Why are so many fantasy fans afraid of guns?

Why are so many fantasy fans afraid of guns?

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Hard to meaningfully balance.

Guns directly led to decline of such thing as knighthood and monarchies. Can't have fantasy without that.
>inb4 you're unimaginative faggot
I don't care what you call fantasy. When I say fantasy, I mean mighty knights and wise kings.

Tough to balance meaningfully.

Knights were killed by polearms, not by guns.

>Monarchies
Powerful monarchies lived centuries after the age of guns began. Quasi-monarchies still exist today. WW1 killed most of the world's big monarchies.

>So, we're running a typical medieval swords and sorcery epic heroic fantasy game and-
>CAN I HAZ A GUN!?!

>player throws huge fit about wanting a gun
>decide to give him a shitty musket
>But now enemies will have guns too
>wanders into bandit camp like he owns the joint
>gets brained by jittery bandit
>bitches endlessly about dying

im going to be running a pirate campaign soon and enemies are just as likely to have a gun as the players and this is what im afraid a player will do

Pretty much a matter of what and were hinting at.

A player will beg for a gun assuming he'll get something that works like a modern one and he'll be mowing down orcs like it's an action movie. He'll complain if you make guns as deadly as crossbows, and he'll complain if enemies also get to use the super deadly guns to kill him.

You can make an interesting fantasy setting and involve guns, but modern perceptions of them means giving players a history lesson, and I would just as soon not bother.

As you can see from the thread responses, fanasy nerds are mostly retarded when it comes to understanding firearms functioning and capabilities.

RL wasn't.
But most splatbooks is so badly designed that default ranged party could finally fight flying beasts.

>wanders into bandit camp like he owns the joint
Why wouldn't he get his head bashed in, peppered with arrows or fireballed in the fantasy equivalent?

>Why are so many fantasy fans afraid of guns?
Why is anybody afraid of guns? They can hurt you... like, a lot.

That's also true of swords and axes, but those are acceptable, so that's not the reason.

I don't want to get shot

Fantasy is often medieval Europe based.

>be american

Fake as hell and stupid
Probably fake
Fake
Real and hilarious
Real and hilarious
Fake
Real and hilarious

Because they weren't in Lord of the Rings.

Really.

They can pierce armor very well and you basically end up having a spear that can also shoot superior versions of arrows 3 times a minute.

>implying

Because they don't like the thought of spending every other turn reloading their musket instead of doing something interesting.

...

>implying

If you get to the revolver I'd say you're well past the point of generic fantasy and entering the world of magitek, or at the very least steampunk with wizards in it

>Muskets, Blunderbuss, Powder Pistols

Because >Sidewinders, Shotguns, Revolvers, Wild West shit in general

Sign me the fuck up!

They don't have to do it with heavy crossbows though.

I know nothing about gun ranges, reloading, 'damage caused', ammo, costs, time, construction, etc.
Nothing.
It's also why I don't run modern games.

I personally don't see it that cut and dried, but I concede I've got a later sense of "generic fantasy" than others. In that case,

>implying

By the time guns are good enough to surpass bows as an elite ranged character's primary weapon, they've surpassed melee weapons as well.

It's sort of hard to have medieval fantasy at that point.

Renaissance fantasy, on the other hand.

You likely know nothing about swords and bows and genuine historical warfare as well. I found it very easy to adapt to not knowing one more thing.

jittery bandit had a flintlock i assume, so bang, pop goes the pc's head

so can a spoon, or a bar of butter in a sock

>I know nothing about gun ranges, reloading, 'damage caused', ammo, costs, time, construction, etc.
You know slightly less than /k/, don't worry.

>a bar of butter in a sock
No bruises. The perfect weapon.

Pretty much true. I only know about axes and trees, but I guess that ain't much help.

that man is about to lose a lung, a heart and probably an arm. there's a reason revolver rifles never caught on.

In the setting I am running now there is a kingdom where guns are real and they led to a Revolution since before that you had to be a great warrior and have at least some magical capabilities/objects to kill a somewhat skilled wizard. A huge wizard purge happens and now everyone uses guns to fight magical people.

This.
It can be difficult to adjust for a weapon that essential ignores armor, and was mass produced. It's one thing to have a single sword, arrow, axe, etc. that ignores armor due to some inherent magic property, is quite another when every magic sword does it, its the same with guns, how do you meaningfully balance something like that?

If it forms a gas seal as he pulls the trigger like the Nagant, then he'd be fine. And the main problem with the revolving rifles, chain fires, was solved by the adoption of metal cartridges. But by that point, lever actions had already made the scene so there wasn't any interest in the revolving rifle anymore.

People can't accept gun damage being abstracted
A sword hitting you does 1d8+str in game but would horibly maim or kill you in real life, you accept the abstraction of damage because it lends itself to a game. People can't do that with guns because they know from all the movies and tv they've seen that when you shoot someone if kills them instantly unless you are the hero in which case it's only a flesh wound.

The only time guns worked for me in a fantasy game was when I used Mutants&Masterminds to run Green Ronins Freeport setting and the only reason they worked there is because the group wasn't treating it like a fantasy game they were treating it like a street level supers game in a fantasy setting

My setting has them, but they're brand new, and most of them don't really work properly yet. When I say new, I mean the first few didn't show up until we'd played in this setting for several months, and one of the players characters was an inventor who had made a few firearm designs. There's also a recurring villain/mercenary guy who has been a sellsword his whole life, and has recently taken to firearms. He's an old man now, and captain of a sellsword company who uses the most advanced ones we've seen in the setting yet, and has a very Revolver Ocelot feel to him.

This is another issue, once "geek the mage first" becomes relevant advice outside of Shadowrun wizards are in for a much harder time of things as everyone will try and shoot them first before the fireballs start landing
Of course there is an argument to be made this is only right and fair as it lets martial classes get some degree of catharsis
Mass manufacture of firearms is actually a relatively modern invention, before then guns were quite expensive and where mostly used in support of melee troops rather than outright replacing them
That and "essentially ignores armour" isn't strictly true either, there was a period where 'bulletproof' armour was capable of being built. The problem was guns were only getting more powerful as gunpowder was refined and the guns themselves built better, whereas armour design simply couldn't put enough metal between the wearer and the bullet.
I think that's another issue in and of itself, the gun represents a huge advancement and shift in a setting, and your average fantasy RPG is pretty heavy on medieval stasis

I mean it depends on how modern the firearm is but guns raise the possibility of just getting shot out of nowhere.

Guns cut into the notion of heroic fantasy. They are equalizers on the battlefield, making common soldiers dangerous. Or, they're kinda shitty and only worth using in armies, which gives them little use in your campaign. So it's easy to toss them aside as a theme you don't want.

I allow guns in D&D though. They hit a little harder than crossbows, and can pop off (expensive) magical shells, but they lack range and are sensitive to moisture and misfire.

Holy shit is this what? The fourth thread in a row about guns in fantasy? Don't you guys EVER have enough?
Look, I'm sorry your GM is not letting you play a gunslinger in his bronze age setting, but please stop pestering the rest of the world with your issues. Some settings have guns. Others do not. Period.

I've never really understood the aversion to at least simple guns when crossbows are so widely accepted.

When it comes to game rules an early firearm isn't going to be all that different from a decently powered crossbow.

That seems more like a general issue with systems where you don't roll for what location you hit.

A dagger to the face is probably going to fuck you up more than a bullet to the foot even if both holes in you are the same size.

And what was WW1 fought with? GUNS! So there you have it.

Because most RPGs are balanced around swords, spells, etc. Making guns into the game is an extremely difficult thing to do because you'd have to rework most everything to make the guns balanced.

The only RPG I know to make guns work is the WH40K RPGs by Fantasy Flight Games, and they built their RPGs from the ground up to have guns in them.

And it should be noted that everything can and will one-shot a guy without armor in WH40K RPGs. Two shot if you actually have armor.

Mh, carapace armor is pretty good at making a person immune to lasguns and autoweapons not using AP rounds.

This, desu. Most people jump from "No accuracy at all" straight to "Musket" and like assume that all guns pierce armor.

The main attraction of the arquebus is that it's a simple, cheap design that's just as easy to train some shmuck to use as a crossbow and does nearly the same amount of damage. The thing is the PC's presumably already have loads of training - So they probably would want to use longbows since they're more powerful and accurate. They do make a decent NPC weapon though, and if a melee specialist PC wants to steal one it's not too much of a loss.

I usually try to put my homebrews circa 1530-1560's tech, so arquebusses are uncommon off the battlefield but everyone has an idea of what they are. This is also about the time full plate became popular, IIRC.

So do bows, though. In fact, with a bow there's no smoke, so it's better to get ambushed by people with guns because then you know where they are!

By the time you get carapace armor in dark heresy, meltaguns become a thing. Seriously, I forgot the last time we hit a combat and no one got in the criticals.

But there's literally an arrow pointing to the direction of the bowman.

It's pointing the wrong way though.

>implying the target will stand perfectly still once hit.

I hate guns in fantasy settings because the moment they're introduced it means that setting is "modernized" and the GM is going to start introducing robots, helicopters, assault rifles, science laboratories with computers, and a bunch of highly organized governments that are too fucking well put together for adventuring parties to be a thing which grants the looming unspoken implication that the party is a group of retarded suicidal manbabies who don't know what they're doing instead of a group of heroes.

Just leave out guns and use golems, wyverns, wands, wizard studies with crystal balls, and have the world be a collection of fiefdoms covered in goblins and zombies. I would say it's not hard but running a setting like that apparently takes a lot of self-restraint going by how many games I've played in that started with flintlock pistols and turned into Mass Effect by the end.

A musket is way quicker to load than a heavy crossbow

Because Gunpowder rewrote the rules of warfare in a way that hasn't been surpassed since. However, there is a new wave of gunpowder fantasy such as the Powder Mage Trilogy, which deserves an HBO series (Jeremy Irons as Tamas)

literally the only shit I introduce ahead of time when I do guns is, sometimes, rarely, airships.

In general though I just want to have this
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>bar of butter in a sock
if it was frozen I can believe it
also a "bar" of butter, seriously?

Judging from the circle jerk going on in this thread, the reason seems to be a fundamental lack of any kind of understanding of the history of firearms, how early firearms functioned, and just medieval warfare in general.

What are some games where guns are balanced?

>it's extremely difficult to balance this one type of ranged weapon where all the damage numbers are completely arbitrary
>bow and arrow though is a-ok
do you even play /tg? what kind of fucking retard thinks that it's difficult to balance one barely-realistic weapon against another when you have total control over their stats?

No, because of ballistics. And the target moving. And the wind. Plus, you're being shot at while you try to do the math in your head, which is hard because you made the questionable class decision of being a martial.

>cut into the notion of heroic fantasy

See, that's funny because I see concepts like spellslingers as the rebirth of heroic fantasy in the modern era.

They're sold in bars in america. We also keep them in the fridge so they stay firm and hard and ruin our bread when we spread them.

Rifled muskets are a thing and could be very accurate in the hands of an skilled shooter.

So the average fantasy nerd?

nobody questions the spoon?

>hasn't been surpassed since.

Nukes.

Because LOTR didn't have them
Ever since LOTR half of the pop culture definition of fantasy is "is set in the medival period"
Hence we have shit like ASOIAF where civilisation has been stuck in the late middle ages (a period that lasted 2-300 years IRL) for thousands of years.

Gunpowder is older than plate armor and it took centuries for gunpowder based weapons to dominate the battlefield.

they're sold in sticks your weirdo

They were... in the 1800's.

/Those/ would be the knight killers. But we were assuming a fantasy universe which included knights with swords and people still using longbows and other things which were rather out of fashion by the time rifled muskets showed face.

So rifled muskets are not relevant here. Assuming the universe follows a similar tech curve to Earth.

Ye early firearms in reality; what about fantasy where you got the best craftsmen in the world like dwarves? Or magic that essentially lets you make the perfect material, or weapon that is blessed by a god?

The point of fantasy is that you take a normal item and ratchet it up to 11 on a scale of 1-5. If you take a gun and do that, you get a ICBM.

A thing which didn't exist till the mid-19th century.

Once you are putting mid-19th century stuff in your fantasy it's only a short hop over to magazine fed rifles.

No they are older than that, they weren't used much because it was very hard to produce and reload, but that is within the capabilites of a PC.

I'd have no problem with an amazing dwarf made musket or rifle being a rare, powerful and expensive weapon.

If it's the kind of setting where things like a wand of magic missile is allowed then why not.

I suspect he meant muzzle-loading rifled weapons, which did exist in parallel with true muskets before the introduction of minie ball ammunition.

Maybe you are mixing up the terms rifle and rifled musket?

Rifles certainly existed earlier, though while having accuracy advantages could be very tempermental.

Rifled muskets are mid-19th century smooth bores converted to have rifing to make use of new ammunition.

I thought you coudl call these early rifled weapons muskets as well.

This. Black powder tech existed for a long time without fully supplanting swords, bows, or horse cavalry. High explosives and massive army/battlefield sizes (too big for line-of-sight command) had more to do with eliminating those things.

Magic can make this weird, though. It competes with firearms, and may make early black powder weapons kind of pointless, depending on commonality and power in the setting. If it can be combined with firearms (magic exploding bullets, magic repeating guns, hammerspaced caches of pre-loaded guns), it's almost like introducing modern weapons.

Magic defenses can make a big difference, though. A lot of modern warfare works the way it does because it's so difficult to make anything sturdy enough to resist likely threats.

Magical long-range communication adds another issue - it basically puts you directly into WWII-style manuever warfare territory.

"Musket" normally means a smoothbore weapon, as opposed to a rifled one. The term "Rifled musket" is sort of oxymoronic, but was used to refer to designs that were originally muskets, but got updated with rifled barrels after the invention of the minie ball in the mid nineteenth century. These were transitional weapons and didn't last too long - metallic cartridges became common soon afterward.

Autism.

I'm saying this as a GM with some experience over the years with a pretty large pool of players.

But guns being present change the mindset of people when they know they are in the game. Most people see a gun in the game and they go "oh, that is gonna be so strong" then they see the damage values and go, "wtf why does it only do 4D3? If I hit someone in the head they should be dead" to which I point out the fucking longsword does 1D8 and if I slashed correctly at them with it irl I would kill them.

People, even the experienced Rper's have a hard time getting around the idea of a gun being balanced in abstract. If there is a sniper who gets only headshots from a concealed position obviously they target should be dead. That also applies to the Bow and Crossbow, but most people don't see it that way.

So then they get around it and start looking more at the stats. They see the bows reload faster, the gun reloads the slowest; but the dps is same. Why would you take a gun? More shots means higher chance of hitting for SOME damage. Then the party composition, an archer in theory in just as vulnerable in melee as a gunner, but they don't have to stand still to reload.

A gun works in fantasy, it 's just a pain in the ass for GM's to deal with it and the kind of people who want to make it or game it to Opness. So we just say no because if you want to play a fucking RPG with guns in it come back Sunday morning for the Mecha campaign.

I mean, that's the answer to like 99% of the questions posed by /tg but we can at least preted to have an argument about it

Because guns ARE instant death weapons in the context of an rpg
In real life even if you don't instantly die from a gunshot wound you're still incapacitated from pain/bloodloss/wounds.
In an rpg, if you're unable to fight back it's treated the same as if you were effectively dead.
It's why when the wizard casts Sleep and puts every enemy to sleep no DM makes the party continue to go through combat. You've incapacitated the enemy, you already won.

How could I have been so blind

Pretty sure those are Butter Ingots bro. From the Butterforges.

This, basically.

In a d20 system guns do d8 damage. With a handful of exceptions (extremely large caliber rounds might do as much as 2d6). But people think it's boring when 9/10 of firearms do d8 damage.

Then you get into armor and how they interact. Which is to say they do piercing damage, but don't bypass DR.

The end result is people paying EWP for a weapon that is meaningfully worse than a bastard sword in all but a handful of situations.

Pfft no, not the problem at all. Can you detail the differences in cavitation from a .38 110 grain and a .45 180 grain? Didn't think so.

The problem is in game terms, they both do d8 damage. There's no meaningful differentiation until we're talking about things like .338 Lapua Magnum and .458 Winchester Magnum. Even those would be d10. Your truly absurd caliber munitions would be 2d6: .577 Tyrannosaur, .600 Overkill, .700 Nitro Express.

So no, the issue isn't that we don't know our firearms. It's that we know them better than you.

>Because swords ARE instant death weapons in the context of an rpg
>In real life even if you don't instantly die from a sword wound you're still incapacitated from pain/bloodloss/wounds.
>In an rpg, if you're unable to fight back it's treated the same as if you were effectively dead.
>It's why when the fighter full attacks and puts every enemy to -6 no DM makes the party continue to go through combat. You've incapacitated the enemy, you already won.

How about you a play a non-retarded system?

I think it's got less to do with being hard to balance and more to do with it letting players try to do WAAC shit.

>My wizard has an 22 int, and muskets are a thing, are you seriously saying he can't build a Gatling gun?
>Alright, I summon 2d6 celestial monkeys and hand them the grenades.

Except it's not the same because guns have the same stopping power regardless of the shooters physical ability or training, while the same can't be said for swords.
Which is why swords are okay because it still relies on individual skill and is heroic while guns are seen as "overpowered" and not heroic.

d20 is the most granular system damage-wise; weapons are arbitrarily assigned values across a broad range for the purpose of being different from each other.

In something like Gumshoe, guns just do 1d6 damage. All of them. So do fists and swords. (It's relatively high lethality -- most characters have between 5 and 10 hit points.)

In Fate they...do exactly the same amount of damage as every other weapon.

In Shadowrun they're retarded because that entire system is about arbitrarily assigning numbers to things without thinking it through. (They often, amusingly, assign incorrect values to weapon calibers.)

I don't recall GURPS doing firearms well except in the sense that any GURPS game with firearms was automatically high lethality.

I know D6 has some substantial granularity to weapons, but most firearms are somewhere between 3D and 5D, while most people resist damage with somewhere between 2D and 4D, so, uh, yeah. High lethality.

I don't normally play D&D, my man. But if I put firearms into it, they'd basically all do d8 damage.

That sounds fucking lit though.