"Nerfing" Guns

What you hold in your hand is not the weapon. Your will, your ki, is the weapon.

With discipline, you may learn to make your sword an extension of your will. But this is harder to do with a more complex implement, such as a rifle; you must know every element of its working as you know the bones of your fingers.

As ki is harder to extend to guns, the strikes of bullets are somewhat weaker, and more vulnerable to defensive techniques (save for those who master the Piercing Sniper Meditation.) But the power and range of automatic weapons compensates for this, making guns an equal match for swords on the battlefield.

The effectiveness of a sword scales with the ability of the user in a way that guns don't. In average hands the gun is better, but significant percentage of the population has through one means or another gained superhuman fighting abilities that favor the use of swords.

yes, that's what I'm looking for mr /k/ man

Actually totally a direction I thought about -
or rather buffing the humans of the setting, making them more tough, strong and capable of anime-level of skill. Stuff like deflecting bullets with swords and all that good shit

Yeah, but why can't you enchant a gun? Or make enchanted bullets?

Organic matter grows (and regenerates) at a terribly fast rate in this setting.

The first consequence of this is that most regions so overgrown that clear lines of sight over any appreciable distances are far and few between, and most combat will occur at close range anyway.

Moreover, combatants will frequently be largely unhindered by 'small' injuries such as impalement or bullet wounds, and only be dropped by dismemberment or decapitation. As such, large blades, high-caliber guns and explosives are the weapons of choice for those in the business of using them.

Enchantments take months to perform, and even if your rifle doesn't fail from the weapon jinx, your bullets will.

>Yeah, but why can't you enchant a gun? Or make enchanted bullets?
Spitballing one here.
The amount of magical energy that you can cram into an object is related to its mass, and... "non-transferable" I guess is a good way to put it. So a gun can be enchanted for durability, for example, but not for an effect you want the bullets to deliver to the target like lightning.
But since a sword touches its target, you can use it to deliver magical effects to the enemy effectively.

That's silly. A superhuman could train to not miss. If they're super strong/heavy, they can increase the caliber as well.

If they're so strong and fast that bullets don't help, swords are superfluous.

Enchantments on a gun would affect the gun itself and the projectiles it fires to a limited degree. Enchantments on bullets would be quantity over quality.

>Yeah, but why can't you enchant a gun? Or make enchanted bullets?
Perhaps enchantment requires the inscription of runes, and swords, by virtue of having a larger workable surface area, are able to hold more potent (or a greater number of) enchantments than guns?

>'small' injuries
>bullet wounds

stop watching anime you fucking retard. guns are better than swords in every way possible. at no point in history have swords ever beat guns in a fight, I know that happens all the time in anime, but anime is fucking retarded, just like you.

you know what happened in ww2 when japanese soldiers pulled out swords and banzai charged the americans? they got fucking mowed down by machine gun fire, and died.

Ok, this are pretty good guys, but lets look at this from a different angle -
How much weaker can you make automatic guns in your setting but still ;eave them usable?
Basically things like
Less powerfull gunpowder because that's the only one that the world has
Less powerfull shot with less penetration, because the firing mechanism is not great
Stuff like that, technical nerfs that make guns not as perfect killing machines as than they are

that just makes the dude who does have a gun even more powerful, since he's got the best weapon around and nobody can match him

The strongest blades are now the absolute largest, and capable swordsmen must have tremendous strength to wield their log-swords. Nimble dexterity fighters need not apply in this world.

Really depends quite a bit on your setting. But "guns are super-fucking-illegal" works for both cyber punk and sci-fi. Cyberpunk it's big brother coming for you. Sci-Fi has spaceships. Guns and spaceships do NOT mix.

Hence the quotes around 'small'. Injuries that would put down a normal human heal within seconds. I'm talking almost Wolverine-level regeneration here.

The upside of this is that the setting can become rather more lighthearted, with characters laughing in the face of what would otherwise be certain death, and players don't have to worry about rolling up a new character every time they lose a fight.

Or you could go the other way and have numerous immortals imprisoned with concrete shoes at the bottoms of trenches.

There's only 2 ways, really.

1) Magic of some kind or, in a scifi setting, some handwavy technology thats magic with a technobabble coat of paint. Shields that slow down projectiles above a certain speed al la Dune, Ki shenanigans, supernatural monsters that are harmed by swords but not guns because reasons.

2) A STRONG cultural and religious aversion to using guns on your fellow man. Its not enough to just be a mortal sin dooming you to hell. To discourage atheists or the plain immoral, society subjects you to, say, chinese style Nine Familial Extermination for shooting another human.

you're going full retard. you either take the jedi angle and give the sword users magic powers, or you make the guns 16th century black powder weapons. pikes, swords, and lance cavalry were still used in warfare before the 1900's

But that's a good thing. Dexterity has been the god stat for far too long. :^)

Jezuz, relax /k/ boi, guns a perfect, everybody knows that and noone questions it

We are trying to make up a world and theoretical circumstances that would make them less perfect, simly so the player has more usable and viable options for their characters

When the world was young, the gods gave gifts upon the young races; they gifted them with swords, axes, maces, bows, and other weapons against the minions of the evil gods.

In the untold eras since then, man created a new weaponry; firearms. While powerful and useful, they could not be enchanted. They could not be blessed. They were not the defenses of the gods but one of man. The gods saw this act as betrayal. Their gifts had been spurned. And so, no blessing or enchantment would or could touch a weapon of man.

OP wanted story explanations for why guns = swords, weaboo delivered.

That's not why I'm responding, though. I'm responding because in your nerd rage, you've told a terrible lie: Guns fucking sucked for large swaths of history, and were most certainly inferior to swords really early on.

You can't really have a situation where machinery is precise enough to manufacture the rounds and magazines or belts required for automatic weapons, but not precise enough to manufacture decent firing mechanisms.

Not him, but your premise that swords have a higher upper threshold of effectiveness than guns is buttfucking retarded. Given the same amount of training the gunfighter will be more effective. A gun in the hand of an expert sharpshooter is on a completely different universe of effectiveness compared to an expert swordsman.

Ok, I see what you mean, that does make sence

Let's figure out the Super Human angle thenSo exactly how bad are gun wounds of different caliber compared to getting hit with a big ol' sword?

>Yeah, but why can't you enchant a gun? Or make enchanted bullets?

maybe all enchanted weapons were created long in the past, before the invention of guns, and nobody can do it anymore. which means all magical weapons are archaic stuff like swords, axes, etc. or the "magicness" of a weapon might be literally tied to how old it is, or how much it has been used. very old weapons are the most powerful, having accumulated tons of magical power over the ages, newer weapons only have the mildest enchantments.

it might be that warriors can make their inner power flow into their weapon while they are holding it, but the same trick can't be applied to projectile weapons, because once a bullet flies away from you, it's no longer connected to your body. maybe warriors can enter a terrible berserker rage in which they have superhuman strength and durability, but makes them lousy shots because their focus is all fucked up. maybe warriors can harvest life-energy from each foe they slay, growing to superhuman levels of power, but they need to be up-close to absorb the energy, so they always fight in melee range. the god of battle might favour those brave enough to wade into melee combat and bless them with power.

or, you could say that bullets are too small to enchant. you might even need ample space for materials, runes, magical circles and other doodads.. perhaps the chaotic nature of magic interferes with the components of guns, too many moving parts and chemicals. or the weapons might be made from special materials that are unsuitable for guns, for whatever reason. enchantment might be expensive, time-intensive or requires scarce resources, so that enchanting every single bullet is impractical, but enchanting a sword you might use over and over is cost-effective. you could also apply this line of thought to tech.

any number of reasons really

...

You know police are trained not to let a man with a knife get within 20 feet of them, right? It's because inside that range, the knife wielder has a good chance of stabbing and killing the officer before the officer can shoot him.

no, they weren't. I know they won the first half of that battle in the last samurai, but in real history guns dominated from day one.

You could go the Arcanum (and to some extent shadowrun) route and say that a weapon's ability to hold magic is related to how much processing went into it. Heavily machined guns won't hold enchantment as well as a sword.

I'm not that anime boy, I'm just pointing out that you are over reacting a lil bit
We are brainstorming over here, just point out the flaws and add your own idea, no need to get offended

they're trained to do that to maintain control. do you listen to yourself when you talk? if the guy is outside 20 feet he has 0 chance of stabbing you, as he gets closer that chance increases, because he has a fucking knife and needs to be close to use it. stop watching movies, stop watching cartoons, go read up on history and warfare, see how many guys rush in with knives and had a "good chance" of stabbing the dudes with rifles.

these threads just trigger me because you weaboo anime fags want to believe so badly that a sword can contend with a firearm. its like watching fat people say they have poor genetics. but I suppose you're correct and I am invading your fantasy world while providing nothing to justify your delusion, so I will leave and let you carry on being delusional uncontested.

The 21 foot rule is based on the attacker having the initiative and the officer having a holstered pistol.

Anyway...close quarters, ki effects, slower, less reliable guns, etc.

Dealt with decades ago: lasguns make nuclear explosions when they hit a shield

>these threads just trigger me
Yeah, we noticed

Handle it the way Destiny did.

A weapon individually doesn't matter, it's the person using it. In Destiny, it's literally the Light/Darkness of the individual that determines how powerful they are. There are exceptions, but at the core a Guardian (Player Character) is only as strong as his Light. You could give him a sword, a sharp stick, Hell even a fucking eight-shooter revolver, and as long as his Light is strong he will channel his power through it and get the job done.

This concept falls apart when you get to the Cabal, who don't supply something like "Ether," "Sword Logic," or "time travel" to win. However, the Cabal deploy brute force to such a degree that they plough through whatever is in their way, complementing martial prowess with ridiculously powerful technology to stay relatively even with even the Hive's ontoformic horse-shittery.

In terms of tabletop RP, you'd basically have to simply everything to a matchup of a single stat and allow the player to explain how they go about using this stat, replacing "oh well I have a sword that does 1d8 now that I hit" with "my check-result is 80 and his is 70, so I am a degree more powerful than him and win."

If the guy is outside 20 feet, he has a better than 0 chance of stabbing you; he just has to slip up close and get next to you before you spot him. But that's not the point.
The point, which you've completely missed, is that there ARE some circumstances in which a blade is effective against a gun. OP just wants to blue sky some fantasy shenanigans that would widen the scope of these circumstances.

alright man you win, I can't pound my head against the wall like that, I concede defeat.

>Yeah, but why can't you enchant a gun? Or make enchanted bullets?
Enchantments are expensive and take a long time.

Sure, you could enchant a gun, but that would mean taking apart and enchanting each individual moving part in such a way that they all work together and perform perfectly. Something like that might be in the hands of a stupidly rich guy, but for your average goober it would be easier to enchant a single piece of metal and hope other pieces (pommel, crossguard) hold together).

Replace 'enchant' with 'NANOMACHINE' where needed for sci-fi

Well, unless you have crazy superguns, bullets will only fire in one direction.
Some people augment themselves/are super space ninjas and are too fast and jumpy to catch with a hail of bullets.

To combat this, soldiers have taken to having a melee weapon on hand, preferably one that can slow down or interfere with said jumpy space ninjas, like a whip or a polearm.
They also start augmenting themselves, to find a more reliable solution to the brutal space ninjas.
For, if you can't beat them, join them.

pls tell me you are just trying to bait some animu lovers and you are not actually that easy to trigger

Read Dune, use energy shields that can block high-speed projectiles. Voila, swords a go go.

In traveller guns are less usefull for a variety of reasons

>The enemy can add more oxigen to the air making the use of fireguns dangerous
>If you shoot in zerograv all the brass will be floating around to get into someones eye.
>If you try to shoot anything that is not ablative you run the riskof damagi. Delicate equipment
>Short distances against enemies that can pull out cover(movab!e floor panels)
>If you play in play in vacuum your guns can overheat and become useless if the gun dont have radiators
>Using a gun can create a weapon scalation that you might loose.

Anyway thats how I played traveller on swords last time

Well if your only argument is "nuh-uh, gun beats sword 100% of the time forever, anything else is anime" then you should get used to conceding defeat, because that's just about as ridiculous a position as the animefags with their magic tank-slicing katanas folded a billion times. It's fetishizing a tool to the point that you try to use it for all circumstances, even when it's inappropriate.
Would I take a sword over a gun in general? Nah. But in specific circumstances, it may be a good choice. For instance, if I have to, say, climb out of the water and kill somebody silently within seconds, a gun is a shitty choice for those circumstances. They're loud, silencers don't work like in the movies, and they don't like getting wet. For that specific combat situation, a blade beats the shit out of a bullet.

>Wanting to fit sword and sorcery into a relatively advanced setting
>Weaboo

It's like the term doesn't even have a meaning anymore.

>Traveller
>Still doesn't have caseless ammunition
>Not solving overheating by using age old trick of barrel surrounded by water
>Not just walking around cover/shooting faster than cover pops up
Damn

You seem to want to maintain form yet preserve function. So a machine gun that looks like a machine gun but acts like a muzzle loading black powder rifle. Lol. Adhere to your own mythos and stop attempting to interconnect setting elements that are incongruent.

Look, mate, if you can wield a sword with such strength and accuracy so that the sword can compete with the guns results-wise, then you might as well forego the guns and just throw bullets with your own hands.

>and they don't like getting wet. For that specific combat situation, a blade beats the shit out of a bullet.

Sort of depends on the gun. There are guns that are built for that sort of wet operation, but comerade Zelnikov out in Siberia or Private Kennedy in Fort What's-it Texas aren't gunna have one.

Same with the volume issue. The stealth modifications to the Sten Gun in WW2 made it very quiet. It also ran hot as Satan's nutsack, so it's RoF was limited by practicality and it probably wouldn't have run wet.

Guns can be specialized very well. It's just expensive and sometimes cumbersome to make those specializations.

>cases
I don't think there are any rules in Traveller regarding bullet cases. I've never seen them, I assume that's something that guy's referee has ruled in.

>overheating
Water evaporates rapidly in a vacuum.

>walking around cover
You can do that, within the limits of the turn order. But whether Classic or Mongoose, it can still be highly effective to just suddenly rush around a corner, leap on top of a guy, and drag him down while knifing him repeatedly. Depending on what he's wielding he may or may not be able to shoot at you, but he's only going to get one chance at it.

You want to be depressed about the world?
Look at /k/, and consider that the people who know the most about some of mankind's deadliest weapons are otherwise the dumbest, most short-tempered douchebags on the planet.

To be fair, if someone's effectively using a sword/spear/beam saber in modern to near-future setting in media, 93% of the time it's anime.

Or batman related

Or the enchantment takes a fucking long time.

You could related it to the concept of taking someone's power buy killing them and taking their head or their heart.

An enchantment on a sword is an empty vessel. The more the sword is used in battle, the more it fills from it's wielder and it's victims. The power in the sword also exudes it's own 'pressure'. So if you spend a lifetime using it to decapitate chickens, you'll at most get a chicken soul's worth of enchantment. (The cock-cutter sounds like a scary weapon, but it's really not). The most powerful and ancient swords grant superhuman abilities, yadda yadda.

So everyone who has regular occasion to fight carries some kind of simple blunt or bladed weapon. Some of them are "retirement policies"; a sword blooded in war can be valuable again yadda yadda reasons for carrying swords.

Power needed is proportional to mass of object. There are legends of enchanted ships and aircraft coming spontaneously into being, but trying to make them deliberately is a fool's errand.

Changing the weapon risks breaking the enchantment, the more severe the change the more likely. Replacing the lock, stock, or barrel on an enchanted gun will almost certainly break or seriously weaken the charm. The strongest enchanted firearms are often Jezails and naval cannon, so wear and tear can be much more of a problem, as is obsolescence.

Kind of.

Batman uses blind spots, stealth, and suprise to take on gun armed individuals. He doesn't charge 60 meters down an empty street against a firing opponent without creating some kind of concealment or distraction. This is completely reasonable.

Anime fulfills more of what OP is going for with sword swinging jackasses charging firing enemies but are "just too fast", deflecting bullets with his "whirlwind bladewall technique", or leaping 30 feet vertically to eviscerate the "too shocked to fire" gun-toting fodder.

Doing a setting is fine that way, I'm not knocking it. But trying to justify it using anything besides "it's fucking magic" doesn't work well so it's best to leave it at that.

I like settings where magic is all about symbolism(The Invisibles, Unknown Armies)
and in such a setting a gun is a modern and thus not as symbolically strong token of your power.

Still a very useful tool for killing but a sword or a shield would convey some subtle benefits that a gun would not.

Here's an idea: don't worry about it.

Just have them coexisting. Trying to justify that shit just opens up a can of worms.

Slow firing inaccurate hand match

Could do it like Rifts:
Guns are easy to use, any asshole can shoot one with respectable accuracy.
They do moderate damage.
Ammunition is in varying levels of availability (from one magazine between a bumfuck nowhere town to cities mad producing them)

Melee weapons do lots of damage, and if it's a fantasy setting, can be used against monsters (ie. Alchemical silver, or somesuch)
But the key is you have to get close enough to use it.
Essentially, melee is a niche, promoting ambush tactics. Most people use guns, and fight from longer ranges. The closer you are going to be to the target initially, the more viable melee is.
Beyond this, you could have it that body armor protects against projectiles better than melee weapons, like how ballistic vests don't provide protection from stab wounds, just like stab vests don't stop bullets. (At least, not very well)

Being hit with either will kill you, so they both deal 1d8 damage

Automatic weapons give a +1 to hit for every action/round/whatever they are fired at a target.

You're giving /k/ far too much credit, user.
The board is 80% shitposters, 15% autists, and 5% shitposting trips.

I did it with range. lets say rifled barrels and aerodynamic bullets never became a thing, or the materials present in the setting dont allow for such things. all the sudden the longest range a gun can get is across the damn street, and thats a finely calibrated rifle.

>implying
Most of /k/ is noguns underageb&s, user.

Also, the real life rebel samurai were using guns as well, just older ones as opposed to the government's shiny new Western-built imports.

It works fine in shadowrun. Do dat.

>futuristic: people use force-fields, melee weapons can be equipped with technology to pierce or break force-fields, guns can't be equipped in the same manner.
Or just use dune rules, if you shoot someone with a shield you both die, if you stab someone only they die.

>at no point in history have swords ever beat guns in a fight
Pretty sure at no point in history have guns beaten swords in a fight, if guns and swords are fighting why the fuck do you need people to wield them?
But yes there are points in history where swords beat guns, hell cavelry used swords for ages, and a good cavelry charge would cut down a poorly drilled/positioned musket line.
Also in the right situations for the early period of guns swords still saw widespread use, if guns were so superior to melee combat in every way the bayonet would never have been invented, improved upon, and refined.

What if?
The concept of rifling was never invented and smokeless powder wasn't either...
Actually that's a horrible idea. Guns would still be really strong without those.

Because of advanced balistic armor that a sword can deal with but a gun can't

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten
Is this what you're referring to? If it is, then nowhere in that article does it ever mention "stealth modifications that made it very quiet". I'm pretty sure you're just lying to us in the hope that nobody will bother fact checking.

>If it is, then nowhere in that article does it ever mention "stealth modifications that made it very quiet".
Of course it doesn't. He gets his historical information from video games.

>superhuman abilities

My weapon is a browning .50 with a chainsaw bayonet on it.

Come at me, bro.

Maybe he means the suppressor and leather jacket on the barrel that i put on stens?

>thinks suppressors didn't exist in WW2

historicalfirearms.info/post/47640978009/the-silenced-stens-the-first-silenced-sten-was

literally five seconds in google

theres no point in arguing, these sword guys are clearly more knowledgeable than every general in the last 300 years.

What's it like being this retarded?

Even with a suppressor, a gun is still fairly loud. If you want to kill someone in a stealth scenario, all a suppressor does is somewhat lower the radius from which people will be alerted to your presence (and if there is an organized guard, like most stealth situations warrant, that "advantage" will only matter for a precious few moments before everyone's ringing the alarms). Compare that with sneaking up behind and slitting your target's throat, which makes virtually zero noise if you do it suddenly enough, guns become a pretty shit option.

shields that only affect things going at a high enough velocity
throw it in space and give guns the risk of causing decompression

>If you want to kill someone in a stealth scenario
and you would just be the fucking expert on that eh?

Charge of the Australian Light Horse.

He's right
They're still over 100 decibels in many cases
But seriously, what happens when you put the barrel against a person? Does that dampen sound?

Explain how a weapon that makes a lot of noise is more useful in a stealth scenario than one that makes virtually no noise at all.

It was a pretty meh example. If you want a good one just cite the fact that there have been bayonet charges in the fucking 21st century

Against ISIS...
Arabian militants aren't known to have the best accuracy

Funny thing Star Wars basically does the same thing with light saber reflection. It's just that only a select group really uses swords.

>silenced
I don't think you know what silencers are for, user.

They aren't for stealth. Metal Gear Solid silencers aren't real. A silencer doesn't make Sten a magic ninja gun. Silencers exists SO YOU DON'T MAKE YOURSELF DEAF WHEN FIRING WITHOUT EAR PROTECTION. GUNS ARE THAT FUCKING LOUD.

For your scenario, subsonic ammunition would be far more effective than a suppressor.

Or placing the weapon against the target to muffle some of the report, for that matter.

What are subsonic rounds, nigger?
Half the reason the military still uses .45's with threaded barrels is because the typical .45acp round is barely supersonic and running it through a baffled suppressor makes the fucking action cycling louder than the muzzle report.

>confirmed for not knowing fuck all about firearms
>but that's what I expect from Veeky Forums

Sci-Fi: Force fields react to high velocity bullets by quickly deflecting them, swords and clubs move slower and have sustained force behind them bypassing the shield or draining its capacitors by allowing no recharge.

Fantasy: Bullets are small so can't carry much enchantment, bolts can carry a bit more, arrows even more and siege engine ammunition can go to near nuclear levels