Why are their rarely firearms in medieval fantasy settings when most of them have technology on par with...

What would make people think everyone switched over to guns overnight? Guns and melee combat co-existed for several centuries.

>The rise of artillery basically killed the idea of castles and other defensive fortifications
*BLOCKS YOUR PATH*

Because most people talking about that kind of thing are American. European history is a vague blur for them.

>you just need to fundamentally alter physics universally to stop this thing from clashing with the rest of the setting, what's the big deal?

I mean, why is that a big deal? You're making a fantasy world. If anything, it makes more sense to base it on archaic ideas like alchemy than attempt to anachronistically force modern chemistry into it.

They don't grow stronger with the player because they got more strength or dexterity or what have you. Past a certain point they will also trivialize many things that lesser ranged weapons can still have issues with like range, and power. Firearms and the like are generally seen as the beginning of the end of the fantastical. Give it a few generations and even the more powerful magical beings like dragons and such would be powerless against them. A few generations more, and your fantasy setting is now a modern setting with all fantasy aspects made extinct or mundane by their powerlessness and irrelevance.

Wild West doesn't last forever, I'd love to see a story about the last wave of adventurers in a changing world personally

But I think that's just bullshit. Even if you don't just alter the setting to not make that happen, the very existence of magic could ensure that things develop completely differently. It's just an assumption that's been stated so often people seem to believe it's inherently true.

i like that armor

cuz it's cooler to use a sword than a shitty mini-cannon that you have a 1/9 chance to hit anything with

Because it would require relearning your fundamental understanding of reality. Suddenly baking bread doesn't work the same because chemistry doesn't exist. Lighting a fuel source works who the fuck knows how.

>guns and swords are mutually exclusive

Not everyone can effectively use magic or even bows, but everyone could learn to operate a mass-produced gun. Firearms are the equalizer, they are the death of personal strength and physical ability.

>the magical being enchant and use guns
Woah...

Have to agree with , we got brief touches of European history with heavy focus on our own even though it is a fraction of the amount. It's just that it's ours so it is prioritized.

Why? People came up with alchemy based on things they noticed in the real world, so clearly most things work as you expect. All you need to do is tweak a few little things to ensure the setting remains consistent and true to your vision. It's nowhere near the problem you're making it out to be.

>everyone can learn to use a gun
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

But the same could be said for crossbows, and nobody freaks out about those destroying fantasy settings.

>mass production in a pre-industrial setting
because most of these people are idiots that assume crossbows are the last step before firearms

>I'd love to see a story about the last wave of adventurers in a changing world personally
It hasn't got guns, but The Last Hero is explicitly this

I don't like them because it implies technology is developing in parallel ways to reality. I'd rather wands become common place than guns

This is another thing, why are people so afraid of technological developments?

Because of the time period that picture was painted in, I'm not 100% sure whether that mole was real.

>invent gunpowder
>these means mass scale factories now exist within generations
Do people just have a poor grasp on real life's tech level?

Technology developing means change for the better and for the worse.

Your Orcs will need to settle down and begin industry or fade into irrelevance.

Your elves will need to adapt or fade along with their forests.

Dragons will learn the fear of Cannon, and the age of swords and sorcery will gradually change into the nightmare and wonder of the industrial edition, tolkein edition.

Children will be ground up in the gears.

I think thats a cool setting, but a lot of the time people would rather have your traditional swords and sorcery with your traditional balances of power and roles within the world.

WHFRP has technological advancement and guns

Baking bread doesn’t have to work the same as long as the result is the same. It doesn’t matter if cooking food works because of chemical reactions or because the food is ritually purified by the flames and ascends to a higher and more edible state of being as long as you still bake for the same amount of time.

Because the technology is developing like ours, despite them having a wildly different resource than us in magic. Why is the world's technological progress not centered around enhancing the uses of magic? Why try to make cannonballs smaller instead of trying to make fireballs and magic missiles easier to cast? I want fantasy tech for a fantasy land.

That even assumes that technological development works the same way. That standardisable, consistent achievement is even the way things will go. These are fantasy settings where the most advanced, powerful things are often masterworks by divinely inspired geniuses or mad inventors, which tend to be near impossible to replicate. It might be that mass produced technology simply cannot rise much further, and that only those rare masterworks will hint at what is possible beyond that mundane level.

>high magic

You can just call it fantasy firearms general. No need to resort to argument starter OPs

Believe it or not user some people actually want to discuss things rather than tossing it into a general

>Why is the world's technological progress not centered around enhancing the uses of magic?
Because magic is only available to special, rare individuals, while technology may be ubiquitous. Applications of magic will still advance, but not with the same vigor as mundane technology because they don't automatically benefit the whole society.

Pretty much, as soon as anyone invents the gun, they expect a reliable and highly accurate rifle to be available within a few years, forgetting that there's a couple of centuries of pre-musket warfare, and that firearm-armed infantry still got crushed by cavalry for centuries after (and that misfiring is a pretty big deal, and that nothing was standardised for centuries)

Because when D&D introduced them people raged.

Artillery has existed long before castles did, user.

>low fantasy

Not necessarily. You could have the printing press be the big revolution in military technology rather than the firearm, because it creates a world where spellbooks and scrolls can be mass-produced, leading to a world where magic use becomes ubiquitous.

I am aware, but was assuming context would imply I was talking about sophisticated gunpowder artillery, which did away with castles in the 14th century or so. After that we did have Star Forts and so on (which are awesome and extremely underused), but they died out when explosive shells became a thing, and the overall trend has been fortresses that were less and less cool looking and meaningful, to the point of the modern world where fortresses are basically entirely pointless.

gunpowder artillery >>>> trebuchets and onagers

This triggers Veeky Forums.

that's some bitchin armor

>I like it when my armor looks like plastic

Hack writers attempt to mimic Tolkien when Lord of the Ring tech is meant to be no more advanced than the Early Medieval Period barring orcs and goblins doing things and then they add late middle ages tech minus guns.

>implying high magic settings all have to be cartoon lands of bright colors and huge pauldrons

It's even directly implied in The Hobbit that Goblins actually will develop firearms at some point, or something like them.

>it just seems to be perpetuated by people with no understanding of history who think the Middle Ages are this stagnant era that stayed with the same tech for a thousand years and nothing ever happened.

Fixed.

>tfw we will never again have heavily armed and armored warrior monks with bitchin armor

>But why is it so feared in the first place?
Because it does not fit with the romatic image of knighthood, chivalry etc... that so many people seek in Fantasy to begin with. How is this so hard to comprehend. It's just a set of aesthetic trope that people desire to maintain. Cold arms are more physically associated with purity, personal competence and agency (even if these associations aren't necessarily logically justified, it IS something that people still feel and and you can't really argue with common-folk symbolism), while fire-arms are associated with onset of industrialization, loss of connection to individual agency, purity of the world, personal individual competence, and also more commonly and immediately associated with the less glorious aspects of war.

It's just that. I used to think that way too when I was a kid. Fire arms come where the magic is gone: they are what replaced the more glorious era of knights and viking warriors - they are loud, noisy, unfair if not cowardly, they are victory of technology and science over bravery, heroism, magic and nature.
They are "modern" while people seek the "old". They are what we use now, and people seek to dream about what they used back, in the "different times". It's all just basic, perfectly understandable aesthetic intuitions. People WANT TO GET AWAY FROM THE ERA OF GUNS, because that is an era that we still drag around, the one we are trying to escape from.

Nowdays, I don't feel that way anymore myself, but it really should not be hard to understand why so many people do.

>The rise of artillery basically killed the idea of castles and other defensive fortifications
I'm not sure that's entirely true user
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sieges
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Rhodes_(1480)

SPBP

see

Pretty sure orcs did use explosives back in the First Age, given Gandalf's regular use of gunpowder explosives it seems a safe bet that it is a known, if somewhat underused 'secret knowledge' among the Maiar, raising the probability both Sauron and Morgoth likely made good use of in the First Age.

Because they are uneducated and have preconceived popculture notions.

>The rise of artillery basically killed the idea of castles and other defensive fortifications

No they didn't. They just changed the design. Pic related.
Because our history only truly starts at the end of the pike-and-shot era of warfare.

Pretty much. That was the strength of the musket. Get bunch of guys, each the basics, point them in the right direction, and make a repeating wall of death.

The French went mad and made a fortress for their whole border and they would have gotten away with it if the Lowlanders hadn't fucked it up for everyone.

Strength of the musket but not the strength of early firearms.

As usual, we can blame belgium.

Fucking belgium.

Hay Belgium can we extend this very extensive series of fortifications along your border to as to protect you from any attack by Germany in the future, we'll even pay for it?
>No
Well can we extend it along the border between you and us?
>No
Why Belgium
>I am a masochist country

Neither do Crossbows retard. The only thing that increases in power with the power of the user is melee weapons and bows. And that's actually only up to a certain point. If you impart too much strength into a sword it will merely blunt it faster or risk damaging it.A bowstring might snap. A mace's shaft could split. Etc.

>The rise of artillery basically killed the idea of castles and other defensive fortifications
Artillery never managed to, completely. Castles became bunkers and trench lines, but artillery never quite defeated a sufficient quantity of concrete (pic related; the Japanese ground and naval artillery never penetrated Fort Drum's fortifications. When it came time for the US to retake it, they didn't even bother and just dumped burning gasoline through the windows).

Even plane-dropped munitions were unable to seriously disrupt Germany's armored submarine pens until the allies came up with earthquake bombs that literally caved in the ground beneath them.

>they are the death of personal strength and physical ability
Which is why Grenadier Regiments composed of the biggest meanest bastards in the their respective armies never existed.

What really defeated fortifications and castles were transportation.

France's mountain mega-bunkers is the go to case for this. A thing that would even hard to go trough by modern standards and the germans just got into their cars and drove around it.

If veichles had not progressed as fast as it did we would see a lot more castling and fortifications nowdays.

They didn't want to let them but the lowlanders didn't want the Line in their back garden.

>uneducated
Coming from the guy that can't understand escapism.

Yeah, most of the people who talk about how they can't understand why people don't want fire arms in their Fantasy are just assholes trying to prove how superior they are without getting even a bit of the damn point in the first place.

All of a sudden, the sweet old lady doesn't need your help clearing the rats out of her basement, she can just buy a gun and shoot them.

Personally I've never started one of these threads but I can't help popping in to point out that the things that make folk afraid of firearms are often avoidable or just untrue.

If you don't want guns in your fantasy, don't have guns in your fantasy. It's that simple.

It's the people who go on about how you Can't have guns in your fantasy without it breaking anything who are stupid.

Tunnels & Trolls has rules for firearms.

>A thing that would even hard to go trough by modern standards and the germans just got into their cars and drove around it.
They wouldn't have if not for the fucking Belgians (see ). The french had started throwing up fortifications in late '39 and '40 once it was clear neutrality wasn't going to make a difference but they focused on more open parts of the low country because they believed them more vulnerable.

Hell, much of the German high command thought the Ardennes impassible for tanks; that they managed to push through twice (the second time during the Battle of the Bulge) is a testament to German organization; even at the Bulge, Germany was unable to fully exploit its surprise attack because the Ardennes prevented them from moving reinforcements and men through to the front fast enough.

Friendly reminder that all of this could've been prevented if the Americans just allowed the French to take the Rhineland and Belgium after WW1, meaning the French could reinforce the entire Rhine frontier against Germany and the Alps against Italy making the entire country an impassible wall of death.

Read this you moron: Being "true" does not mean a shit in fiction. Unless you are doing a rigid speculative alternative history study, it's the symbolic associations that matter for fuck sake. People don't fear firearms, they find them distracting from the aesthetic and symbolic ideals they fucking seek.
It's fucking sad enough that people even have to justify not using firearms in their fiction. Fantasy ISN'T FUCKING SPECULATIVE. It's not fucking hard sci-fi. "Truth" is what resonates with people, not some half-fucking-baked masturbation of half-true shit you heard on history channel.

Actually, those people exist in your mind. It's just people complaining consistently about how fantasy does not have firearms even though their history channel professor told them that gunpowder did exist in in Europe around 14th century already, and thefore, it totally should be in the fantasy world.

It's ALWAYS the faggots complaining about other people for not wanting to use it, and never the other fucking way.
And I say that as somebody whose world fucking STANDS on gunpowder. Just stop being hypocrites: it's people jerking off their half-baked ideas about realism in fantasy that keep the whinning, and then get offended when people actually try to give them reason why they don't want it.

The GM outlined up top that firearms are a new and rare thing.
Now every civilian is packing heat and it's just off putting.
Like, how exactly are wolves and shit still giving them problems?

Uh... No. People have posted actual arguments of the type I described in this fucking thread. Scroll up.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I completely understand not having firearms as an aesthetic and thematic choice, and agree it has a lot of advantages. But there are also those who act as if it is simply impossible to do it without fundamentally breaking the nature of the setting, which is flatly incorrect.

Because most people have a ridiculously limited view of what a fantasy setting is supposed to be and it happens to be a rather anachronistic mish-mash of various fictional and non-fictional tropes.

>Uh... No. People have posted actual arguments of the type I described in this fucking thread. Scroll up.
Yes, you retard, in a thread that is literally: "I CAN`T COMPREHEND WHY PEOPLE DON`T USE FIRE ARMS IN THEIR MEDIEVAL FICTION, I DEMAND YOUR SPECIFIC RATIONALITIES FOR THAT".

If you fucking demand that people give you the particular in-universe rationalities for why fire arms aren't a thing, which they only had to come up because they are consistently bombarded by shitty questions from retards like you, that is what you are going to get.

Then going on around saying "BAH, these are all stupid, I was never willing to accept any of your reasonings to begin with, ha ha ha look how much smart and educated I am": that is pathetic.

To be honest, Warcraft left a bad taste in my mouth.

Exactly. It's also why we no longer put soldiers through physical training.

At this point it honestly just sounds like you're projecting. The OP was shit, sure, but mine is literally the second post in the thread, arguing at least part of your corner.

Some of the thread has been people giving a specific rationale for why they don't use guns in their setting, sure. Hell, I shared a few of my own.

And then a few of them have been posts that have explicitly stated that guns Shouldn't, not aren't, be in fantasy settings. There is a distinct difference in phrasing and in intent, and it changes it from a more general statement of how things work in your world to a prescriptive statement of 'No, they shouldn't work like that because x', which is invariably dumb and is what is being argued against. Nobody is saying every setting has to have guns, or has to have some ironclad excuse as to why they don't have gones. Literally the only thing that was said to get you flipping your shit is 'Saying guns break traditional fantasy settings by their mere presence is incorrect'.

Really anyone of any size and condition can be in the special forces it's only fair.

>supposed
Ah, there it is.
I really doubt that because people tend to not include firearms in their settings, they believe that firearms shouldn't be used in fantasy settings at all.
I think you're just making yourself mad for no reason.

The same people who cry about muh romantic hero are likely the same people who are just fine with having guns and space wizards in their star wars rps

Right, because they're completely different.

How?

Funny how some settings like Warhammer & Warcraft have guns no problem.

To be fair warcraft doesn't even pretend to be medieval anymore.

>earthquake bombs
God DAMN that sounds metal.

>Warcraft
>no problem

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_bomb
Modern bunker busters are descended from these bombs. In a fantasy setting, it'd be for dwarves what agent orange would be for elves.

Romans produced swords, mail etc in mass production, in the Po valley. And in the middle ages (in the Renaisence) this same region could outfit the entire army of some Duke (I thin it was Bohemia, I would have to chase the paper) in weeks.