D&D 5E Why do guns do so much damage?
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zarionofarabel
Hero
My vote is to keep them as is!
The extra damage is a way of extrapolating one of two things, the AP nature of firearms (because you can stop a knife thrust with your hand, but not a bullet), or to compensate for not getting STR bonus to damage (do firearms get DEX bonus to damage???).
Anyway, bullets cause catastrophic damage to a human body, same as any weapon. The only real advantage firearms have over melee weapons is range. The real advantage firearms have over bows and crossbows is ammunition and rate of fire. You can blast away thousands of rounds, hundreds of rounds per minute, with a man portable machine gun. That would require hundreds or thousands of troops and wagon loads of arrows or bolts. One guy can carry several thousands rounds of alone. Even black powder firearms have the advantage of ammunition, as a single soldier could carry several hundred shot. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight...
Extrapolate all that in an RPG...
Yeah, guns do more damage!!!
......
Yay!
.....
Let's play D&D!
(Yeah...just keep whatever rules are in the game. Then play D&D!)
The extra damage is a way of extrapolating one of two things, the AP nature of firearms (because you can stop a knife thrust with your hand, but not a bullet), or to compensate for not getting STR bonus to damage (do firearms get DEX bonus to damage???).
Anyway, bullets cause catastrophic damage to a human body, same as any weapon. The only real advantage firearms have over melee weapons is range. The real advantage firearms have over bows and crossbows is ammunition and rate of fire. You can blast away thousands of rounds, hundreds of rounds per minute, with a man portable machine gun. That would require hundreds or thousands of troops and wagon loads of arrows or bolts. One guy can carry several thousands rounds of alone. Even black powder firearms have the advantage of ammunition, as a single soldier could carry several hundred shot. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight...
Extrapolate all that in an RPG...
Yeah, guns do more damage!!!
......
Yay!
.....
Let's play D&D!
(Yeah...just keep whatever rules are in the game. Then play D&D!)
Levistus's_Leviathan
5e Freelancer
I just want to slightly correct this, as I agree that guns are better at killing, but a major part of this is that guns can be used at range and with accuracy while swords can't. Sure, bows and crossbows exist, but guns require less strength to use and are generally easier to aim with.
clearstream
(He, Him)
I found gun damage underwhelming, considering the following
- they have the ammunition and reload properties
- if you are using the Renaissance guns, they are more costly - that pistol costs 10x the price of a light crossbow
- short range - that pistol has about 1/3rd the range of a light crossbow
Horwath
Hero
that is a problem of trying to balance two systems that essentially cannot be balanced together.
For gameplay reasons, swords(melee weapons) need to be too good or guns need to be far worse than they are.
John R Davis
Hero
I like the idea that guns=cantrips
The massed ranks of 10 peasants with +2 to hit against a high AC fighter. I'm sure if the fighter needs to making a dex save versus the peasants needing to hit, more damage will be done.
This way armour has no bearing on whether the bullets hit you. I guess you could subtract any magic bonus of the armour from the damage?
The massed ranks of 10 peasants with +2 to hit against a high AC fighter. I'm sure if the fighter needs to making a dex save versus the peasants needing to hit, more damage will be done.
This way armour has no bearing on whether the bullets hit you. I guess you could subtract any magic bonus of the armour from the damage?
Horwath
Hero
true, but in the end, only thing that matters, is that it works better.
LuisCarlos17f
Legend
This is the classic conflict of gameplay vs realism/accuracy. If the firearms could cause more damage in the game then all the players would want to be gunslingers and the classic melee combatant classes (barbarian, paladin, monk) would be forgotten because the disuse.
And we are in the age of videogames. This means players notice katanas vs kalashnikovs are spectacular fights in the anime and movies, but a total disaster in normal videogames, but if the firearms are "nerferd".
And the players can invent homebred anti-gun countermeassures, for example pieces of ectoplasm to block cannons or bulleproof barriers, summoning swarms, remote-control trained war beasts, or illusory magic to create effects as smoke grenades.
Real machine-guns can be lethal, but they can overheat too much if you keep shooting.
Not only PCs can use firearms, but also the enemy humanoids nPCs, and this can break the power balance easily if the PCs are from a civilitation with a lower level tech.
* What about to use "organic tech" to craft crossbows that reload itself thanks artificial muscles by a creature from real nature, the pistol shrimp
I remember a fun gif of Assasin Creed III about expectation vs reality, where the players is killed fastly when he tries to charge against a squad of musketeers.
And we are in the age of videogames. This means players notice katanas vs kalashnikovs are spectacular fights in the anime and movies, but a total disaster in normal videogames, but if the firearms are "nerferd".
And the players can invent homebred anti-gun countermeassures, for example pieces of ectoplasm to block cannons or bulleproof barriers, summoning swarms, remote-control trained war beasts, or illusory magic to create effects as smoke grenades.
Real machine-guns can be lethal, but they can overheat too much if you keep shooting.
Not only PCs can use firearms, but also the enemy humanoids nPCs, and this can break the power balance easily if the PCs are from a civilitation with a lower level tech.
* What about to use "organic tech" to craft crossbows that reload itself thanks artificial muscles by a creature from real nature, the pistol shrimp
I remember a fun gif of Assasin Creed III about expectation vs reality, where the players is killed fastly when he tries to charge against a squad of musketeers.
clearstream
(He, Him)
If we are speaking of the Renaissance guns (per the OP - flintlock pistol) they do not need to be worse than they are.
Honestly, it's a non-issue: at least so far as the game mechanics are concerned. With 250gp I can buy a pistol or for 100-500gp I can buy a +1 light crossbow (call it 300gp on average). It's a complete wash! I'd rather have the crossbow - better range, more likely to hit.
UngeheuerLich
Legend
To better reflect how reliable damage wit a weapon is, dnd used modifiers and even exploding dice in the case of firearms.
So a sword would better be represented with 1d6+1 or 2d4 because you usually do a reliable amount of damage.
Bullets used to do 1d4/6 explode 4/6 if I remember correctly. So usually you do less damage, but in the case of a good hit, you do a lot more.
So a sword would better be represented with 1d6+1 or 2d4 because you usually do a reliable amount of damage.
Bullets used to do 1d4/6 explode 4/6 if I remember correctly. So usually you do less damage, but in the case of a good hit, you do a lot more.
Speed absolutely matters. As Bruce Lee said, “Take a piece of lead the size of a rock and throw it at someone. Now take the same piece and shoot it out of a gun.”
The ballistic energy of a bullet is crazy, and if anything, damage is underrated.
the shot on the left is from a .22LR, and the shot on the right is a 9mm, both low energy rounds, and look what they did. A bullet wound is not just a finger wide hole. Imagine what a musket ball does, or a high velocity round like a 5.56 or 7.62 round.
The ballistic energy of a bullet is crazy, and if anything, damage is underrated.
the shot on the left is from a .22LR, and the shot on the right is a 9mm, both low energy rounds, and look what they did. A bullet wound is not just a finger wide hole. Imagine what a musket ball does, or a high velocity round like a 5.56 or 7.62 round.
DammitVictor
Druid of the Invisible Hand
There are two enormous fallacies at work here:
The first being, of course, that guns in the hands of even the most unwashed peasant-- much less the leveled D&D warrior!-- are magical death talismans that cannot be withstood or countered. Sometimes they punch lethally through the armors designed specifically to counter them, sometimes they have access to a much deadlier critical hit system than other weapons, sometimes they just have the absolute ability to oneshot kill absolutely anything on a Save or Die basis.
This is, in my experience, almost always the work of game designers with very little exposure to armed violence from either a professional or-- more importantly-- an academic perspective.
Second... and more pernicious... we are looking at the damage of firearms versus swords in terms of damage dice compared to the number and size of Hit Dice of human opposition. I don't feel like I should ever have to explain this to functional adults, but here we are: the measurement of weapon damage in die sizes compared to humanoid hit dice is also, entirely in itself, complete rubbish. Absolute nonsense.
If you're an untrained, unwashed peasant and you take a "solid blow" from a sword-- any kind of sword-- you die. If you take a vital shot from a firearm, literally a shot to the vitals, you die. If you take a solid blow from an arrow, a bolt, or a slung stone... regardless of the difference of those weapons' relative damage dice, you die. If the shot doesn't kill you, then whether you can keep fighting or you're forced out of the battle, you're going to spend months making whatever partial recovery is possible for you.
Thing is, though, it's the same for trained warriors. Their training and their equipment allow them to prevent some of those solid blows from disabling or killing them, but if a "lucky punk" gets a lucky shot with a flea-market switchblade, in the first round of combat-- something D&D rules don't model-- then the trained warrior, with more than one Hit Die that is more than a d4 in size, will die. If they take their helmet off and a small child throws a chunk of masonry at their exposed head, they die. Needless to say, if small arms fire breaches their armor... they stand a good chance of dying.
But not 100%, either. In the modern world, the rule is that if your heart is still beating when you're rolled into the trauma surgery, you're going to live. If a bullet doesn't hit a vital organ or a major artery, the human body can withstand a whole bunch of them; the reason being shot multiple times is more likely to be fatal is that you're more likely to get hit in something you need.
The only real difference, realistically speaking, between firearms and melee weapons is that the larger a firearm is, the more likely it is to kill you, while with a melee weapon, the larger it is, the less likely it is to crush or sever something important and kill you.
And the problem with this argument is, for the most part, we're trying to shove one truckload of nonsense into another and then demand it make sense.
Firearms, especially early firearms, are generally appropriately (if not realistically) depicted in terms of their rate-of-fire and reloading speed. Simply assign them whatever damage value you feel is right, in terms of how desirable you want them to be as player choices, and you're good to go. It's all nonsense anyway. There is nothing about the interaction between weapon damage and human injury in D&D that is even remotely realistic, so just go with whatever feels most natural in the combat rules you're already using. I think 5e's firearms rules are pretty okay, in comparison.
Personally, I like to go with d20 Modern's 2d4/2d6/2d8/2d10 classifications, with their default 20/x2 crit ranges... and if I can be bothered, I might do something about their ridiculous (short) rifle range increments and their even more ridiculous (long) pistol range increments.
The first being, of course, that guns in the hands of even the most unwashed peasant-- much less the leveled D&D warrior!-- are magical death talismans that cannot be withstood or countered. Sometimes they punch lethally through the armors designed specifically to counter them, sometimes they have access to a much deadlier critical hit system than other weapons, sometimes they just have the absolute ability to oneshot kill absolutely anything on a Save or Die basis.
This is, in my experience, almost always the work of game designers with very little exposure to armed violence from either a professional or-- more importantly-- an academic perspective.
Second... and more pernicious... we are looking at the damage of firearms versus swords in terms of damage dice compared to the number and size of Hit Dice of human opposition. I don't feel like I should ever have to explain this to functional adults, but here we are: the measurement of weapon damage in die sizes compared to humanoid hit dice is also, entirely in itself, complete rubbish. Absolute nonsense.
If you're an untrained, unwashed peasant and you take a "solid blow" from a sword-- any kind of sword-- you die. If you take a vital shot from a firearm, literally a shot to the vitals, you die. If you take a solid blow from an arrow, a bolt, or a slung stone... regardless of the difference of those weapons' relative damage dice, you die. If the shot doesn't kill you, then whether you can keep fighting or you're forced out of the battle, you're going to spend months making whatever partial recovery is possible for you.
Thing is, though, it's the same for trained warriors. Their training and their equipment allow them to prevent some of those solid blows from disabling or killing them, but if a "lucky punk" gets a lucky shot with a flea-market switchblade, in the first round of combat-- something D&D rules don't model-- then the trained warrior, with more than one Hit Die that is more than a d4 in size, will die. If they take their helmet off and a small child throws a chunk of masonry at their exposed head, they die. Needless to say, if small arms fire breaches their armor... they stand a good chance of dying.
But not 100%, either. In the modern world, the rule is that if your heart is still beating when you're rolled into the trauma surgery, you're going to live. If a bullet doesn't hit a vital organ or a major artery, the human body can withstand a whole bunch of them; the reason being shot multiple times is more likely to be fatal is that you're more likely to get hit in something you need.
The only real difference, realistically speaking, between firearms and melee weapons is that the larger a firearm is, the more likely it is to kill you, while with a melee weapon, the larger it is, the less likely it is to crush or sever something important and kill you.
And the problem with this argument is, for the most part, we're trying to shove one truckload of nonsense into another and then demand it make sense.
Firearms, especially early firearms, are generally appropriately (if not realistically) depicted in terms of their rate-of-fire and reloading speed. Simply assign them whatever damage value you feel is right, in terms of how desirable you want them to be as player choices, and you're good to go. It's all nonsense anyway. There is nothing about the interaction between weapon damage and human injury in D&D that is even remotely realistic, so just go with whatever feels most natural in the combat rules you're already using. I think 5e's firearms rules are pretty okay, in comparison.
Personally, I like to go with d20 Modern's 2d4/2d6/2d8/2d10 classifications, with their default 20/x2 crit ranges... and if I can be bothered, I might do something about their ridiculous (short) rifle range increments and their even more ridiculous (long) pistol range increments.
In fact, don’t imagine. Here you go.
King Babar
God Learner
Part of the issue is that DnD combat doesn't simulate a weapon's ability to penetrate armor. A simple flintlock pistol has a good chance of penetrating even well-made plate armor, while the weapon in your video would be less-than-useful against an enemy in plate.
clearstream
(He, Him)
I've got to unwatch: this thread is making my brain melt.
Look at the costs, ranges, and special traits of the ranged weapons (including +1 ranged weapons). Then come back to - is the listed Renaissance gun damage OP!?
Look at the costs, ranges, and special traits of the ranged weapons (including +1 ranged weapons). Then come back to - is the listed Renaissance gun damage OP!?
I was watching a drama about Anne Boleyn yesterday. She certainly didn't think swords don't do much damage.
The benefit of guns is that (a) they're ranged and (b) they're easier to operate. If damage was just about kinetic velocity then a rogue's sneak attack wouldn't do all that damage. Getting beheaded with an axe is just as fatal as being shot in the head by a gun. It's not the velocity, it's what you do with it.
Also, I feel like I have this exact conversation every couple of months!
The benefit of guns is that (a) they're ranged and (b) they're easier to operate. If damage was just about kinetic velocity then a rogue's sneak attack wouldn't do all that damage. Getting beheaded with an axe is just as fatal as being shot in the head by a gun. It's not the velocity, it's what you do with it.
Also, I feel like I have this exact conversation every couple of months!
Leatherhead
Possibly a Idiot.
I'm going to step aside from the debate about the Real Physical or Mythological damage that swords and guns do, mostly because I think the point about the destructive nature of both weapons being grossly under-estimated has been beaten into the carcass of the dead horse by now. (Which I'm sure someone has a youtube video of.)
Instead, I will talk about the only thing more geeky than ballistic tests, spreadsheets!
Longswords do, in fact, under-perform in 5e.
As in the only characters who get a distinct benefit from using them are Monks, thanks to the optional class features in TCoE. Which again, has nothing to do with how many people you can bisect, and everything to do with how many bonuses you can stack while using them. There just isn't significant character option support in the 5e system for them. And this is despite longswords being the most iconic and most common type of magical weapon in all prior editions of D&D. In fact, magic longswords being so common and powerful was the entire reason that Thieves getting to wield longswords was considered a huge boon for the class.
In contrast, the Renaissance Firearms fit in near-perfectly with other ranged weapons.
They do a bigger die of damage than other options, but in return have lesser range. Additionally, characters have multiple effective avenues to greatly improve their potency. There are arguably problems such as cost, noise, and lack of magic items to pull from, but those well within the boundaries of DM discretion: If you are going to put guns in your game, you are going to make them work for the players that want them.
Instead, I will talk about the only thing more geeky than ballistic tests, spreadsheets!
Longswords do, in fact, under-perform in 5e.
As in the only characters who get a distinct benefit from using them are Monks, thanks to the optional class features in TCoE. Which again, has nothing to do with how many people you can bisect, and everything to do with how many bonuses you can stack while using them. There just isn't significant character option support in the 5e system for them. And this is despite longswords being the most iconic and most common type of magical weapon in all prior editions of D&D. In fact, magic longswords being so common and powerful was the entire reason that Thieves getting to wield longswords was considered a huge boon for the class.
In contrast, the Renaissance Firearms fit in near-perfectly with other ranged weapons.
They do a bigger die of damage than other options, but in return have lesser range. Additionally, characters have multiple effective avenues to greatly improve their potency. There are arguably problems such as cost, noise, and lack of magic items to pull from, but those well within the boundaries of DM discretion: If you are going to put guns in your game, you are going to make them work for the players that want them.
Then why does sneak attack work?
commandercrud
Hero
Nothing about D&D is realistic. Not encumbrance, not food requirements, not sleep or exhaustion. Not weapons or hit points or damage. And not guns either.
Cap'n Kobold
Hero
Guns didn't end knights by punching through armour. Plate armour was literally "proofed" by firing a close-range pistol shot into it.
Guns ended knights (and bowmen) by logistics: Arrows need to be crafted by skilled workers. Gunpowder can be made by the bucketload.
A knight takers years to train. A musketman can be trained to a base level of proficiency in weeks.
Firstly, I wouldn't bother increasing damage much for a higher-tech firearm. If it actually gets into your body with a high degree of velocity, lead musket balls are as deadly as most bullets of equivalent power. - More modern firearms represent better ranges and rates of fire.
However bear in mind that D&D crossbows are already an abstraction. Even without the feats, they shoot much more rapidly than an actual crossbow could.
Pistol crossbows are even more so: there was never an historical equivalent, and even using modern materials you can't make a pistol-size crossbow that can be drawn with one hand yet is as powerful as a shortbow. In earlier editions they were more realistic: minimal damage, but used as a poison-delivery system.
So absolutely give your guns crossbow stats and allow your players the fantasy of flintlocks and rapiers. Just balance them against the AC of brocade coats and suitably-ruffled shirts.
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