What Do You Do For: GUNPOWDER

[Mallus]

On the subject of firearms = touch attacks? Hells no. Bad, bad, bad idea. Doesn't make sense anyway. (The dragon has four times the natural armor of what a suit of full plate would grant, but it's still as easily wounded by bullets as a human? The psion has twice full plate's armor bonus from a force effect, but the bullet still penetrates it just as easily?

I suggested making them touch attacks only at their point blank range, and I'd give firearms relatively small range increments. That would put guns in line with magic items like a wand of scorching ray.

Re: dragon's armor and 'making sense'. Well, a regiment of musketeers would still have to close to point blank range w/the dragon, so in practical terms, I don't have a problem with them wounding it, as the odds of that happening are pretty bad.

Also, I'm prioritizing metagame concerns. My point is that if you're going to introduce firearms, they should have meaningful applications. Otherwise, they'd just be more useless items cluttering up the equitpment lists... Think about how interesting it would be for PC's challenged with getting a squad of gunmen into postion to shoot a dragon...

"Don't fire until you see the yellows of its man-sized eyes".

I'm interested in what leads to interesting play situations. Accurately modeling the impossible, not so much

 

[Agamemnon]

Well, there's other kinds of "armor penetration" you could go for. Bullets could halve natural armor, give a -3 to your armor and shield bonuses to AC, or what have you.

 

[trav_laney]

Wow...I go away on business for a couple of days, and my thread has taken on a life of its own. I love it! Based on everyone's feedback, I have hammered out this rough draft of rules that I think I might use. Please feel free to critique them and offer suggestions; there is a lot of room for improvment here.

The weapons that I am planning on introducing are most similar to the muzzle-loading muskets of the 15th century. They have a matchlock firing mechanism (where a smoldering piece of rope is attached to the hammer, and provides the ignition spark), which means they are useless if they ever get wet, and are extremely difficult to operate in humid or rainy environments.

The rules:

1. This particular musket is considered to be a large (two-handed) simple weapon that deals 1d12 points of piercing damage (x3 on a crit), has a range increment of 100 feet, weighs 10 pounds, and costs 500 gp. Masterworked muskets are available, at +300 gp. cost. At this time, I have no interest in introducing pistols or cannons.

2. The muzzleloader takes 4 rounds to load, but a highly-trained soldier (i.e., one with the Rapid Reload feat) can reload it in half that time (2 rounds.) 10 shots' worth of powder, bullets, patches, match rope, and grease weighs 1 pound and costs 50 gp.

3. The smoldering match rope is considered to be a normal, open flame for the purpose of certain spells and magical effects (such as gust of wind, quench, and pyrotechnics), and for certain hazardous environments (such as vacuums or areas containing flammable or explosive gasses). The pungent smell of a burning match rope is easily tracked by creatures with the Scent ability.

4. Bulk gunpowder costs 50gp/pound. Creating gunpowder or match rope requires a Craft (alchemy) check against DC 20, the same DC for making tindertwigs.

5. Bombs, grenades, claymores, etc. created from gunpowder create an effect identical to the fireball spell, and require a minimum of 5 pounds of gunpowder. A Craft (explosives) check is required against DC15; the DM makes this roll and does not announce the result to the player.* Adding shrapnel, using special casing, shaping the charge, etc. might grant a +2 competence bonus to this Craft check, but these actions do not change the damage, area of effect, or behavior of the device.**

The successful Craft check result divided by 3 is the effective caster level of the effect, to a maximum of 10. (For example, a character who gets a result of 20 on his check will create a bomb that functions like a caster level 6 fireball spell, reflex DC 13 for half damage). If the check fails by 5 or less, the bomb is a "dud" (fails to detonate, but the ingredients may be reused). If the check fails by more than 5, the bomb burns rather than explodes, consuming all materials used but dealing no damage.

6. A character with 5 or more ranks in Craft (alchemy) or Knowledge (engineering) gains a +2 synergy bonus on Craft (explosives) checks.

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*This helps demonstrate the unpredictable nature of primitive explosives. I don't suppose this needs to be a "hard rule;" it would depend on the attitudes and personalities of your particular gaming group.

**Some might have a problem with this, but it is the only way I can abate the plethora of "what if" statements that will spew forth from my chemistry-savvy players. :\ It was either this, or ban them altogether. I don't have a problem with "cheap fireballs," since everyone in the party is between 10th and 13th level...but I do have a problem with every fighter, bard, and cleric behaving like Special Ops.

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So what do you guys think?

 

[Gabester]

The guns themselves don't seem very useful. Why use those when even a first level could get 3-5 bow shots off in the same time.

I know lots has been said about the history of guns, probably by people who know more than I, but it's my basic understanding that they were relatively easy to use and shredded armor and that's why they became so popular. I would emphasize those aspects. I wouldn't use a "touch attack" but I would grant them something like the ability to ignore the first 4-6 points of armor AC. The effect would be that heavily armor creatures, such as dragons, will still have some armor against guns but a fair amount of it will be negated. The overall damage is not superb but it might be worthwhile to, for example, bring along a gun for the first volley against such critters.

Just an idea, I'm sure you'll have lots of others.

 

[Celebrim]

The guns themselves don't seem very useful. Why use those when even a first level could get 3-5 bow shots off in the same time.

The first firearms really didn't have anything on a heavy crossbow, and were probably inferior to a longbow. When the first firearms were invented, it certainly wasn't clear to anyone that they'd eventually revolutionize warefare.

What was revolutionary about a firearm was that you could become an expert in using one in just a few weeks of training. That was huge. Compared to archery, which required months of training, and to the longbow - which basically required you to be trained from birth to be any good at it - the ability to train up a large force of skilled musketeers in just a few weeks was huge.

But the longbow held its own against muskets for hundreds of years. It's penetrating power was nearly as good as early musketry and its rate of fire was 10 or 20 times higher, and it was more reliable in bad weather. In fact, there were longbowmen participating in battle as late as Waterloo in the 19th century. And consider that the aboriginal Americans were by no means overmatched by 16th or even 18th century firearms when using only stone age weapons.

So, if your impression is that warriors trained since birth can do as well with a bow as they could with muskets, then that impression is probably correct. And warriors trained since birth continued to fight successfully alongside or against musketeers in roles that would have seemed rather familiar to 11th century knights - archers, pikemen, lancers, swordsman, etc. - right up until the 18th century. The problem is that warriors trained sense birth soon became radically outnumbered by nationalized militias wielding standardized firearms wearing standardized uniforms and firing mass volleys.

And by the time we get to a late 18th century musket or rifle, we are dealing with something that just really outclasses melee weapons and traditional missile weapons.

That said, you are quite right to say that even a primitive musket should ignore the first couple points of armor protection - say 3. It should also have an inherent +2 to hit compared to traditional missile weapons, reflecting its fast and flat trajectory. That and the range increments in D&D are about twice as long as they should be and longbows should be an exotic rather than martial weapon.

 

[StGabe]

At the end of the day, all that stuff doesn't really matter. If in game terms it doesn't make sense to use a gun over a bow then your gun-inclusive foreign culture is going to seem pretty wacky and guns won't add much to the world.

That said, you seem to agree with my all my conclusions so ....

I considered a flat bonus to attack for the ease of use. I thought it was more simple to just make it a flat armor penetration. But I could see going either way.

 

[Shades of Green]

At the end of the day, all that stuff doesn't really matter. If in game terms it doesn't make sense to use a gun over a bow then your gun-inclusive foreign culture is going to seem pretty wacky and guns won't add much to the world.

That's why I've made firearms Simple weapons AND made Commoners automatically proficient in them (actually, they'll need a few weeks of drills to use it, but they won't need a feat for this). Sure, PCs might prefer longbows (or Repeating Crossbows for that matter), but the ability to arm masses of peasants with weapons which are comparable to crossbows and have them shoot relatively well after a three-week bootcamp is a HUGE military advantage (if the ruler could afford the large number of guns, that is). Furthermore, in military use, you could circumvent the ROF issue by arranging your musketeers in several rows, firing in turn over the shoulders of the others, so that in every given round one row of musketeers fires and the other rows reload; with a large unit this could be very effective in shredding the enemy's expensive, trained-from-birth cavalry (level 1-3 Aristocrats in most cases) to pieces.

By the way, from a game perspective, how useful would be a wepon which could only fire every third round (with Rapid Reload) in a typical dungeon setting? At worst, I'll move the tech level a little further and introduce precussion caps, allowing for a move-equivalent reload with Rapid Reload (and thus making them comparable with crossbows).

 

[trav_laney]

By the way, from a game perspective, how useful would be a wepon which could only fire every third round (with Rapid Reload) in a typical dungeon setting?

Going back to the original post, the purpose of introducing muskets was to simply add a bit of flavor to the game. I really wasn't trying to revolutionize the way combat works in the D20 system, nor was I trying to make the Best Weapon Evar(tm). Sure, the musket eventually made knights in shining armor obsolete, but it took hundreds of years to do so. I certainy do not want to fast-forward through 300 years of history.

True, the musket functions in a lot of ways like a heavy crossbow...except it uses a combustible propellant rather than a tension spring. It is that propellant itself that I was most concerned about, especially its potential for abuse by overly-creative players. Because, you know, there is always *that guy* at the table...

 

[Aaron L]

In my setting, the planet is essentially a prison for an extragalactic alien god from beyonf the Far Realm, and one of the effects of the alterations placed is that certain explosive chemical reactions don't work properly. Reliability is very low, and firearms are as likely to blow up in the users face as function normally, and sometimes may vaporize the weapon in a poof of white hot poof of smoke.

Directed energy weapons are far more reliable, but the power drain on them is so extreme because of the prevailing alterations of physics in the local area of space that their use was abandoned long ago, and the few remaining high tech energy weapons still around run dry very quicly. Some very few have been adapted to run on arcane power sources, but these are extremely high-level magic items and not in the hands of common ruffians, and the vast majority of people have no knowledge that such things exist, anyway, since technology simply doesn't work reliably, or is so prohibitively energy intensive that it isn't worth the effort.


Now, just a few hundred miles above the planet's surface is an entirely different story, and some very interesting things happen on the moon... caseless ammunition pulse rifles and high energy plasma weapons aren't uncommon. And some Psychic Warriors on the Astral Plane swear by their phase pistols and plasma rifles. They make staving off attacks by Illithid, demons, and insane demi-gods much easier.

 

[Destil]

Monte's apparant goal in his execution of firearms is to add flavor while impacting the game minimally. His guns are basically slightly superior crossbows. Personally, this implementation doesn't meet minimum standards for versimlitude.

1) Once you hit the musket stage, guns are simple rather than exotic weapons. In fact, the thing that makes guns so important early on is that they are easy to use.
2) Guns aren't all powerful, but they should be notably more powerful than non-firearm missile weapons.
3) Reloading an early firearm should take at least 5 rounds or so (without a fast loading feat). This is one of the reasons #2 needs to be true.

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

When I've flirted with the idea of guns I usualy make them simple weapons, but they require a feat to reload (or mabye 5 minimum ranks of Craft (Gunsmithing)), otherwise there's a chance they jam or the powder goes off early.

Personally I've never had the problems you describe with players feeling enabled to advance Gun-Tech 300-400 years based on an 18 int and some skill ranks... If memory serves it took Watt something like 5 years to get a machine shop that could engineer parts to the specifications nessessary to build one of his earliest prototype engines. Reguardless of how good the idea is you just can't toss a dark ages blacksmith some powder and a sketch and get it made.

...besides, physics went out the window as soon as you let them use all thoes alchemy ranks to make their first sunrod or thunderstone.