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

[wellis]

IIRC fast reloads were about 20 seconds, so that's like 3 rounds of time I think?

 

[Fenris-77]

IIRC fast reloads were about 20 seconds, so that's like 3 rounds of time I think?

The last site I was on suggested that a really good soldier could manage 6 rounds a minute, which is essentially a shot shot per round. Average was closer to three, so every other round. I might even go to a two round reload if I were making the weapon list from scratch, but add in abilities by level to cut that down. In all those cases accuracy was mostly junk past about 100 yards (a very loose and general number). So maybe something like 100/300 with a -3 to hit at long range. Again, abilities could cut that at higher levels.

I'd rather an adventurer have a musket and a brace of pistols than have to faff about trying to make people happy with starting reload times for the long gun.

 

[Argyle King]

Um D&D has plenty of minions, NPCs, and other critters knocking out high quality magic items. Plus gawds of knowledge. So I would say Caspar, Jasper’s no magical brother, could corner the market on high end smoke powder. Why in the world do these threads reach for ancient tech when your pc is living in a world which has magic as tech?
My question is can I mount a 50 cal on a red dragon? and if so what location?

Probably.

From drawings of how a dragonlance works, it appears to attach to a pintle mount. The shield which is traditionally attached to protect the rider would stay and become the blast shield. Most of the tech to attach the M2 is already there; just swap out the lance with the M2.

Further, if you have someone who knows a little bit about the inner workings of the M2, you could mount two of them side-by-side by reconfiguring each M2 to feed from different sides and expel the brass out the bottom. If you plan to do a lot of firing, I would probably figure out a way to make a bigger saddle for a second rider, so as to allow for a barrel change during combat.

 

[Flamestrike]

And if you had the numbers for archers versus swordsmen you would result in more people being killed by arrows than swords.

No I don't mean TOTAL numbers.

I mean [injured (by X)/ died (by X)] expressed as a ratio.

If 100 people are injured by swords and bayonets and 50 of them die, that's 1 in 2 die for a 50 percent fatality rate.

If 1000 people are injured by arrows, and 100 die, thats a 1 in 10 ratio, for a 10 percent fatality rate.

More died by arrows, but edged weapons were more lethal.

Im sure if I dug around I could find after action reports on casualties by type, broken down into injured/ KIA.

 

[Flamestrike]

Getting stabbed in the chest by a longsword is going to be just as deadly (probably more actually) than getting shot by a gun in the chest.

No, it's really not more deadly.

Musket balls do all the same damage as a thrust to the chest with a longsword (punch a large hole and cause serious bleeding), plus the extra trauma to surrounding tissue and organs caused by your body near instantly decelerating a .69 cal lead ball traveling at 400mps, and transferring that energy to the surrounding tissue.

A long sword thrust with a roughly 3lb longsword traveling at 5' per second is 15 pounds feet/second of momentum:

Momentum of an arrow or a sword thrust?

Its roughly the same energy generated by a 400 grain arrow fired at 250' per second. (15 lbs per foot second) by a modern 65lb Hunting bow, which delivers 55.5 ft/lbs of energy on target (75 joules).

By comparison, a .69 caliber smoothbore musket ball has 463 grains, and is fired at 1,200' per second, delivering roughly 1480 ft/lbs of energy on target, or over 2000 joules.

The difference between your body decelerating a projectile with 75 joules of energy (the arrow), and it stopping 2000 joules (the musket ball) and the effect this energy absorption has on surrounding tissue, is immense.

The arrow and the sword punch a hole in you and bruise the nearby tissue. The musket ball literally turns nearby tissue to pulp, and dislodges organs hit (in addition to pulping them)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, it's really not more deadly.

Musket balls do all the same damage as a thrust to the chest with a longsword (punch a large hole and cause serious bleeding), plus the extra trauma to surrounding tissue and organs caused by your body near instantly decelerating a .69 cal lead ball traveling at 400mps, and transferring that energy to the surrounding tissue.

A long sword thrust with a roughly 3lb longsword traveling at 5' per second is 15 pounds feet/second of momentum:

Momentum of an arrow or a sword thrust?

Its roughly the same energy generated by a 400 grain arrow fired at 250' per second. (15 lbs per foot second) by a modern 65lb Hunting bow, which delivers 55.5 ft/lbs of energy on target (75 joules).

By comparison, a .69 caliber smoothbore musket ball has 463 grains, and is fired at 1,200' per second, delivering roughly 1480 ft/lbs of energy on target, or over 2000 joules.

The difference between your body decelerating a projectile with 75 joules of energy (the arrow), and it stopping 2000 joules (the musket ball) and the effect this energy absorption has on surrounding tissue, is immense.

The arrow and the sword punch a hole in you and bruise the nearby tissue. The musket ball literally turns nearby tissue to pulp, and dislodges organs hit (in addition to pulping them)

I don’t have the historical numbers handy, but they don’t bear this out as well as you’d think.

One thing you’re missing is that a longsword is a tapered blade, and creates a quite large hole that will bleed someone out very quickly. Another is that historically, bad medicine is the cause of death more often than the inciting injury itself, with both weapons.

If the musket “pulped” the body like you suggest, the vast majority of people shot in the torso by a musket would die pretty quickly after being shot. That isn’t the case.

Flintlocks can range up to 550 or 600m/s. Just curious, but is there a reason for the 250m/s cutoff here? If we're talking black powder fantasy I don't see why that should be the break.

I'll happily elide modern guns if no one's talking about them.

It was in part intended that way. Guns are modifiable in ways that swords or the like aren't, so why not lean into that? Players love tinkering with their kit. The real trick will be to find a happy medium where there's enough widgets to be interesting, but not so many as to be boring or over-whelming. I'd probably start with a list of 'common' upgrades that any competent gunsmith can manage (including PCs) and add the rest in (the higher level/more rare ones) organically as story elements. You'd think that master gunsmiths would be very secretive about their craft, tools and ingredients, so the result on the player side might feel more like trying find new spells does for a mage (in a game where your can't just pick whatever spells you like of course). You want to know the secret of Al'hazar's famed long barrel rifles? Go find one or meet the man. That sort of thing. I think has promise as an idea, and is certainly far more interesting than just adding a list of firearms to the PHB.

That said, you'd be amazed at the number of medieval war dead that are missing hands and arms. That's down to swords and whatnot.

Out of the fight is out of the fight . That’s what I focus on in my homebrew system, and what Trauma represents. Is the blow enough to knock you out of the fight, or not?!

Modern stats on gun violence and mortality are pretty useless for the topic at hand, no offense to anyone in particular.

They’re useless for anyone trying to “prove” that guns should do way more damage than swords. For those of us saying that most weapons should just do close to the same damage, it’s pretty useful. Gunshot survival rates are really very high, and most people who get shot aren’t even maimed by them, much less killed. And that’s looking at vastly more advanced weapons.

TI'd rather an adventurer have a musket and a brace of pistols than have to faff about trying to make people happy with starting reload times for the long gun.

I’d much rather just have fun and let guns be reloaded “unrealistically” fast, and just basically be better crossbows. I’m happy to assume easier advancement of better gun tech due to magical materials science and better chemistry.

 

[Fenris-77]

My point was more about making them cool, but different.

 

[Flamestrike]

One thing you’re missing is that a longsword is a tapered blade, and creates a quite large hole that will bleed someone out very quickly.

If the musket “pulped” the body like you suggest, the vast majority of people shot in the torso by a musket would die pretty quickly after being shot. That isn’t the case.

Hmm:

Within a 12-year period ending in March 1984, 1109 patients with penetrating thoracic injuries were treated at King-Drew Medical Center located in south central Los Angeles. The average age of the patients was 28.1 years. There were 607 stab wounds and 502 gunshot wounds. Antibiotic prophylaxis was prescribed only for the 428 patients who had laparotomy, thoracotomy, and pulmonary contusion with hemoptysis. Of the 1109 patients, 105 had cardiac injuries. All patients with cardiac trauma underwent thoracotomy, and the mortality rate was 18.1%. Specifically, the mortality rate of gunshot wound of the heart 24.5% and that of stab wound of the heart, 11.5%.

Unusually low mortality of penetrating wounds of the chest. Twelve years' experience - PubMed

Gunshot wounds of the heart result in higher mortality than stab wounds to the heart.

Penetrating chest wounds: 24 years experience - PubMed

Patients with a Gun shot wound (GSW) were ten times more likely to sustain a cervical spine fracture than those with a stab wound (SW) and more than six times as likely to have an associated spinal cord injury. All patients in the GSW cohort with a spinal cord injury had an associated fracture compared with only 50% in the SW group. The incidence of an injury to the brachial plexus was four times more common after sustaining a GSW compared with a SW and the incidence of ischaemic cerebral or cerebellar infarcts was twenty times as high.

Once the mortuary data were included, the total mortality rate of PNI was found to be 27% for GSWs and 16% for SWs.

A comparative audit of gunshot wounds and stab wounds to the neck in a South African metropolitan trauma service

• One hundred ninety perforating gunshot and 146 perforating stab wounds of the abdomen have been reviewed.
• The mortality for the entire series is 51 per cent for the bullet wounds and 14.1 per cent for the stab wounds. The operative mortality is 48.9 and 13.8 per cent respectively.

DEFINE_ME

Gunshot wounds are significantly more lethal than stab wounds.

 

[Oofta]

Hmm:



Unusually low mortality of penetrating wounds of the chest. Twelve years' experience - PubMed


Penetrating chest wounds: 24 years experience - PubMed



A comparative audit of gunshot wounds and stab wounds to the neck in a South African metropolitan trauma service


DEFINE_ME

Gunshot wounds are significantly more lethal than stab wounds.

Are people being stabbed with battle axes and claymores on a regular basis? Are knives in South Africa 3-4 pounds with blades 3 feet long or longer being wielded by trained soldiers? Are people being shot with blackpowder muskets or muzzle loading pistols? Is this a fantasy game? Is D&D particularly realistic? No?

Why do you think these numbers are particularly relevant?

 

[Steampunkette]

That's not at all how that was intended, sorry. I was just pointing out that D&D is not particularly granular or historical in terms of weapon options, rules, or damage (like, at all). That makes projects that want to work it like that a lot more work. If you want nuance, which is a fine goal, you'd need to expand and revise the entire weapon table and add a lot of elements.

More specifically, the game as it stands is not the product of any kind of nuanced investigation of how actual weapons hurt actual people. At best it's a very general reflection of that, and even with that notion you'd get a lot of arguments and pushback from people who actually know weapons and combat.

So no, not a strawman, nor a PA snipe, just the reality of the rules set. YMMV about how much faffing about you want to do with things, of course.

I accept the apology, and apologize for my own part in the miscommunication. Text is a difficult medium, sometimes.

The reload rule is probably key. If you want differentiation, up the damage, and maybe the crit range, but push the reload time to start and maybe up the fumble range as well. Just my two cents there...

In the case of an entire Black Powder setting, I'd definitely start monkeying around with the above, as well as the crit multiplier. In general, less attacks, but massive damage potential. That seems fun. Also less prone to abuse.

I'm not sure upping the Crit range is the best idea. But giving it a particularly nasty crit result could be the way to go for it?

Something like a x3 to represent that when it hits a vital organ it can be a -particularly- savage wound, but most hits that aren't to immediately lethal "No more Birthday Buttons" aren't drastically more devastating than strikes from other weapons?

Are people being stabbed with battle axes and claymores on a regular basis? Are knives in South Africa 3-4 pounds with blades more 3 feet long or longer being wielded by trained soldiers? Are people being shot with blackpowder muskets or muzzle loading pistols? Is this a fantasy game? Is D&D particularly realistic? No?

Why do you think these numbers are particularly relevant?

Because he's not interested in the damage done to the human body by the weapons, which is the topic of the thread, but instead interested in proving without question that guns are vastly more lethal than any melee weapon whatsoever. I've tried to steer him back on course, directly, tried to discuss the damage shown in videos he's actively posted, himself... And he just ignores it to declare victory.

Because it's not about the damage, for him, it's about the quantity of body bags.