Co-ed combat

What do you guys think of guns, swords and magic sharing the same battlefield?
I'm working on a tabletop ruleset and could use some inspiration.
So far they all have similar damages based on their weight-class, and melee is limited by range, guns by ammo and availability, and magic by MP.
TL;DR, Guns, Swords and Magic, how balance for low power settings?

Barring people being cyborgs, having magic-enhanced bodies or some other method of not dying on the way to the fight, range beats melee.

As of now, cyborgs can be a thing. I do have a class built around shield use and you can get a ballistics shield that stops bullets. Just not sure how to universally balance stuff. Maybe kinetic force fields?

We have this thread every day. The answer is either to limit your guns to the turn of the 17th century or just straight-up to cook the books.

Yeah, making combatants resilient enough to take a few bullets/fireballs without getting struck down is probably the most important thing to making melee work.

If you're doing low magic right, guns are indistinguishable from magic.

One of the few ways to do that would be having very rare individuals who can do magic, maybe in power suits with swords and shit, and general troops with standard firearms.

If you want modern-ish accurate, powerful and reasonably quick firearms in the setting, you need to come up with some reason why they don't completely dominate, but without rendering guns useless. Also consider why any enhancements you might be able to do to a person can't or shouldn't be used to just carry a bigger gun and more ammo.

A few examples: For some reason most combatants you're likely to run into don't give a shit about impacts from small, fast projectiles. Like a magic shield that only cares about mass of the incoming object.

Fighting typically happens in places where missing a shot is at least as bad as getting hit. Usually used as justification in Sci-Fi; poking holes in your ship's hull is bad.

Whatever magic is in play makes closing distance nearly a foregone conclusion; if someone wants to be in melee, they can make that happen pretty easily. Anything speed/stealth based could potentially do this. Or reliable shields or whatever.

Hurting magical anything requires someone's will behind it, which dissipates the longer it's been since a human has touched the thing. So shooting a ghost is not very effective (at least not with a magazine-based gun), but using a sword, or punching it will. Unless you mean Low Magic = common (for fighting people) but weak, this will still mean regular troops expecting to be fighting other people will be using mostly guns.

>What do you guys think of guns, swords and magic sharing the same battlefield?

Pretty cool, magic can balance both of sword and guns pretty easy with enhancement and protection spell, and if you go with tech, you can go with power armor and some technobabbles too (hyperreactive armor, nanodermis, etc) .

And take Shadowrun for example, they have Kung Fu and gunslinger at the same time.

>the same battlefield?
How about on the same person?

I'm fine with it

I assume you've looked at shadowrun for inspiration?

The way I have it right now, magic is available as a class feature, with a few races getting cantrips. MP pools are low and take a while to regenerate, so more complex magic is relatively rare, being the domain of player characters and named NPCs. The most basic magic is simple blaster stuff, and higher levels unlock field control and more complex spells.
Guns and ammo are expensive or rate in most areas, but one standing military is literally the US army coked up on technology.
I'm trying to go for a worlds collide setting.
I've wanted to pay it for a while, never had a chance. Your picture looks perfect for the setting and style of quest players might go on.

Oh, and players are basically middle class or lower scavenger/adventurer/bounty hunter types

Rock paper scissors

Magic beats guns
Guns beat swords
Swords beat magic

Why? That is an exercise for the reader.

The Old Kingdom books have them share a battlefield, but magic disables technology. Even things like handmade thread on handmade leather, if the jacket was sewn with a sewing machine it'll fall apart.

Dresden Files has guns and magic be standard, but some ancient creatures prefer swords because they're more experienced with them. Skullduggery Pleasant has the same justification.

In The Secret World, it's ALL magic. Some spell foci just look like guns (or are guns).

In my current setting, guns win but are too expensive for regular use. Also reloading is a bitch. ALSO also, a +1 gun is about the same 'loot tier' as a +5 longsword.

I quote Eric Flint's Ring of Fire series at you
"Rate of fire is king"

>magic disables technology

Never ever bring a sword to a gun fight - even in close/meleee range that's a sure way to get yourself killed immediately.

you could have magic interfere with technology, especially more complicated(advanced) stuff. So it's not useful to have an enchanted gun, but a simple sword can be enhanced.
Like magic use emits a sort of wrong probability field (shenanigans aith probability is how it works in the first place). so a gun in the hands of an active mage is likely to jam or missfire often enough to be a liability. Passive magic users also exist, enhancing themselves in strength or resilience rather than throwing around lightning or fireballs. But passive users still emit the probability field that makes a gun or a phone crap its pants so to speak. So they get by with simpler swords or bows.

basically make it so each is an option but they're mutually exclusive so you don't just have wizards destroying everything with oversized magic guns.

I prefer effects based systems where I don't have to give a fuck.

>if the jacket was sewn with a sewing machine it'll fall apart
The guy who wrote that is a complete cretin, disregard everything he has ever done.

OP, what you want to do is think of a reason someone in your setting might use a sword over a gun. Or a gun over magic.

Agreed, usually. I definitely wouldn't use it as a 'balancing' system for an RPG. Fuck Shadowrun.

It's essentially a side-effect of extra-planar travel. Magic bleeds over the borders for about 60 miles south. Anything not hand-made doesn't survive the transition.

It depends. People can move fucking fast, and shooting accurately is hard. Modern firearms have shit like fire-rate to compensate, but plate armour was partially designed to counteract firearms in their early days.

sounds like pretty boring magic desu. I don't know if magic has ever been more boring without someone actively trying to do so.

my setting so far:
-some combatants have a "spirit" that protects the user with a rechargable forcefield
-The meelee attacks of another spirit user or a magical weapon can harm a spirit-forcefield far easier than a bullet or arrow
-for very important occasions, it is possible to use a "ghostbuster"-bullet that can be both used to kill ghosts or be able to punch through a spirit (those are extremely expensive and may not even make any difference if you only score a light hit)

If magic is a big thing people might have invented light/heat/electric based ranged weaponry before they discovered gunpowder and solid projectiles. As such, surviving the setting's "guns" would focus on an armour's ability to disperse or insulate against thrown energy, rather than resisting and dispersing force.

It'd be hilarious if they then discovered gunpowder *after* warfare became heavily built up around energy weapons, because then solid slugs would screw up armies who came dressed to fight Emperor Tiji and his Chi-carbines.

It is perfectly fine so long as you can give even a vaguely bullshit reason for it and your players aren't super autists who can't suspend disbelief long enough to actually play a game

Then again I am a fan of kitchen sink and supers games as well as old school "fantasy" that had robots and rayguns next to monsters and magic

A thing I was thinking of the other night: The way you can fix that is have ranged have to roll to hit and melee be guranteed to hit and just rolling damage dice - the game becomes much more about ranged weapon users keeping distance so they can survive if they miss while melee attackers are nibbling away at their ankles?

Working on a science-fantasy setting and RPG right now which does this, here's what I got.

The most common kind of magic takes to long to rely on. It takes time to figure out the local latent "magic"'s well enough to alter it for an effect, and while you are focusing on that someone with a sword or gun is just going to kill you. If I fight drags on more than a couple rounds though, the side with the better mage is quickly going to start dominating as they begin bending reality to shape the battle in their favor. So having a solid mage is very important and protecting/targeting them is a core part of tactics.

Shielding technology works by ramping the vacuum state of a small point in space near you for an instant, as altering vacuum state is extremely energy demanding. This, paired with appropriate sensor technology, detects incoming dangers and generates a point to intercept the danger, draining it of momentum until it isn't dangerous. This can be countered by having the danger be constantly propelled rather than a once propelled projectile, or having the danger have high inertial mass. Melee weapons do both of these very well, so while you can deflect a sword with your shield, it is far more energy inefficient than deflecting a bullet. Thus, swordsmen are there to quickly kill crucial targets (like mages) and quickly deplete the shielding of other targets so the gunmen can gun them down (if they are wearing any body armor at all, or have any skill in melee, guns will kill them far quicker than swords once the shielding is down. Brave, experienced warriors may even choose to not use their shielding against melee attacks for this very reason)

Guns are good for all the obvious reasons. A fight can't drag on too long, because eventually people are going to run out of shielding and then its just a matter of seconds before they start dying very quickly.

Kinetic shields. Small, wearable device that creates a hard electromagnetic barrier when anything past a certain speed tries to penetrate its area of influence. The higher the quality, the larger caliber/velocity threshold.

This makes melee more viable just by having the natural course of technology make guns a little less efficient.

There is already setting that does relatively high tech co-existing with magic. And it does it quiet well. It wouldn't be hard to integrate magic into this.