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

[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-...