What Do You Do For: GUNPOWDER

[Celebrim]

The problem is already there with heavy crossbows, which should take 5-10 rounds to fully wind....

Well as long as we are on the subject, a longbow should take 5-6 seconds to load, draw, and fire, and it should be alot easier to swing a sword quickly than to fire a bow quickly, but which gets 'rapid shot'?

What it boils down to is that these are artifacts of the hit point system. Some of them are correctable, and some are much less so.

I'd settle for the assumption that D&D's relatively superior knowledge of materials science compared to the real world has produced crossbows that verge on modern energy efficiencies, and so produce much higher projectile velocities for a given draw weight compared to the real medieval weapons. This means that a light crossbow refers to one with a pull weight that can be drawn by hand (probably by putting your foot into a stirrup), and a heavy crossbow refers to one which is drawn with the aid of an attachable lever device of some sort. For either, the rate of fire in D&D is much closer to realistic than the rate of fire that bows have.

For a true late medieval/early modern windlass based seige or hunting crossbow, an 'arbalest', the concensus on the cocking time is four full round actions (firing every fifth round), or two rounds fired a minute. I'd allow such a thing to be available with superior range and striking power than the heavy crossbow.

 

[trav_laney]

Well as long as we are on the subject, a longbow should take 5-6 seconds to load, draw, and fire, and it should be alot easier to swing a sword quickly than to fire a bow quickly, but which gets 'rapid shot'?

Since you mentioned it (and at risk of derailing the thread), I thought I'd chime in. "Flurry of Blows" is not a monk-only class feature IMC, it is a feat which any character with 13+ Dex and a +1 BAT can take. Improved and Greater versions are available, too...which reduce and eliminate the -2 penalty (but have higher BAT requirements, to keep them in tune with the monk's class ability progression).

Anyway. Back to guns. Should bayonets be considered simple weapons (like a spear), or should they be considered martial? Friends of mine who have served in the armed forces have told me that it takes longer to train for the bayonet than it does to train for the rifle...

 

[Celebrim]

Anyway. Back to guns. Should bayonets be considered simple weapons (like a spear), or should they be considered martial? Friends of mine who have served in the armed forces have told me that it takes longer to train for the bayonet than it does to train for the rifle...

Heh.

Well, it would. Getting decent with any other sort of weapon is harder than getting decent with a rifle. That's sort of the point.

I personally think a bayonet should be a simple weapon. It's a horribly ineffective highly mythologized weapon which was often abandoned by experienced soldiers in favor of swinging your musket like a club. Only relatively tiny number of people in world history were actually killed by a bayonet, even back when firearms were relatively ineffective. But its a relatively simple weapon, basically a short clumsy spear. Anyone proficient in a spear would get the basic gist of a bayonet.

Let me go off on a tangent to say that the weapon list prices, categories, weights, and most everything else (range increments I'm looking at you!) are primarily designed for balance/and or pulled straight out of the air and do not have any basis in realism. Things are simple weapons if they are - at least according to the mechanics - relativing inferior weapons as opposed to relatively easy to use. If it comes down to what it takes to become proficient in thier use to categorize a weapon, the sling should be an exotic weapon (it should probably also have a range increment longer than any other weapon except the longbow and the heavy crossbow). After all, the sling was in many ways the longbow of antiquity, and slinger mercenaries were paid higher wages than just about any auxilleries in the Roman legions because they could out range and out rate of fire anything else available. And the sling bullet actually has better effect on 'soft' armors than an arrow from a short bow, because even if it doesn't penetrate it has far greater momentum - breaking and crushing much as a bullet from a gun breaks ribs even through a bullet proof vest. And, like the longbow being essentially a Welsh weapon (at least in the West), good slingers only came from two places in the ancient world, Sicily and Judea, because - like the longbow - you pretty much had to have been training since you could walk.

But because the D&D mechanics don't reflect these qualities, the sling is a simple weapon and little used even then.

 

[trav_laney]

And the sling bullet actually has better effect on 'soft' armors than an arrow from a short bow, because even if it doesn't penetrate it has far greater momentum - breaking and crushing much as a bullet from a gun breaks ribs even through a bullet proof vest.

What are you talking about? Every movie star I've ever seen get shot with a bulletproof vest on is completely unharmed by the bullet...not even a bruise. Clearly those BPVs give some sort of damage reduction, like 20/- or something. And you know what? In "Fight Club," I saw Ed Norton fire a pistol into his open mouth and all he got was a sore throat. So either he rolled a natural 20 on some kind of save throw, or his tonsils are AC 50, and the bullet missed... </sarcasm>

I get what you are saying. Physics in the D20 System are nothing like the physics of this world, but are more like the physics of Hollywood (although not as extreme as my examples.) I'm okay with that. I've accepted and embraced that fact, and now I have peace. Once everyone else accepts it, they will also have peace.

So I agree, bayonets should be simple weapons, just like any other spear. And swinging a musket like a club should probably be an improvised large bludgeoning weapon...I'm thinking heavy mace.