Why are guns in fantasy settings such a contentious issue...

>indicate there's still demand.
as tools though right?

I doubt anyone is running around with sabers

RoI and the Iron Lord stuff was so much more interesting than all of Destiny's other bullshit

great sets of gear too

It always bothers me that people believe that blades are no longer effective simply because guns exist.

I mean, you're not going to go charging into a group of dudes from a distant with sword drawn unless you're protected by magic but a knife didn't stop being able to kill people just because guns exist.

>It seems like they can only ever be unstoppable weapons that kill everything ever or made to be absolutely useless to a point a dagger is mechanically a better option?
That's how guns in real life work. Do you see anyone using a sword nowadays? Even with what references, the swords and spears people were given were SIDEARMS to the gun when they shared mass deployment status, which doesn't work out for anyone that doesn't want to use a gun as their primary weapon.

>I understand a sword is a symbolic sort of weapon that has many a legend attached to it by why not a gun?
Guns are a mass-produced weapon made for mass-produced soldiers. It's a weapon with a very low skill floor, pretty much any idiot can become proficient in a gun with barely any training and do better than someone who spent years mastering a sword. On top of that, gun models are very mass manufactured, printed out by companies by the truckload, unlike the swords of old which were the custom jobs of skilled blacksmiths. Guns just aren't conductive to being legendary weapons, nor are they conductive to making legendary individuals.

Nobody uses swords. Knives are more for utility than anything else.

>Guns are a mass-produced weapon made for mass-produced soldiers. It's a weapon with a very low skill floor, pretty much any idiot can become proficient in a gun with barely any training and do better than someone who spent years mastering a sword. On top of that, gun models are very mass manufactured, printed out by companies by the truckload, unlike the swords of old which were the custom jobs of skilled blacksmiths. Guns just aren't conductive to being legendary weapons, nor are they conductive to making legendary individuals

>implying I can't have a master crafted gun custom made for me

At a distance one pistol may look like any other but I certainly defy the idea that it can't have some kind of legendary identity attached to it. The gun that shot kennedy certainly has a legacy behind it. Simply because people don't know it's proper name people generally tend to know what you're talking about when you talk about it.

Yes, and you can still kill with them and there may be occasions where you have need of it if you don't have your other weapons on hand.

Nothing special went into the make that shot Kennedy. It was just another mass produced gun, and the shooter certainly wasn't someone distinguished. Legendary weapons are as much about their make as they are who used them, that's why people bandy around names like Masamune and shit for otherwise ordinary katanas.

So? You're playing a game here. The guy who wants to use a sword, wants to use his sword as his main weapon. He doesn't want to be told he has to use a gun and maybe, just maybe, he can knife somebody once or twice during the campaign.

>the swords and spears people were given were SIDEARMS to the gun when they shared mass deployment status
while this is true, guns were not not the primary weapon of soldiers for a few hundred years after their introduction.

An army would have specialist gunner units to support the rest of their army. It wasn't entirely due to cost, since well equipped pikemen would also cost a lot, but rather due to what was observed to be most effective at the time.

Early firearms were plenty lethal, but they had extra logistical concerns and were not reliable except with volley firing. Early firing mechanisms also sucked a lot.

Eventually melee weapons did shift to sidearms, and pikes started going away. Swords were pretty much always sidearms to begin with, which is a big reason why people love them so much.

Even the percussion weapons, lever action, and revolver didn't fully displace the saber.

But the machine gun sure did.

>guns were not not the primary weapon of soldiers for a few hundred years after their introduction.
Which plays into OP's 'absolutely pointless' line. Guns and swords only overlapped each other as useable weapons during a period when guns weren't all that good.

In addition to this, it brings up another argument, the fact that introducing guns is also introducing the death of fantasy. It's the death of the sword, the knight, the nobility, of medieval culture and chivalry, maybe even magic, of most of the separation from the fantasy and reality that makes it a desirable place to go to. As soon as guns show up, you know all of it is doomed eventually.

Don't think it ever really occurred to me until now how much Destiny treats multiple guns akin to legendary weapons.

I don't know if I would go that far. I haven't done the raid yet, but I think from Rise of Iron the only really interesting things have been the Iron Lords themselves and the hinting by Efrideet that there is a community of pacifist Guardians out there. Both House of Wolves and the Taken King were just as interesting, if not more so, for what they revealed about the Awoken, the Fallen, the Hive, the Darkness, and the Traveler.

you could always roll up some weaboo fighting magic a la final fantasy where guns have range but don't deal as much damage as melee

Because of how 'real' guns are to us, it's extremely hard to justify the idea that guns wouldn't function against bodies like they do in real life.

you are already suspending your disbelief about a man being capable of farting lightning,
in shadowrun you can have mages and guns and it works nicely

Honestly, I find the fantasy millieu without them to be very odd, like they take a bunch of stuff from the 15-16c but then have a gun-shaped hole.

On the other hand, if you have people who are obsessive about them, and i've seen this, I can see their exclusion making sense. Typically I treat them as a part of it like anything else. I like ages of transition, where different cultures, different styles interact.

>this dude does not recognise the myth of the gun
>this guy does not acknowledge the many legendary spears and knives

If there is no legendary guns, why is AK-47 or Peacemaker or a plain shotgun being put everywhere?
It's not like Gram is an actual sword, or anyone gives a damn what type of a blade Liechtenauer favored and whether he gave it a name.
If you want to look at modern "legends", you need to consume mass-culture.

Not all things are as easy to suspend your disbelief about.

Because it's fantasy. Not reality. Their picture of the late middle ages/early Renaissance is as fake as the dragons that populate it. It's more of an ideal. Lacking guns is part of it, no more death knell to the fantasy setting or the classes in it.

AK-47 is a model. It's no more legendary than a longsword is. It's not a legendary weapon at all.

>In addition to this, it brings up another argument, the fact that introducing guns is also introducing the death of fantasy.
guns were not useless when they were introduced. They were unreliable except in volleys, but they had range and they were deadly against anyone not wearing lots of armor.

The armored knight came about in large part BECAUSE of guns. It took hundreds of years for guns to evolve to where they were too good for that.

The historical era we think of when we think of armored knights, swords, and pikes literally had those people fighting along side people with guns, and lasted for well over a hundred years

>AK-47 is a model. It's no more legendary than a longsword is. It's not a legendary weapon at all.
Swords that actually saw combat tended to get beaten up or broken quite a lot which makes the idea of a "legendary" weapon a little silly to begin with when you think about it.

See You also ignored the part of my post talking about it as an eventuality. Guns being there at all means that eventually they'll invent modern guns, and all those melee weapons will completely die, as will your bows and maybe even your magic depending on how that works. They just roll over and destroy any other kind of combat as they advance in technology.

nothing lasts forever user

that's just a given

Maybe not, but putting the death and the murder weapon right in front of your face lends an air of depression to the setting. Being in a dying age isn't a happy thing.

There are, I think, development patterns other than 'nothing changes' and 'everything goes just like and as fast as history'. I mean, if a fantasy world spends thousands of years in the medieval period, there's no reason it couldn't spend all those years in the 17th century or 16th century.

Living at all is acknowledging that you will eventually grow old and die.

You've been depressed from a young age, I take it? That's not how normal people think of their lives.

It's an inevitability. You need to invent really stupid godly contrivances to keep guns from overtaking everything else, and that just ruins your immersion/suspension of disbelief more.

I think that is a lot of the problem
People today "know" that 9.5 times out of 10 if you shoot somebody they are either dead or dying
That doesn't work in a role playing game where you need to abstract out combat even with the idea that HP isn't meat points
People expect something to die when it is shot period

So guns either end up doing so much damage that combat devolves into rocket tag or they are made to do average damage like any other weapon and therefor appear too weak
The only way guns work in an RPG is in a hyper lethal game where a character is expected to die every session or in a game where HP is explicitly meat points and your character can survive because he is just that damn tough

And all that is just the mechanics you also have what said the idea that the gun signals the end of fantasy and the road to modernization, it takes people out of the game they can no longer suspend disbelief

But how does he expect to close that gap if everyone is firing guns at him?

>But how does he expect to close that gap if everyone is firing guns at him?
That's exactly the point. Once you have guns anywhere near a modern level of technology, EVERYONE has to have guns or they're dead. You can't do anything else.

A really fucking good initiative roll.

Chivalric knight-errant becomes a vigilante outlaw becomes a cape.
All of those easily fit in fantasy.

And what is a longsword? It isn't even a model, or a type of a sword, it's a label for a bunch of them. Not a lot of legends or epics even describe how the sword looks, because the idea of The Sword is more important than its actual characteristics.
Much like with AK - even though the latter models saw much more action, the look of 47th has become iconic, and its' idea of a cheap, crazy-dependable, powerful and ubiquitous weapon has long eclipsed any actual characteristics it has.

Honestly you have to invent stupid godly contrivances to have nothing change and have guns never be invented. It kinda bothers me just as much to see weapons very deliberately made for the shot and pike era used when there aren't any guns.

>Guns are a mass-produced weapon made for mass-produced soldiers. It's a weapon with a very low skill floor, pretty much any idiot can become proficient in a gun with barely any training and do better than someone who spent years mastering a sword. On top of that, gun models are very mass manufactured, printed out by companies by the truckload, unlike the swords of old which were the custom jobs of skilled blacksmiths. Guns just aren't conductive to being legendary weapons, nor are they conductive to making legendary individuals.

I feel that you didn't consume much cowboy fiction as a youngster. The gun has a certain mythical power in the consciousness of many Americans as a symbol of personal liberty. The six-gun, and repeater rifle are legendary in part because anybody could and did use them. Guns have power, and confer that power to anybody. I don't think that's the only mythical context you could build for firearms in fantasy, but to dismiss guns out of hand because they aren't likely to be like Gram or Excalibur.

youtube.com/watch?v=vbThC9Dt1BQ

youtube.com/watch?v=1cvMy5tATjM

youtube.com/watch?v=g6tR78d0cmA

40K must drive you nuts.

Because the modern audience has the perception that guns are basically death rays, so any stats for a gun that aren't unstoppable appear useless.

Period accurate firearms would effectively be crossbows, more or less.

From there, it's a matter of essentially not fitting the genre, tone, or player expectations. Heroic fantasy games don't want to be brought down by an overpowered weapon that's easy to use, so guns there are often weak to match the fact that you could train a handful of serfs into a firing squad with ease. More gritty fantasy games can handle lethal firearms, but those same games often have the same results from an arrow or an axe, which simply makes them more redundant.

I do think it really just boils down to the collective thought that guns can kill people very well, and players not really wanting that in the game. It also might be a bit of backlash against occasional 'That Guys' who try to have their characters invent guns in order to instakill everything.

Pretty much.

Cowboy adventures and capes don't really fit into the same kind of fantasy setting. They're completely different kinds of fantasy, with different themes and mechanics.

And your example of an AK STILL focuses on a model. Not a PARTICULAR AK, with special powers or status. Not a legendary weapon.

Mankind went tens of thousands of years without moving beyond the stone age. It's more likely than guns NOT advancing in technology for them to never be invented.

And assuming he doesn't, his character is useless. It's not even a "depends on the setting" type of deal. It's a "if guns exist, you play a character with a gun". Special snowflake katanasamuraimen have no place in a world of bullets.

40k is scifi. Scifi usually justifies melee with stupid advancements in melee (muh lightsabers) or with extremely advanced armor technology that laughs off bullets without being too heavy.

I've said before in similar threads, that carbon nanotube based armor and weaponry might be able to bring back some limited melee use in combat, because for a while it might be too expensive to put a countermeasure in bullet form.

The wild west would like a word with you.

Big iron, big iron

>I understand a sword is a symbolic sort of weapon that has many a legend attached to it by why not a gun?
Did you ever wonder why, in your modern action flick, your archetypal action hero uses a handgun, while all the villains use machine guns? That's a hangover of the symbolism of the sword - the nobleman with a sword raised in one hand, taking on foes encumbered with heavy equipment, yet emerging victorious.
>A pistol with a literal story etched onto the grip.
With that in mind, many hand-pistols crafted in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries did have fancy craftsmanship - especially if they were designed for a specific purpose (dueling) or for a specific person.

But as I said, they're not legendary weapons for legendary people. The common man weapon is an entirely different thing, and cowboy fiction is a separate genre from fantasy.

user you also have to take into consideration that modern guns have been in existence for less time than other weapons

>Mankind went tens of thousands of years without moving beyond the stone age
Says you

Funny you brought up destiny, if you want an answer there it is I guess or just in vidyagames in general, just a hefty dose of well applied sci-fi logic as to why weapons which should be roughly functionally identical can do such drastically different damage to their targets, and how swords can manage to compete. Otherwise you could just go balls to the wall like any JRPG and just kind of accept that arguably the effectiveness of all the weapons isn't actually tied to their plausibility so much as stats assigned to them that everybody in the game universe can't see but can observe as long as they don't question the logic behind their odd intuition for figuring out how much better one giant sword is to another.

That doesn't change their innate status as a weapon anyone can become proficient in with minimum effort, or how they work in people's minds.

>With that in mind, many hand-pistols crafted in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries did have fancy craftsmanship - especially if they were designed for a specific purpose (dueling) or for a specific person.
in those days it was pretty common to have fancy craftsmanship on all kinds of stuff

youtube.com/watch?v=beOgmCxeh7A

That's because smiths didn't typically number their longswords. There's no Longsword #5, and longswords haven't been used in ages, so the common person wouldn't even know if there was.

For another comparison though, consider the Gladius. 2000 years old, still a sword that conquered the world.

Still, neither it nor the AK really fit with what people are talking about with 'legendary' weapons here. They're famous, to be certain, but legendary here refers to something that's unique. It has a name, a story, a life unto itself. It isn't something hammered out en masse.

Because it invites armyfags that want to kill all the wizards and dragons with automatic and nuclear weapons.

In terms of world-building and actual history, the availability of firearms renders almost every other weapon and armour option obsolete, meaning that the setting automatically graduates from the Renaissance to the early-modern era. Not only that, but a man no longer needs years of training to reliably be able to kill on the battlefield, and with thousands of armed commoners running around, kingdoms become nation states, chivalric noble orders become standing armies, governments are overthrown in popular revolutions, terrorists get access to bombs and warfare takes on a whole new level of lethality.

Either the guns are plausible analogs to their real-world counterparts and completely revolutionise any vaguely traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting, or they are nerfed in some important fictional way to prevent them from being mass-produced and handed out to peasants.

Nanomachines

Or a very good reactive armor
Not everyones are godlike Simo Hayha level of marksmens m8.

This and also everyone wants it to be hyper accurate, long range instant death sticks they can kite with or snipe, which never works well in any game system I have played.

IT's kinda funny how this shit gets talked about with guns but none of the other fantasy conceits that would probably have an even greater effect on society.

Like religion being literally obviously true with gods who actually do things.

I think one of the factors about a firearm is the day to day stuff. How much of a burden is it just to carry? How easily is ammunition made or bought? How reliable is the gun and how vulnerable is it to rain, dirt, heat & cold? Is it useful for hunting? Is it useful as a primary weapon in a fighting situation or is it more of a one-and-done tool?

During WW1 all the way through 1918 and later, cavalry soldiers on all sides had a rifle/carbine, pistol, and sabre. After the carbine, the secondary weapon was still the sabre, and the pistol in many cases was really only there because etiquette demanded that an officer own a pistol. Bayonets on riflemen were extremely long, especially in the start of the war because there was this conception that melee fighting would be done on a dueling basis of fencing with rifles. There were requirements to some armories for extremely long-barreled rifles so that soldiers could fire standing/kneeling in ranks. So even during the dawn of industrial warfare just shy of 100 years ago when you had machine guns, heavy artillery, aircraft and mechanized fighting vehicles, swords were still an issued weapon of war.

I mean they were next to useless most of the time, but they were there. WW1 is a fascinatingly grim case study on outdated tactics & thinking clashing with modern tools of war.

Guns in fantasy settings should be fairly powerful 'ancient artifacts' or loot from some faction you can't be a part of.

The limit should be the ammo. Its boring to have a six time use instagib machine, though, so have them be fueled by something interesting.
>Body fat (lose n kg / use)
>Blood of x, user or dragon
>Curses, but you better hit, and better not fumble

Just tell them its not working with someones with hypereactive lamelar scale/armor, strong protection spell, and can fuck up your instawin meme weapons out of their trajectory with magic.

Want proof? Ask Jedi

>swords were still an issued weapon of war.
But they were both useless, and secondary weapons. People still mainly used their guns.

There are 2 guns I'd be stoked to get my hands on. pic related for one

Change it so certain armors are effectively high-level DR against a certain type of damage type (slashing/piercing/bludgeoning, sonic, force, etc).

Another gun that became legendary

An actually valid solution. But then you have people complain that the magic sword outdoes their boomstick. Then the meme weapon gets the short end of the stick and butthurt gunheads r sad wunce moore

Suspend your disbelief.

Of course, but as a cavalryman you were trained to use your rifle, and then reach not for your pistol, but for your sabre.

That reminds me of AoD where with high enough Crafting skill you can make yourself a gun and shoot all those roman fucks

Later you can also get some sort of power armor for the complete experience

>Like religion being literally obviously true with gods who actually do things.

That wouldn't change as much as fa/tg/uys often like to imagine it would, given that for most of history the vast majority of real people have believed this to be the case in our own world.

What difference does it make to a mortal if the god they believe in has shown his face in public or not? All the irritating atheists would suddenly change their tune, but that's about it.

I think we're both ignoring the elephant in the room that is literal, physical magical powers to warp reality being available to regular people. THAT would fuck stuff up.

The model is. Not the weapon itself. What's its name? What's it been used for? Who made it?

I dunno, I've seen it pulled off. Fantastical 1700s shit, like Pirates of the Carribbean or the better bits of 7th Sea sell the idea that you can have the fantastical alongside firearms. The age of exploration is rife with it, as you plunge into the last unknown lands with pistol and cutlass, or fight through the fields of !Europe, where old spirits still linger in the cospses and forests. I mean, just look at Dracula. That's a book all about the mystical, untamed wilds on the edge of civilization, and it's set in the late 1800s.

And then there's also the good old Weird West stuff like Deadlands.

What i have for any balance in my 5e game is that pistols and muskets all have the loading property but do 3d4 and 4d4 respectively. While the pistol is vastly superior to the hand crossbow, the max cap for damage is only slightly better on the musket, but the lower end makes them average a bit better than crossbows. Is a musket better than a character with a longbow and multiple attacks, no. Is it better for a character that only has one, sure.

As for mass production, firearms for the most part were not mass produced till the 19th(?) century and even then were more expensive STILL. So firearms are artisan weaponry. So, not everyone can still have them.

Legendary firearms don't exist, but I have allowed rifling, that equates to a +1 bonus on the firearm, and other modifications might as well make them magical.

>Cowboy adventures and capes don't really fit into the same kind of fantasy setting. They're completely different kinds of fantasy, with different themes and mechanics.

Cowboy adventures function pretty much in the same way as knight-errants - do you know how spaghetti westerns are linked to samurai movies? A fistful of dollars is pretty much Yojimbo, for one.
And capeshit is often freely interchangable with demigods fumbling about, or, if it's about the "normals", with the same knights.

Really, now? AK, as a whole, has special powers of functioning everywhere, after taking almost any beating, and piercing even the steel rails. It has a special status of a weapon of the terrorists and the oppressed.
What is PARTICULAR abot Gram? It's a blinged-out sword that Sigurd used to kill a dragon. No special powers, just a pretty custom look and a bit of history.
What is PARTICULAR about Kladenets, a legendary sword, on the other hand? Absolutely nothing. It has no particular look, no details to describe it as anything but "a hidden sword". Even it's supposed sharpness can be attributed to the ungodly strength of it's users.

That kind of stuff isn't the same as fantasy, user. It's broken and dying and isolated there, something retreating before the modern world

I know that Juan or Tex travels to a mundane town and shoots some mundane bandits with his mundane gun. I'm not seeing where the fantasy enters into it.

You keep conflating individual weapons with entire models in such a way that I think you're being stupid on purpose.

Simple. Your setting has some manner of widely-used magic spell makes it inherently harder to deal lethal blows, forcing gunpowder weapons into a development pattern where singular projectiles either have to be very large or come with a very rapid rate of fire to do the work that an enchanted blade could.

Basically, develop setting rules appropriate for a fantasy tale such that guns can have utility, but still leave breathing room for non-gunpowder weapons.

This is what I meant with contrived plot devices that ruin your suspension of disbelief and immersion.

>You stubbornly dare to disagree with me, therefore you're being dumb on purpose.
Eh, at least I've somewhat collected my thoughts on the matter.

Just a remark on my way out: unmistakably magical powers weren't a feature of legendary swords per se, only those of them that were supposed to be "purity tests" for their wielders, and represented heavenly mandate to rule or to judge.

Sword worship by retards.

It's more that you keep insisting AK-47s as a monolith vs. individual swords like Gram. It's so patently obvious the difference.

Only if you're only looking at Christian myths and fantasy.

Then everyone was just an average joe of no distinguishment, and this isn't conductive for a game about individual heroes.

Man this guy must have been pretty butthurt in one of those katana cuts through anything threads to post shit like this.

Okay, what about urban fantasy?

>This is what I meant with contrived plot devices that ruin your suspension of disbelief and immersion.

Keep in mind there's decent odds you're playing a game in a setting with wizards, resurrection spells, and giant firebreathing lizards that fly in spite of impossible anatomical design.

There's a lot of room to ignore how reality works in fantasy settings while still being immersive.

Completely different focus and style from traditional fantasy. More like cyberpunk than anything frankly.

But such an obvious and specific and widespread spell targeting guns alone completely takes you out of the setting.

Yeah. It's almost like you shouldn't even bother with something like that and just suspend your disbelief to the point where the two weapon types can coexist for the sake of the game without some kind of contrivance.

That's not how people work, user.

I want to see a setting based on this.

cavalry with sabers was useful right up until mass machineguns were made.

>But such an obvious and specific and widespread spell targeting guns alone completely takes you out of the setting.

The specific formulation of said magic was for a setting where it was harder to deal lethal blows in general. Basically, how any setting that operates with a non-realistic way of handling injuries where getting hurt doesn't instantly kick off a death spiral can easily be adapted such that whatever wonkery enables "RPG injuries" locally also nerfs guns.

I mean, if you want to be a stickler about it, the way that most settings in general handle damage from getting slashed with a sword is unrealistic since you aren't getting forced into days and weeks of bedrest afterwards.

what triggers me about this is the christian dark ages bit, christian monks and the papacy were the largest patrons of the sciences for hundreds of years, and the so called dark ages were full of technological advancement, such as crop rotation.

Cavalry with sabers were useless from the moment the dragoon was invented.

dragoons were cavalry that carried sabers! at first they were infantry that rode horses, but they became cavalry that was just as likely to use their carbine as they were to charge with their sabers!

Yes, I know they had sabers. The point is that the sabers were just irrelevant sidearms to the gun. Everyone had to use a gun or fuck them. That's not conductive to someone who wants to be some sword wielding melee fighter.

Then remember well user, once you see /k/uk player, you'll kick him outright. They're enemy of fun, imagination and reason.