D&D 4E New 4E Class: Gunner?

[Fallen Seraph]

I am waiting for someone to make a true wild-west 6-shooter gunslinger class

 

[GnomeWorks]

You misunderstand me. I dislike Balthier in FFT not so much because I hate Balthier or thing guns are out of place in FFT, but rather because I hate FFXII and think it is a game which completely wrecks the great unique identity of Ivalice. FFXII tries to replace FFT's Ivalice, a great setting based on a grim setting based on the terrible ages of real world decades-long war, civil unrest, and religious intolerance on a backdrop of manipulative forgotten evil and the terrible, unknowable might of "the Dark", with a poorly-designed setting that plays out like a cheap imitation of Star Wars. Not to mention FFXII is such a boring and poorly plotted out game... It just annoys me that they are trying to portray FFT, one of the best videogame tactical RPGs of all time, as a kind of tag-along game for one of the most spectacular failures of a videogame ever.

Ah, I see. I'm glad to find that I'm not the only one disappointed at the destruction of the setting that was Tactics. At least they had the good sense to keep most of the FFTA stuff separate.

XII had some good points (especially the esper fluff!), but I'll agree that most of it didn't mesh well with the original setting.

 

[D.Shaffer]

Eh. Guns, at least, were around since the 1100's in Asian, gunpowder itself even earlier. It's not COMPLETELY out of the scope of 'realism' that someone could have figured out how to make guns in a middle ages based society, so I'm not sure why everyone seems to get so flustered about guns showing up in their medieval fantasy societies.

So...go for it, IMO.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Naw, if I were going for something similar it would have to be a grenadier.

Guns are just, well, second place to explosions.

 

[Lizard]

A simpler method would be to:
a)Allow a weapon proficiency with guns.
b)Specify that someone can learn any bow-related exploit as an equivalent gun-related one (to do it with both, take it twice, or maybe have a feat which lets you flip between them)
c)Create a small number of talents which require gun proficiency and which emphasize the difference between bullets and arrows -- high armor penetration. (You could also do this by making most gun attacks target reflex defense instead of armor defense)

Of course, this is my design philosophy -- broad, customizable, base classes instead of focused ones. To my mind, it should be easier to build a "gun totin' ranger" variant or add that option to the power picks than to create a whole new class which is basically "ranged combat specialist, but with a gun instead of an arrow".

(On a personal note, I don't think we've seen enough of 4e to build classes yet. We don't know what concepts are currently 'doable' with the existing abilities, or what gaps exist. It's been hinted by Mike Mearls that the light-armored fighter is not currently viable, for example, so that's a likely region for early class design.) (It might be that it could be done with a rogue and some 'dipping' into fighter, but since we don't know how multiclassing works yet, who knows?)

 

[med stud]

Eh. Guns, at least, were around since the 1100's in Asian, gunpowder itself even earlier. It's not COMPLETELY out of the scope of 'realism' that someone could have figured out how to make guns in a middle ages based society, so I'm not sure why everyone seems to get so flustered about guns showing up in their medieval fantasy societies.

So...go for it, IMO.

I think it might have to do with the early guns being so damn ugly . The matchlock guns with the support-poles must be one of the most un-cool weapons in history.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I think it might have to do with the early guns being so damn ugly . The matchlock guns with the support-poles must be one of the most un-cool weapons in history.

Except when they are seen in Alatriste That movie make those matchlocks damn awesome

 

[Cadfan]

Guns break D&D for me because for some reason I can rationalize someone getting shot full of arrows and continuing to fight, but after a bullet wound or two I figure you should be done.

Maybe that's my own flawed logic (an arrow pretty much screws you up in real life just like a bullet), but its how I imagine things.

That being said, yay retheming! If you want a gunwielding class in your game, this is a great way to go about it.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Guns break D&D for me because for some reason I can rationalize someone getting shot full of arrows and continuing to fight, but after a bullet wound or two I figure you should be done.

Maybe that's my own flawed logic (an arrow pretty much screws you up in real life just like a bullet), but its how I imagine things.

It really all depends on the types of bullets being used, earlier musket-balls yeah one hit and your basically out for the count, it shatters so much bone and fragments so much tissue, if it didn't kill you it would completely incapacitate you.

Though if you look at Somalia, you had Rangers unloading whole clips into guys and them not filling a thing and continuing to fight.

Now while it would be more accurate for a musket-ball to be used in D&D. Given it is a fantasy game, no reason why firearms developed differently and the bullets they used had more in common with a m-16 round.

 

[Lizard]

Guns break D&D for me because for some reason I can rationalize someone getting shot full of arrows and continuing to fight, but after a bullet wound or two I figure you should be done.

And this is where the abstraction of hit points is so useful. Both the gun and the arrow do 'flesh wounds' to high HP character and 'lethal head shots' to low.

(And this is why the non magical healing of 4e bugs me; it means even as hit points near 0, I need to keep my flavor text to non-lethal sounding wounds, things which could reasonably be recovered from with some bandaging and a good night's sleep. You have trouble w/guns and arrows; I don't, but I do accept almost anything if it's "magical" and I can't if it isn't. So it goes.)