How would you balance guns vs swords ?

Guns only damage if your less than three meters from the target

Swords only damage if you throw them from more than three meters away

This.

Also armor heavy enough should be perfectly capable of protecting you from the bullets (but it's not invincible).

So basically get inspiration from a time where sword and gun were actually kind of balanced, like the early 15th century.

Not really, having a backup gun for when in a real pinch sounds like a proper boon.

As a thought experiment, think about the bullets as one-off magic items. Really potent, yes, but scarce.

If ammo is that scarce, making a shooty specialist who can't hold a knife in his hand is just shooting yourself in the foot.

ballistic armor

The same way D&D balances swords versus spells. One day or another, the Fighter is going to have to accept that he's obsolete: whether it's against the kingdom-ending wizard or the Maxim machine gun, there is only so far you can go with hitting something hard with a sharp piece of metal.

Though if you want a way to at least make it look cool, give fighters the ability to use the Force and deflect less than fully automatic firearms with their swords Jedi-style.

Personal energy shields which deflect fast travelling projectiles but can be pierced by relatively slow blades.

Why draw the line between reacting and moving impossibly fast to parry bullets from single-shot firearms, and reacting and moving impossibly fast to parry a succession of bullets from rapid-fire firearms?

Well characters are going to end up being specialists in shit so guns would have the advantages in combat over bows for specialists, because a trained archer is just spitting arrows. But this means that guns can be used by untrained people to initiate combat. Fighters become more like officers or shock cavalry using their pistol to weaken the enemy before closing in on melee.

I was thinking this too.

It's such an arbitrary line to draw.

The guy using the sword gets shot, learns to use guns, balance achieved.

Guns are good at distance, swords in melee.

How does W40k do it? People seem to use swords there all the time, despite there being all manner of powerful guns that shoot explosives and plasma and poison and flesh-eating beetles and stuff.

The way melee works in 40k is in three ways, Either the thing in question is;
A: Very well armored, such as a space marine
B: Very durable, and doesn't care about taking some bolter shots, Such as an ork
C: in a group of 60 other dudes with the same weapon so they can die in droves

>People seem to use swords there all the time
In the RPGs people use high-power explosives all the time.
In the wargames, in older editions especially, it was safer to engage in melee combat than to stay at range.
If you
>can't be shot while fighting in melee
>can jump from a melee to the next one without stopping
then you can't be shot at all.

Well, those first two sound appropriate for player characters and other elite swordsmen. Maybe add in the option of super kung fu bullet dodging skills.

And the guys who shrug off high caliber exploding bullets are susceptible to sword blows because...?

Even in 40k the reality of it is that it doesn't.

Most of the realistic battle reports of 40k barely mention any actual close combat fighting. Close combat only happens in close quarters.

Armor-piercing swords are less expensive than armor-piercing bullets.
Also, since it's more expensive than basic guns, a skilled swordsman can get more out of his sword (more attacks AND better ws vs a raw recuirt) than a skilled gunner out of his gun (better bs and that's it), it's more cost effective to have swordsmen.

The melee weapons in question are either equipped with some way to cut through said armor (Such as a power or chainsword) Or or so bulky and wielded by someone so strong that it actually doesn't matter that much (Such as any ork weapon)

Because the sword is large enough to support an power-source that surrounds the blade in a energy field that cuts through metal and armor like butter.

>what is a chainsword
>what is a poweraxe
how long have you been on Veeky Forums, newfriend?

You don't, you fucking moron. That's the entire point of using gun - it makes sword obsolete

How many bullets you got left? Can you get more?

This was such a stupid explanation because Frank couldn't write a good gunfight to save his life.

By making a lot of shooters unable to fire at point-blank range, which is the most retarded solution possible.

... arbitrary power balance decisions.

Really, there is no logical explaination behind W40k balance of weapons, it exist solely for making melee not sucking.

/thread

Certain enemies require dismemberment to defeat.
Only real guns can dismember, none of that man-portable shit, I mean 30mm, while pretty much any sword can (after a few whacks anyway). Suddenly guns don't seem like must haves.
P.S. Fuck Max Brookes.

Power shields that block bullets but don't block swords. And go boom if shot from lasgun.

Pretty much the only way is to have only early firearms. You blow your musket load then close to melee and sword or bayonet it out.

>Maybe it's the post apocalypse, and bullets don't come cheap, if at all.

This is another option.

can the realismfags pls leave now?

Realismfags will never leave, you should know this by now.

>2017
>Realismfags is somehow an insult
>Neo/tg/ doesn't know it's stample of this board
Top fucking kek

By making combat absolutely abstract.

Ever heard about Curious Expedition vidya? Guns are useful, but so are any other forms of attack and it all works, because the combat system is pure abstraction, rather than trying to emulate an actual engagement.

The moment you try to in the same time have engagement and "balance things" you end up with unplayable/highly arbitrary ruleset.

Running a Wild West + Samurai game at the moment. I made guns unrealistically anemic, allowed most any trained swordsman to parry bullets at a penalty (and master swordsman to parry at no penalty), and let swordsmen have a good number of cinematic skills that let them, for example, cleave through armor like butter, make impossibly powerful blows after a few seconds of focus, etc. The advantages of guns are their high rate of fire, their range, and that most anyone can use them, but a sword in the hands of a strong master is much more destructive.

It does help that my setting's guns are all revolvers and lever-action rifles; true rapid-fire weapons have to be mounted or used by someone of monstrous strength. If I included more modern weapons like assault rifles that combined impressive RoF with decent damage and range, there'd be less incentive to go with swords even with the fancy chi skills. I also don't have any variant rounds, so peeling through armor requires swordsman skills, not AP ammo.

how about endless fog realm?

It's not realism but memes. Swords and guns coexisted for centuries.

At least for my modern fantasy setting, gunshots do attract certain monsters. Plus a melee weapon is a good backup for when you're in tight corridors or low on ammunition.

... with the guys with swords being gradually removed from the picture OR brutally gunned down (depending on technological gap between fighting forces)

Besides, the question by OP is how to balance things, while one of those things is clearly superior just by the fact it can engage at range.

>you're in tight corridors
That's what handguns, SMGs and short-barell shotguns are for

Please explain us how the fuck tight place works in favour of melee combat, because apparently we are all missing some important piece of data.
It takes to be a fa/tg/uy to assume melee combat is static, with two guys just standing in front of each other and trying to smack each other with their weapon.

make it so that the god of the setting wills balanced guns and swords

>It's a meme when a guy with gun shoots down the guy with a sword from range so large the swordman can't even dream about getting close to engage

You don't.

Unless your combat is abstract, you literally can't balance the fact that one is ranged weapon and other is not.

Damn chinks and their machetes, they're just giving the Japs more swords to butcher civilians with.

Yes, phased out over the course of roughly two centuries as firearms tech improved. Which means at some point(s), the two were competitive if not equal.

>... with the guys with swords being gradually removed from the picture OR brutally gunned down (depending on technological gap between fighting forces)

Actually, with the different weapon and troop types supporting each other, but I guess the concept of mixed forces is too difficult to comprehend for someone of your capabilities.

>with the guys with swords being gradually removed from the picture
So gradually that it took literal centuries, nothing that a normal individual can notice if he lives in the time where the swords are still in use

>
OR brutally gunned down (depending on technological gap between fighting forces)
I wasn't talking about colonial shit.

Besides, the question by OP is how to balance things, while one of those things is clearly superior just by the fact it can engage at range.
So bows are clearly superior to swords and can't be balanced? Different weapons are used in different situations. The gun will not be "unbalanced" until it makes the other weapons obsolete, something that didn't happen until relatively recently after literal centuries.

Yes like weed is illegal or maybe alcohol during prohibition?

The swordsman can wear armor and the shooter can miss.

Yeah, that was my mistake. Sorry.

Or the concept of someone having different weapons for different situations.

Primitive firearms were absolute and utter shit. Their only advantage over bows was that they didn't need as much training to use and you could give a load of them to a bunch of shmucks so that they could use volley fire and hopefully actually hit SOMETHING. There was even a time where good plate armor was more than enough to block bullets. Guns didn't come to the world as we know them

And according to the logic of everyone in this thread, all melee weapons became completely obsolete as soon as the bow was invented

That doesn't sound like balance to me.

>[Britbong wanking over Agincourt intensifies]

bullllllllllll. handgonne weren't accurate by today's standards, but you could shoot a man sized target at 25 paces (125ft) most of the time. In a table top scenario that's not bad.

Also that guy in plate has several broken ribs.

Nice piece of memery, without any actual knowledge about guns

Also, have you seen around any army for last... 150 years still actually using melee weapons? And don't even try with bayonet training, because that's what it is - training.

wouldn't you be able to dismember people with shotguns or high-caliber automatics?

>And according to the logic of everyone in this thread, all melee weapons became completely obsolete as soon as the bow was invented
Nice you know better than me my logic pattern

Especially since I didn't say a word about bows. The logic is really, really simple:
Weapon A can kill you at range. Gun is that weapon
Weapon B can kill you at close. Sword is that weapon.

Bow won't kill you on range, you can endure just absurd amount of arrows. Similar with crossbow bolts. Gun will knock you down, if it's anything else than the most primitive, under-calibred arquebuse... and those still were amazingly effective, when compared with other ranged weapons.

So nice knowing you have no fucking clue how gunshot wound differs from being shot with an arrow.

>I have no idea how much force it takes to hack someone into pieces
Cool story, bruh. How is your collection of top hats doing, along with that cool trenchcoat and stainless steel katana?

I don't see your point when OP was probably talking about elfgames that most likely have an archer class which is shooting the legs off a mite a mile away while doing a triple backflip. Granted, that already means you left all realism behind, but it also means you have no logical reason to give the gunslinger modern firearms and effortlessly mow through everyone else instead of giving them magic marksmanship bullshit

>T-this doesn't count
Yes it does. Guns rendered every other weapon obsolete, fucking deal with it. Even in times of smooth-bore muzzle-loaders they were STILL better than anything else.

use a narrative system that doesn't devote 75% of the rules to combat.

Do it the way Traveller does it. When boarding another ship, you don't want to use weapons that could blow a hole in the wall and depressurize the cabin.

>75%
I wish there were non-narrative games giving so little space to combat.

You can endure an absurd amount of gunshots even with modern firearms. I have no idea where you got the impression that guns, much less ancient ones, were magical instakill weaponry.

>Balancing guns and melee is impossible
>"Here's a large period of history where the two coexisted, plus it's already a time period popular for RPGs."
>lol if swords are so good, why didn't the US Army use broadswords in Iraq lolololol

user, I'm not sure you understand the basic physics behind being hit by 14mm ball of lead. And that's what you are arguing against.

Meanwhile, in case of modern guns, unless it's some really small caliber, you are going to end up disabled from any fucking action. Unlike what Hollywood might taught you, gunshots hurt like a bitch. Getting even scrapped on your arm is still painful enough to knock you down. Then comes actually being shot and again, unless it's .22 or even smaller caliber (yes, they exist) you are going down. Not dead, but down.

But sure, let's use action films as a reference! Because ballistic tests and actual combat performance doesn't exist

And how many bullets does it take to remove a limb ? Let's say, an M9 for baseline? More or less bullets than swings of a machete? I know we could go to /b/ right now and find some proof of the latter anyway.

Coexisting doesn't mean balanced, you fucking moron.
That's literally like saying a HMG is equal to a spear, because they coexist in the same time.

Simple. You can push that low envelope for players. You can fire off a handgonne pretty quickly if you ignore proper safety (just like how we ignore keeping bows strung 24/7 all the time). Lets say for balance make sure a specialist gets 2 shots before an average runner can close from their maximum range (in a strait line). They're not moving if they're firing that quickly. So it becomes an opening tactic that must be abandoned, call it a trade off for being "easier to learn" (because we all know most rpgs ignore that as well.

They have a shorter effective range than your magic elf archer, but do more damage, and who says that they can't be magic elf guns if you're going to bring magic into it? Minor characters are going to be a bit inaccurate so the mooks aren't slaughtering players left and right.

And then you can add in all of the joys of caring for a matchlock, or I guess just a match and a stick if you want to go back even further. Can't fire your gun if that isn't lit, only going to stay lit for an hour or so. Long enough to not be burdensome, but short enough to make it deliberate.

There is one gun user in my fantasy setting
How do I balance them against everything else ? They hate killing or provoking death and believe everyone can have a second chance

Depends on range and what type of bullet you used.
Specify those and I can provide the answer.

If you want disable the limb, a single bullet is enough, but the real question is - why would you. You either use a pistol like M9 to shoot the centre of mass (torso) or knee-cap someone (not even literally, just by shooting a leg, preferably NOT in a thigh, as there is a high risk of damaging one of few arteries and that's usually what you want to avoid when not shooting to kill)

>[Laugh in /k/ommandos]
You are fucking pathetic.

The only games that give guns justice are Twilight 2000 and GURPS (without movie rules)

>I don't understand what "balancing" and "coexisted" means, so I use them interchangeably

In my modern fantasy setting, melee combat is still superior to ranged combat while ranged combat have the superiority being able to pick more targets to fire at.
More powerful guns have setbacks to compensate for their longer range or higher firepower.

Because it is fantasy designed by me.

The original premise was explicitly introducing a hypothetical enemy that requires dismemberment to disable.
You're kind of missing the point completely.

Jesus Christ how desperate for an Internet fight are you that you are puting in so much effort to willfully misinterpret what people are posting?

Last i checked during the heyday of harquebusiers in japan the majority of fights were still sword and spear. Guns for the volleys. And bows for picking people out in crowds, and also for the volleys because you could only buy so many dutch guns.

your hunting monsters. monsters can only be killed (relatively easily) with a special metal vs all the normal metals (iron/steel/whatever). the special metal is rare and difficult to come by and or requires special know how to make. its infinitely easier to make and re-use swords and melee weapons or archaic weapons like arrow heads than mass producing celestial bronze tipped bullets.

look, rick. i get it that you wanted it to make a little sense as to why they would use swords and bows versus guns. but damnit man you could have put a bit more thought into it.

I'm not talking about action movies you retard. On actual reality a gunshot doesn't instantly kill you nor does it knock you down and leave you helpless.

Actually, before you give another obnoxious rant about how guns are invincible, I meant that it doesn't ALWAYS instantly kill you or knock you down and leave you helpless.

Use superior reflexes to deflect bullets.

No idea why are you arguing with gun retards from /k/ that never hunt and only waste thousands of their welfare money on guns but hey, as long as you are having fun, it's all work out in the end.

Everything you said can be realized instantly the moment those faggots ever try to hunt wildfire and the moment that realize all the fps and movies they watched are all bullshit, as stated beforehand by hollywood and game developers always before the actions begins.

Limit the access to guns.
Make the aftermath of using guns really taxing. Sure you can kill 10 dudes in an instant but then every police and goverment agent is after you and even when the shooting is lawful you have to go through hellish paperwork and bureocrazy.
Also make killing people have some real consequences other than just phat xp and loot.

>Fa/tg/uys who never held a gun in their life badmouthing /k/
Ebin

>/k/ is all just armchair gun freaks
>It is us, Veeky Forums, that are the real beacon of knowledge
My fucking sides

Yes, because killing people with sword won't attract the exact same attention from law enforcement...
Jesus, that's the most stupid excuse so far posted in this thread

By playing pike and shot, not pike and M2 Browning.

You seem buttblasted but don't worry, your type look stupid and embarrassing all the time we have this kind of threads.

>Projecting this hard
Be retarded and stay retarded