement. The advancement, by the way, is in simplicity, not complexity. A flintlock is superior to a wheelock not because it's harder to make, but because it's easier. It serves the same function while being easier to make and less likely to malfunction, because its operation is so much simpler.
Although I've never heard of a wheelock revolver, I don't see any reason why you couldn't also do one, since both the flintlock and snaphaunce systems have leant themselves to revolvers. The trick is that each bullet must have its own charge, otherwise you'd have to refil the pan everytime you fire. Prior to the advent of caplock technology, this was tricky to pull off, but it was done. Each barrel on the revolving cylinder had its own pan, where the powder goes. Arranging the mechanism to open one of the movable pans while the serpentine sparks against the frizzen is the tricky part, which is why they weren't made as much as single- or even double-shot models.
As to your specific questions:
> What would the Knowledge DC be to actually design such a weapon for the first time?
Near as I can tell, people have been working on revolver designs ever since they first invented the pistol. If guns are already around somewhere in the campaign setting, the idea of a revolver will already be floating around, and somebody will have already tried his hand at it. I wouldn't make it a knowledge check, I'd make it a locksmithing check. It was locksmiths who made the mechanisms in guns. Possibly it could be 25 or 30 to develop a design, but you could lower it if the character can correspond with other craftsmen who have worked on the problem. > What would the Craft DC be to make the gun?
There are three major components on the gun -- lock, stock and barrel.
The lock mechanism is on locksmithing. The PHB lists a lock as an example of an item that requires a DC 20 craft check. But it doesn't say how complex a lock you can make with such a roll. If you need that kind of check to make just any lock, that would mean that only masters can even begin to make locks, and surely they didn't call in masters to make those crappy locks on the chests you find in goblin lairs. I'd say that a straightforward flintlock would be DC 10, a wheelock DC 15. These mechanisms are not any more complicated than the ones in the toy guns we played with as kids. A revolver is more complex, though, requiring degrees of motion in more than one direction and probably some kind of cam. Still, it's not as complicated as, say, a combination lock. I'd make it DC 20 for flintlock, wheelock or snaphaunce revolvers, and a DC 15 for caplock.
The stock is just a piece of wood that gives you a handle for the pistol. A well crafted pistol should have a nicely carved stock for style, but it doesn't take much to make one that is simply functional. DC 5 woodworking. You can make it out of other materials, and use the appropriate skills instead.
The barrel requires blacksmithing. Makers of pistol barrels would proof them by testing whether they would rupture if filled all the way with powder and ignited. Your average shot doesn't require nearly this much explosive force. While a strong barrel is important, it is not by any means difficult to produce one. I'd call it DC 10 for one that will pass proof, with the difficulty rising trivially for decorative barrels or less trivially for rifled barrels that improve the range of the weapon.
If your world has a strong and specialized and guild system, as Europe did in the real world, then no one is likely to have all of these skills. Instead, gun makers would comission locks from locksmiths, barrels from blacksmiths, stocks from wood carvers, and they would assemble these to make pistols. But you could simplify it all and have it all be one skill called Craft (gunsmithing).
> What would the Craft DC be to Make Ammo for such a gun?
Trivial. If you can get the ingredients, which should be some of the most readily available alchemical ingredients around, you can train a monkey to pour them together and mix. It requires, by one recipe:
7 parts saltpeter @ 24gp/lb 5 parts charcoal @ 1gp/lb 5 parts sulfur @ 1gp/lb
The prices are given as per the 2nd Edition Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog. What it works out to is that it costs you about 10gp per pound for the ingredients. You make sure they're a fine powder by using a mortar and pestle, if your supplier didn't already do that for you, and you just mix them evenly. If you want to keep the resulting powder from separating during your travels, wet it and let it dry into cake, and then mortar and pestle it into a fine powder again. I wouldn't even make the player roll unless he was trying to do it in the middle of a combat.
The correct load can vary widely by the type of pistol and ammo, but to make it simple I assume 100 grains for a pistol load. That's about 1/4 oz. One pound of gunpowder, therefore, can fire 64 bullets.
The bullets are also trivial. You need lead, which Aurora's lists at 1 gp per oz. Funny, though, because sling bullets are made of pure lead and cost 1 sp per five pounds worth, going by PHB 3.5 116. Desperate characters can steal lead from roof gutters while in a town. Lead can easily be melted down over a camp fire in pans about the size of a teacup saucer and poured into a handheld bullet mold about the size and complexity of a pair of pliers. Again, if the character has access to trained monkeys, he may wish to consider delegating this task. I use a standard of 1 oz of lead per bullet, therefore 16 bullets per pound.
You could make the player also worry about a separate grade of powder for the actual firing pan, which is realistic, but I wouldn't bother unless you're the kind of GM who makes characters keep track of how often they rosin their bows and oil and hone their weapons.
Caplock revolvers, while they would require less complicated mechanisms, are more complicated to make ammo for. The bullets are the same, but instead of firing powder, you need to create a metal nipple full of fulminate of mercury. In a world in which alchemy can produce a powder that gives you darkvision, I shouldn't think this would be all too complicated, but I'm not sure what the process involves. I just set a price of 1 gp per cap to have a professional do it, but if you want the character to do it himself, I wouldn't go higher than a DC 15 alchemy check. That high a check will get you a hollow glass sling bullet full of acid, according to Arms & Equipment p. 33, and that strikes me as outright implausible. Wheras, in real life, firing caps were made by barely trained proles in factories.
The advent of firing caps simplifies the process, because it's easier to make a mechanism that just strikes the cap, rather than one that has to create a spark while it's pushing open a firing pan full of powder. But the caps are not as simple to make as the loose powder and the chunk of sparking material that previous designs were based on.
You can make the character sweat malfunction chances. If you want to do that, you might want to look into the malfunction rules in Deadlands d20. If you roll a 1 on a caplock or 1-2 on a flintlock gun, you then have to roll on the malfunction table. Our group has something like this for the sake of flavor, though I don't really like it because it's not as though bow users are ever harassed about the tendency for bowstrings to snap, nor repeating crossbow users about the possibility of those mechanisms jamming, both of which are realistic concerns.
Anyway, as to your conditions:
> A: All Ammo has to be made by him personally
No problem, except possbly for caplocks.
> B: All repairs have to be made by him personally
This seems arbitrary. There's no reason the work on individual parts can't be comissioned from craftsmen of the appropriate skills. Even if the world had never seen a gun before, the barrel is no big deal for a blacksmith, the lock could be complicated but not beyond the knowledge of a locksmith, and a guy sitting on his porch whittling driftwood can make the stock for you. All the technology has been available since antiquity. Once you know to put them together, it's not that big a deal to find somebody who could do so for you.
> C: Getting the weapon enchanted could prove to be a major headache.
There's no reason you couln't masterwork the thing by paying the standard price, and then it's just a matter of paying an enchanter the book price just as with any other weapon.
> D: And when all is said and done he's just creating a cooler Repeating Crossbow.
Cooler counts for a lot. Anyway, I'd do the stats as per the pistol in the DMG 3.5 p. 145 -- 1d10 damage x3 critical, 50' range increment. That makes it a different weapon right there. Plus, you could use the butt as a club.
