Steampunk campaign questions

[John Q. Mayhem]

Aight, I'm thinking of starting a steampunk campaign, and I need a bit of help. If anyone here has played in/run one, can you just give me a few tips? My main problem is with the DMG's renaissance firearms. I'm thinking that they are severely underpowered, but I don't know how to fix 'em without making them ridiculous. Assistance?

 

[Desdichado]

Check out the Freeport rules. Actually, I've got them online (love that OGL!) right here, adapted somewhat for my own campaign setting. Also, the Iron Kingdoms setting has pretty good rules for firearms, although they seem a little too good; there's hardly a reason not to have one there.

EDIT:

URL typo.

 

[BiggusGeekus@Work]

Aight, I'm thinking of starting a steampunk campaign, and I need a bit of help. If anyone here has played in/run one, can you just give me a few tips? My main problem is with the DMG's renaissance firearms. I'm thinking that they are severely underpowered, but I don't know how to fix 'em without making them ridiculous. Assistance?

The thing about 18th-century firearms isn't that they're better than longbows, they're just easier to use. It takes a long time to get good with a bow, but pointing and shooting is somewhat simpler.

So that a gun is an exotic weapon is a little crazy, although it makes sense for a D&D game. For steampunk you might want to move them to martial or simple weapons depending on how prevalent you want them to be.

Also, there's the whole concept of hit points. They don't reflect physical damage. They're an abstract concept. So a gun doing 8 points of damage to a 100 hit point character might best be described as a "narrow miss". In D&D you could get away with a "light bruise" but with guns we expect a bit more impact when you get hit. You may want to move to a modified Vitality Point/Wound Point system. The character's hit points at first level are the characters "true" hit points, everything else is luck/narrow misses/whatever.

The advent of guns saw a declined use in heavy armor. Assuming you want to keep that, grant the characters a Defense Bonus to AC. Star Wars d20 or Wheel of Time have good examples of this. A rough simulation might be to give the characters an AC bonus equal to 1/2 their FORT save, with that save being capped for armor DEX penalty.

Hope that helps.

 

[Greatwyrm]

Here are a couple of options for firearms.

The least nasty is to make the damage open ended. I'm pretty sure they did this in 2e. In other words, if you roll the maximum on the damage dice, roll again and add the results. If you keep getting the max, keep rolling.

If you want something a little better, make all firearm attacks touch attacks. This might be too good, unless you introduce some critical failure rules for firearms too.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Guns on the whole have come a long way in the last 200 years, before that they were not really that useful except in large numbers, then it was everyone firing and only a few hits.

the advantage was; less training than a bow which meant you could put more untrained troops in the field, range was crappy.

I don't think D&D handles guns well, because if you are playing early weapons (no rifling) there is no skill to shooting, it was luck to hit something, no matter how long you were doing it you did not become better at hitting the target. I know it could be debated but just how I feel. I like the idea about increasing the damage on max.

 

[Wombat]

Of course it all depends on how "realistic" you wish to get with firearms as well.

Remember, firing lead, REAL lead, into the human body is not just bad because of the tearing and the shock, but also because of the high incidence of lead poisoning (and those bullets tend to really splatter through the body).

Thus with early firearms at least as many people died due to infections and lead poisoning as the impact of the bullets themselves...

 

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

I think a minimum of 2 rounds to reload is appropriate, otherwise no matter what the cost of obtaining them, firearms would dominate the campaign. Multiple shot weapons should be VERY rare.

Reloading should provoke AoO's.

I picture fighters shooting to begin a comabat, then pulling a sword for melee for instance.

Fumble rules ( misfires ) should alse be incorporated

 

[Arthur Tealeaf]

These are great rules: Privateer Press Firearms v1.1 I wouldn't go near anything else... (But, I'm a Privateer fanboy, so go figure...)

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I have the firearms in my campaign being percussion cap weapons putting them around the 19th century...

A single or double-barelled firearm can be reloaded as a standard action which provokes an AOA. Guns which contain more shots such as revolvers, spitterguns (originally from the polyhedron spelljammer article), and pepperbox pistols take a full-round action to reload.

Anyways one suggestion for such a campaign is to give every class a class defense bonus, and take the emphasis off of armor.

 

[widderslainte]

THe history chan

The History Channel is your friend. Both Mailcall and Conquest have has room good episodes about early firearms lately. In one they time someone firering and reloading a flintlock rifle. A bout one shoot every twenty seconds, which matches up with (I believe) the Freeport fire rate of 1/3 rounds.