D&D 5E Why do guns do so much damage?

[Necrozius]

From what meagre things I’ve learned from history, things were a lot more complex than film and game media would have us believe.

Towards the end of their “life”, longbows and crossbows were already making plate armor less useful. I think that firearms became so much more potent as a military force because of how comparatively quickly a group of nobodies could be trained on how to load, aim and fire.

If one wanted to show how much of an impact firearms would have on a fantasy setting, I’d probably reduce the damage dice to the equivalent of bows and crossbows, but make muskets Basic/common weapons to show how easily they could be used by people.

This would show the unbalancing nature of them. Now anybody could do significant damage with ranged weapons, not just heavily trained soldiers or special PC classes. Peasants didn’t need to rely as much on nobles for self defence or Bowyer/fletcher guilds for hunting tools.

A parent could teach their children how to load and maintain a musket for hunting rabbits and birds.

Dwarves and Gnomes would likely shake up the existing economy as they’d jump on such production and industry. Elves would get pretty upset that other races could pull up military units in much quicker time constraints, and coupled with their longer life and lower populations... things could get tragic for the Elder folk.

It could be really interesting of a concept.

Pistols, however, might still be more of a thing for officers, gunslingers and elite warriors though. A shorter tube = less accurate so maybe they require more target practice? I dunno.

edit: what @Cap'n Kobold said

 

[QuentinGeorge]

The idea that "gunpowder ended armor" is a persistent myth. I mean, sure, eventually armour wasn't cost-effective against the firearms available (18th century), but there was never a period where armor was useless.

And gunpowder arrived a lot earlier in European warfare than people expect....

...and armor didn't reach its apogee until the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

Clearly no one told Cortez and co that the money they spent on their fine cuirasses was wasted.

Or, indeed, centuries later, these cavalrymen of Waterloo:

It is very odd that D&D players seem fine with plate armor and breastplates, but very troubled by gunpowder, even though the latter is more authentically medieval than the former, and I think part of this, is the absurd pop-culture beliefs about firearms. The effectiveness they have now is a much more recent things. Pre-Victorian era they weren't the killing machines you might think.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My issue with D&D renaissance firearms is that they're absurdly fast to load. That's what breaks my suspension of disbelief. I would actually increase their damage, but make them much slower to load.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

If the sword guy had sprint-rushed Indie, at that short a distance, and just tried to kill rather than intimidate, the movie would be shorter.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

My issue with D&D renaissance firearms is that they're absurdly fast to load. That's what breaks my suspension of disbelief. I would actually increase their damage, but make them much slower to load.

Yes, forget armor - a single musketeer is frantically trying to stoke his weapon while the swordsman stabs him multiple times, which was why firearms were always used with large numbers of troops. Multiple lines of gunmen and massed fire took care of the two weaknesses: slow reloading and bad accuracy.

 

[Horwath]

My issue with D&D renaissance firearms is that they're absurdly fast to load. That's what breaks my suspension of disbelief. I would actually increase their damage, but make them much slower to load.

I hear you, but for gameplay aspect anything above 1 Action(reduced to Bonus action with feat/style) is not good for the game.
Unless you want to go with Bag of holding and several firearms pre-loaded.

 

[DEFCON 1]

All I know is that when one of my groups that was playing Curse of Strahd was in the tombs beneath the castle and they found the crypt that had the anachronistic "rifle"... I knew I wanted it to be more powerful than a typical D&D melee or ranged weapon just so that the "ballistic weapon" meant something to them.

So I basically treated it like a magic item and gave it almost the same properties as a Wand of Lightning Bolts:

This rifle has 7 "rounds" (charges). While holding it, you can use an action to use 1 of its "rounds" to fire the rifle (cast the lightning bolt spell (save DC 15) but the damage is force rather than lightning and only can hit one target).

The rifle regains 1d6 + 1 expended "rounds" daily at dawn as you spend the night "prepping additional ammo". If you expend the rifle's last "round", roll a d20. On a 1, the rifle backfires and crumbles into ashes and is destroyed.

These are also not "realistic" per se... but since none of the combat rules in D&D are "realistic" in my opinion, all that mattered to me was to find the best way to make the rifle feel different and "better" in comparison to normal weaponry, while at the same time making sure the item was still balanced with anything else already in the game. Treating it like a magic item did that.

But if this kind of thing doesn't work for you, another option of course is that you use the Gunslinger fighter subclass for 5E that Matt Mercer had made (based off of the Pathfinder class), and which you can get rules for either from DMs Guild, or on D&D Beyond. And they include all the rules for firing, misfiring, reloading, trick shots, repairing the weapon and so forth.

 

[Steampunkette]

There's definitely a lot here to digest from both sides of the argument. I know from my studies of history that @QuentinGeorge is -absolutely- correct that armor was effective against firearms to varying degrees, but not economically viable. Particularly after Napoleon began the era of insanely huge armies on the field of battle as opposed to the much smaller armies of earlier eras.

Agincourt, for example, saw an incredibly massive 25,000+ Frenchmen lose to 10,000+ Englishmen... But Napoleon marched around Europe with almost 700,000 Frenchmen just 350 years later.

On the other hand, I had not considered the hydrostatic lateral pressure from a bullet. And while I still do not think it comparable, it is something to consider. The reason being that the example clay shot used 78 grains of modern 300 Blackout powder which is very different from the 50-60 grains of much lower quality gunpowder that would've been available in the early renaissance. Primarily due to relative chemical purities and varying levels of mixture without laboratory equipment providing precise measures.

For now, what I think I'll do is:

1) Make Pistols and Rifles available for players to purchase but otherwise largely have them in the hands of the well off.
2) Treat all these Pistols and Rifles as Breach-Loading weapons rather than ramrod.
3) Define all ammo for such as paper-cartridge shots that are very susceptible to water damage.
4) Make that ammo -dirt- cheap.
5) Get rid of any Misfire chance. Seriously, that's not remotely fun for anyone. If a gun blows up it should be for narrative effect, exclusively.
6) Assign them damage equivalent to Hand and Heavy crossbows for Pistol and Rifle, respectively, along with proficiency and feat-interactions.
7) Give them the same load/ammunition qualities as the respective crossbows.
8) Make their fire audible from 100ft away for pistols, 300ft for rifles (mirroring Thunderclap and Thunderwave)
9) Make them simple weapons that someone with the "Noble" background can start with in place of a ranged weapon from their class)
10) Change their Damage Type to Bludgeoning.
11) Have a great time.

All weapon damage in the game is, after all, an abstraction placed behind a further abstraction. A combination of luck, mettle, and morale rather than a measure meat being destroyed

Probably won't use Mercer's Gunslinger... Though I might make a Rogue or Ranger subclass that does gun-tricks as a fun option.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I hear you, but for gameplay aspect anything above 1 Action(reduced to Bonus action with feat/style) is not good for the game.
Unless you want to go with Bag of holding and several firearms pre-loaded.

Well, carrying a brace of pistols seems perfectly appropriate, and I don't feel a bag of holding with several nonmagical guns will be a problem at the levels at which other characters are wielding their magic swords and bows.

 

[Umbran]

Well, carrying a brace of pistols seems perfectly appropriate, and I don't feel a bag of holding with several nonmagical guns will be a problem at the levels at which other characters are wielding their magic swords and bows.

Also, once you get here, you get some wiseacre making the Holster of Ehlonna... Actually, Murlynd's Holster would probably be a better name, as he's the original canonical D&D pistol-guy...

 

[Oofta]

Most of my thoughts on this topic have been covered, but one significant factor or early firearms is being missed.

When gunpowder was first used in combat saltpeter (a main ingredient) was quite expensive and difficult to amass in large quantities. On the other hand, the first time people were exposed to the loud noise and smoke blackpowder creates it was effectively magic. Some of the first cannons were used more for that effect or as flame throwers than damage.

So in a world where even low level mages an cast firebolt or make thunder, there's questions in my mind if people would have pursued the development. Of course that depends on how ubiquitous magic is in your world, but there were centuries of development of gunpowder before we had any hand-held weapon.

 

[Steampunkette]

Most of my thoughts on this topic have been covered, but one significant factor or early firearms is being missed.

When gunpowder was first used in combat saltpeter (a main ingredient) was quite expensive and difficult to amass in large quantities. On the other hand, the first time people were exposed to the loud noise and smoke blackpowder creates it was effectively magic. Some of the first cannons were used more for that effect or as flame throwers than damage.

So in a world where even low level mages an cast firebolt or make thunder, there's questions in my mind if people would have pursued the development. Of course that depends on how ubiquitous magic is in your world, but there were centuries of development of gunpowder before we had any hand-held weapon.

That's actually specifically why I placed the sound-ranges on part with Thunderclap and Thunderwave. To mimic the societal impact of the sound of powerful magic going off.

Well... "Powerful"... but to a commoner a level 1 combat spell is -pretty- powerful, really!

View attachment 137805

Also, once you get here, you get some wiseacre making the Holster of Ehlonna... Actually, Murlynd's Holster would probably be a better name, as he's the original canonical D&D pistol-guy...

Ooo... Murlynd's Holster sounds like a great name for a magic item...

Give it a brace for four pistols. Have "Drawing" a weapon from the holster cost no action, have putting up to 4 pistols into the holster be a Bonus Action, and have it automatically reload any pistol placed into it with the available powder/bullets/cartridges that are kept in the holster's ammunition pouch on the end of the wearer's turn.

Must be attuned, probably very rare...

 

[Flamestrike]

OP could not be more wrong comparing terminal ballistics and the lethality of a handgun bullet and the lethality of a sword.

Bullets don't just 'put holes in you' - they literally destroy organs and cause immense internal bleeding as rhe bullet tumbles through you.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

So, then speed, in and of itself, isn't the point.

A bullet that passes through the body does not deposit much energy or momentum in the target. What it does to the body roughly equivalent to a thrust with a fencing blade, no matter what speed the bullet was moving.

This truly isn't true. Bullets are rarely like stabbing someone. They deposit tons of energy into the target, when that target is a squishy organism, rather than a piece of wood or whatever. They do all sorts of weird and pretty specific-to-speeding-bullets things to bodies, including creating hydrostatic shock, hitting bones and breaking them much more easily than a blade would, or the bullet breaks into multiple fragments that ricochet. I'm not saying this because of something I imagine to be true based on the physics. Look at forensics data and what medics and surgeons deal with, compared to other kinds of wounds.

I'm also not saying this as some sort of gun-humping weirdo. Blades are totally scary too. But I think it makes sense for bullets to be uniquely horrifying.

That said, if this was about "realism," I think the right move would be for most guns to have a really wide damage range, simulating the fact that some rounds do very little to a person, and some are totally devastating, based on where they hit and all sorts of random factors. That swinginess is one of the reasons guns are so frightening in real life--a single stray shot can end everything for someone, whereas you're unlikely to lose your grip on your sword and cut a bystander's head clear off. But since it's pretty unsatisfying to shoot someone in a game and nothing really happen, I get why a lot of systems just amp up their damage overall.

 

[Flamestrike]

Most of my thoughts on this topic have been covered, but one significant factor or early firearms is being missed.

When gunpowder was first used in combat saltpeter (a main ingredient) was quite expensive and difficult to amass in large quantities. On the other hand, the first time people were exposed to the loud noise and smoke blackpowder creates it was effectively magic. Some of the first cannons were used more for that effect or as flame throwers than damage.

So in a world where even low level mages an cast firebolt or make thunder, there's questions in my mind if people would have pursued the development. Of course that depends on how ubiquitous magic is in your world, but there were centuries of development of gunpowder before we had any hand-held weapon.

Casting lightning bolts requires years of training and special aptitude to be able to even cast a few per day.

I can train and arm hundreds of men to use guns in a day, and they can fire them over and over.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Then why does sneak attack work?

It's because rogues are using their bonus actions to dash around the battlefield, building up speed and kinetic energy for their sneak attack!

 

[Steampunkette]

OP could not be more wrong comparing terminal ballistics and the lethality of a handgun bullet and the lethality of a sword.

Bullets don't just 'put holes in you' - they literally destroy organs and cause immense internal bleeding as rhe bullet tumbles through you.

"Handgun Bullet" and "Flintlock Pistol Ball" are two different animals.

Swords -also- destroy organs that they hit, and impart significant kinetic force to the target over a larger area through a VASTLY greater mass. But you show me a Flintlock Pistol that can bisect a pig and we'll immediately agree that the pistol is flatly more damaging.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Casting lightning bolts requires years of training and special aptitude to be able to even cast a few per day.

I can train and arm hundreds of men to use guns in a day, and they can fire them over and over.

Yeah... but you aren't taking the years and years of training to design the guns and the years and years needed to produce the hundreds of guns you need to give to those men into account in your comparison.

If you start at the exact same time and have two separate tracks going... one is taking a prototype design for a "pistol" and then going through the entire process of learning how to design them, figure out how to make ammo, figure out how what is gunpowder and how do you make it and make large quantities of it, put all the pieces of the pistol together to make sure the whole thing actually works and fires, get the process of manufacturing down to build a hundred of these "pistols", and then train one hundred people on how to load, shoot, clean, and repair these pistols... and the other is taking 100 smart men and women and then sitting them down to teach them how to do magic and to eventually cast the lightning bolt spell...

...you probably wouldn't be too far off in terms of total length of time.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Clearly no one told Cortez and co that the money they spent on their fine cuirasses was wasted.

Or, indeed, centuries later, these cavalrymen of Waterloo:

You're absolutely right that old-fashioned armor and guns coexisted on the battlefield. But I think that's a pretty serious misreading of how warfare typically worked at that time. There was some shooting, but also lots of melee. For calvary you tried to deal with the former by moving fast and being on a big terrifying charging horse, and you addressed the latter (as much as you could) with armor to help deflect bayonets and other calvary dude's sabers.

But if that sort of armor was really a great defense against bullets, you'd have seen American Civil War-era calvary using it. Rifling and other techniques weren't all that better by then compared to Waterloo, and calvary were mostly well-heeled bros who could have afforded all sorts of armor, even if the military wasn't providing it for them. It just wasn't useful against bullets. And if they came up against other calvary it often meant an exchange of revolver fire, not sabers--revolvers firing the same old balls that muskets were using, essentially, not the pointier, more armor-penetrating stuff of later eras.

I think it's possible to recognize the fact that bullets changed the game, and made most armor essentially useless, without it being a matter of buying into some sort of gun culture mythology. If anything, it's the opposite that's myth-making. If there was any dude on any battlefield just riding around in his plate armor, lighting up ranks of riflemen with his mighty arming sword while bathed in a shower of sparks from deflected rounds, it'd be the only thing some historians would ever write about. Guns just happen to be as mean and cruel and destabilizing as they are.

 

[Steampunkette]

Doing some quick calculations...

There were 34 pistol balls to the pound for English Pistols. That means each one is about 0.029lbs or about 0.013kg.

The muzzle velocity of a musket is the closest approximation we have of acceleration... so let's just input that value whole instead of acceleration at 414m/s.

And that gives us... 5.9 Newtons of Force. That's pretty great!

Average weight of a Longsword was between 1 and 1.5kgs. Averaging it out, let's go for 1.25kgs. Let's compare them to Baseball Bats for ease of "Fast Speeds". The fastest swings of a bat are around 41mph or 21.4m/s. Let's put that in annnnd....

26.75 Newtons of Force.

Even with it's -vastly- lower speed (just over 1/20th!) the longsword imparts nearly five times as much force as the bullet does. Even dropping the sword's swing speed to 12.1m/s (about 20mph, the "Slower" swings of a bat) you wind up with 15 Newtons of Force which is still three times as much.

While I had a gut instinct that a heavier weight would impart more force just through simple mass, I didn't expect the force difference to be -this- drastic.

... That's -interesting-...