After taking a look at some of the previews for the DMG, I noticed a table for firearms that basically duplicates what you would find in d20 modern. I.e. every gun, even a lowly pistol, is ridiculously overpowered compared to every other weapon in existence. I disagree with this both for balance reasons and also because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
I mean, yeah, when you're talking about something like a rocket launcher or plasma rifle, those kind of things should effectively be like magic items that duplicate spell effects (Fireball, Disintegrate, etc). But a handgun? How is being shot with a single 9mm pistol round literally TWICE as deadly as being stabbed with a shortsword?
Yes, in the real world this might make some kind of sense if you ignore the fact that it's actually quite common for people to survive several gunshots, even to the head, without instantly dying like badguys in a Die Hard movie.While, conversely, getting a giant chunk of metal shoved through your sternum is not something you can bounce back from after a half hour surgery to remove the fragments. But in a fantasy world where magical healing can cure wounds and regrow lost limbs and even raise people from the dead, how is a tiny hole from a pistol supposed to kill someone just as easily as being hacked at with a sword that's bigger than your arm?
Then of course there's the fact that a lot of monsters and PCs are going to be wearing armor, which should effectively reduce the damage dealt by a gun enough to make them no more effective than a crossbow. After all, the term "bullet proof" was originally used to refer to plate armor that could stand up to a point-blank shot from a pistol. Even if you're talking modern firearms, there's not that big of a difference between being shot in the torso with an arrow and being shot in the torso by a rifle. On the contrary, the bullet is likely to pass straight through, whereas the arrow is going to stick there and keep cutting you up if you try to move (the reason you can't fight with arrows sticking out of you in real life).
If it were up to me, I'd make all but the most devastatingly powerful firearms match up pretty well with the standard weaponry available to PCs. A handgun would be equivalent to a hand crossbow, a rifle to a good heavy crossbow, a shotgun to a greatsword, and so on. Basically, it just seems like they shouldn't be so obviously better than anything else, even if just for the sake of game balance. I mean, if a DM were to put these in their game, why would any PC ever use anything else?
What do you guys think?
Guns are hard to get right in D&D. There are reasons why they replaced non powered weapons and platearmor. Extra dam,age is a simple way to reflect that. If one wanted a more realistic take on guns they should be.
1. Simple weapons. Guns are easy to use.
2. Ignore armor, 5E lacks a touch AC like 3E though.
3. Be cheap. Guns in D&D tend to be expensive.
4. Inaccurate until you hit 19th century levels of technology.
Rates of fire are kinda silly in D&D post 2000 although so are RoF for crossbows and bows. They need to deal more damage otherwise no one would use them (they are loud) or you need to add complexity to the game to get them right. AD&D E probably had the best take on guns in D&D history. At point blank range they ignored armor, next range was -5AC if you were wearing armor and at long range had to hit normal AC. They also had exploding dice and the amount of damage they dealt depended on how modern the gun is.
Guns are overpowered its how Europe took over the world;).
Chameleon-X wrote:
They aren't much more powerful. They're slightly more powerful. Maybe 50% at most - you double the die, but not the modifier from Dex, and not the +10 damage from the feat.
They're also ridiculously loud. And priceless expensive. This game does allow for more expensive equipment to replace cheaper stuff, after all; and there's even precedent for the tradeoff being a stealth penalty.
I think they're more powerful than one might think. With one doing radiant damage and another necrotic, you can use class/Feat abilities to raise their damage even higher.
My opinion is enemies with a "extra help" should be higher XPs reward, like added monster template. And using extra help to kill monsters it ought to be lower XPs reward because it would be easier.
What if in my campaign there is a steampunk goblin civilitation like one from World of Warcraft? Even a simple first level goblin with a gun would a a challenge. Or in my campaign a PC is an archer like Green Arrow, Hawkeye or the real Jack Churchill.
I have thought in D&D universe the gods would curse gunslingers and would bless with "free anti-ballistic divine magic" to hand-to-hand fighters who don´t use firearms. And the wizards would create their own arcane tricks to sabotage the enemy firearms. A simple piece of ectoplasm could block a canon or wet the gunpodwer.
I think if you were launching a sword at the same speed as a bullet, it would be more deadly.
I mean get a piece of metal the size of a grain of rice up to a high enough speed and it'll evaporate a basket ball sized part of your torso if it hits. It's a disgusting amount of energy being transfered. Physics doesn't work how we think it works once you turn up the numbers (an example).
Besides, someone with +3 to damage is essentially doing 2D6.
Granted, the pistol (if it's doing 2D6) would be doing 2D6+3 if someone had that good a dex mod.
Chameleon-X wrote:
People have actually died from gunshot wounds to the arm that should not have killed them. Most likely because they believed that if you get shot by a gun you would die.
Guns are why we no longer use swords and bows for defense.
Knight_Marshal wrote:
ankiyavon wrote:
If equiping goons with muskets what level would you recommend they should be to achieve various rates of fire?
http://www.napolun.com/mirror/napoleonistyka.atspace.com/infantry_tactics_2.htm
The ratio of musket fire was 1-6 shots per minute, depending on quality of weapon, training and time taken for aiming. Marshal Maurice de Saxe wrote: "Light infantry should be able to fire 6 shots a minute, but under the stress of battle 4 should be allowed for."
I think modern guns should do comparable levels of damage to bows and swords (d6, d8, d10, 2d6). but, they should ignore armor and target reflex. Oh. Wait. 5e doesn't have that. Then a dex save, I guess? No save for half, though. Save for none. But the save should be hard, ie: the shooter can use their wis or dex bonus + prof. as a penalty to the save.
Archaic guns should be inaccurate, do a lot of damage, but also require a long loading time. Like in reality. Maybe you can only fire if it's loaded and then you can only fire during the first round. Loading a musket or flintlock is not something that can be done in a typical D&D combat, unless you have cover, are far away, and have a round or 3 to spend time loading another volley.
Explosives like a modern grenade should do 7d10, piercing and thunder damage. AoE, dex save for half.
A stick of dynamite should do 4d10 fire and thunder. AoE dex save for half.
seti wrote:
Guns are, essentially end of a certain era in human history (canons as well)
It's not surprising if they kill one genre (while inventing the next)
seti wrote:
Because decent guns ended the age of shields and swords, they'd have to be better than the older weapons. Games set in more modern environments should generally take into account that guns force a different kind of combat, a sort of duck and cover struggle rather than the close quarters combat DnD usually favors.
Of course this is the wrong approach to take in 5e, where once again Armor is keeping you from getitng hit rather than mitigating the hits you do take. THat's the problem DnD has traditionally had with guns, it's using the wrong armor system for the gun system it uses, i.e. guns deal more damage. Most of the time DnD guns have the edge in damage and/or range rather than accuracy and/or penetrating powers, generally because penetrating power and accuracy are not stats wepaons generally effect. So you get into wierd situtations where the best way to aoid getting sniped is to walk around in plate armor and carry a big shield.
Now if we went to an armor as DR system then we'd be looking at decent guns having the edge in penetration power and/or range. This is countered by ditching armor and praying you don't get hit at all.
The traditonal advantages of firearms, especially early firearms, over bows and thrown wepaons are generally lost in the kind of close quarters melee DnD is famous for, especially becasue oone of the biggest was that soldiers only had to be taught how to point and shoot in order to kill people allowing for large units to be trained quickly. Since DnD doesn't really have the level of granularity for weapon skills required for that to come into play, most of the guns an adventurere would care about are the nasty things that obsoleted medieval weapons for the most part. The weapons that you saw mixed in with spears and armor and swords just aren't useful to the average adventurer, and the stuff that comes out later is OP compared to medival weapons.
Who would use firearms in a D&D world? Paladins and clerics don´t, it would be forbidden by god because it is a fight without glory nor honor. Wizards? It is too cheap and "vulgar"? Why a gun instead a wand with fireballs? Firearms are too noisy to be used by assasins and rogues.
In fantasy worlds, magic could neutralize firearms, for example creating magic fog where far targets couldn´t be seen in the battlefield, summoning creatures or creating antiballistic magic moving shields, or maybe monster with some antiballistic resistance, for example a softer curse of wererat infection.
In fantasy world the shotguns would be replaced with crossbows that reload itself, or even biopunk technology, living machines, would be possible.
All this discussion of how much damage weapons actually do misses an important point. Whether getting shot in the torso by a bullet causes more trauma than getting shot in the torso by an arrow is pretty much irrelevant to whether bows or guns should have bigger damage dice in D&D. Either event should pretty much take you out of a fight, and at the very least provide pretty serious penalties to most anything you want to do. Neither result in D&D short of the blow that kills you (at which point the size of your damage dice were pretty much irrelevant), therefore neither event occurs in D&D. There are other interpretations of HP, granted, but if you're playing with a "black knight" interpretation where PCs are running around with a half dozen arrows lodged in their chest then it's a little silly to use realism to support your position. Rather, the question ought to be (from a realism standpoint, anyway) whether grazes or near misses (for them as accept near-miss HP loss) from a bullet cause more damage than an arrow or sword. There are some decent arguments to be made that that's the case--cavitation, morale, etc. At best, greater deadliness of GSWs to the center of mass suggests some kind of high-crit property that increases your odds of one-shotting an opponent without dramatically changing DPR. Assuming you even accept the premise that GSWs to the chest are more deadly, which honestly depends upon the tech level of the setting, which can vary so widely that talking about it in the abstract is silly and pointless.
Difference between guns and bows? Heavy infantry can defelct arrow with shields, guns not so much.
Longbows could deal with armor but they were a rare weapon outside England on the battlefields of Europe. Longbows were more accurate with a faster rate of fire than guns until the 19th century, England ended up importing wood to make them though.
There's a bit of controversy over guns and the damage they cause. For example, Hyrostatic Shock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_shock
But really guns are just a lot better at transfering energy into injuries. The amount of kick you feel when you fire a gun is how much force goes into the target. It's actually a lot less force than a sword swing. Despite that though they create much more explosive injuries, rifles especially, due to bullet fragmentation/spin, wound cavitation, pressure waves, etc. If you were facing down a charging grizzly bear would you want a bow and arrow/crossbow or a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with deer slugs?
Some ballistic gel examples:
Bow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hkR9_VkP2Y#t=216
9mm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jexyDDA3TBU
30-06: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N238oOIvzbQ
12 gauge slug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftrCtOyLrmU
Chameleon-X wrote:
Mephi1234 wrote:
The key is we are talking about gameplay vs realism. D&D wasn´t designed to be realistic... and even the most of first-person-shooter vidoegames aren´t realistic.
Other part of the trouble is if firearms are too powerful, then most of PC will want to be gunslingers, not barbarians or paladins.
For realistic system of damage we have to use a special module that isn´t yet, not only for firearms, but normal weapons, a module about historical settings without healing magic.
D&D is a multiverse where the living beings have got their own midi-chlorians and it allows to heal faster or to endurace serious injuries that would lethal in our real world.
---
What if a DM wish to play a primitive vs high-tech campaigns, something like the comic "dinosaurs vs aliens" or a D&D version of na'vis beings invaded by (biopunk) Yuuzhan Vongs
Chameleon-X wrote:
I would check to see what games who have used guns all along have done. You might find some better insight.
- Call of Cthulhu
- Colonial Gothic
- etc.
Btw, my "Book of Fractures" on my shelf (not oft-used in my chiropractic office, but was required in school), indicates that there is no damage from the shockwave of the bullet, however there is direct damage from the bullet and secondary damage from the compression and tensioning effect of the bullet passing into/through tissues. MORE damage is done to bone than is done to softer flesh (harder tissue is more damaged by bullets). Lastly, all weapons pull bits of clothing/armor/bacteria from outside the skin into the body. No, it is not "cauterized" by the bullet.
I'd just give it a greater critical damage, but less initial damage.
Mephi1234 wrote:
Bullets have a lot more velocity than swords. Weird things can happen with the human body. People survive getting shot in the head, an Aussie cricket player got killed the other day by a cricket ball in the head.
I don't think anyone is denying that guns are more dangerous than swords for multiple reasons. I don't think sowrds were the primary battlefield weapons when guns came along anyway. Bows, pikes, lances were being used a lot.
The thing about the guns in the DMG is they aren't really there to be used in a dungeon like a cross-bow. They're there if the DM wants to deal with a non-standard settign and thus don't really conform to the normal rules. Those guns are for a different kind of game, one that encourages more modern combat tactics and considerations.
The guns are there for D&D games set in later time frames (15th, 16th, 17th century etc) or maybe some kind of lost technology/post apocalypose setting IMHO. If anyone else has read the Jon Shannow books by David Gemmel for example. PLate armor and rapiers were contempory with guns as well so they fit in the D&D timeline unless you ar eplaying maybe 1E or BECMI.
In my own campaign, I want guns to do a very different thing than they do in the DMG - guns, in my game, are military and militia weapons. Elite warriors, like adventurers, get more use out of the classic D&D weapons, but firearms make a conscripted force far more effective.
They're simple weapons that take an action to load, do about double the damage one would expect from a bow, and have a very short optimal range but a ridiculously long maximum range - a formation of peasant soldiers can line up and start firing on an open field when the enemy is far outside bow range, firing at disadvantage but still hitting often enough to bring a few enemies down. A bow fires once or more per round, though, adding ability modifier each time and not requiring wasted rounds for reloading, and thus doing more damage when in the hands of a proficient wielder.
* If PCs can use firearms the enemy humanoids also can use them.
* If everybody could use firearms lots of players wouldn´t want to play a hand-to-hand fighter.
* Protection from arrows is a second level spell. Protection from bullets could be a first level spell (damage reduction againts ballistic damage). If there is a module about firearms, we should see anti-ballistic magic.
* Gunslingers can´t shoot anybody can´t see. A simple smoke or invisility spell would be enough to send a soldier who throw a explosive grenada againts that torret.
* Have you thought about an arcanepunk version of gadgets from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare? For example the exosuits or the mobile barricades.
* Have you seen the comic "Arrowsmith" about a fantasy first world war?
* If we see firearms, somebody will want the ones from d20 Past.
* Have you seen this video about a fast shooting archer? She is only a teenage. Let´s imagine what could a professional elf archer who had been training for thrirty yeas (even only an amateur civilian for sport).
FFSAA wrote:
LuisCarlos17f wrote:
Mephi1234 wrote:
For me isn´t about knight vs pirate (have you seen that episode of "the deadliest warrior"?) but about musketeer vs warmge... the best relationship between power and cost. Warmage could be more powerful, but too expensive for mass battles.
In a fantasy world wizards and alchemists could craft paper armours or a clockpunk mecha totally inmune to ballistic damage, or half-golem beasts. Firearms would be too slow for slingshots throwing explosive grenades or smoke bombs....... and you culd bet firearms would be forbidden, and cursed, by dragons, giants, lord feys..and most of cults of war gods.
* The skyships are canon in fogorten realms, but too expensive to be in the battlefield... have you thought about magic flying machines in the D&D battlefield? A canon shooting from the top of a floating disk would be a knigtmare for hand-to-hand combats.
Have you thought maybe a sniper from the top of a tower should be a XPs reward like a shooter trap couldn´t be disarmed?
LuisCarlos17f wrote:
Mephi1234 wrote:
Now I have got a great doubt, about the idea of arcane-punk settings where high-tech is magic, but it is so cheap like real technology.
I love stepping into a thread in the midst of an argument, only to be ignored by subsequent posters who continue the argument. 
But I assume there are other lurkers who, like me, just read the topic without contributing to get other people's opinions. So I'll say this anyway.
It seems to me, if I wanted to include guns in my fantasy setting (D&D is really not the system for non-fantasy games with firearms and such), I could go about it a couple ways. Either guns are basically equivalent to other weapons for a proficient user, or they're scary death machines that outpace all that primitive sticks-and-string "technology." If I want them to be equivalent, I'd just make them crossbows. No special rules needed.
Otherwise, I have only one design goal: "people with guns almost always best people without guns. And by a lot." In this scheme, I'd allow for a very skilled person (higher HP, more and better spells, better accuracy/damage stats, etc) to beat a lower-level gun user, but I wouldn't make it trivial. Guns are dangerous business, and getting downwind of one, even in incompetent hands, is just going to be worse for you than getting hit with an arrow. Ammunition that deforms or fragments, the burning hotness, lead poisoning, and so on. The current rule is much easier than accuracy penalties, finely-tuned damage bonuses, exploding crits, etc. Guns just kill people faster.
As has been pointed out, taking HP damage does not necessarily equate to taking a direct hit. You could also view HP (as I do) as a mix of stamina and luck, wearing down as you just barely dodge blow after blow. If I wanted scary guns, I'd say that bullets are more stressful to be targeted with, much harder (or impossible) to dodge or deflect than other weapons, and any direct hit is more likely to take you out of the fight right then, as opposed to other weapons. Moar dmgz does that well enough for me.
Macv12 wrote:
Silentwolf wrote:
I want guns to be powerful in my game. One set of guns in my world is owned by royal guard Musketeer types who have to earn them and hope they don't break because they can no longer be produced. The other source of guns is a clan of dwarves who have been hidden from the world for thousands of years and have avoided several breakdowns of society that has affected the rest of the known world.
If the players can figure out how to either earn a gun or fight for one, then they'll have a nice item.
If one wants to use guns that are effectively at the technology level of the other weapons and armor in the game, one can simply have them function EXACTLY like crossbows. The differences between crossbows and early guns are not really things that D&D mechanics tend to pay any attention to.
They load about the same rate, they hit for about the same damage, they have similar ranges, crossbow bolts are larger but then you don't need to carry black powder so it all about balances out.
I would assume the DMG ones are modern firearms, not archiac ones.
Chameleon-X wrote: