Question for homebrew system

the kind of weapon that decides if you can end a fight during the first turn or if you'll have to unsheath your blades anyway.

at least as long as you play on "reasonable" hp-levels

>expensive
Gunpowder weapons were actually vastly cheaper to their crossbow counterparts

Black powder weapons don't require much training

I did not know this. Thanks for that user.

In terms of my list, in the vein of making each weapon viable without leaving one out in the dust, I think it still sits well for a quick and dirty

Guns may be cheaper, but the cost of munitions is most certainly higher

Match and Flintlock actually required extremely little of that, barely anybody used the wheellock because it actually required those things.

Twice or three times the damage of a crossbow.
Ignores armor.
Accuracy penalty past 120 ft
Requires reloading.
Breaks stealth.
Small point requirement to use.
+5 to intimidation checks.

How common are they? Do you want them to be standard issue, or something only select troops have?

>but the cost of munitions is most certainly higher
Wrong, supplying a steady supply of arrows to a army was incredibly costly and difficult, creating arrows requires many times more skill and effort than a musket ball often involved multiple people while uneducated soldiers making their own balls was common.

I was more referring to the powder needed to make those musket balls useful.

You know blacksmiths paid taxes in arrows heads, right?

This is how I do it. In my setting, there are crude matchlock guns and while they do quite a bit of damage (when they hit), an extra turn has to be used to reload before it can be fired again. They also have a penalty that reduces accuracy, however I made up feats that diminish that penalty.

Probably an import to the setting, a bit rare or expensive to find in most places but at certain ports you could acquire your guns, powder, ammo, accessories, etc.

The fact that all these things are only really being made overseas and not natively means people haven't really adopted the gun en masse for warfare. They're being used by ship crews, making their way into the armories of castle/manors, and maybe some eccentric individuals.

You can't reload on the move and its size makes it inconvenient for someone like an adventurer, but its power makes it great for sentries, guards, etc. who basically get a 1 shot maim/kill wand that alerts everything in the area, that they can reload after a limited threat has been dealt with.

Sulfur, Charcoal, and Feces are abundant.

Niter needs pre-processing (so does Charcoal, but you were making that anyways) and Sulfur needs transportation, but those are the only roadblocks.
Historically, lead shortages were a bigger issue. People went as far as to tear down stained-glass windows in churches to get the lead out of them.

>Not making sure your supply of powder doesn't get wet and become useless
>Not knowing how much powder to put in the pan so it doesn't blow the musket in your face and you get a mouth full of splinters and shrapnel
>Not knowing how to properly stuff and pack the ball into the barrel so the ball doesn't uselessly roll out of the barrel when you fire.
>Not knowing how to reload under pressure, in formation, when guns are going off around you and your buddies are dropping dead left and right

Yep, no training required.

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Disregard the psychology factor. Muskets were only intimidating in large numbers and only scared stupid animals.

Have different classes of guns. An actual musket is very heavy and requires a stand to rest its long barrel on. Its lighter counterpart was the arquebus, which was even used on horseback. Have the arquebus sacrifice damage for speed and the musket speed for damage, requiring an action to set it up.

Have different kinds of locks with different rates of misfiring. Matchlocks would be the most unreliable, flintlocks more reliable and wheellocks the most reliable, but also the most expensive.

The advantage of pistols should be able to fire to pistols in consecutive rounds. Dont make them reload faster, make it so that you can fire a pistol immediately after another.

Have them do hueg damage but inaccurate but I guess thats a given.

As for the role of bows and crossbows, that depends entirely on your setting and whether or not guns are commonplace or not.

Cannons

>takes literally 1 second to learn
>rendered obsolete by standard issue charges and cartridges
>as easy as learning the order of a krabby patty
>drill training does not take as long as training a longbowman

>Crossbows and bows silent.

They are only comparatively less noisy than guns. A flying or bolt will be heard.

>His party of adventurers is not equipped with throw-away handgonnes for a killer alpha strike against the monster.

>training a longbowman
God, that takes forever.

It literally did, that's why bows died out

Checked

Depiction of hangonners often pair them with crossbowmen or archers. After being battered by a hail of arrows, the enemy would draw close enough to receive a salvo of deadly handgonne shot. Accuracy of pre-matchlock handgonnes would have been solved by firing them at closer ranges, on mass and firing at close formations of men while providing better penetrating power than bows or crossbows.

It also appears the handgonne was a viable weapon from the beginning, and one that became all the more effective as gunpowder and the weapon’s design improved in quality. Only the earliest pieces would have resembled the stereotypically dangerous hand cannon,

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The bowstring itself isn't exactly quiet either, especially on some of the beefier crossbows.

Very early guns like wheel lock muskets and pistols are in the setting but almost entirely useless to the party as weapons. They require about 10 turns to reload. They don't require proficiency at all to be used and are cheap to use.

Npc armies use guns and canons against cavalry armies and fortresses. In large numbers they work well and can be used by idiots but a highly skilled adventurer wouldn't need one.

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>They require about 10 turns to reload
How long is a turn?

>Cheap
>No proficiency

Fill a fucking cart or magical equivalent of these things. Why reload when you could just grab a new gun every round?

>half to a whole minute reloading.
Yeah, no.

Norse Gothic.
Welp, im spending the night worldbuilding i guess.

That's bad drilling. 3 shots a minute should be viable, particularly for heroes.

Can you fire an arrow for turn and do damage? Sure it's fancy, but something tells me that you need to pull the bow a bit further to account for armor.

You have no idea how long I've wanted to do pic related with a character.

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5e turns are 6 seconds

Nothing says you can't do that but my players never thought to try. It would take too much time compared to hitting with a sword repeatedly as a fighter and casters don't have a reason

ok so, you got a lot of options buddy and that depends on what kind of system you're thinking of making and weather of not you want guns to be balanced with other ranged weapons.

>realistic low fantasy game please
Guns shoot much slower than short bows, but not that much slower than heavier long and war bows. Crossbows shoot at about the same rate as guns except for the smallest of draws. Short bows should only be a threat to game and lightly armored troops, fast weak crossbows should be the same but like all crossbows should get a damage bonus for firing at short range.

stats should be
damage
Guns>crossbows(short range)>longbows>crossbows(long range)>shortbows
Rate of fire
Short bows>Long bows>crossbows=guns
Acuracy
Guns(short range)>Guns(medium range)>short bows>long bows>crossbows(short range)>Guns(long range)>crossbows(medium and long range)
Armor percing
Guns>crossbow(short range)>long bows>crossbows(medium range)>short bow>crossbows(long range)

>crank that Tolkien shit up senpai
a few ways to balance out guns with other ranged weapons could come from your magic system. If lead cant be enchanted but arrows can magic arrows can give them an edge for the high level party. Sadly there isnt anyway to keep crossbows and guns realistic and in the same setting, guns out crossbows at every turn and fill their niche to boot.

My logic:

Firearms are far more powerful than bows and crossbows, 2x-4x more so, but they're much more difficult to enchant for one reason or another so you'll never have magic guns. They can't punch through magic defenses (or, alternatively, they're great in an anti-magic field) and can't do neat stuff like hit multiple enemies with the same bullet or daze or set enemies on fire.

Specifically in my homebrew world, ease of enchantment relates to how often a magic item appears in legends and stories. There're plenty of stories about magic swords and magical archers so you can draw on that collective memory to put magic in your bow, but firearms have only existed for a century and there aren't enough stories of legendary gunslingers or silver bullets yet.

Honestly, bows and crossbows don't make much sense for adventurers either. They fight in small groups, often in enclosed areas like dungeons. Ranged weapons benefit from volume of fire and distance.

Archers in adventuring parties is partially justified by often making the archer of the group superhuman archer that would give Robin Hood a run for their money.

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Six seconds in most d20 games

In my homebrew setting guns are starting to phase out bows and crossbows. Generally speaking bows are cheaper to buy outside of the areas with major gun production. Guns are really powerful, but their production is still limited, and in many places bows are still the primary weapon.

other nations have yet to encounter blackpowder and thus getting ammunition in those is all but impossible.

TL;DR guns are cheap and powerful, but not always readily available for purchase, neither is ammunition available everywhere.

I love this meme
powder weapons probably require more way more training to use effectively than any martial weapon or crossbow.
Guns require less training to use well, but any asshole can pick up a spear and stab things with the pointy end, most people would end up harming themselves if they tried to use a gun untrained.

Ever fired a crossbow IRL? They're actually fairly loud. By no means a gunshot, but they make a pretty distinctive twang.

Everything. They're objectively the superior weapon. There's a reason guns completely surplanted bows and crossbows. Even among cultures with a strong archery tradition it was replaced.

honestly this, Gunpowder weapons should have more AP damage vs arrows, slightly lower reload rates, and equal damage. An arrow will kill you as good as a bullet (better maybe) but the AP value of guns is a lot higher than bows.
There's a reason body armor is still virtually not a thing, because the ap value of guns is so high as to make it pointless against all but the weakest of guns.

>powder weapons require more training to use effectively
>guns require less training to use well
>compares gun to spear

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So 3 turns of spending an action or bonus action to reload, then fire on the 4th turn, spend 3 more turns reloading, fire on the 8th turn, spend 3 more turns reloading, fire on the 12th turn. That evens out to a reasonable 3 shots per 72 seconds, and it's easy to remember 3 turns of spending your action or bonus action to reload. I'd play with that assuming the gun does a fuckload of damage like said.

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Yeah, yes. Early guns were awful. Highly trained people could reload them faster, but it was still really slow.

OP, the way I sell them to my players is that they're like a spell. Takes some earlier prep, huge damage, slow recharge (reload). They're a "fuck this enemy in particular" weapon.

Depends on the time period though user. And cheap ones weren't reliable, sometimes deadly so.

>Ignores armor.
STOP

>ignores armor
Lolno.
youtube.com/watch?v=rCFMFeZ0JvQ

>People aren't aware that the average arquebus ball weighted more than a 30 Winchester and had a higher velocity

>tiny caliber
>probably reduced load for safety
Might as well use BB gun.

Takes longer to reload.
Does more damage.
Has better range.
If it's a system that doesn't do armor as DR, you should include some sort of bonus against armor at close-ish ranges (not completely negating, but definitely doing better than a bow or crossbow, and before someone goes on about proofed plate, the armor was typically proofed with a pistol at a reduced load).

The more expensive, proffesional alternative.
All low grade thugs, militiamen and hunters are gonna be found with crossbows, not because they are cheaper to make but because everyone and their master knows how to make them now but gunsmiths are relatively rare and combined industries for the materials are all over the place.

Other than that, its a straight upgrade, outside of ammo. Bolts are easier to carve than smoothing pellets.

>Pistol
>Small calibre pistol
>Probably safely loaded with a half charge because faggots
Hahahahaha

I basically give them the crossbow treatment and don't care much.
But then again my damage system and simplicity affords that kinda shit.

All weapons have a "to hit" and "to wound" bonuses. Any time you hit something (roll to hit >AC), you roll a to wound vs. their toughness.

So easy to use, light weapons have +to hit (rapiers and spears (and there's no difference between a rapier and a spear in my shitty homebrews due to rampant simplicity)), and heavy, fucky weapons have a +to wound (battle axes and hammers).
Balanced weapons (swords) have a smaller bonus to both.

So if I add a drawback to guns that they're long to reload, I have to buff up their + to wound above a crossbow; if I don't touch them, they're basically a "crossbow skin".

I like keeping it simple as fuck not only to relieve my bookkeeping (which I am true shit at, forgetting buffs and many more such things), but to also accommodate my players, which are often gamers that have trouble reading 10 pages of a system.
The less numbers I have on paper, the easier it is for all of us to play; we're that kinda simple shitter gamers.

It doesn't always, but it does enough. A rifle almost certainly does nearly every time while a pistol it would probably depend on how well-made the armor was, range, and how dead on the shot is.

youtu.be/dQfcRLT18IY

But low training requirements was the only advantage of early firearms.

Training archers took years to develop the skills and upper body strength to be effective. You could teach someone to use and maintain a gun proficiently in weeks. Even though a skilled bow user was better in terms of range and rate of fire you could have way MORE guys with guns. You eventually reach a point where instead of missile weapons being a specialized unit of your army they're nearly your entire army.

The massive increase in the number of soldiers in an army capable of ranged combat was what also led to the decrease in effectiveness in cavalry.

This, people if you think shooting a gun is harder than shooting a bow then you've never shot either.

The rise of the firearm as the primary weapon of armies is a fun story. Because for a very very long time they were complete and utter garbage compared other ranged weapons.

The range component of an army for the majority of history was relatively small in western armies due to training times required. In some eastern armies you get some different compositions though. Mongol armies for a lot of time were composed entirely of horse archers. Entire armies with what in the west are two specialized skills. Their effective range and movement speed are why they were so massively successful.

Because of the relative ease to train someone to use a firearm compared to a bow you could start equipping a larger percentage of your army with ranged weapons than ever before. Like in many cases, quantity is better than quality.

Later on you can stick a pointy bit on the end of your firearms and suddenly your ranged soldiers are also pikemen. Even more reason to produce even more guns and give them to every soldier.

Group your guys in big squares and lines and they can deliver effective volley fire to overcome the inaccuracy of their weapons. When they're formed into square they can stick their bayonets out and effectively defend against cavalry.

Keep developing and improving those firearms and you get rates of fire that completely change military doctrine. Cavalry loses almost all of its usefulness and is relegated to scouting. Defense tactics and entrenched positions now have MASSIVE advantages over an attacking force. Welcome to WWI and the death of the cult of the offensive.

I sorta rambled. But tl;dr a gun is so goddamn easy to use and deploy, despite its drawbacks, that it changed nearly everything about military tactics that had been developed up till then.

>with an added roll to see if it blows up in your face
Fix'd.

Shooting people.

Flintlocks don’t explode in your face. They’re the Cadillac of single shots!

>The rise of the firearm as the primary weapon of armies is a fun story. Because for a very very long time they were complete and utter garbage compared other ranged weapons.

Nah, they were good enough from the beginning, else they would have been abandoned. Handgonne are not the stereotypical dangerous hand cannons that threaten you to explode in your face.

>next to
Gunpowder weapons are in all ways superior. The shit accuracy meme is just anglo longbow faggotry and denial.

>muh agincourt
I'll remind you fags that the tea-sipping dental disasters lost that war. To the fucking french, mind you, because an illiterate teen-aged peasant chick brought the hammer of god down upon them, by which I mean she utilized artillery and gunpowder weaponry to their full potential. The French charge broke on the English lines after wading uphill through fucking mud, they weren't beaten off by your fucking katana-esque view of longbows.
>muh munitions costs
Once Pandora's freedom box was opened, there was no closing it again. What do you think was more efficient? Pouring some metal into round casts and then grinding up and mixing shit tons of powder at once before distributing it, or fashioning an arrow out of a metal arrowhead, a whittled stick, feathers, and all the fucking shit to keep it together in flight? Making metal balls is fucking trivial and economy of scale goes heavily in favor of just mixing a shit-ton of crap at once.
>muh arrows n bolts r bigger, durr
It takes a real fucking retard to say that an early blackpowder weapon would do less damage than a modern .50 BMG, just because the lead ball is bigger around than .50 and it takes the same sort of fucking retard to think arrows and bolts will be more dangerous than a lead ball going at just under mach 1. It doesn't matter how big the hole is when every bone the bullet hits gets fucking shattered from the sheer speed and force of impact.

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The only time in which guns MIGHT be less effective than other ranged weapons is in the case of the handgonne and even then its debatable as the handgonne had better penetration and comparable accuracy when using musketarrows than even the heaviest crossbow. Once the arquebus arrived no other ranged weapon could compare. Even the samurai who had a long and storied archery tradition virtually phased archery out entirely by the Imjin War only thirty years after their introduction to the archipelago.

Firearms should deal fairly static damage, not scale terribly well. They do need to be somewhat rare. In my opinion they should ignore some percent of nonmagical and natural armour. To demonstrate that while guns are still experimental and not dreadfully refined they bring a force and damage that the world has never seen or had time to adjust to yet.

You should never be able to multiattack with guns and you won't do a hundred plus damage with one. But they should be more consistently able to hurt things then a crossbow

In the beginning they scared the shit out of people, were enough to destroy walls when in cannon formed, and shot arrows half the time.

It took corned powder and usage alongside other weapons (such as in pike formations) to take down knights constantly, and then it became more and more valuable. That took a long, long while.

I been thinking about that too, how to make guns common enough than even some Tribal chieftain in not-america/carib can get one trading with not-Euros/ERE/Not-Persians and how to make them scarce enough so not everyone is using them.
At the moment I'm using the ERE with primitive black powder weapons, than used it as a secret weapons only the Not-chinese and them used and sold it to other countries/city states, but the Not-Iberians, after entering a portal to not-amazonia, got themselves a bunch of tropical plants than along they sap and some other shit than when electrical activated it behave like smokeless powder. In both quantity and price its a lot steeper (the guns are more expensive and only a few city states and some principats in not-Iberia can do them), but its also a lot better than the black powder used be the Not-Byzies,than apart of being more common, its dirtiers, less powerful and and a lot more dangerous to store (magic exist and fire elementalists have been used to blow out the reserve or powders in some few but very well done instances).
Why I have done that? Because that aestethics is my prefered, I love javelins, crossbows and heavy armor along shotguns, pistols and muskets plus tribals and the late Roman empire, the sassanids and the persians in general. It lets me play a pulpy lost cities in the amazone feel, pistoleers and all that with the rest of weapons being useful if only because they are cheaper. A good armor can stop a musket shot but they are so expensive and cumbersome to make than not many people can afford them. Guns and bombs are also the prefered way to kill powerful monsters than until recently caused lots of casualties to humans and they allies when trying to end them.
sorry for blogposting I guess.

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>Treating the Hundred years war as one continuous conflict.
>Ignoring the Treaty of Troyes
>implying both sides didn't use gun powder
>Implying for the most part, aside from seiges, canons were just used for scaring cavalry rather than mowing down mass ranks of infantry
>Implying England's loss of her French territories was due to French technological superiority, rather than superior man power and a standing army, and political intrigue and bankrupt nation back home.

I think an adventurer would have either a blunderbuss or set of pistols. The first has a role that can't be easily be filled by any other weapon and the second is a flexible alternative to crossbow in close quarters.

Musket provides nothing that bow and crossbow don't do better when the distance grows and is more difficult to handle up close.

Take the warhammer route and have any pc that uses guns carry multiple guns. Like 30 god dam flintlock pistols strapped to his belt, so he doesn't have to reload during fights he just shoots then grabs a new pistol

I did this in my campaign. Also on the worst possible roll they blow up and get destroyed

>takes forever to relaod
That's realistic, but it's just going to lead to your players bringing more than 1 gun to a fight. So you probably shouldn't rely on that for balancing.

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Well you need to examine the advantages and disadvantages, and apply that to what makes sense for your setting

Pros:
>Really easy to train levvy/conscript troops to use them (this is the main thing)
>Bayonets mean that ranged units now actually have a viable defense against cavalry and infantry charges
>They do much more damage since a bullet will penetrate through and cause all kinds of nasty havoc and bleeding, whereas an arrow just sticks in you and unless you pierce something vital, the guy won't drop all that quickly because the arrow shaft actually prevents blood loss
>they can penetrate armor (not all armor at first, but as guns get better they end up being the death knell of the armored knight)
>They are a shock and awe weapon, great for terrorizing men and horses who have to fight them
>They can engage at a longer range

Cons
>Expensive (this evens out if you have a large army and lots of skilled craftsmen, since the reduced training cost more than compensates for the cost of the weapons)
>Complex to manufacture, requires an advanced nation with good craftsmen and lots of raw materials
>Inaccurate. Bows aren't all that accurate either, endless Robin Hood adaptations to the contrary, but early guns are very inaccurate
>Slow rate of fire thanks to muzzle loading
>The last two mean you basically have to employ guns in large numbers with line infantry fighting in formation in order for them to be effective
>Requires gunpowder. Not a problem if you're a rich and advanced nation with connections, in fact it makes it easier since powder and ball is easier to assemble into ammunition vs crossbow bolts, but if you don't have a secure source of powder you're screwed

Basically, guns are a weapon for the line infantry of large, rich and technologically advanced nations. You won't see them being used as much by smaller nations, units or mercenary bands, and almost certainly not by murderhobos or bandits.
Of course pistols are a different story.

>Musket provides nothing that bow and crossbow don't do better when the distance grows and is more difficult to handle up close.
This is retarded

Exceptional damage, extremely long range, high accuracy, incredible ROF, light, easy to use and able to penetrate all armour imaginable.

...this is the daily firearms thread isn't it?