You Got Peanut Butter in My Chocolate...D&D and Science-Fiction

[Scarbonac]

Barrier Peaks YO!

 

[Shades of Green]

Or make it inaccurate. Or unreliable. Or really expensive. Or easily defensible via another available technology.
Swords and spears were in use for centuries after the development of firearms. Is it impossible to do heroic fantasy with +5 mighty composite longbows?Would stormtroopers (from the d20 version of the game) pose that terrible a challenge for a D&D party?

Also, remember that swords will be useful for fighting monsters with resistnace to firearms, not to mention ones with significant damage reduction - sure, you could enchant each bullet, but that will be more expensive than enchanting a single multi-use sword.

 

[Hussar]

Also, remember that swords will be useful for fighting monsters with resistnace to firearms, not to mention ones with significant damage reduction - sure, you could enchant each bullet, but that will be more expensive than enchanting a single multi-use sword.

Not really. No different than enchanting a bow, for example, so that all the ammunition is now treated as magical.

Where guns and the likes would actually start to suck is at high levels. Sure, you get multiple shots, but, without that Mighty Longbow, or Power Attack adding in all that extra damage, you would actually likely be lagging pretty hard.

Think of all the buffs that wouldn't actually apply to a gun - none of the strength buffs for example would help you. You damage would likely remain very static throughout the campaign - there's only so much additional damage you can add on. As soon as the campaign hit double digits, guns would be about as useful as crossbows.

 

[mythusmage]

I should hope so. Her original story was pure fantasy with scaled Dragons. But John Campbell wouldn't print it in Astounding (the best paying market at the time) because he only printed sf. So he suggested that she add a prolog and viola, it's sci-fi! (Which, IMHO, was the worst thing that ever happened to Pern. Oh, and what happened to the scales? They're still there in the first half of Dragonqust, where Lessa agrees to go with the Dragonmen. Just one sentence really, but its there. She changed her mind about scaled Dragons after reading Hot Blooded Dinosaurs, then added the 'hide flaking' to doubletalk her way around it.)

John Campbell was a long time fantasy fan, and printed thinly disguised fantasy stories in Astounding/Analog. Weyr Search (the original story) got into Analog because John liked it, and got Anne to add the science fictional elements so it could pass as the hard science fiction Analog is known for.

One should also remember that John was real big on psionics, and a life long practitioner of (pre-Scientology) Dianetics He once published an article on ghosts in Analog that pointed out a very small number of them do follow the laws of physics.

Basically, Campbell asked his authors to think out the implictions and consequences of a given premise. Nightfall by Isaac Asimov is a famous example of John's thinking.

John Campbell didn't so much as mix fantasy and science fiction as he gave various subjects the scientific treatment. Including numerous fantastical ones.

 

[lukelightning]

Ah, good old Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. I recall pointing what I thought was a gun at a robot and pressing a button and then discovering it was just a translation device..."Beep bop bana zip! Blap zoop gurgle flek!" *point and press* "Stop the humanoid! Kill the Humanoid!

Weapon technologies affect individual and small-unit combat in very different ways than they affect combat on the army scale. You can't use arrow storms, shield walls or musket volley fire in single combat.

You can with the right PrC or feat!

 

[Johnny Angel]

Guns will not take over any D&D world. Yes, when they became widely available in the real world they came to dominate, but that's because in the real world people had tender mortal flesh, not hit points. Firearms are just an exotic ranged weapon. If we were to be a bit more realistic they would be simple weapons for the same reason that crossbows are -- it's pretty much point-and-shoot whereas regular bows require a good deal of training to learn to use proficiently. And as Hussar pointed out, firearms are going to fall behind bows pretty quickly in damage at higher levels.

I think it's funny about all the anachronisms people blithely put up with in D&D. A lot of people want to think of it as 'medieval.' You see that word applied to the settings often. Yet, it's almost always at least Renaissance and with a lot of Victorian elements. Yet, guns are somehow a deal-breaker. That does not compute.

 

[Phantos]

Bury my heart in the Barrier Peaks.

--Erik

exactomundo.
(hi, new guy here.)

 

[painandgreed]

I would contest that, but its just not worth the effort. You be one of the 80%-99% (depending on time period) of people who fixed bayonets and got blown away by some sort of firearm, and I'll risk being one of the 1-20% of people who reloaded and got stabbed to death - usually by a lancer, spear, pike, or some other purposed melee weapon and not a bayonet on the end of a musket.

My appologies for hasty reading and typing. Given choice, yes, I think guns would be prefered weapons. The point I was trying to make (and mistakenly addressing) was that spears and swords still had a place on the battlefield well into modern times. Rifles (and the like) are ranged weapons and spears are melee and serve two different functions. Ranged wins out because it can be done from hiding or with suprise, and it is easier for the attacker to retreat if need be. Close combat tends to be final one way or the other.

 

[Celebrim]

My appologies for hasty reading and typing. Given choice, yes, I think guns would be prefered weapons. The point I was trying to make (and mistakenly addressing) was that spears and swords still had a place on the battlefield well into modern times.

What I was trying to say was that, beginning with the invention of 'rifling' (roughly about the time of the American revolution), which extended the effective range of firearms out to that of a well used longbow, 'spears and swords' still showed up on the battlefield but increasingly had no place on it even though most commanders didn't quite realize it yet. Napleon did. He realized that the fundamental battlefield weapon of his day was the cannon, because it was the cannon ultimately that was doing the most damage. Even in the Napleonic wars, most bayonet charges were survived by the simple expedient of running away from them and that's assuming that the charge wasn't in fact suicidal, which it often was. By the American civil war, bayonets were an insubstantial part of the actual mass of the battlefield, but commanders kept ordering them anyway and getting men killed uselessly. It's been calculated that less than 1% of the deaths of the American civil war occurred as the result of any melee weapon at all, much less the bayonet which many experienced soldiers didn't use in favor of swinging thier gun like a club. Not that anyone in Europe paid attention to this, which is why in WWI you have officers ordering bayonet charges against not just repeating rifles but machine guns. That worked like, oh, 1 time in 1000. There have been about three bayonet charges in the last 50 years that worked, and they all involved elite troops charging irregulars and conscripts, and even then if you look closely at them, it wasn't so much that they worked because they were driving bayonet points into the enemy. They mostly worked by running up to point blank range of the enemy and unloading an automatic weapon in his direction, usually into his back because he was running away.

In reality, melee weapons have been increasingly obselete since the 16th century. Ask the Scots. However, the role of melee weapons on the battlefield has been for that entire time overrated. Even at little big horn, the Souix won not because (or not just because) of overwhelming numbers, but if you analyze the bullets in the ground you find out that the Souix were as well equipped with firearms as the US Cavalry (and Custer had left all his heavy weapons behind). If they weren't even someone as dumb as Custer probably would have won that battle.

The few times that melee weapons overwhelmed firearms are more or less equivalent to the few times that barbarians overwhelmed Roman legions. They achieved surprise, they hit a column on the march rather than deployed for battle, they weren't fought on the terrain of the firearm wielders choosing, and they had superior numbers. That's about the only chance you've got.

Rifles (and the like) are ranged weapons and spears are melee and serve two different functions. Ranged wins out because it can be done from hiding or with suprise, and it is easier for the attacker to retreat if need be. Close combat tends to be final one way or the other.

Ranged wins out for the same reason that Greek pikes got longer and longer. If the enemy is dead before he gets a chance to attack, you pretty much have an absolute advantage. Firearms obselete melee weapons to such a large degree because a) they take less skill to use effectively, b) they require more skill to defend against effectively, and c) they do as much damage as a beserker with a battle axe but they do it at 400 yards rather than 40 inches. Modern close combat means pointing a barrel at someone from 5' away and holding the trigger down. Knife work is relatively rare and accounts for an insignificant percentage of all casualties of war.

 

[paradox42]

I've never minded a mix of sci-fi and fantasy. And my homebrew setting, which I've been running games in for around 15 years now, is built on the premise that it was Gamma World that went through several thousand more years of history and turned into a D&D-like place. Remnants of the Ancient technology aren't particularly common on the world, but neither are they so uncommon that the average Commoner has never heard of them. In fact, since one of the remnants of the "Golden Age" is a Ring Station which used to be linked to the surface of the planet by a series of space elevators built into the now-called Diamond Towers, pretty much everybody who lives on the surface can just look out their windows at night and see a shining example of what people used to be able to do.

There are plenty of interesting items I've had the parties in my setting find over the years, most recently in the Epic game a "flitter" (basically a family flying aerospace car capable of travelling between the planets of a typical star system) with a built-in cloaking device, which the party used to spectacular effect in the raid they staged on Demogorgon's treasure vaults. They needed it, too, because in my setting an archfiend or deity is able to throw Dimension Lock over its entire domain at once, at will (among other things). If you need to compress a 1000-mile trip from your entry portal to your destination, there's little better way to do it than an invisible flying vehicle travelling at slightly over Mach 10...