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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6091258" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think it should be too hard.  I have deliberately kept firearms out of my game since the 1e era, even though I do have what are essentially grenades in a variaty of flavors.This is a weak explanation, and I don't think stands very well on its own.  The problem with secrets is that if they obtain an advantage for you, then they are quickly stolen.   Think how fast the Soviets stole atomic bomb technology, or how difficult it has been to contain its spread.  The real thing that prevents atomic bombs from being made in everyone's basement aren't the secrets of production, but the cost of production.  In the real world, once the secrets of production where known, gun barrels and blackpowder were inexpensive to produce.  The strong explanation for why firearms don't spread is that the explosive that serves in the role of blackpowder in your world is not inexpensive or easy to produce.  In other words, you insist that the magical world's chemistry has no relation to real world chemistry.  Since it is based on 4 elements and not a periodic table, this is not a difficult assumption.   In my own game, not only are explosives expensive and dangerous to produce, but the most stable known explosives are roughly as stable as liquid nitroglycerin.   Gunpowder as it exists in my world cannot be stored in quantity because it decays in just a few days, and becomes so sensitive that a breeze can set it off.   It cannot be produced in quantity because it requires high skill not to blow yourself up and the larger the batch, the worse the dangers.  In short, firearms have been known about for 1000's of years but they have always been an impractical if not actually suicidal weapon.  Only a few sages and assassins guilds even know about them, and they would tell you that its really not worth trying to make one.One thing to keep in mind is that the introduction of tube artillery not only did not immediately obselete the castle, but it didn't even immediately obselete the older torsion engines like trebuchet.  There was for about a century and a half a period where both were in use and people weren't certain which was superior as a weapon of war.  The other important point is that fantasy world fortifications are vastly more powerful than real world ones even before the introduction of cannon, because they have to contend with giants, dragons, and above all spellcasters.   Quite a few fantasy fortifications may well be almost impervious to primitive cannon assuming you've taken the steps required to make a castle not be obseleted by wizards.This is also a weak explanation.  There is no historical evidence social schemes like that ever blocked the spread of new weapon technology, though they were on occasion tried (for the crossbow, for example).  One reason is that if the weapon is useful, each kingdom is encouraged to enlarge its position and power by cheating, and licensing the weapon as broadly as possible.  'Gun control' isn't going to work, because it requires your neighbor to concede weapon development to you.  Each nation is going to want as many firearm owners as possible, in order to conscript powerful armies to use against the other.A stronger explanation is to note that the introduction of the hand gonne didn't immediately obselete all other missile weapons.   Even the crossbow survived at least two centuries alongside the gonne.  The longbow remained competitive with the firearm in terms of accuracy, range, and rate as fire as late as the early 19th century.  The only trouble was that the longbow was so much more difficult to use, very few nations could field them in any numbers and the problem only worsed as the rifle began to supercede the longbow as a hunting weapon.   In fantasy worlds, this typically presents no difficulty, as longbows are easy to use (martial weapons) and commonly employed in great numbers.   Moreover, in fantasy worlds, gonnes are often hard to use (exotic weapons) and have game attributes that don't make them significantly more lethal than missile weapons of other sorts.   Often in game there is little reason to try to field large numbers of firearms, and generally more reason to try to field large numbers of spellcasters if you could.It doesn't strongly convince me.  For me the answer is simple - firearms don't exist or aren't in widespread use because they aren't superior and are perhaps inferior to the alternatives - whether magic or regular kinetic weaponry.  In my game I do this by making explosives nasty undependable and dangerous, so firearms aren't reliable weapons in the hands of anyone without significant alchemical knowledge.  Training soldiers to have the equivalent of Ph.D.'s in chemistry is expensive as is producing the propelent, and you cannot stockpile such weaponry.In the real world, whereever they were introduced, they were emulated within a decade and generally completely revolutionized warfare within about a century of introduction - faster whenever they were introduced in a more advanced state, muskets for example.   But again, this was because they were reliable, cheap, easy to use, easy to stockpile in quantity, and significantly more lethal in many ways than other commonly available missile weapons.   Take away those advantages, make them unreliable, expensive, difficult to use, impossible to stockpile, and really no more lethal than longbows or magic, and they become a marginalized weapon.I will admit that the Patherfinder RAW makes this job more difficult because they use the mechanic of the 'touch attack', which means that the musket resolves for the average D&D military a very intragient and otherwise difficult problem - "What can you do to make your average soldier effective against monsters that have very high AC, usually as a result of supernaturally strong natural armor?"   Under my preferred rules for firearms, the advantages they produce are not nearly so radical.</blockquote>

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