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Message: <blockquote data-quote="David Howery" data-source="post: 5076700" data-attributes="member: 17239"><p>In my younger days, I was a black powder enthusiast; I still own a couple of muzzle loader replicas.  So, when guns made their first appearance in the Realms back in 2E days, I included them.  However, I also added several home rules for the problems that I knew the earliest firearms had: high chances of misfires, absurdly long and complex loading process (especially for matchlocks), intensive cleaning requirements, and extremely inaccurate beyond 50 yards.  Not to mention, the problems of such things as 'no glass, no steel' (they carry static electricity, make black powder go boom unexpectedly), the joys of having your powder flask fail it's save against a fireball, the rather extensive list of accessories they needed to have, and things like that.  The only real advantage of firearms was the open ended damage rule... thus, the only reason the PCs bothered with them (they mainly stuck to pistols, to keep the weight at a minimum).  Early firearms were useful only in mass quantity... have a big bunch of men shoot lots of bullets to do a middling amount of damage.  The PCs lacked the numbers to do all that much with their pistols (especially with the high misfire modifiers I gleefully applied).  Basically, pistols were a one shot item they used and then put away as the dragon closed in...</p></blockquote><p></p>