>Party charges into an army, feeling confident because they are OP as fuck
>near TPK because they forget there's a volley of arquebusiers firing at them
I personally love using them in "semi-realistic" settings, but i don't force them on everyone
Thoughts?
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There's really no way to balance them without making them shit and having the players keep melee weapons or magic.
This seems like an appropriate as any place to ask, I want to run a fantasy game in the age of early matchlocks, where bows and crossbows are still widely used, but muskets are still common enough. Are there any systems or resources available for something like that? Because my Google Fu is failing me.
Gunpowder weapons in the Renaissance replaced two earlier weapons in Europe; bows and lances.
Bows were superceded due to the ease of training a soldier to hit things with a musket rather than a bow. They were really only any good in large masses of men, and until the development of the bayonet these large masses had to be protected by pike to avoid being run straight over by cavalry, having fired only a single volley. In terms of adventurers, a single musket wouldn't be much good at all due to the inaccuracy and loading times, although they did make effective clubs when reversed. A hunter would generally be better off with a bow, although there were some specialised hunting muskets.
Lances were replaced in western Europe by the pistol; in the likes of the Thirty Years War the knight became the cuirassier, an armoured horseman with a fuckload of pistols and maybe a sword as backup. A pistol would outrange a lance, did not require as much momentum to use, required less specialist training and offered superior armour penetration. Although initially these were used in "caricoles" where the horsemen would fire from close range and wheel to the back of their formation to reload, this tactic was later superceded by horse riding in as shock troops and unloading their pistols at point-blank range. The pistol seems the most useful weapon for adventurers, offering a lethal weapon that can just outrange a spear and would do a lot of armour-piercing damage.
Download Lamentations of the Flame Princess, it's a really simple game featuring firearms in the Appendix.
England Upturn'd by the same publisher is a mini campaign/sandbox adventure set in the English Civil War and features Odin turning up to try and flip a section of northern England upside down, unleashing the monsters that dwell in the centre of the hollow Earth.
They're good fun, give them a read.
If the party can stop crossbow bolts and can tank 1000 horsemen charging at them, why would they not be able to block bullets? Arquebusiers aren't that strong.
Awnsering your question, I love to have early firearms and I'm adding them in my next game. There's gonna be a war where this artifacts will be used en masse for the first time. Since there's also magics and shit the weapons race is expected to escalate really quickly.
I very much enjoy them. My last artificer was pretty well known in-setting for her rifle and it made a good touchstone for her as a futurist.
I do get a bit annoyed when people use them as Magic Death Rays however. Yes, guns are scary and dangerous but you so often see people 'Guns need special rules to show just how Better At Killing they are than a 3 story tall giant with a sword scaled for his size, somehow'.
Historically guns and swords existed on battlefields as practical weapons for something like 400 years (1200's to 1600's). Appropriately crude firearms in your setting and the balance issues should be nonexistant.
With more modern technology maybe swords still compete with guns because you can't enchant a gun- a +5 flaming death vorpal whatever would still be feared even if people have pistols. Perhaps there is some ubiquitous, perhaps magical, defense against bullets such tgat that most combats tend to be decided with hack & slash and guns are more for early skirmishing?
Perhaps guns are ancient relics, tightly controlled, stolen from the highly advanced invaders, or are otherwise very hard to come by? Then they function more like wands- highly powerful, but limited in number of uses.
To add to the idea a bit- armor gradually became obsolete after the introduction of firearms on the battlefield, but that's only because it didn't provide enough protection against gunfire relative to it's weight and expense.
Magical armor, especially when materials such as mithril are involved, would be more than enough to provide a consistent level of protection against gunfire.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
Warhammer fantasy has 16th century gunpowder weapons, but certainly not modern weaponry.
I think that early firearms can be included without changing too much of the setting barring aesthetic since they were roughly analogous to crossbows. If you're going to include muskets and rifling then armour becomes obsolete and the entire game changes.
Of course it's fantasy and you can just as easily say that the armour is good enough to be worth using still.
GURPS can run that no problem.
Pike and shot era would be the best time, when the HRE and the Spanish Empire shone the brighest, with swordplay, arbalests, and gunpowder weapons that are not that powerful yet make for an amazing setting.
>GURPS can run that no problem.
GURPS can run anything no problem. It’s literally a system for making your own system, and even mentioning it is dull as fuck because yes, we know; GURPS can do it.
Also, the sky is blue and fire is hot, what the fuck else is new?
yeah no shit GURPS run anything no problem
But can GURPS run itself?
Alright, I'll rephrase since I upset the autists.
GURPS would be particularly good for that, since it has lots of transitional tech and a robust injury system that works well for representing arrows, swords, axes, musketballs, cannons etc etc etc.
Guns Are The Great Equalizer.
They turn an illiterate, untrained peasant into someone who can kill a Master Swordsman or a Learned Wizard. The Age of Heroic Fantasy turns into the Age of Grim Technology.
That said, it depends on how the game addresses the use of gunpowder. I like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's use of gunpowder weapons because they're slow to reload and temperamental.
Yeah, there's a thematic issue here too; heroes just don't work as well. Because of the equalizer thing, but also because of range. When swords and stuff become obsolete and most fighting takes place at range, you don't get the heroic duels, swords clashing, exchanging combat banter, stuff.
Also, guns take a lot less skill and training than, say, a longbow. It changes the *kind* of warfare, to be less centered on elite knight-types, and closer to the less heroic/romanticized modern model of warfare. It reduces the impact of the heroic (knights etc.) and fantastic (wizards, superhuman warriors etc.) elements and thus makes it -- in a sense -- "less fantasy" because the fantasy elements have less impact on the outcome.
Also, if you have gunpowder you can make cannons, which messes up big monsters - dragons and stuff - being able to attack towns. Again, this reduces the impact of the fantasy elements and makes it more "Renaissance era, oh, and there are dragons too" and less "medieval-styled fantasy"; the mundane dominates.
It boils down to changing the dynamic of warfare to being more "modern" and less "fantasy/medieval".
My fantasy setting is England circa 1650 so there is gunpowder everywhere. Guns take a while (though still an unrealistically short amount of time) to reload and do good damage.
Works in settings designed for it, doesn't in settings that aren't.
And a crossbow can do the same thing for a dumb illiterate peasant. It's probably ably preferable over early black powder weaponry
A sword doesn't save your ass from a projectile. Armor and shields do. Guns, in their early stages such as arquebuses, had problems piercing plate, which was becoming more and more common. It's not until refinements were made which gave guns, and weaponry in general, rapid advancements over armor.
Depends on the setting, really.
Stuff like WarCraft has guns and yet the heroes are still ridiculously over the top, and guns don’t change warfare literally just because they don’t and nothing really misses a beat.
It’s not realistic to be sure but tabletop games are fucking atrocious nedouks foe realism (especially when it comes to combat) and for the best realism I have a front door on my house that takes me outside.
7 words: Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword
>qt lamia monstergirl gf holding an arquebus in a trench getting peppered by cossacks
GURPS gets pretty lethal once firearms and explosives start flying.
Character generation can be a little time consuming, but once you actually get into play combat can be really fast as long as your players are ready to act when their turn comes up. And character advancement is usually pretty painless too.
>How does Veeky Forums feel about gunpowder weapons in their fantasy settings?
What does it even matter? Renaissance era gunpowder weapons were slow, inaccurate and only functioned when supported by infantry. Your typical fantasy TTRPG involves a group of 3-6 murderhobos going on adventure, even in the most exceptional circumstances there won't be more than 10. How do gunpowder weapons help them, even if they exist? Not only do you get very little bang for your buck, not only does using a gunpowder weapon as your main piece of armament leave you very vulnerable to enemy attack, but you'll have to log around a lot of gunpowder. Gunpowder that's very sensitive to rain or other sources of dampness. You actually become a burden to your party and you'd be better off just using a crossbow instead.
By the time guns become worth the trouble as equipping as a main weapon we're in the Age of Napoleon, and even then it's only worth the trouble because you have a bayonet attached to it. That means most of the time you'll be using your musket/rifle as a half-pike anyway.
Entirely gunpowder-centric era doesn't become worthwhile until the 1880s, but by that time it detracts from class-oriented roleplay. All your classes become replaced with "guy who uses gun".
Gunpowder weapons add nothing to TTRPG fantasy adventure games, they're only interesting for wargames.
The question is can gurps do it well?
Gurps is bad at several things, vehicles is one of them.
Vehicles aren't bad at all. I don't know how you came to that realization at all.
>not playing pirate style with 5 pistols and a hanger
This is why you stick to DnD huh
They're just creatures with special move options, they're not actually anything separate.
There's no localized damage that isn't gonna completely fuck it over and god forbid you want a mech game where getting shot in the arm wont blow the whole thing up.
I'm fine with them existing. I run a FC game where one of my players uses a firearm while all the other sword-wielding nerds charge in, and she hits quite hard on the turns she's not reloading.
I fail to see how treating them as "creatures" is a bad way to handle them.
Give a mech a shitload of DR and you'll be fine.
Such a shame that barely changes anything.
>Five pistols
Good job, you can now attack five times. Even if we assume that means five rounds with one attack per round, what're you gonna do after that? You can only pray that combat is over in five rounds or pack a sword as a back-up weapon (or your de facto primary weapon, actually).
Even then, you're still dealing with the problem of having to drag gunpowder everywhere, making it a liability and potentially entirely making your primary mode of attack useless.
Once again, what does this fighting style bring to the table that a hand crossbow or throwing daggers does not? It's okay for a pirate who stays dry on his deck and can store his gunpowder below deck, but what of an adventurer who has to travel through the rain, into underground caverns, perhaps wade through chest high creeks et cetera? Pre-modern gunpowder weapons are not worth it.
>open door
>go outside
>the battle of Lepanto is storming just in front of me
Lucky cunt.
People still carry melee weapons today even with machine guns so I don't see the problem.
If we're handwaving that a PC can maintain swords, knives, bows, books, armor, boots, rope, and every other piece of minutea through rough terrain it's not much of a stretch to assume he can maintain a fucking pipe stuffed with flammable powder.
Why bother arguing though? Guns get the same treatment on /tg that female PCs get where we don't like thing so we're gonna apply several hundred penalties onto it for (((((realism))))) while everything else remains conveniently handwaved.
t. Person who believes that everyone started using tanks and machineguns after 1453
>If we're handwaving that a PC can maintain swords, knives, bows, books, armor, boots, rope, and every other piece of minutea through rough terrain it's not much of a stretch to assume he can maintain a fucking pipe stuffed with flammable powder.
Because swords, knives, bows, armor, boots, rope and to a limited extent perhaps even books don't instantly become as useless as gunpowder when wet. Sure, you don't want to dip a book in water, but I'd rather leave a (closed) book out in the rain than my gunpowder.
>Why bother arguing though?
Because it's the question OP ask? Your whataboutism changes nothing.
GURPS is Turing complete, so I don't see why it couldn't.
>Just fix the game lmao its better if you homebrew it
Failure of a system
>and a hangar
A hanger is a sword. Pic related.
So firstly, if you're playing anything close to a realistic game, 5 shots is enough to do more than your part in any combat short of unreasonable. And you have a sword.
Secondly, you carry gunpowder in a sealed barrel on your horse and in a powderhorn and/or cartridges on your person, if thats being bookkept by the GM. It's also safe to assume in that case nobody will be using anything near to full plate as that also requires a squire and storage space.
Finally, 'hand crossbows' didnt exist outside of gimmick pieces owned by people with money to waste. The few that did exist were basically jokes with no draw weight. You can't keep a crossbow strung and drawn on your person without it being damaged and you can easily keep loaded uncocked pistols. Throwing daggers again in any realistic setting are basically useless. There's a reason pistols were popular; they're pocket-sized containers of 'Fuck You'.
So I mean so long as you're not a moron about your powder and keep it dry (literally just put it on the horses back when you gotta wade), there's no reason to not use pistols.
I'm fine with them. I run a lighter system so they're basically identical to crossbows. The only difference is crossbows can be quickloaded with a Might roll, and matchlocks can be quickloaded with an agility roll. Both have a disadvantage on bows though: there's a type of critical hit that kills multiple enemies, and crossbows and matchlocks can't fire fast enough to do that.
>pic related**
>premodern combat can be Hollywood cartoon hodgepodge nonsense and still demand to be taken seriously
>but modern weapons have to be 100% realistic
You faggots are the worst.
If you're at a level where a small group can comfortably take on an army, early firearms aren't going to make that much of a difference. If they were armed with crazy advanced 20th century shit, sure, but not that 14th century garbage. Those weren't that much more damaging than a bow or crossbow.
>if it isn't the PC's primary weapon it may as well not exist
que?
Depends on the kinds of guns we're talking about. Cannon fire is adequate for for telling a giant to get off your lawn.
Gunpowder dries dude, it doesn't just dissolve into nothing when it gets wet. Melee weapons fail against flying enemies and magic fails in an antimagic field, I don't see how guns being vulnerable to soaking completely disqualifies us from even considering them for mechanics in a game. People want to do retarded builds with whips and crossbows and every other niche weapon all the time what is /tg's beef with firearms?
No the basic rules work fine. You're supposed to add a lot of DR to powerful tanks and shit you pleb. The tanks from High Tech have 500 DR.
Failure of a post.
He liked LotR and wants all his settings to be LotR, which is fine if a little sad.
But to feel better about himself, he wants to make ALL settings LotR and pretends that this is for logical rather than emotive reasons which is very sad.
Muskets shooting round ball can still be protected against with metal armor. It will just be heavier. Now if we start talking about conical bullets and rifling then yeah it's pretty much obsolete.
>but what if it gets w
>but what if
>but what if it g
>but wh
>but what if it gets WET
It doesn't rain every fucking day jackass. Gunpowder weapons are a force multiplier even if you can't shoot down absolutely everything you encounter.
Quads of good gaming
The only armour worth using against anything but the earliest muskets is a cuirass since you can make it thick and angled enough to work, which kinda negates 90% of all the knights in shining armour shit.
>near TPK because they forget there's a volley of arquebusiers firing at them
If the party was OP enough to take an army in the first place, they should be able to deal with this as well. The only real change the arquebus introduced was fulfilling the role of both crossbows and longbows, that being the ease of training and use of crossbows combined with the range and fire rate of proper longbows.
Ergo, if the party is capable of dealing with massed longbow or crossbow fire, they should be capable of dealing with arquebusiers.
Muskets didn't have better rate of fire of crossbows, not signficantly anyway.
I mean that was true when the guns were introduced in real life too. They're not meant for duels, they're meant for armies to fire en masse. Some kobolds might find a cache of guns, adopt guerilla tactics, and make the PCs' lives hell without making them OP, for example.
Pistols and arquebuses seem like they'd be good weapons for fighters. Pop off a shot or two while you close distance and ignore the guns until the end of the encounter. Maybe spellcasters and the like as well, as a last-ditch effort to fend off attackers or gain the upper hand in a wizard duel.
Maining a firearm might be a bit more difficult (unless you just say fuck it and reload with super speed, which is certainly an option for more fanciful games), but if you had two or three and a little bitch squire to reload them for you it could go quite smoothly. They wouldn't even need to be strong like they would with a crossbow.
oh also
>pirate who stays dry on his deck
He's on a boat surrounded by ocean and humidity, and the golden age pirates we think of were in the hot-ass spanish main where the sun keeps the water evaporating and you get seasonal typhoons. There really arent much worse conditions for keeping black powder dry and they seemed to do just fine.
This alsp annoys the fuck out of me
You are not alone
Bag of holding amigo, weatherproof storage. Or dessicate the powder as a repair spell.
Is this post just a segment from TVtropes
Something I think everyone is missing is firearms that work off of magic. Perhaps instead of flint and powder, it's a magically enchanted stone and rune crafted metal that upon contact throws out a burning fireball that on contacts leaves a fiery crater or longterm burning magical fire that can eat away armor. And a way to mitigate this is its not always reliable and on a certain failure roll it explodes in your hands or misfires. Give it a limited number of uses per stone/crystal and boom, Swedish mercenary that operates more like a handicapped mage.
>Pic related
Except ya know the thing called Full Plate in D&D is literally the stuff made to take a pistol shot once firearms hit the field and the image of Knights so armored they could barely move is BS up there with Lemming suicide
Arquebusses, handgonnes, pistols and v early muskets, yeah
And it's not going to be any use against a proper musket, except perhaps on your torso. There's a reason cuirassiers existed.
My DM thought it was a good ide to allow flintlocks.
>two weapon fighting, rapid shot, quick draw
>have dwarven defender cohort, he has rapid reload, and quick draw
>have a leather worker make a special rack of holsters that sling over my cohorts back
>fire gun, drop, draw, fire. Repeat
Cohort just stood infront of me as a meat shield, whilst reloading and reholstering flint locks. DM got pretty mad as we were basically a machine gun.
Me and my cohorts faces when
>When swords and stuff become obsolete and most fighting takes place at range, you don't get the heroic duels, swords clashing, exchanging combat banter, stuff.
Why not? There are hundreds of epic gunslinging duels in movies.
>in a sense -- "less fantasy" because the fantasy elements have less impact on the outcome.
Again, how does this lessens the fantasy? Wizards create bullet-resistant Mage Shields or zones that slow projectiles down (or even revert them back) and Superhuman Warriors are badass enough to shrug some of the bullet injuries, or fast enough to evade some of them. If anything, guns pour lots of new material to play with to the otherwise stagnant genre.
>Good job, you can now attack five times.
Get a perk that stops you from wasting attacks by attacking more.
DND multi attacking is pathetic, even more so if you start to consider how archery works. Or throwing spears.
Or you accept that Legolas DND is carrying 2000 arrows and at the least 300 javelins.
In my game I essentially gave "melee classess" (I'm running in gurps so its more like a choice of gear) a free gun.
Related: Any fantasy setting inspired in the 18th century either in Europe or the American colonies?
Guns are awful and overpriced in that game.
Blunderbuss is OP
>Autist takes everything from real life and can't differentiate when it doesn't follow up perfectly.
No, it's not.
>you're still dealing with the problem of having to drag gunpowder everywhere
Gunpowder is more manageable than arrows or crossbow bolts. Yeah, it's a bit harder to resupply if you're a long way from civilization, but the same can be said of arrows.
Realismfags in a nutshell.
Really the only reason not to get guns are the cost, reload speed, the upkeep and the more localized firing sound.
The others are memes. Besides theres no reason game wise to make guns different from crossbows.
I think people are dumb and don't know enough historically to implement real world discoveries.
Gunpowder=/Guns
Gunpowder=A whole slew of technologies both martial and not
Maybe gunpowder is rare in your fantasy setting and so firearms are not common. Maybe gunpowder is super abundant but cheap and abundant fuels are hard to come by so the production of sophisticated weapons en masse is impractical, leaving gunpowder a limited spectacle of applications.
Oh and fireworks. If you include blasting powders in your game but not fireworks you're objectively a bad GM.
Burning wheel. Firearms are deadly but take long ass time to reload, so you probably won't be shooting same gun in a conflict twice.
*Crossbows
Crossbows phased out other types of missiles before firearms were a thing.
And armor was basically ineffective against arrows and cavalry, despite the long use after the fact.
I imagine it was a combination of all the lead in the water and the challenge of finding bowmen skilled enough to kill can cocked crusaders, whereas you could give a fucknucle a crossbow or firearm and get a similar result.
>near TPK because they forget there's a volley of arquebusiers firing at them
>implying that would do anything to people who can tank fireballs
Not to mention the tremendous amount of danger and skill associated with creating hand sized explosions to propel shrapnel into other people's bodies.
Like. Modern guns are hard for modern people. Why not reflect the risk and practice in tt rules?
Oh yeah because TV and VG ruined the hobby and D&D is a mediocre system built for killing mons and getting loot.
e_e
I love the movie "7 samurai" and in that movie the bandits have 3 arqebuses and they become vitally important to control to win the battle
Early handguns were roughly comparable to arbalests, only less accurate and better at piercing armour. It's as easy to balance as simulating that.
Actually in early musket production era the crossbow lingered around with hunters and criminals for quite a while thanks to the cheapness of buying them en-masse. Mostly because the profession was still strong. Even though actual production costs considered, guns were cheaper.
But early guns were shit at piercing armor?
It was more like getting a hammer to the chest than getting trough it.
>GURPS, a generic system designed to be modular and to have things added or modified as required for a campaign
>"hurr durr lmao le homebrew xD"
You're a memeshitting moron. Use your brain for once and stop arguing on autopilot.
At ranges of less than 100m handguns were capable of piercing milanese hardened steel breastplates, while shots from crossbows and longbows would be deflected.
You're retarded if you think bows and crossbows aren't affected by humidity and rain.
Yeah "musket era"
That's way closer to the industrial revolution than the Renaissance or the 9th century for certain parts of the world.
My point is you're making a huge gap in time from where I was referring.
Wait there, buddy. You talking about handgonnes? Yeh they didnt do much better than a crossbow at armour piercing but they were vheaper to make.
Why get 50 cfossbowmen when you can get 100 gunners?
>Yeah "musket era"
Terminology thing here:
Muskets originally were late contemporaries of arquebuses. They were long-barrelled firearms that needed a rest to prop up the barrel. They were around from the early 1500s. The name carried over to the more advanced flintlock firearms of the late 1600s which didn't need a rest for the barrel, and are what most of us think of when we see 'musket'.
So... I guess it would help if the first user clarified which type he's talking about.
There´s a series of Spanish books about a veteran Spanish soldier who fought on the Tercios Viejos in Flandes.
During peace time he, like many others in his time, earned a living through not-very-shiny shenanigans, mostly working as a paid thug, occasionally as an assassin, if needed.
Soon he gets into some shit when he gets hired by some shady individuals to kill some random travelers who turn out to be British royalty in disguise.
It´s a pretty nice series, rather historically accurate and very easy to read that would make for some nice inspiration for an adventure&intrigue campaign in that setting.
It´s called Alatriste, by Perez-Reverte. The first book is fully self-contained, so just give that a go if you like that time period.
I do believe the reply line started at "Renaissance"
>Alatriste
The film of that book has become a minor bane in some historical re-enactment circles, since you always get Spanish guys turning up dressed as the guy from the film and wading theatrically through rivers.
How do you wade theatrically?
The movie was an attempt to smash 6 or 7 more or less independent books with different plots into a single story, and then cutting it down into a movie.
It´s a fucking mess.
The books are nice, though. Ignore the movie, read the first book.
I'd love to play/run a contemporary tech level fantasy setting. Maybe have to players be mercs or something in different warzones.
You hold your matchlock tacticoolly above your head