The problem bullets and arrows comes from players thinking it is totally reasonable for a fighter to kill dozens of men in melée or survive several rounds of choking by a giant or red dragon, but it is not reasonable for this same guy to pass between bullets or bounce them off his sword. The ogre with his retart chimp strength can't brain you with one hit from his tree club, but a bullet should obviously be able to.

Quote from: Cranewings;411814The problem bullets and arrows comes from players thinking it is totally reasonable for a fighter to kill dozens of men in melée or survive several rounds of choking by a giant or red dragon, but it is not reasonable for this same guy to pass between bullets or bounce them off his sword. The ogre with his retart chimp strength can't brain you with one hit from his tree club, but a bullet should obviously be able to.

Is that a problem with bullets and arrows or a problem with the system?

Quote from: Soylent Green;411813More training than a longbow? More expensive than magical elven chainmail?

Not sure about the training for a longbow, however the materials for longbows are more readily available. Though since its possible that a fantasy character has at least used a short bow for hunting in their youth, they would have been practicing the basics of archery for quite a while. They would 'just now' be picking up a gun and starting from square one.

As for magical elven chainmail, is that often available at the local armory? I was mostly trying to illustrate the point that guns, especially primitive guns, are not something you just pick up and start blasting away with. There are lots of fiddly bits, yes a good deal more fiddly than a longbow, and those bits are very expensive and require significant skill to produce and maintain.

A bowyer can make a longbow, that's all it takes. A gun needs an advanced blacksmith working with good quality metals and an alchemist/chemist type supplying gunpowder and lots of it. Not to mention tracking someone down to teach you the skills you need to accurately fire and keep it in good working order. Specialize skills to create + complex assembly and materials = $$$$

I have no problem with guns in a fantasy game. Honestly I've no problem with most things in a fantasy game. Its up to the GM to maintain balance. And a sufficiently powerful magical artifact can unbalance a game faster than the introduction of primitive firearms. But early guns require a fair bit of work to keep up and if its a weapon used by a player its a good chance he didn't just pick it up in the market one day.

In the TSR-era, I favored the exploding damage die when max damage rolled.  I did have a special fumble table for critical failures with a powder firearm.  It included "hung shots" in addition to your oh-so-typical explosions.  I think it was in Combat & Tactics.

In the d20 era, I gave firearms a good but reasonable damage die and then beefed up their critical threat range and damage multiplier.

I think the "trick," in either case, is not to shine a spotlight on your guns (unless that's part of your campaigns shtick) or gimp them out of use in an attempt to "balance" them against more traditional ranged weapons.  I've seen DMs make both mistakes quite a few times.  In the latter cases, I wondered if they wanted players to even choose to use guns at all, given all the hoops they made people jump through to use them.  It would have been far better for DMs to just give out their guns as treasure.

As for availability, that's fairly setting specific, but I practice the idea that it takes a specialized craftsman to repair or make a firearm.  However, there are going to be settings where firearms are common enough that the group can resupply by looting the local barracks or jumping a band of armed orcs.

I liked the take on firearms in Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms when I ran it. The weapons are expensive and require an extremely skilled and well equipped craftsman to make them; this pushes price way up. The best weapons are all military, and more difficult to obtain than even their high price would indicate.  The "BP" is in fact a magical concoction of two alchemical reagents, and the secret of making it is kept and controlled by a particular mage's guild that guards it jealously.  Once again, price and availability are limited.  Ammunition is also specific to a particular weapon type. Reloading the weapons takes some training, neccesitating a skill check.  Failure leaves the weapon unloaded, and a failure by 5 or more ruins the ammo. Damage is good compared to other weapons, generally being in the 2-dice range (2d8 for a rifle, 2d6 for a pistol), with x3 criticals and 19-20 threat ranges.  They also have better range increments than other weapons.

With all this said, I still felt they weren't quite deadly enough for me.  I understand the argument being made with the example above of an ogre wielding a tree, but I always had less trouble imagining someone rolling with a melee blow, however nasty, than dodging a bullet. That just moved into broken suspension of disbelief for me. It might be fantasy, but we all have our own tolerance for these things.  I also wanted to have even an experienced character worry about a commoner pointing a loaded pistol at him.

I achieved that by tweaking threat ranges and damage calculation.

Quote from: Soylent Green;411735Can't hold back progress. If black powder weaposn are effective in your world, they will will become pervasive in a matter of years and in doing so get cheaper to produce.

Metallurgy and mechanical engineering need to catch up. You have about a 100 to a 150 year period where they are just better siege weapon. Hand gunpowder weapons were literally cannons you could hold in your hand. The fact that gunpowder was only available in it's serpentine  form (a dry loose powder) meant that it didn't store well.

What this all means that there is a lot of leeway in how you use gunpowder in a fantasy D&D game. You can tweak it realistically by choosing how far back it was introduced. My own Majestic Wilderlands has Dragon Powder and it is a recent innovation. So far it has been used as a better siege weapons. The most recent innovation was that bronze bell casting techniques could be used to make a more reliable cannon.  Basically the bombard. Corned powder has not been discovered yet.

Note that black powder hand weapons has that same advantages as crossbows in that they were easy to train and use. Once corned powers, better metallurgy and better mechanics they proved superior to both crossbows and longbows. Mostly because while they only slightly faster than the fire rate of a crossbow they had a lot more punch then a crossbow. The bow remained more accurate.

These two wikipedia articles sum accurately the situations with the first blackpowder hand weapons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arquebus

a mixed formation of pike, sword, and arquebusiers dominated warfare for a century in europe. The Spanish Tercio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Tercio

Both of these are Phase II development occurring after after a long Phase I where they were mostly specialty equipment for sieges.

In short the introduction of gunpowder is no more revolutionary than any other advance in armor/weaponary. It is only significant when looking across back the gulf of centuries.

Back in the day we never came up with a system to make guns in D&D work in a way we found satisfactory. None of my group in the 80s ever thought of anything like exploding dice, which is the kind of thing I'd use now.

The rationalization I use now for why gunpowder weapons are not supplanting other kinds of weapons is that they never got the traction in a fantasy world that they did in the real world. Magic, particularly the kind of magic in D&D and how common it is implied to be by the system, simply makes researching stuff like gunpowder not as much of a priority. I assume dwarves to be more technologically-inclined, especially when it comes to big machinery, so they have artillery and heavy rifles and sidearms, while gnomes would work on smaller, more complex stuff like revolvers. The halflings in my campaigns are more hobbitish, with a bit more curiosity about machines, and would have squirrel guns they like to go out and plink some cans with.

I've made them higher damage than bows but taking several rounds to reload, costing slightly more than bows not outrageously so.
 
There are pragmatic reasons that keep their use down.  They're not good for stealth missions of the sort that adventurers often do.  You also wouldn't want to shoot a bunch of guns in an underground dungeon if you wan to hear anything in the near future.  Most rpg combat also takes place at short ranges so that only one shot per gun per combat is really possible, and only when there is no one around or you don't care if people know that you're in a fight.  In the end, they're just another tool like alchemy but not on the level of powerful magic.

Quote from: Soylent Green;411816Is that a problem with bullets and arrows or a problem with the system?

It isn't a problem with the system. The system is designed to depict cartoonish super heroes fighting their way through completely impossible odds with their superhuman reflexes and hardiness.

I have no problem with a D&D hero fighting off a giant that is choking him with two hands. Realistically, someone who is 1800 pounds and all muscle should have the strength to obliterate any normal man with a single blow, especially if he is smart enough to put that strength behind a lever or tool. That doesn't matter in D&D because it isn't trying to show you how a REAL PERSON would overcome a giant or a dragon.

Similarly, bullets shouldn't be able to do anything more to a D&D character than a sword. If swords do 1d8 + Strength, guns can do 2d6+6 and I'd call it pretty fair. A high level fighter could easily ignore firearm damage, and as well he should, because any man that can slide under dragon fire, wrestle giants, and survive hundred foot falls should be able to monitor the barrel of a gun and dodge it or block the bullets with his master work sword.

Hit points only make sense if you see them as script immunity and so someone shooting at a guy with a LOT of hit point will miss, even if he does damage. 12 points of damage to a guy with 100 hit points means so little, he might as well have blocked the bullets with his sword.

Like I said, the problem is the players, because they are willing to imagine all these different heroic exploits, but then try to insert some bullshit realism when bullets are applied. It is stupid.

Quote from: Cranewings;411896It isn't a problem with the system. The system is designed to depict cartoonish super heroes fighting their way through completely impossible odds with their superhuman reflexes and hardiness.
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Okay, I get where you are coming from now and what you raise are all valid points.

I've been running a Freeport game using FC for about a year now, and I've pretty much lost all fear of them.

It uses an approach similar to:

Quote from: Cranewings;411757Firearms usually do high damage, for a sword, and crit on 18+.

with the notable additional point that in fantasy craft, crits go straight to wounds (=con), so are even pretty threatening for PCs. No "armor doesn't apply" thing; in FC, armor subtracts from damage, but guns do enough damage that they render most armor moot.

It's expensive, but not incredibly so. It does have a slow reload time, though, so for the most part, they are limited to fight-opening shots.

It hasn't become pervasive, because the range and training advantages they have in the real world aren't something that factor in too strongly to the personal/heroic scale. Most fights begin close enough that you are pretty much invariably in melee by round 2.

Its kind of easy why in fantasy worlds guns aren't that popular.

Until the Wild West/Victorian era guns kind of.. SUCKED, especially from a gamer's standpoint.  They are slow, inaccurate, and unsexy.

Its like a Crossbow that's even more involved to prepare for firing, less accurate, and more likely to blow up in your face.  And don't even get into weather affecting the powder or gun itself..

If you have guys throwing Magic Missiles (Rate of Fire based on edition of course) and Sleep spells that can take out an entire combat squad, a firearm that takes 10-20 seconds (for a more experienced wielder) to prepare each shot isn't very handy.

Yeah they make mincemeat out of heavily armored troops.  Who cares?  Fireball is far more effective and that weedy little wizard or appealingly underdressed sorceress can go a lot more places than a cannon will...

I don't think I have ever used firearms under 3.P before. I did use them quite a bit in 2E though. One thing I did was use 'exploding' dice. If you rolled maximum damage you got to roll again and add the two numbers together. This keeps repeating until you don't roll maximum damage. Under 3.P I think I might give them some limited armour piercing capabilities. Maybe -1 AC for a Light weapon, -2 AC for a One-handed weapon and -3 AC for a Two-handed weapon. You would probably not want to be hit by a cannon...

Quote from: Captain Rufus;412033And don't even get into weather affecting the powder or gun itself..
 

What people tend to forget is that bows sucked almost as much in bad weather.  Wind and rain made it hard to hit anything.  Worse, the strings were made of gut or sinew so reconstituted if they got wet and became stretchy.