Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 bandaman Jun 14, 2008 21:52:24	I am building a campaign world based on high fantasy with a single hive city that is basically in light steampunk, with old fashioned firearms and things i would love some feedback, I am a first time DM, so a lot of this is new to me Flintlock Pistol -Prof +1 Damage 1d10 Range 10/20 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter) Price 200gp Weight 3lbs Group: Gun - Pistol Properties: Fires 1 shot, reloading is a standard action Revolver Prof +1 Damage 3d6 Range 15/30 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter) Price 700gp Weight 4lbs Group: Gun - Pistol Properties: Fires 6 shots, reloading is a standard action Miriam Likeman's Revolvers Prof +1 Damage 3d6 Range 15/30 Price - None Weight 4lbs Group: Gun - Pistol Properties: Fires 8 shots, Special Ability: DoubleShot-Shot: Standard at-will: Revolver fires 6 shots as long as it has enough ammo Reloading is a minor action Flintlock Rifle Prof +1 Damage 2d6 Range 20/40 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter. If you take the Gunfighter feat, you always take -2 when shooting at long range) Price 400gp Weight 5lbs Group: Gun - Rifle Properties: Fires 1 shot, reloading is a standard action Sniper Rifle Prof +1 Damage 2d10 (4d10 crit) Range 30/60 (When firing you take a -6 instead of the usual -2) Price 200000gp Weight 6lbs Group: Gun - Rifle Properties: Fires 6 shots, reloading is a move action. Special Ability: Assassination: Standard Daily: You forgo all move, standard, and minor actions for 1 to 6 hours. For every 2 hours you remain stationary you add 1d10 to your damage and gain a +1 attack bonus for that action GatlingGun Prof +1 Damage 6 attacks 1d4 each Range 10/20 (you always take a -2 to hit when firing this weapon) Price 23000gp Weight 240lbs Group: Gun - Mounted Properties: Fires 500 shots. This is enough ammo to fire nonstop for 8.3 minutes Special Ability: Standard at-will: Covering Fire: You spray wildly providing covering fire for your allies. You make your attacks with a -8 modifier. All Allies within 50 ft of you gain a +2 AC bonus against ranged attacks. This Weapon is mounted and used for siege defense. Feats (Heroic Tier) Gunfighter - You gain a +1 prof bonus with all firearms. You take a -2 to all long range shots instead of -4 (Epic Tier: Requires Archer Fighting Style) Sniper - Prerequisites: Gunfighter, Weapon Focus: Rifle(PHB 201), Distance Shot(PHB 202), You gain a +2 prof bonus, and +2 dmg with rifles
#2 bandaman Jun 16, 2008 3:58:41	I made some changes, and have a resubmitted list, P.E.A.C.H please Flintlock Pistol -Prof +2 Damage 1d8 Range 10/20 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter) Price 1000gp Weight 3lbs Group: Gun - Pistol Properties: Fires 1 shot, reloading is a standard action Revolver Prof +2 Damage 1d12 Range 15/30 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter) Price 2500gp Weight 4lbs Group: Gun - Pistol Properties: Fires 6 shots, reloading is a standard action Miriam Likeman's Revolvers +4 //this is for an NPC Prof +2 Damage 3d6 +4 Range 15/30 Price - None Weight 4lbs Group: Gun - Pistol Properties: Fires 8 shots,each Special Ability: QuadShot: Standard at-will: Each Revolver fires 2 shots Reloading is a minor action Flintlock Rifle Prof +2 Damage 2d6 Range 20/40 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter. If you take the Gunfighter feat, you always take -2 when shooting at long range) Price 5000gp Weight 5lbs Group: Gun - Rifle Properties: Fires 1 shot, reloading is a standard action Sniper Rifle Prof +2 Damage 2d10 (4d10 crit) Range 25/50 (When firing you take a -6 instead of the usual -2) Price 250,000gp Weight 6lbs Group: Gun - Rifle Properties: Fires 6 shots, reloading is a move action. GatlingGun Prof +0 Damage 4d6 Range 25/50 (you always take a -2 to hit when firing this weapon) Price 1,000,000gp Weight 240lbs Group: Gun - Mounted Properties: Unlimited Ammo Special Ability: Standard at-will: Covering Fire: You spray wildly providing covering fire for your allies. You make your attack with a -8 modifier. All Allies within 50 ft of you gain a +2 AC bonus against ranged attacks. This Weapon is mounted and used for siege defense. Scope - Extremely rare items created in the laboratories of Althiloc. When fitted onto a rifle, it increases its range by 15 feet, and grants the ability to Crit on a 19 or 20 Cost - 500,000 Minimum lvl 21 Ammo 12 Flintlock Bullets = 50gp 12 revolver bullets = 100gp 12 Sniper Rifle Shots = 500gp Feats (Paragon Tier) Gunfighter - You gain a +1 prof bonus with all firearms. You take a -2 to all long range shots instead of -4 (Epic Tier: Requires Archer Fighting Style) Sniper - Prerequisites: Gunfighter, Weapon Focus: Rifle(PHB 201), Distance Shot(PHB 202), You gain a +2 prof bonus, and +2 dmg with rifles
#3 Forgember Jun 20, 2008 7:22:19	I always thought an interesting thing to do with Guns in a game is to make them ignore Armor, Nat. Armor and Shield bonuses. This kinda explains why people eventually went to guns over bows and crossbows even though they where much slower to reload and required more maintenance/training.
#4 danmarlok Jun 20, 2008 14:50:08	hmmm unless your intent is to make them a one shot kind of weapon at melee range the standard action to reload makes them a little unappealing to carry around I would think. Realistically one shot every 12 seconds is doing good for a blackpowder muzzle loader but again I'm not sure that the value is worth it in a fantasy situation where people don't actually have to spend the time training bows and crossbows. Why would I take a rifle when I can shoot multiple times in the same time frame with a bow? And a quiver is unlikely to explode if I get hit with a fireball. Also the price on bullets seems high, all it takes is a mold, a campfire and some lead and you can churn them out by the dozens with little time or effort for the cost of a little bit of lead. I would make the bullets cost the equivalent of sling bullets, they're the same thing for all intents and purposes and make gunpowder be the primary expense. Your sniper rifle doesn't match the others. Reloading one shot in the flintlock is a standard action, reloading 6 shots in the sniper rifle is a move action? Then there's the gatling gun... Using blackpowder flintlocks along side cartridge based bolt action magazine fed rifles seems a little anachronistic from both a 'real' viewpoint and a game viewpoint. If they can create enough cartridges to feed a gatling gun then it's likely that manufacturing is long past a point where blackpowder guns are still available. In real history the arrival of the gatling gun pretty much marked the era past the end of the blackpowder rifle and flintlocks gave way even earlier to percussion cap based rifles. In american history the Spencer repeating rifle was in wide spread use about the time that gatlings were put to practical use. Note this isn't intended as criticism, you've just stumbled into an area of knowledge on my side and the more you know the better you're able to make a decision on useage and design. I think depending on what you're wanting to accomplish you might want to simply make cartridge based weapons the norm, make them single shot breech loaders and make a reload a move action. Also note though that realistically if there are rifles and pistols then you're going to get the why can't I have a gun made that shoots six shots at one and does six times the damage? It's completely feasible mechanically if the society has the ability to make the gun in the first place. But do you want your players able to do 6d6 or whatever with one shot? And then there will be the "I pull out my second 6 barrel pistol".... I speak from experience going a loooong way back where a player wanted to have a quad-bow built that shot heavy cross bow bolts. So just keep in mind balance and the fact that you will get asked the "Why can't I...." questions and generally you'll have to arbitrarily limit those back to a "Because I say so" or just make them cost so much that no one could possibly buy more than one in a life time of adventuring. Another issue then because they wno't ever run into an beatable NPC with one because if they defeat the NPC they get it as loot.
#5 bandaman Jun 22, 2008 21:25:55	thanks for the reply it will help out a lot. I want guns to be powerful but very rare until they reach about 16th or 18th lvl. The sniper rifle was going to be for even higher level characters. In my world, basically, the entire world is your standard DnD world, except for one giant hivecity (which is almost country sized) this is where all the technology originates (its steampunk inspired, airships, etc.) And the PCs will begin in the military going to war against the steampunk area. But I will definitely take you advice and rework some stuff, ill post an update later.
#6 docaquatic Jun 23, 2008 7:11:00	My two suggestions (As I imagine the anachronistic guns, with flintlocks alongside gatling guns and rifles, is a flavor thing in the setting) are, first, that the guns that reload with a standard action reload with a move action instead, as a standard action is too much to give up, and it'd be easier just to toss those guns away and draw a sword (Or even a bow!) after the first shot and secondly that guns target the opponent's reflex instead of armor. This highlights the fact that the guy in plate mail is about as well-protected as the guy in a robe when it comes to fighting a gunman.
#7 generalhenry Jun 23, 2008 7:40:47	a long bow has no more trouble against plate than a musket does. But a long bow took a lot of skill. The gun didn't take much skill and while it wasn't as effective as a longbow it was enough to displace knights. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_warfare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arquebus
#8 WhiteHarness Jun 23, 2008 15:38:27	a long bow has no more trouble against plate than a musket does. Yes it does. How many times does the longbow fanboy myth have to be shot down on these boards? It's almost as bad as the katana myth... Here we go again with my standard anti-"longbows R k3wl" rant: Remember that at Agincourt the French armoured men-at-arms did in fact reach the English line, and were defeated in hand-to-hand combat, not by archery. The high casualty figures for the men-at-arms are probably the result of Henry ordering all prisoners to be slaughtered after they were captured and bound. Also, remember that Agincourt is the last of the great English longbow victories. It did not prove as effective against advancing armour technology. Plate armour won the conflict with the longbow. Sure, there was a back-and-forth, and at times the longbow even had the upper hand at a few points in the 14th century, but ultimately plate armour prevailed. It took the advent of effective firearms to drive armour from the battlefield. William Turner, writing hudreds of years later in the late 17th century argues that longbow use should be revived because, "...arrows would do more mischief than formerly they did: since neither men nor horses are so well armed now to resist them, as in former ages they used to be." Essentially, he believed that a force of longbowmen would be effective in battle since they can shoot more quickly than musketeers, but also because soldiers would be vulnerable to the arrows precisely because they no longer made a practice of wearing armour into battle. He acknowledges that armour defeated arrows and drove the longbow from its once-exalted position on the battlefield. A century later, none other than Benjamin Franklin would echo his words. The longbow won at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt simply because the English got to pick the battlefield and made the French fight on their terms, which included placing their longbowmen behind substantial field fortifications. What conclusion should we draw from the results of other battles in which English archers were ridden down by the very heavy cavalry whose bane they supposedly were? In the batle of Patay, that's just what happened. Where was the longbow's armour-piercing power then? I submit the following passage from Dr. Michael Lacy's paper on the Effectiveness of Medieval Knightly Armour. This portion deals with the battle of Flodden (1513) wherein the Scots fielded a force clad in the latest plate infantry armours mass-produced on the Continent: "...the longbow, so decisive in the wars of the last century, was defeated by the heavy German armour of the Scottish front ranks; a contemporary accounts describe them as "most assuredly harnesed" in armour, and that they "abode the most dangerous shot of arrows, which sore them annoyed but yet exept it hit them in some bare place, did them no hurt." Bishop Ruthal, writing 10 days after the battle remarked "they were so well cased in armour that the arrows did them no harm, and were such large and stout men that one would not fall when four or five bills struck them." Pay special attention to the sections I have picked out in bold. That's right, contemporary English chroniclers reveal that the longbow did not pierce armour. Other accounts from Poitiers and Brouwershaven (1426) tell similar stories, to say nothing of reports of battles from the English dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses in which both sides turned the longbow on each other, in which it is specially pointed out that Lords Clifford and Dacre were not vulnerable to arrows until they had lifted their visors to drink or shout or breathe. More near the time of Agincourt, here is a passage from the biography of Don Pero Niño, a Spanish privateer, who raided the English coast a couple of years before Agincourt: "...they (the Spanish) were so near them (the English) that they could easily tell the fair men from the dark...the standard and he who bore it were likewise riddled with arrows, and the standard bearer had as many round his body as a bull in the ring, but he was shielded by his good armour" For what it's worth, that standard bearer was none other than the author of this account himself, Gutierre Diaz de Gamez. It is noteworthy that his plate armour enabled him to survive a close-range arrow onslaught and live to write this passage years later. The longbow was not the "king of the battlefield," the magical nuclear armour-piercer that its fanboys want you to believe. It was only effective under certain controlled circumstances, and even then was mostly an anti-cavalry weapon. Don't buy the hype. Don't misunderstand me--the English were awesome during the early part of the Hundred Years War, but it was because of their strategic expertise, and canny use of combined arms tactics, not because they possessed some magical, battle-winning wonder weapon. Now kindly offer proof, citing primary source material, that the longbow was the mighty armour-piercer that Anglocentric myth wants you to believe.
#9 generalhenry Jun 24, 2008 0:40:00	I never said longbows had no trouble with plate, just that muskets had about the same level of trouble when it came to plate. Which is why a rule negating armor wouldn't make sense. It's not saying that longbows where super weapons, I'm simply saying they where as good as the contemporary firearms. And that is was the fact that gun men where easier to train that lead to guns becoming dominant.
#10 bandaman Jun 24, 2008 0:44:11	My two suggestions (As I imagine the anachronistic guns, with flintlocks alongside gatling guns and rifles, is a flavor thing in the setting) You are correct, it is mostly for flavor. that the guns that reload with a standard action reload with a move action instead, as a standard action is too much to give up, and it'd be easier just to toss those guns away and draw a sword (Or even a bow!) after the first shot and secondly that guns target the opponent's reflex instead of armor. This highlights the fact that the guy in plate mail is about as well-protected as the guy in a robe when it comes to fighting a gunman. Great ideas, I especially like the guns hitting vs reflex, it makes a lot more sense, and gives a reason why one would choose firearms over a bow. I also changed the reload on the flintlocks and revolvers, I think its a bit unrealistic for the flintlock weapons, but for the sake of gameplay a standard action is a bit to much. That said Flintlock Pistol -Prof +2 Damage 1d8 Range 10/20 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter) Price 1000gp Weight 3lbs Group: Gun - Pistol Hits vs Reflex Properties: Fires 1 shot, reloading is a move action Revolver Prof +2 Damage 1d12 Range 15/30 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter) Price 2500gp Weight 4lbs Hits vs Reflex Group: Gun - Pistol Properties: Fires 6 shots, reloading is a move action Minimum lvl 11 Miriam Likeman's Revolvers +4 //this is for an NPC Prof +2 Damage 3d6 +4 Range 15/30 Price - None Weight 4lbs Hits vs Reflex Group: Gun - Pistol Properties: Fires 8 shots,each Special Ability: QuadShot: Standard at-will: Each Revolver fires 2 shots Reloading is a minor action Flintlock Rifle Prof +2 Damage 2d6 Range 20/40 (When firing at long range, you take a -4 instead of the usual -2 unless you take the feat Gunfighter.) Price 5000gp Weight 5lbs Hits vs Reflex Group: Gun - Rifle Properties: Fires 1 shot, reloading is a move action Minimum lvl 11 Sniper Rifle Prof +2 Damage 2d10 (4d10 crit) Range 25/50 (When firing you take a -6 instead of the usual -2) Price 250,000gp Weight 6lbs Hits vs Reflex Group: Gun - Rifle Properties: Fires 6 shots, reloading is a move action. Minimum lvl 21 GatlingGun Prof +0 Damage 4d6 Range 25/50 (you always take a -2 to hit when firing this weapon) Price 1,000,000gp Weight 240lbs Hits vs Reflex Group: Gun - Mounted Properties: Unlimited Ammo Special Ability: Standard at-will: Covering Fire: You spray wildly providing covering fire for your allies. You make your attack with a -8 modifier. All Allies within 50 ft of you gain a +2 AC bonus against ranged attacks. This Weapon is mounted and used for siege defense. Scope - Extremely rare items created in the laboratories of Althiloc. When fitted onto a rifle, it increases its range by 15 feet, and grants the ability to Crit on a 19 or 20 Cost - 500,000 Minimum lvl 21 Ammo 12 Flintlock Bullets = 1gp 12 revolver bullets = 10gp 12 Sniper Rifle Shots = 50gp 12 shots worth of Gunpowder (for flintlocks) 500gp Feats (Paragon Tier) Gunfighter - You gain a +1 prof bonus with all portable firearms. You take a -2 to all long range shots instead of -4 (Epic Tier: Requires Archer Fighting Style) Sniper - Prerequisites: Gunfighter, Weapon Focus: Rifle(PHB 201), Distance Shot(PHB 202), You gain a +2 prof bonus, and +2 dmg with rifles I'm really not sure about these prices, gunpowder prices, i dont know what would be good. The gun prices are also just ballpark figures, as I said before the PCs wont even get a gun till at least lvl 11, and they wont get the nicer guns until 16 or 17ish or even higher (sniper rifle) thanks for all the great feedback