Why are guns so unpopular in fantasy?

Yes because over time they improved enough to be useful on an individual level.

Because of people like

The brits wore plate until WWI, it must have had some effect against primitive small arms fire.

Because all pop fantasy is at least partially borrowing from LOTR and Arthurian legend, and they didn't have guns.
Fantasy is a very unoriginal genre. Look into anything slightly outside of the traditional box and you'll find plenty of guns eg. Warhammer.

Pic unrelated it was my Captcha

>until WW1

>Pic unrelated it was my Captcha
>"please select all cars"

>parade plate

Plate was only became commonplace in the late renaissance, and at that point gunpowder was commonplace. Shitty inaccurate guns didn't come close to hardcountering a pike wall or a heavily armoured man on horseback

They weren't in LotR

Because most fantasy takes place at a tech level before gunpowder was used to make guns. You're welcome to include guns in your fantasy game however.

The easy answer is that most people are mouthbreathing incompetents when it comes to history, let alone something like firearms in history. Your average normie doesn't know anything more about historic combat other than "pointy end goes in other person". Get to your dumb normie, and they can't even tell you when WWI started.

As such Fantasy gets a lot of shit wrong a lot of the time. And not just stuff that can be handwaived away with magic, or a different world, or whatever. Right now GRR Martin is the big darling of "muh realism" shouting normies, and even the most cursory glance reveals that he's still operating under D&D logic.

Most people simply can not conceive of fire-arms in Fantasy settings because they assume there weren't any in history, either. The popular image of Medieval times, let alone Fantasy, is still that of swords & sorcery.

>30 years war

You mean the 80 Year War?

The entire myth of useless early firearms comes from mass produced ones without rifling.

When in reality rifled firearms existed since the early days of gunpowder weapons. It was just too expensive to produce them for every soldier.

>Why are guns so unpopular in fantasy?

they're not. i don't know why we keep having these threads. it is by no means difficult to find fantasy settings with guns.

Rate of fire was honestly a bigger reason. It's why the British stuck with muskets for Redcoats even though they could afford rifles. Rifled guns took longer to reload for muzzleloading guns and the rate of fire and discipline of units was more important than having an accuracy advantage when massed fire was involved.

Rifles didn't really see a major gain until the beginning of small unit tactics becoming common in warfare, where each shot mattered more.

That is because they are. Guns require next to no skill and kill even an armored and trained warrior effortlessly. A sword has difficulty bludgeoning to death a man in full mail, even when wielded by a man trained since late childhood in the arts of war.

As far as OP's question,
this is pretty accurate. Nothing more need be said.

"Medieval" fantasy is absurdly specific about what technology is and isn't appropriate for the humble of anachronisms it's made up of, a tradition that was started in Victorian times.

That and people have a very poor understanding of early firearms and the history of guns in general. To fantasy players guns are either hunting rifles+blunderbuss or glocks+automatic rifles. There are no other guns.

The problem with guns has never been inaccuracy. Volley fire solved that problem just as well as it did for archers. And I suppose that's a common misconception about guns vs. archery. But on the battlefield, both were used by large bodies of men shooting at other large bodies of men. Individual accuracy means fuck all.

But the plate of the day was made by people who were actually aware of their environment, and thus made to counter firearms. Lots of plate was tested simply by shooting at it with a gun.

Not the entire myth, matchlocks had a whole pile of issues unique to the fact you have a burning fuse stuck to the side of your gun and a shitload of loose powder all over the place.

>Lots of plate was tested simply by shooting at it with a gun

That's a myth. Yes, good plate could stop a bullet. But that bullet would still damage it. You don't want to damage your freshly made product.

>and kill even an armored and trained warrior effortlessly

lol okay

look up what proofing armor meant

Less scrupulous merchants sold shoddy plates with dented forms, to make it look like it was bullet-proofed.

But guns existed just fine in the 15th century.

There are reasons of varying merit
>it advances the feel of setting such that knights, kings, etc. seem out of place
>it opens up the door to the age of sail, which opens the door to colonization, which opens the door to conquest of natives and slave trades
>devalues the archer concept
>early firearms are superfluous and fights will still be a matter of melee
>later firearms are essential and melee becomes a desperation strategy
>firearms open the door to science, which many nerds see as incompatible with magic

people see them used today, so having guns in fantasy games ruins escapism

Just play in bronze/iron age, goddammit, they are stylish

Early riles were expensive pieces of art that required skill to use and maintain.
Also, good plate would stop a ball, just good plate tends to be on the expensive side. It came down to deciding to give muskets to everyone or plate for some.

>a myth
>with tons of historical proof

Sure.

Fantasy is mostly based on legends originating in germanic heroic age and generally, happenings that took place prior to 10th century, not 15th century. that means that plate armor and much more things are as much anachronisms but most people seem not to care really

Plate could stop bullets form pistols. But stopping bullets from rifles at short distance is bullshit.

I bet you think arrows penetrate plate too.

>Right now GRR Martin is the big darling of "muh realism" shouting normies, and even the most cursory glance reveals that he's still operating under D&D logic.

Explain? It is not perfect, but i think westeros is ok.

Post some historic proof that isn't digital (and therefore faked) then.

I just think the entire idea is a gigantic strawman.
Renaissance is fuck all. It really is. City states and permanent warfare was still the norm.

Age of sail by itself is fucking nothing. 90% of the sheenigans that happened during Age of Sail, happened before. The only news is that landbound nations suddenly used their ports to fuel a navy.
Even something like unsettled land becoming colonies, is basically Feudalism 2.0

Colonization itself is just Feudalism on Steroids. What did happen historically, is that Mercantilism penetrated more than just the fringed of society. So suddenly coins could start being traded for goods, even if it was only true for lower nobility and the ports.

And again: The conquest phase is again Feudalism on steroids. What differentiates it from earlier Feudalism is again: Trade economy due massive export/import.

The pattern repeats once early modern times hit: Suddenly, trade economy, but this time commoners can suddenly trade and earn money.
Suddenly this is important enough to warrant a patent system, courts that enforce that, even more diplomats than before, and even more trade. Suddenly foreigners of no importance is traveling around without guards, and information is important enough that spies become a bigger profession.
There are still wars everywhere, but its getting further and further way from the main areas of civilization.
The improvements to lifespan, mortality and money also means there is a unprecedented increase in technology, which is further fueled by a tool called SCIENCE.
Things like information trading and printing press further improve technology, and when paired with patents: This kills trade secrets, which again gives unprecedented technological growth

Modern modern times is just marked by more of the same.
Meanwhile D&D is anachronism up the ass, marked by superhumans everywhere, and gigantic doom monsters. Also trade economy everywhere

>armies can be raised at a moments notice
>again and again
>iron bank keeps on lending to the westerosi who have no intention of ever paying it back
>continent is the size of south america yet has fewer towns and cities than rural new zealand
>civilian population can somehow survive decades of winter, unable to farm
>continents are squares
>Average peasant spends roughly half their life begin muderraped apparently
>next to no real relations to the free cities that are less than an english channel away
>entire continent the size of south america united somehow
>tracts of land the size of europe ruled by single family houses in a single city

ASOIAF operates 100% under grimdark dnd logic. It takes a few presuppositions about the middle ages (classism, shit for peasants, knights were horrible people, etc.) and logically extrapolates them far beyond logic and reason to the point of pure comedy.
I still like it, but not for realism.

For everything wrong with A Song of Ice and Fire, its still one of those rare works that portray eternal war, no trade economy for civilians, a hardcore class society, no real centralization of power, and loyalty in serfdom.

That JRRM has a gigantic murderboner & magicboner, is just a bonus at this point.

Plate was invented after gunpowder was common on the battlefield, plate armor could easily stop a glancing shot, a shot from a carbine, or a shot at range.

if you were to stick the barrel of the gun right up on the guy it would go through like butter, but at that point he had a lance in you.

also muskets are much more accurate than people think, you can make an accurate shot out to about 70 meters if you were good.

>If you were good

Man sized, yeah. if your barrel was clean, your ball wasn't undersized and you had something approaching sights you could -probably- double that.

If you think arrows or bolts are even close in penetration to bullets you have no idea what you are talking about.

Alright then folks, to avoid things going around in circles all day what are some fantasy settings that make good use of firearms?

Warhammer does it fine.

Warhammer isn't fantasy. It's just grimdark. If you can't have flying, teleporting wizards replacing science with magic and making non-mages obsolete, it's not actually fantasy.

Not him, but you did the extraordinary argument, so you are the one which has to provide the extraordinary proof.

Because nobody tries to balance guns as reasonable weapons, and if you did people would complain they're unrealistic.
See Pathfinder, their guns are expensive as fuck, have less range than bows, deal less damage, but can hit things easier. Even muskets had a respectable range and would really fuck up someone's day even on a bad shot, and targetting touch is stupid since you can't ninja flip out the way of a bullet. But they also penetrate armor (See skallagrim on youtube, he did this) so it shouldn't even factor in armor.

Why are cars so unpopular in fantasy?

Is there a logical reason why existence of combustion engines would make a fantasy setting worse?

>your party decides to cross the plane to get to the dark wizard's castle
>BOOM
>the dark wizard's magical antimaterial rifle blows your character apart from several kilometers away
Wow, fun

More importantly, if digital proof = fake, and we're on a fucking internet image board, how in the fuck is someone supposed to provide proof?

Except that's not how Warhammer works. Your average Empire citizen never has access to any of that shit.

>XIV century tech vs XX century tech

You tried to sound smart and failed hard.

How about pointing to actual work done by historians not some youtube videos with pseudo experiments?

"No gunpowder" is a nice clean distinction that everybody understands. Even if you draw a line with firearm technology, you'll still end up with a mouthbreather who doesn't understand why he can't have a revolver or sniper rifle in a setting with only matchlocks.

And that's before you have to implement firearms in a system not made to handle firearms.

>you have to implement firearms in a system not made to handle firearms

What RPG systems are like that? Except D&D but that shit is terrible at everything.

what said but in addition I don't think a horseless carriage would ruin a fantasy setting if it were something made by like, dwarves or gnomes or whatever.

why must you make this thread every day?
You already got every single possible answer in the last 100 threads about this exact same topic.

Make it a tank and most people wouldn't even give it a second thought

>That is because they are. Guns require next to no skill and kill even an armored and trained warrior effortlessly. A sword has difficulty bludgeoning to death a man in full mail, even when wielded by a man trained since late childhood in the arts of war.

Sigh... Another victim of the myth of firearm super lethality (which is one of the answers to the Op's question). All it takes in many cases to kill with any weapon is one solid hit. The "Super Lethality" myth is based around how stark the difference between that one solid hit is for firearms versus all the failed attacks made with them compared to the much more granular difference in failed attacks with weapons such as swords.

Firearms are not any more lethal than any other weapon. In many cases they are less lethal than many weapons that are considered bad. What makes firearms so good is their ratio of lethality to training needed to access that lethality.

The other user already did it pretty well. Some minor stuff also struck me, like the way he describes weapons, which seems to communicate a rather minimalist knowledge. He's also been accused of being "obsessed" with heraldry and food, but he's nothing of the sort. His heraldry resembles no real life system, and is too simplistic to function. Especially in a setting as huge as Westeros is supposed to be. Personally, my head canon is that the setting is a lot smaller. Ten times smaller, at least. Dude really fucked up his map. And the food he just plucks from the pages of history without putting any real thought in. A particular example was someone drinking hippocras, which is named after Hippocrates, a person who never existed in Westeros. And it's just a type of spiced wine, so the use of the name is not needed. He might as well have called wildfire napalm, or Greek fire. He also commits the typical mistake of describing his setting as completely stagnant, though that might simply be attributed to the characters' limited viewpoints. But real life Medieval times were a time of rapid technological and social development.

Essentially he just picks and chooses from Medieval stereotypes without taking their underlying causes with them. It's kind of like all those authors who describe wild and gruesome gladiator fights in Roman settings. It's history sensationalized to fit this modern viewpoint that historical people were complete barbarians.

Honestly, the only thing keeping any high magic setting from having what is essentially modern technology is the general unspoken assumption that magic does not get cheaper and easier as technology does through development.

Even then, a lot of people forget that something like a tank or fighter jet represents a mindboggling sum of money both to develop, purchase, and operate. Any kingdom worth its salt might use its wealth to buy itself such an advantage. Even if they'd have less of this stuff than we do, it would still be a necessary expenditure if neighbouring kingdoms also pursue these items. The moment your setting has flying ships, it will also have mages on the decks of those flying ships.

Might be fun to throw players expecting a typical Fantasy campaign into its equivalent of WWI, with idiot commanders not knowing how to handle new magical items, and seeing how quickly they catch on.

Because I don't like them.

Why doesn't he do the same with bows and the sword?

Just make them work like a fancy and noisy crossbow, you idiots.

>What makes firearms so good is their ratio of lethality to training needed to access that lethality.
Basically the point he was making, even if the hyperbole was unwarranted.

You should fear someone with this thing more. Imagine a wizard mass-producing magical scrolls with this thing.

Russians still wear plate to the present day.

In my fantasy settings, gunpowder and any weaponry using it are illegal on most human kingdoms, but sometimes smuggled by dirty dwarves.

I think it will be a nice surprise when my players run into someone badass thug with a shotgun.

Every military wears 'plate'. They just wear far less and the plates go in a vest called a plate carrier.

But Russian special forces wear titanium and go for more extended coverage while Americans generally roll with ceramic plates and issue lighter, less-coverage rigs for SOF.

Water magic would fuck firearms. Actually, it would also ruin bows, and most forms of armours, even swords, now that I think of.

>Guns require next to no skill and kill even an armored and trained warrior effortlessly.
Depends on what you mean by that. Because operating a firearm requires knowledge on mixing your own powder and not blowing yourself up.
According to some sources arqubusiers received more training than pikemen.
Humphey Barwick claimed that training to use an arquebus required a lot of training and that men in England had a distrust for it because they were unfamiliar with how it worked.

Personal opinion time: guns take away the core of what, to me, is fantasy.

I grew up playing knights and whatever in my backyard with sticks and to me that involved two things
A: A princess
and
B: Swashbuckling

I grew up, realized what I imagined was basically a mishmash of tropes that never existed in real life and moved on. Started to get interested in Samurai and shit, figured out that the time period I was interested in basically happened next to the embrace of gunpowder in the west, got dissapointed and moved on.

Nothing scratched that particular it.

Nothing had the same feel.

Then I found D&D, then Pathfinder, then a bunch of other shit, and all those things let me live out those fantasy's that I could never really have in real life.

Basically I want things to be like they were in my head when I was six, and those things never involved muzzle loaders, and even though they basically did in real life I can just pretend they don't in a P&P.

Ya feel me?

Guns = Crossbows.

I feel you man. It kinda sucks when you find out for the first time that swords were always kinda shit.

What could be more cooler that knights armed with guns?

This is going to sound weird, but my childhood basically died when I learned halfhanding a sword was a thing.

But I can pretend it doesn't exist on the tabletop, so there we go.

If that does it for you don't let me stand in your way. I can see the appeal, I just don't personally like it, I prefer things my way. Doesn't mean it's better or anything, just preference.

Four losers with guns can kill any hero.
Four losers with blades may not.

>halfhanding
That just makes it cooler.

More fantasy writers are hacks who just copy Tolkien. Tolkien's world is meant to be in decay. It's even possible that the Numenor were straight steampunk. They also have the tendency to clumsily treat the early/mid/late middle ages like one single thing with full plate armour (which didn't appear until gunpowder was around), and leather armour which never existed at least as it is often portrait. And for some reason they also have a tendency to hate feudalism and knights, and their settings are filled with powerful kings, standing armies, sprawling urban cities which didn't become a thing until the renaissance/early modern.

To some people sure, and that's cool, but not really for me.

Who does a riposte to a child?

Guns and gunpowder aren't really effective except in large numbers in the late medieval era that many fantasy RPGs try to emulate. You might have a few finely-crafted pistols that adventurers might use, but they'd be rare, hard to maintain, expensive to operate, and not all that much better against most enemies than a crossbow.

When you start getting into military formations using large numbers of firearms, you start killing off the medieval fantasy and advancing into "modern" fantasy. Plate armor and such is no longer as important, warfare changes to be focused more on range and artillery, and most RPGs don't handle gunfights well in that they get boring.

Plate armor only exist because guns.

I'm playing a rogue in a 4e game where matchlocks are the new hotness (equipvalent stat-wise to superior crossbows) in her citystate, been around about 20 years or so. She's in a party with a winged hussar, a priest of the god of dragons, a scimitar-wielding persian wannabe immortal slash scholar, a surface drow chasing after a purple-eyed elf, a creepy necromantic englishwoman wiht her granddad's skull in her pocket and two swords, and a minotaur who summons nature spirits to fuck shit up.

No one's complained about the matchlock.

>Plate armor and such is no longer as important
Why do people think this is a thing?

Guns on the battlefield predates plate as D&D knows it, the D&D "knight in shining armor" vision of armor only came into existence BECAUSE of guns.

Virtually no fantasy has been or is being written that has guns. Breaking the mold is hard and few are even aware of ERB.

There is none, other than rules problems. The Arms Law rules from I.C.E. were able to do both because they built it from the start to do so. I played in a magic using 'Three Musketeer'esque game that worked quite well.

Assuming you're talking tabletops, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and, IIRC, first and second edition D&D both had firearms.

>not all that much better against most enemies than a crossbow.
Except having longer effective range, better penetration and strike power, and being faster to load than a heavy crossbow.

TO be fair, even though the first edition of WFRP and D&D2nd came out three years apart, there is a pretty wide gulf between those two and the next thing that included firearms. So far as I can remember.

Plus WFRP isn't really that big of a game, is it?

Settings with medieval stasis are funny. They are often not even all that medieval.

The next major thing would be D&D 3rd edition, which had rules in the DMG, then WFRP 2nd, then Pathfinder. Also when talking tabletops as far as "big" games go you've got D&D and that's about it as far as kitchen sink fantasy goes until Pathfinder.

Not at all. FFXV had a great setting.

A lot of fantasy is about aesthetics more than it is about history or realism. You cannot make an argument against aesthetics in that manner, it simply doesn't work. You can only try to introduce a new aesthetic to rival it.

>ishiggydiggy