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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1055504" data-attributes="member: 5171">Not much room for argument there, except that I'd argue that the main reason for guns replacing swords would be the facts that they're easier to carry surreptitiously, they work from a distance, and their attacks are much more difficult for someone to dodge.  d20 Modern has already accounted for those factors by having them be Small or Medium-Sized, giving them range increments, and having them do more damage than most melee weapons.  If a longsword slashes across your throat, it kills you just as easily as a gunshot -- but because a gunshot is somewhat harder to parry or reactively dodge, they have guns do a bunch more damage.Ah. That's somewhat different than what I saw argued.  Well, guns already do threaten those five feet as pistol whips, but I still disagree with you about letting them shoot as AoOs from five feet.  I'd be fine with it as a feat or a class ability, but I don't think people should get it for free.  I understand that it does not take much time to pull a trigger, but look at it this way:Below, you say that I'm full of it, and that guns are well-nigh impossible to defend against.  If that's true, and I'm so squat-outta-luck, then, assuming that no action I take this round is going to result in me being behind cover, why does it matter whether I'm quaffing a potion (which would provoke an AoO) or taking no action at all that round (which wouldn't)?  I mean, it sort of makes sense with someone next to you with a sword -- if you're taking no action, you can still weave and duck and keep yourself defended, but if you stop to drink a potion while some guy with a cleaver is right next to you, your butt deserves to be cleaved in twain.  With our magnificent gun, though, it's so easy to shoot and so hard to defend against by your logic that, really, the only way to adequately reflect it would be to have the gun-user get a free attack on each person on their turn, because it takes so little time and is so hard to defend against.  Except that the round system is sort of designed to abstract all of that into a turn-based system and then let the DM insert the appropriate flavor text to have it make sense.I don't see how that exactly relates to the issue at hand, to be honest.  I mean, yay, you're being condescending and dismissive, and bully for you, but you could say the same thing about someone with a knife at your throat, and all it would boil down to is, "weapons can kill you", which we all sorta know.  For guns, it can be extrapolated to "weapons can kill you at a distance", which, again, we all sorta know.I didn't say that guns were harmless.  I didn't say that guns didn't kill people.  I said, "In close combat, I'd rather be facing a gun than a knife."  If he's twenty feet away from me, sure, I'd rather it be a knife then. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />As I said earlier, I was trying to make the point short and sweet without taking over the thread.  You're speaking in the same extremes and absolutes that I am, and you're making inaccurate personal attacks on me while doing so.  Do you always try to justify your points by being condescending?Wait -- the gunman gets to aim carefully and drill me while I stand there flat-footed?  Wow, that DOES prove that guns are completely unbeatable in close combat.  That's the kind of logic that the idiot martial artists use when saying, "Oh yeah, but I don't have to LOAD MY FISTS or TAKE OFF THE SAFETY ON MY AXE KICK, so I can just kill you before you even get your gun ready!!!"  In both cases, a one-sided argument is being used to make a sweeping generalization.If you're talking about a gun expert that is good enough to train a weapon me in close combat while I'm doing something on my turn and take a free shot, it sounds kinda like you're talking about a Gunslinger with gun-feats -- not a common mook."Believe me"?  Have you been shot in the torso, or have you just watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies?  I don't see you dragging out your own experience here.If we're talking about reality rather than d20, then let's talk about reality.  In reality, if a gun hits you in a vital area, you die -- and if a knife hits you in that same area, you also die.  Forget hit points and all that.At a distance, the gun wins, easy.  No contest.Against a flat-footed opponent at close range, both weapons work pretty well.  The gun-user has a second to aim a good shot, and the knife-user can make a fast stab to the throat, and both fights are effectively over unless you've got a bad guy so pepped up on drugs or adrenaline that he's gonna fight until he's dead.(For the record, there is no defense against someone shooting you.  That's the first thing they teach us.  There are things we can do when someone is THREATENING to shoot us -- a wide range of things, depending on our relevant body positions and where the gun is.  But if someone is actually shooting at you, all you can really do is try to protect your vital areas, minimize the target you present, and decide real fast whether you're going to charge, dive behind something, or run for your life.  Yeah, I'd love it if every bad guy put the gun right against my chest, fully extending his arm as he did, and THEN demanded my wallet, and then got distracted by a coughing fit or a Brittney Spears poster on the far wall.  But a good school trains for situations other than that one.)If both sides are already struggling, though -- say the martial artist had a better reaction time and moved in to try close strikes and see if he can get rid of that weapon -- then the knife user has a few advantages when compared to the gun user.  To reiterate -- any attack to a lethal area by either the gun guy or the knife guy ends the fight.  The difference is that the knife guy is more likely to deliver small incidental wounds to the unarmed guy while the two of them struggle over the weapon.  And while a small knife wound isn't likely to kill you, it IS likely to make you flinch and reflexively pull back -- and that flinch gives the knife guy the opening to finish you off.  Those are the wounds that can turn the fight around, either ragged tears from the knife's tip or slashes from the blade that are more painful than life-threatening, but which cause an instinctive flinch reaction that can lead to you getting gutted a moment later.Beyond that, you've got the fact that a gunshot wound to a nonvital area is less likely to disable you than a knife wound to that same area -- knife wounds are by far less lethal than gunshot wounds, but they do a lot of unpleasant damage going in and then out, tearing along an area while cutting into it.  Gunshot wounds are, I agree, more likely to kill you, but if were talking about an incidental minor injury to a non-vital area, the gunshot wound, on average, is easier to ignore until after the fight.  To reiterate: I'd rather not go against either, because there's a good chance that I'd die, either way.  But once I AM in close, assuming I have an opportunity to get there, the gun is less likely to give me a painful incidental injury that throws off my concentration and lets the wielder finish me off.That's the slightly longer version of me saying "I'd rather go against the gun."  It's real possible that I could die either way, and I certainly wouldn't do it unless I believed that something more than my wallet or car keys was at stake -- but in a situation where I CAN get into a struggle with the person, the gun is a bit easier for me to deal with.  In a situation where the bad guy is ten feet away from me and not negligently holding his weapon extended, of course I'd prefer to be facing a knife.  I apologize for being less than clear and giving the impression that I'd rather have someone standing clear of me with a gun than a knife.Again with the condescending assumptions and the rudeness.  Please stop.  You don't know me, and getting all grandfatherly with someone who might well be older than you are is somewhat impolite.I agree with just about everything you say here.  I certainly wouldn't object to something that a third-level character could take to give him AoO-shooting in a five-foot square -- although he should still provoke an AoO from doing the shooting.  If he's a Gunslinger with Close Quarters Shooting or whatever it is, AND he takes that feat, then he's a lot more powerful -- but he's also spending feats getting good at something that isn't the main purpose of a firearm -- doing damage at a distance.  So that's probably fine.</blockquote>

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