Hellcow said:
That is the fundamental idea here. It may take some suspension of disbelief, but there it is. A few more points:
* I'd have to argue with the statement that "everyone can use medieval firearms"... at least effectively. If you handed me a black powder rifle and some gunpowder right now, I'm sure I wouldn't load it correctly the first time. Goodness knows how long it would take for me to develop accuracy with a cannon. Then, you add in the possibility of misfire, wet powder, etc. So, these weapons can be used by a trained individual without magical ability. However, as has been noted, magical ability can be taught; this is the whole point of arcane magic and its place in Eberron. Full wizards may be rare, but magewrights are more common. Are they as common as warriors? No. But it's not difficult to find a 1st-level magewright to act as your bombadier.
Everyone can use muskets. It just takes a little instruction. Very little. Yeah, you might not be able to intuit it. But if you thought about it for a few minutes it probably would become pretty clear. Just don't tamp the powder in too hard. The point is, is that it has a set of limitations that is different than a wand (or what have you), not the least of which is cost. A mage or magewrite can only make so many wands they cost not only time, expensive raw materials but "experience", but any moderately competent metalsmith, certainly any capable of producing any halfway decent sword, could produce a great many tubes for guns. I could really go off, it's not like metalworking isn't some area of particular expertise. Which costs only time and cheap materials. And by all accounts less time.
Does a flaming crossbow cost about one months pay, that's pretty close to what quality firearms have tended to cost. No it costs more than even a modestly ranked soldier might expect to earn over many years. And while a wand has certain logistical advantages, small to carry. It's still disproportionately expensive. A middle ages shootist could carry all the shot, powder, and wadding he'd need to shoot all day. Bowmen would be firing far more arrows than they could carry. So despite some of the advantages they had, their great cost proved their undoing. And that's against pretty modest firearms before they had a decent muzzel velocity and spin stabilized.
But back to proficency with the weapons. That's, oddly enough, profided for via DnD's system. (I saved this for last.) Just and I could pick up a sword and get by, and maybe even manage to kill some one in a drunken rage or just stand outside a convienece store getting blasted with a firehose. I'd be ill advised to walk into a kendo class and take on any comers, even the sickly or infirmed. If I want to be a marksman I take an exotic weapon proficency, which is wasted on essentially an afternoons worth of instruction. The rest is how much practice I seem to regularly get, accounted for in my bab, and my natural gifts as embodied in my dex bonus. But unlike a sword, or even a long bow. I hardly need a lifetimes worth of practice to become very adept at reloading swiftly and being able to very reliably hit targets within at least the first range category of the weapon. Such unaimed volleys aren't well provided for within the d20 system, but when you've got cannons pointed at the castle or the other ship where you can't miss, they're pretty dang effective. Again, to do that and do it very well, I don't need to know much, or invest much beyond very cheap material.
Hellcow said:
* A musket can misfire or end up with wet powder. A flaming crossbow will always perform as expected. Both can be used by any trained warrior. I know how to create a flaming crossbow. Am I going to start searching for a less reliable way of replicating the same effect, or try to find a way to enchant weapons cheaper and more efficiently? If I've already got a technique that works, why try an entirely different approach?
To claim that people naturally glom onto what looks like the best idea, or even the only idea in the race, is to completely ignore the world around you. Even now people are still, and have been furiously working to replace "modern" rimfire cartridges with everything from stable explosive plastics or gels, to liquids, that crazy "Metalstorm" technology, and (in the case of at least one DARPA project and Akira) man portable laser weapons. But not to be left out, the Airforce wants to install 100kw lasers as the gun armament on the F-22 replacing the M-61 Vulcan cannon. Even now, with as advanced as our firearms are, people are not content to just "refine" them, even with the many billions of dollars sunk into them. People aren't content to just be more or less content.
In a world where the people in the mob are made up of extras, and not people, that probably works as an abbreviated convention for telling many stories. But for me that's pretty much where the great opportunity is lost too. I don't think I've ever really come close to that lofty goal myself, but it is something I've almost always aspired too.
Hellcow said:
* The observation about the lightning rail makes sense... IF there is a culture somewhere using gunpowder. If this is the case, the increased level of traffic and communication between nations should cause the idea to spread throughout cultures. But if the idea doesn't exist in any of the cultures, how will travel cause it to spring into being?
Gunpowder is charcoal, sulfer, and potasium nitrate, all of which are very common. You can get potasium nitrate from the white woodash you inadvertainly made either making charcoal or using that charcoal to make say a steel sword, or even an iron nail from the local smith.
Charcoal, well everyone knows and has that. No one has a gas furnace in their home
Sulfer of course likely mentioned in some spell componants, and should be part of a healing kit or so I would imagine in the PHB. (On page 231 of the PHB 3.5 ed, Sulfer is mentioned twice! once as brimstone and once, in the case of "Fireball" with bat guano which maps nicely to saltpeter/quick salt/potasium nitrate.)
The common compounds all used, together, in alchemy under a system that provides for it in a culture that encourages it, and no one managed to find a new way to make fire interesting. That sort of stretches the bound of credability. But it's not a coincidence that it's first recorded uses are in China. The only superpower of it's age. They even had handguns and rockets with shrapnel by the 13th century. The fertility of their soil, and the might of their culture civilized even those who managed to conqure them. One might even say it was a quirk of geography that led the european powers to perfect projecting power abroad at the expense of such innovations, while China had exacty the opposite inclinations. Eberron, was a huge peaceful kingdom united however tenuously (china had it's warring states period) for a period without catastrophy, and once more they had the lightning rail.
Hellcow said:
* Finally, to go into metagame and actually echo critics of Eberron: I just don't want guns in my D&D. I want swords & sorcery, not guns & sorcery. Eberron has tried to logically expand on the things that already exist in D&D; for me, guns have never been a part of that.
I don't either, unless we're going a special Vacation in Gamma World episode. And there are reasons, magic itself, as a concept doesn't work. But those are forgiven as part of the suspention of disbelief. But that good ideas, and reasonable questions are ignored for the sake of moving the story along, aren't. Just because the busty, mean girl has to be chased down in the woods (while wearing a matching bra and panty ensamble from Victoria's Secret) to advance many a slasher movie doesn't make the decision to go out to the lake shore to have a skinny dip while everyone else discusses what connection the mutilated body has with the story of the escaped serial killer any better, or the writers any less lazy. To me, calling a "Cliche" an obligation a reader must accept under the guise of Suspending Disbelief while wrapping one's self in a wrap around painting by Wayne Reynold's sounds pretty dull no matter how sweet it looks. It's just one of those things. I'm gonna go drink a sprite.
