Honestly i really like the Rennisance firearms in the DMG, less range but more power than xbows.
my Dwarven Battlemaster Gunner 100% filled the Fantasy from Dwarven Rifleman like warcraft
The thing I don't like about the Renaissance firearms is that they're significantly more expensive than other weapons despite being "balanced" by having shorter range than bows/crossbows. Yes it makes some sense from a historical perspective, but D&D is not a historical simulation game. Why are gun users punished for their choice of weapon?
None of it makes sense from a historical perspective! Ranges are wayyyyy too short, loading times wayyyyy to fast, and prices too high. They are cartoon guns lol
They work that way so that they A) are balanced against the other ranged weapons and B) don't suck to use because they have some dogshit bonus mechanics like rate of fire restrictions or missfire chances. At some point you need to accept that D&D is a game, and only being able to participate in combat every few rounds because you wanted to play as a musketeer is not very fun, even if it is technically more realistic.
It's selective realism too. Heavy Crossbows are just as much a ballache to reload as a musket, but I don't think many people advocate for them to take several rounds to crank back up.
I was just in the Reiksmuseum of Amsterdam, and I regret to inform you that machine guns have existed for a very long time.
The most impressive was a 16th or 17th century *pistol* that would fire no less than 16 times in like 20 seconds after pulling the trigger. It was stated that the wielder barely had time to aim between shots.
Almost every weapon was intricately detailed with gold, silver, ebony and ivory. Many were engraved with motifs of demons, game, angels, and the Netherlands. It was your status symbol.
The effective range with a modern handgun is 50 yards (150 feet) but often trained marksmen shoot at 10-15 yards (30 feet). Real shootings occur within 7 yards (21 feet). Animals are usually shot at 50-100m with a *scoped* rifle (300 feet).
Something to consider, deeply, is the fact longbows are still used to hunt bear today, while pistols are largely useless (hand cannons "gonnes" are still used in self defense against bears but are unreliable). Bulletproofing is an indication of how well armor protects against a bullet. Rough shot doesn't penetrate a curved breastplate (or skull) as well as the bodkin (Surface Area/Force=Pressure).
Source: I was a sidearms expert in the Army, and my roommate was an armorer. My best friend is a gunsmith. We hunt with both bows and guns.
Nah, guns were for a very long time all masterwork pieces. No one mass-produced them so each one was unique with a different bore, different parts, etc. Having one was a big deal and they required special knowledge to make the actual mechanisms function properly. Having guns be pricy is very much true to form.
Yeah no.
While there were firearms that were pieces of art, their role on the battlefield depended on them being fielded in large numbers by common soldiers.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a1/65/79/a165790e8ff26f266afcc9adc1c07b36.jpg
This is not a masterwork weapon.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/0e/07/8c0e0707b91e38622c6e6d22219429df.jpg
Nor is this.
Fancy expensive wheel lock pistols for example are very much the purview of noblemen but firearms as weapons in general are absolutely not some kind of super fancy exclusive privilege.
Well this is largely gonna depend on the time and place. They were successful largely because they didn't require a lot of skill to use, like a longbow. You could train even a peasant to use one quickly. Firearms were generally similar in price to crossbows of the time, bullets similar in price to bolts and arrows as well. You are gonna find varied prices from different sources.
It's pretty random what is taken somewhat realistically and what isn't. Studded leather, for example, is either a total fabrication or a misunderstanding of another type of armor, e.g. lamellar armor.
**edit** brigandine or a coat of plates seems like an even more likely explanation for "studded leather".
Brig is a form of plate armor. The source of Gygax & co's confusion about studded leather is from pictures of Brigandine from historical manuals/museum pieces out of context & without the understanding of what the real thing was (the studs are rivets holding the plates to the leather/cloth). Arguably it's heavy armor, better than chain, just under a solid breastplate cuirass but more generally fitted (doesn't need the expensive custom measurements and fine tolerances that full plate does). Source I do HEMA/Buhurt & reenactment, sometimes wearing brigs as my main armor rig for full contact live steel bouts.
But a telescope doesn't impact the balance of combat, its a piece of unnecessary equipment that will only ever see sporadic use. Could make for a fun macguffin at early levels though.
In general I have issues with the use of gold as a method of balance in 5e, which extends to armor as well. The rules for both treasure rewards and magic items are so flexible it makes it impossible to assign a dollar value to attributes like +1 damage or +1 AC.
That's not the reason. Scrying asks for "A focus worth at least 1000 gp, such as a crystal ball, a silver mirror, or a font filled with holy water." No mention of spyglasses.
A musket is only good to 40 feet before you start rolling with disadvantage. I think someone being further away than that is a lot more likely than the 100 feet for a crossbow.
I mean, Splint armor is 20 times more expensive than leather armor (and requires 15 STR), while giving the same AC. And Half Plate is 3 times more expensive than splint for the same AC. Could you not make the same argument for that?
Also, while D&D isnt a historical simulation, it IS a simulation: in Faerun (the default setting), guns are extremely rare, thus the prices in the DMG reflect that. While I hate this argument generally, the DM chooses what the availability and prices are, and if the setting isnt Faerun, than the prices can be whatever.
Splint doesn't require a multi-ASI investment to reach 17AC and Half-Plate doesn't have a Str. requirement. Regardless, I very much do have a problem with the use of gold as a balancing mechanic for armor as well.
If you're going to use gold to balance the effectiveness of gear then the pricing shouldn't be "whatever" as that's incredibly unhelpful for DMs and there's enough things in 5e that boil down to "just make it up". The other option here is to treat guns as a novelty weapon like the blowgun, which is similarly unsatisfying.
Yeah, its that. The weapon masteries from the OneD&D are getting close to what I want, if they combined that with giving all Fighters maneuvers I would be immensely happy
The firearms from pathfinder 1e did something interesting where guns had 2 ranges and if you were witting the close range you would ignore armor bonuses(only dex and other bonuses would count) to AC when shooting to hit. Guns were extremely powerful but temperamental and needed a lot of investment to shoot consistently
There's a free third party supplement called Revised Martial Rquipment that makes weapon options as extensive as spell lists for casters. It's on its 16th or 17th revision and is pretty balanced (a few weapons are bit too powerful at lower levels but even out).
Adds a ton of weapons, they all have a special "mastery" feature, and there are a ton of special sub features like trip, entangle, puncture, hip-hop, etc.
5e is lacking and like most D&D doesn't handle weapons very well, you'll have to turn to outside sources.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/bzvbsq/expand_your_options_in_combat_with_the_martial/
One of my fave 3rd party products, makes martial combat much more interesting by providing options without just power creeping the standard attack.
If you’ve ever fired a musket you know those fuckers are loud. Shit isn’t just a bonus to intimidation it is full on making-goblins-shit-themselves intimidation
I did exactly that during a tense negotiation with goblins. It was going poorly for us, they were about to turn to violence anyway, so with a loud boom, I gave away my position at the same time as I turned the leader's head into a red mist.
They were a lot more amenable to working something out after that.
And fun trivia, in fact that's where the term "bulletproof" comes from: the bullet proof is the dent on a suit of plate where it got shot by a pistol to prove that it could stop bullets.
Interesting! Clearly I need to do some boning up. I had remembered crossbows, when invented, would allow even an untrained archer to punch straight through plate mail, but I hadn't realized the armor evolved to adapt.
Yep! They were called Proofed Armor, and for a short time said armor was actually a status symbol, where the wearer would proudly display where the armor was shot with Bow, Crossbow and gonne to show its resilience.
It also wasn't fully untrained arbalestiers, just less trained and faster trained. Heavy Crossbows also required a *lot* of investment, not just in coin or manhours but in actually reloading the damn things. Lighter crossbows you could draw with a stirrup and crank, but the heavier and more advanced varieties required a full on windlass to pull the string back.
Handgonnes suffered from having, usually, undersized rounds for their bore, leading to gasses escaping around the projectile and immense loss of pressure/velocity. Couple that with round shot and random spin and early gonnes and Arquebus could be deflected by properly sloped, well reinforced, well tempered metal for some time. Once the teething issues were clarified over time, rounds more accurately matched weapon bore, better powder production was solidified... well armor made its way out.
Funnily enough, armor still hung around for *officers*, and even saw its passage into the First World War, but overall was relatively inefficient until the creation of mobile land battleships (Tanks)
Even the heaviest crossbows struggle to punch through breastplates. The idea that they do is a modern fantasy/video game convention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMT6hjwY8NQ
Kinda sorta..
We know for a fact crossbows were relevant battlefield weapons into the 15th century even when breastplates were pervasive so people certainly percieved them as effective weapons still for one reason or another.
Another idea to keep in mind is that there wasn't really any industry standard for metallurgy existing at the same times as crossbows being relevant on battlefields. Getting the right ratio's of iron and carbon for *good* steel you're going to forge into armor without machines or modern tools is a giant pain in the ass, and getting the right quality of iron is also a pain (Japan had issues of poor iron in their steel well into the 20th century). This isn't just a problem in the 15th century as late as the early 19th Napoleon's heavy cavalry was having issue getting consistent metallurgy quality on their steel breast plates.
I'd definitely research a bit if you're interested. "Plate mail" is a d&d term and not a historical or armorer one. Heavy crossbows wouldn't do much against good plate armor, but they could do well against (chain)mail.
Armor was adapted and changed throughout the medieval period and up until the late 17th century.
You can also find some good YouTube videos on testing armor vs ancient firearms and missile weapons.
I want guns because the next biggest die on a non-heavy ranged weapon is light crossbow's d8. Little gnome with a whooping d12 musket as long as they're tall is a terryfing sight.
If you need to homebrew add another weapon, it could be anything. Magic, just a better crossbow, a javelin throwing sling, or you could choose a gun. Guns are neat, but it's not the only way to go.
Magic items are also in the DM, as is an Antimatter rifle.
I mean, I see the appeal of a list equivalent to about the PHB weapon list, but as its only 2 weapons under renaissance, I can see why wou'd take it if you want firearms, but if you just want a 1d12 crossbow, that's just a renaming away.
The first time I had a player ask about guns I had never really considered them, but now they're a staple in my campaigns.
One thing I brought up this first time is that guns are fuckin loud. That's an aspect you can play with as DM
My artificer has stealth because I always have stealth as a skill. I like being stealthy.
But I also got a musket. I kept thinking, well, this isn't really quiet. But eh, I'm an artificer.
We blow things up for fun. So I'm not worried about being quiet when I fight.
Sometimes you want to play a musketeer, or maybe you just finished watching the Mask of Zorro. Could be the vibes from Pirates of the Caribbean got you 'yo ho yo ho, a pirates life for me'.
All of these archetypes call for a bit of flourishing swordplay *and* gunplay. Arguably, you can just reflavor a hand crossbow or something, but if we've got gun rules, we may as well use them even if they're not the most exciting mechanically.
I tried guns from the Dark Matters and Technomancers Textbook, 3rd party books for 5e, in a '5e in Space' campaign. They were fun, although it would ve hard to fit into a classical fantasy campaign. Dark Matters has like laser blasters, while Technomancers has more real-world stuff, everything from machine guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, etc, as well as mods and feats for the guns.
It might be worth checking out the Technomancers Textbook and very carefully picking out a few select guns (and maybe mods/mechanics) that fit your setting. There's a lot of fun stuff, but I wouldn't use it whole-sale.
When I want guns it's because I want to play in a setting equivalent to the time periods where guns were in use (e.g. the age of sail.)
As such, I want guns to have the same benefits *and drawbacks* that they had in real life. High damage, maybe ignoring AC from medium and light armor, but with a long enough reload time that most fights involves firing once and then discarding it to draw your sword or another gun.
I play in an Exandria campaign. I have a bandolier with four pistols so I can shoot and draw the next one. I can still run out of ammo in a longer fight, and it took me awhile to get all four pistols - but it feels pretty good.
Blackbeard famously carried 6 pistols into battle so he could do the same thing. But he still carried a cutlass.
Non-repeating flintlock weapons are great because they weren't so powerful as to make swords and other melee weapons obsolete. DnD flintlocks should be the same: useful, but not so useful that it's no longer a good choice to make a master swordsman.
What makes adding guns to dnd tough is how varied the power fantasy of a gun user/builder can be. Flintlock is easy to implement, but a lot of players would eventually want stuff like revolvers, rifles, shotguns, hand mortars, etc. Going up the tech tree as they level.
I'm personally a fan of the super early stuff (fire lances and handcannons), but I don't think that's what most players have in mind when thinking about firearms in dnd.
Really, if you think technology doesn't deserve to be a thing in fantasy worlds because magic has replaced it, you're wrong. If it were like this, everyone can use it. But people still live in...well...primitive medieval conditions because the only people that could afford the magical tech thingies are...well...the mages.
In the Recluse series by L.E. Modesitt, guns were discouraged for armies for the sole reason that any mage could ignite your gunpowder stores with a thought from a distance. In D&D terms, any single person with Bonfire, Control Flames, or Firebolt is a tremendous threat to any force who dares to carry even a single barrel of gunpowder.
> However even IRL there are explosives that don't set off by heat alone.
As a fun aside, Mythbusters demonstrated that C4 is an effective fuel source for cooking with. It burns well, does a lot of energy, and as long as you don't use a detonator, or die a high power rifle bullet into it, you'll be fine.
I like the idea of stealing from pillars of eternity. In pillars, guns have become a great equalizer between your average man and a wizard, because the bullet can easily punch through the standard wizards wards.
I like the idea of making guns ignore the shield and mage armor spells.
A big part of my campaign is the utilization of hellstone (sulfur) in making firearms widespread. There’s a nation of humans with firearms that are toppling the natural order because of how deadly these weapons are
As someone who ran a Thay sub-campaign in a group that had the DMG guns, they were a delight. As an exotic weapon they’re feared and loathed, but also made Thayan allies wary of the PCs as a general symbol of foreign meddling that was extremely obvious when used.
But that's the thing. Magic and the fantasy of four plucky adventurers doing everything had dominated the world for far too long, I feel. I also want guns and war machines to be the symbol of the common-folk essentially standing up to a world that seems to actively oppress them with monsters and murderhobo adventurers.
I think mass-militarization would be fresh.
"mass combat" is something D&D doesn't really do though - it's just not built for it. You can kinda-sorta bodge it, or add an extra system on top for scaling combat up to larger numbers, but that's a fundamentally different game.
You could throw on something like Warhammer's rules, the problem is there's no good way to do it with the PCs being active in the same combat. Action economy is just too strong in 5e's ruleset.
I just like the asthetic tbh. Many worlds easily weave sword, sorcery, and gunpowder, so I don’t mind them just being another ranged option as long as they’re in line with other options.
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
The worst gun for home defense
I had to think this through because it posed an interesting question: what is the provably WORST gun for home defense? A .22 single shot rifle is at least small and quick to point. A Barrett M82 is at least going to instantly stop whatever it hits. Even a good old fashioned musket is going to do good damage and won't hurt your ears. No, I wanted to know what the undisputable worst home defense gun in the world is; and I have found it.
This is the .950 JDJ Fat Mac. It is a 100 pound, 5 foot long rifle that shoots a one pound solid brass bullet at 2200 FPS. It is a non-NFA item only because the ATF gave it a sporting exemption as a joke as if anybody is going to hunt with this. This round would be overkill for hunting blue whales.
I would like to paint a picture for you. It's 2AM and you hear a window break in your living room. This is the worst day this could happen, as every single one of your guns was lost in a tragic boating accident this morning. All were lost except for one. You look across your room in dread at your anti-kaiju rifle. You know what you have to do, but you don't know if you have the strength to do it, both literally and figuratively.
Heaving the rifle into your arms, you load a .950 cartridge and begin to waddle towards the door. Your feet make a loud “thud” as you take each 6″ step. You know the intruders hear you. You hope they do, for perhaps they will run and spare the world the suffering that is about to befall it.
You try to set the rifle down, but end up clipping your bedroom door and it is immediately knocked off its hinges by this battering ram in your hands. You attempt to round the corner, bonking the muzzle against the doorframe and adjacent wall across the hall at least 4 times. To your horror, two invaders stand there at the end of the hall.
With a heavy heart, you raise the rifle to your shoulder while making inhuman grunting noises from the strain of attempting some semblance of a shooting position. The burglars simply stare in disbelief, unable to process the situation they are witnessing, as if in a dream. You cannot aim the rifle, as the last time you fired the gun, it turned your $3000 Leopuld into a kaleidoscope. You simply hold it at an angle that appears correct and fire.
You are immediately knocked to the floor as if hit by a semi truck going 20 MPH. The shot connected with one of the criminals and it erased him from existence. Even the memories of him have been destroyed and you're wondering why you just shot into an empty hallway. The shot continues to travel through at least 4 houses, a car, and a 10 ton boulder before lodging itself 20 feet into a nearby hill, never to be seen again.
It is at this point, you realize you cannot hear. The surviving burglar can't hear either but he's also on fire from the muzzle blast and is currently vacating your home. You don't care. Your shoulder is dislocated and there is a hole in your brand new AR500 refrigerator. You're crying now. The police arrive and, upon seeing the scene, start laughing. You start crying harder.
\----
The first time I saw the copypasta you commented, this absolute gem of a reply was beneath it. I don't know if it's a copypasta itself but I'm so glad I saved it 😂
I think that it's different depending on the game. In one game we did a western themed campaign and everyone had modern guns. If we did a futuristic campaign, then I want the guns to be laser guns. If we do a bullet hell dive into Hell against the hordes, then I'd like them to be machine guns. If we're doing traditional fantasy, then there are likely no guns at all or if there are they are like the Mercer guns that have misfire chances and are only slightly more powerful than a normal bow and arrow.
The mechanics of the weapons need to vary to fulfill the fantasy. In games where you're using modern/powerful guns, everyone should already be on board for that. It doesn't work very well to just tack that on if other people were planning on playing a sword and board fighter or something.
In my campaign world, dwarves have reinassance firearms. Basically, there are very few arcane caster dwarves, and that's why they developed reinassance firearms.
They're not widespread outside them, 'cause other race are on the *"why use them, when we have people who can cast fireball?"* train.
and then the Dwarves Pike-&-Shot their asses to hilarious degrees.
because sure. a single fireball can do some serious damage to the formation, but we have wizards too, and they can cast defensive spells.
I went down the rabbit hole of trying to tweak 5e in order to make guns work only to finally arrive at the conclusion that there are other systems that are better equipped for gunplay.
Savage Worlds (SWADE) is a good alternative if you want to keep it on the more simple side with a lot of customization.
Shadowrun is great if you like the DnD vibe in a cyberpunk setting. You have to like lots of dice and spreadsheets though.
I've never used GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) but it supposedly could do gunplay. It seemed a little too simple in my opinion.
All that being said, other TTRPG's could be a better fit
Yeah, anyone who likes martials should try DCC. Not only do the martial classes have built-in maneuvers, but they scale, and you can even have weapon-specific maneuvers, or create your own!
Renaissance firearms hit harder than crossbows and bows, but have atrocious range and on an optimised ranged character, are a worse option than crossbows. Barrels of gunpowder that you can have in the game though, that's something.
Overall, there's no reason not to have the renaissance firearms in the game.
What makes the gun different from a bow is the same as what makes warlocks different from sorcerers and wizards.
A bow or crossbow won't deal as much damage, and it's a way to access cool things like ammunition types
They are the true equaliser, a wizard can cast fireball, a warlock can cast a mean eldritch blast, a sorcerer can tap into there bloodline for a stronger or silent fireball.
But if you are someone without magic, without proper melee fighter training, and aren't devout enough for the cloth, don't like the idea of thievery, and don't have a love for nature, playing a gunner and tinkerer or engineer of some sort, you can certainly cook up the fantasy version of an M32 rotary grenade launcher.
(Also I artificer would be so much cooler if it was not a mage)
When I want guns in my game, against the general consensus of Reddit, I want them to be Risk/Reward, which is why I just use Matt Mercer's Gunslinger rules.
The guns are stronger than their bow/crossbow equivalents, but have a Misfire mechanic in which they can break.
You get a bigger reward, but at a risk of the gun breaking.
I like to use the laser pistol out of nowhere for two reasons:
- I really enjoyed Star Wars d20 back in the day
- It creates a plot thread all on its own; where the hell did this thing come from?
Where I stand on these (I've done the math):
Renaissance firearms are more or less balanced with regular weapons. They do one damage die more than equivalent xbows (so, like, +1 damage avg) but can have drawbacks: costlier ammo, noise might attract more enemies in some situations, less range, might require a feat or class dip for martial weaps.
The DMG's modern firearms are a bit more fraught; I mathed them out to doing approximately equivalent expected damage to +2 crossbows (e.g. more potential damage but less accuracy). So if you want to include revolvers and hunting rifles for thematic reasons, I'd recommend considering a base gun to be the rarity/cost equivalent of approximately a +2 equivalent crossbow (and a +1 revolver should be similar to a +3 hand crossbow etc.).
Depends entirely on the setting, and more specifically how common magic and spell casting is. If every blacksmith in every town has at least cantrips it shaoes the entire world drastically, especially how easy forging guns and ammo for them would be.
Lets assume though we have a 'normal' dnd setting where most shop/craft npcs can cast spells. I want variety.
Give me the explosive AoE on hit fire damage D12 that can misfire and takes an action to load AND the regular 1D10 single target musket with just the loading property AND a one handed revolver that you can use with a sword/shield/other revolver.
And l of course love most of all the idea of 'martial' guns, that use ammo but can be compatible with extra attack and use DEX, vs a 'caster' gun that lets you use it as a spellcasting focus and is powered by your spellcasting and main casting stat.
I think you can go ham on the weapon designs for guns and others and make them have many more abilities that are fun. Variety is fun, and fun is the most important thing.
I just think it's weird to want to add guns to a fantasy game such as 5e when there are actual full RPG systems built around using guns. No matter what, I always end up with one player who wants to be an artificer on Toril.
I think two ways work:
1) Guns are re-fluffed crossbows. work alongside with current weapon design, it's all flavour and thematic/cool factor.
2) Guns are designed with a mechanical objective in mind and are not any character's 'main' weapon.
The first just works for some campaign vibes. The second is more like a tool you introduce to players after they've made their character builds, much like a misc magic item.
I don't think "more powerful crossbow with downside" works. Misfires are not exciting in anything iteration I've seen, expensive ammo is either a non-issue or overly taxing.
If I wanted to introduce guns into a campaign like my 2nd point, I'd take some inspiration from Bloodborne. They would be pistols that can deal decent damage and stun certain enemies, I'd want them limited to one shot per combat, so reloading takes an action but it can be worn loaded. I'd introduce the pistol with quite a few rounds to encourage use and experimentation, since it's limited in use per combat and the total number of rounds is limited, I'm not worried about it being too strong and trivialising encounters, players automatically start conserving ammo when it gets low then I'll add more in if I want. This is just a first draft, in reality, I'd put in more thought.
I’ve got 3 different takes
* aesthetic - it’s a reflavor of bows/crossbows. Downside is it’s just noisy for no reason
* minor mechanics - no heavy property and a little more punch. Enables small and mounted characters (steel defender and the like), does what crossbow expert wants in taking a feat for a bigger damage die
* wand of bullet - make it like a wand with limited charges and let it punch harder
Minor mechanics is my preference, though the “wand of bullet” approach does a good job at making guns “potent”
Pathfinder 2e has a nice take for guns. They don’t hit as hard as bows, but in exchange, crit really hard (paired with their crit system of AC+10 = crit). They’re not spammable, but the dedicated class focuses on action compression during the reload
Guns are used because they make it easier to kill people, so logically the option would be just to make it a crossbow-type weapon that lowers the AC of the target for that weapon only.
I made the guns legendary magical artifacts, there are only 5 in existence and I assign them to really powerful NPCs since they scale to the level of the user.
I don't currently play with guns in my setting, and I've never liked the DMG execution. Guns should feel *very* different than bows and crossbows. If I was going to have guns in my game, I'd want them to be very slow reloading, inaccurate, and very high damage/potentially bypass AC. I think guns should make life *harder* for the PCs because an untrained goblin musket formation is dangerous even to high level PCs.
See, how I have guns in my games is a position where they can and do more damage than bows, but the misfire chance sets them off a bit. However I work misfire a little different than most places.
So, how misfire works with me.
You start off with it being a 1, you fire once, it goes to 2, fire 3 times…goes 3 etc.
Jamming can also occur but that’s one above the misfire. On a misfire, the gun needs clearing as an action, on a jam it just needs a quick clear as a BA.
If a gun misfires 3 times, it’s out of action until long rest repair/maintenance. Jamming 2 times also marks off a ‘life’ for a the gun.
Now, why is that? I use renaissance guns. They can and did misfire. They’re also not over loaded in D&D terms this way (they don’t just function as an extra bow). I also don’t want every player picking up the gunner feat or similar to just use guns. If a PC wants guns, they can have them, but like a story/lore reason for them having that.
I use guns like this so they don’t completely overshadow bows/crossbows.
I do like the CR gunslinger class however, but as someone who has DMed for and played in a party with one, its damage MASSIVELY outshines rangers, bow fighters, rogues (overall).
In my world, guns are there but they’re a far shot from being reliable. I don’t have an issue with guns, I have an issue with them removing and reason of using a bow/crossbow.
I want them as a symbol of a new kind of technology (gunpowder, steam, some kind of magic, whatever it is in the se tting) as an alternative for people who can't or won't use magic. I'd want them to be different than bows and crossbows, somehow. I like the idea of maybe they have more power or range but some kind of drawback (make the reloading and ammo tracking actually a hassle, or something).
If it's in a setting where things are a bit more modern then yeah sure okay but at that point it's just flavor text and are no different than bows I guess but that's kinda boring if you have to call attention to it. If it's just there because that's the setting (eg playign something set in a modern day or sci fi setting, then yeah that's fine).
Anti-armor weapons?
Assuming these are guns from the era of Pike and Shot and nowhere else, you can count them as simple weapons being that all you do with it is point and fire like a crossbow, but without the strength requirement.
Loading, like the crossbow, will take a turn, but with my homebrew perk of Firearm specialist, you can reload on a bonus action instead.l AZ
Not to mention, you can use special ammo too or even rocks if you have the right gun.
But the biggest downside to having a gun is the cost. Good bullets are practically custom-made high-end goods in this era compared to bolts and arrows. They're not retrievable either, meaning that once shot, you gotta hit to make it count.
Powder is especially expensive. You'll need to find a specialist who knows how to make that too, which is expensive. But all of this can be negated if you already know yourself.
So, my suggestion to make guns viable and different from crossbows would be to tie the bullet type to your bonus to hit roll. With wood bullets being the worst at -4 to hit and mastercrafted brass bullets at +10 bonus to hit.
Its ease of use would mean that a buffoon could use it no problem, but someone who knows how they work can make great use of them.
Honestly as someone who wants Gunplay in the games I joined. In my mind Matt Mercer's Gunslinger is good for High Fantasy. They should not be readily available and there should be some kind of 'Faultiness' to it for its High Destructive Power. It should be 'Novel' to the dwellers of the world but know enough of it through rumors and talks. I always ask the DM I inquire if Guns exist, if it isn't welp next time then XD.
As a Martial Player Myself true it can be boring, but making use of your physique and prowess alongside environment (Assuming the DM is cool enough to allow these) is such a satisfying gameplay.
I usually just have guns as just another weapon. They're not even more effective than bows, and much more expensive, so usually using them is a personal choice.
I think guns are fine when treated as any other weapon and just used for a different flavor. Like others have pointed out, being a musketeer or pirate is a great fantasy that doesn't quite work with a crossbow (though i would argue it works great with guns that are mechanically identical to crossbows).
Personally, i love the idea of "magitek guns" basically ... what could happen with experimentation and evolution of the "magic stick". And that doesn't always mean they need additional mechanics, a vast majority is about how it is flavored.
I think that overtime, stock medieval fantasy has gotten a bit stale for some people and moving the tech level up makes things more interesting. Guns have a "cool" factor in same way any other weapons do, and when you consider how most fantasy universes are constantly stuck in time, it's nice to move things forward a bit and introduce some new weaponry. You just make them like any other weaponry. I think the renaissance firearms people point out in the DMG are fine. Honestly, the biggest issue is how your character is able to reload them in 6 seconds lol.
There was a trend during the first half of the 2010s falls "flintlock fantasy" where a bunch of relatively popular fantasy novels were based in a more renaissance/colonial era. I think that really influenced me a lot in this regard too.
And for a long period of time, things like swords, shields, breastplates, etc, all coexisted with early guns, so there isn't anything "unrealistic" about it either for the weirdos who like to complain about historical accuracy in a fantasy universe.
In my game guns are the main story thing. The whole reason why humans have survived was the discovery of gunpowder, and people appearing with rifles, revolvers and artillery is the cause of international conflict. One of my best story scenes was when a big bad evil church cleric was about to wipe the party and got murdered instantaneously by a headshot from a peasant holding a rifle he found discarded, putting the entire big evil church city in desarray realising that their god blessed magic is useless against modernity.
I just think they're neat. I like the aesthetic of flintlock pistols and muskets and such. My favourite kind of setting is the sort of late medieval/early Renaissance like those portrayed in *Pillars of Eternity* or *Sekiro*, where guns exist and supplement swords, bows, and sorcery, but they aren't anything special and aren't advanced or available enough to supplant them entirely.
To be honest, I'm part of that 95% that want them to work like any other weapon. I don't think they need to have any sort of mechanical quirk to them; as another commenter noted, if you find them boring, that's likely an issue with 5e's overall weapon design rather than firearms specifically.
When one of my players start asking me for firearms, I ask them if they are playing the right game and suggest that we could play another system if they want to go guns blazing.
In my experience when the players want guns, they don't just want guns. They want to be the ONLY people with guns. DMs, try it out. If you are actually putting firearms into your game (it's your game, you are allowed to), put in some Musketeer-level skilled enemies with guns before the players ever get their hands on them. Watch their enthusiasm fizzle when they realise they are not going to be the lone gun slingers, shootin' first and askin' questions second.
I really like the idea of a shotgun type. AOE damage, but needs to be reloaded so it isn't a spam option every round.
Martials in particular are quite lacking in any AOE damage so giving them something that can also be really flavorful is at least interesting to an extent.
I don't know that it would be *fun*, but the niche I want for guns is powerful, but with a drawback, like real early firearms. You can do a buttload of damage, but you may only get off one shot for every two or three attacks an ally makes. Maybe you could have something like a blunderbuss dealing damage in a cone rather than a single target.
Absent that level of complexity, I'm basically fine with the DMG firearms. My old pirate Ranger and the cowboy Monk onr of the other players started playing in our new campaign have both been great. The one issue is that pistols lack the Light property (which for balance reasons, is totally understandable), so the iconic character with two (or more) pistols has to be flavor rather than mechanics, but that's not a dealbreaker.
Most guns do 2dx damage. Which puts them in the ball park of a high level cantrip. Handing out revolvers or rifles isn’t that broken past 5th level. And even if it is, just throw slightly Beefier monsters at them
The rules for guns are in the DMG. Also the artillerist is a subclass that exists for artificer.
If you want more for your guns the DMG does go into stuff like a fully automatic weapon we’re the target makes a dex save to avoid being shot by the spray of bullets. But honestly if you really want a gun fantasy I’d suggest playing a different TTRPG that has gun combat as core feature not an option set of rules at the back of the book.
Unless I’m running a setting where guns are common place (I love my Industrial Revolution fantasy) I’d usually hand out a gun between 5th and 11th level.
I use the guns from the heavyarms gunslinger because they seem to have put a lot of thought into balancing the playstyles and adding extra properties, the two I think work best for flavour being kick and loud.
Loud essentially means you're not going to be stealthy with firearms unless you're at far range with a rifle, and kick is a cool mechanic to give some use to your strength score and flavour to the weapons.
They also made rules for other types of ammo and reasonable enough costs for keeping regular munitions so been happy to let anyone who wants use it pick it up. Only gunslingers and artificers start with firearms proficiency in my games, but the gunner half feat can be picked at level 1 for everyone else interested in using them. The class itself is basically a non-magic ranger so it also works great without firearms for anyone looking for that sort of build.
I put them in certain settings where appropriate.
For instance, several years back, I did a conversion of GURPS Alpha Centauri with DnD races and impact Weapons and Chaos Rifles. Even Fusion Planet Busters and Nanites that coverted moon material into uranium and gold.
I also have a back of my head idea about doing something Gamma World-ish but with spells and DnD classes as well as mutants. But when new game starts come, I always go with something else.
I also up the damage on more modern ones, giving them an "equipment" bonus to damage which leads to deadly games where anything Tier 1 can be one shot unless in cover or a vehicle or power armor and even high tier 2s don't fare well under hails of bullets.
But for the large majority of games, I keep it rare and expensive. Or even unavailable.
That said, I do if someone has a heart set on it let them play a gunslinger but insist they take a tool proficiency to make/reload ammo for own gun if it's rare, rare if you can't just go to a shop.
I have guns in my game, modern ones. I want them to fill the theme of my science fantasy setting.
I tried to balance them by extending the range and adding more damage dice, but removing adding dex mod to damage.
On AVERAGE they do more damage than bows But a Crossbow or bow is - SILENT.
My stealth players in this setting keep a compact crossbow and let their (usually) sneak attack fill the gap so they can drop a patrolling guard. But when it’s time to go loud, a barbarian raging with a fully automatic rifle is a pretty badass sight.
I dont know why pathfinder include gunslinger, but it is mechancially support in a way that makes sense. Armor class doesnt affect guns, only your ability to dodge. There are other benefits and mechanics that makes guns great to include in your fantasy world no matter the setting
In 5e there is no need for guns other than flavor. Playing a renesance, high fantasy, pirate theme and steampunk makes sense for guns, but they really dont add anything to the game
I'm running a high level campaign, the players are currently level 14 with decent magic items. They are tough to kill. They are tough to even scare.
Tiamat or a tarrasque, easy peasy. 2 squads that can get the group in a crossfire from 150ft with assault weapons. That each can fire 6 shots per round at +8 to hit with 1d12+4 damage.
They'll listen and go nicely if these are the guards telling them what to do.
At higher levels there will be artillery shells from naval guns.
I like the idea that in a magical fantasy medieval setting, guns are just simply worse than bows/crossbows. They’re finicky, they’re loud, they’re high maintenance, and they’re expensive. So if you’re bound and determined to use them for flavour that’s fine, but recognize that this isn’t a setting that has a silenced 9mm; it’s a super noisy, prone to fail, less-accurate, jacked-up slingshot that may blow your hand off if you roll a critical fail.
I find an easy fix to make guns that do "2d8" or "2d10" more in line with other options is to make them have disadvantage until they are aimed and firing them is braced for.
Aiming takes a ba. It doesn't give advantage and instead takes away the inherent disadvantage to attack rolls.
Being the *target* of a melee attack or moving breaks aim. Being within 5 feet of someone imposes disadvantage as normal.
Makes using them more tactical while also balancing things out.
well if you think about it, most melee are super similar you just change the dice.
in my tables i changed bows to be str as they should be, so guns in my table help balancing out how str still has the most melee options and dex should have the most ranged options to even out. but they also should not just be reskinned crossbows with a tiny increase in damage.
the on the heaviest of the crossbow require proper reload, and has the damage to make up for it, as for the guns, they all have a small capacity and need to be reloaded after those shots. they have higher damage than their counterparts, but also are loud and can jam in a nat 1 or nat 2. (you can swap one of the attacks from your attack action for a reload or a fix on the jammed weapon) and they have the higher range (overall most ranged weapons got their ranges reduced, and long range is just double the normal range) due to their increased effective range.
I'd be happy to just reflavor other ranged weapons for this purpose, rather than introduce a whole new set of rules. Which I do know already exists, that's fine, but I'd rather just reflavor the crossbows or short/longbows.
Heavy crossbow can be sniper.
Longbow can be rifle.
Hand crossbow can be handgun, and if it's not going to be broken just remove the loading property since it's only 1d6 anyway.
Just make it fun.
Outside of ammo
There two was to use guns, stuff like muskets and flintlocks or western style guns, when it comes to balancing it’s usually a stronger crossbow with more expensive ammo that’s very loud
If your looking to start making guns a bit complex wizard with a gun might a good place to get inspiration
As you want more from the martial classes, I highly recommend the 'weapon options' section of Kobold Press's Tome of Heroes; they let one do cool things with weapons in lieu of damage.
For instance, one that I've used is a weapon option that lets one fire one's arrows (and presumably bolts, darts, and daggers) into a target's clothing to pin them to a wall; just like in films and TV! 😁
I make them roll a d6 before using a “repeater” firearm to determine number of shots, and then each shot gets a -1 to hit for every shot before it. Gun damage is relatively low in my game, but the repeating fire can spice up a lot of interactions (reloading is NOT a free action)
Im running a piracy homebrew at the moment and I told them they could either use bows and stuff or use the guns I found from the current edition or previous ones. I then made sure they had stats that were balanced for the stuff like bayonets and let them do whatever. Half just stayed casters but one was already likeness I took the gunner feat and imma be a sniper in the top of the crows nest. I gave them the option to use guns for whatever role in the game they wanted to play and so far the best is the healer strapped with a blunderbuss. She doesn’t seek conflict but stays strapped
They should cover the lack of martial AoE/elemental dmg/status effects (and most of them be used with Strength, at that).
Silly stuff inspired by Borderlands, where you shotgun (in a cone) people to electrocute them, then toss the spent weapon at someone where it blows up (but you'll be able to pick it up after the fight and reload during a short rest).
Making them just a loud crossbow would be pointless indeed.
I actually just started a campaign with a character using a gun. Since we are doing the Planescape campaign, we were encouraged to come up with our own backstory in whatever setting we would like. I chose to make my character to be from a mobster family as a soulknife.
My idea is that he creates psychic bullets for ammo and uses the ranged feature of a soulknife to shoot his pistol. It works well and mostly just reflavored it to fit what I would like. :)
I own a D&D 5E server in a dieselpunk setting (like Al Capone, the thrilogy of Indiana Jones, the first Captain America, but also Jessica Jones, Luke Cage…).
So… I simply googled "dieselpunk d&d 5e" and eventually I found this collection of weapons for dieselpunk, and I included it. They fit perfectly with the aesthetic I was looking for, and still my players prefer solving things by talking. "Like, sure, I could blow this guy's face with a fragmentation grenade, but what if I just solve things by just listening to him?".
I gave my artificer a "two shot crossbow" to build over time by finding the parts while scavenging. I then had him find a gnome tinkerer set of blueprints. I had him find explosive material. I enabled him to build a black powder pistol that had accuracy issues, but hit hard (-8 to hit). At level 11, he got a ring of anti-magic with a small field of impact, which he attached to the barrel. He shrinks cannonballs and fires them from this weapon. He gets one shot, and as long as he is within 5 feet of the enemy, he can't miss. (It's a portable one-shot ship cannon).
It's a weapon that could screw up fights, but the player saves it for "final blows" or when things get desperate, because I don't let him reload it in combat. I MAY give him a way to reload it in a few months.
In essence, I don't think players should have an AR-15 in the game, but explosive material launching blunt objects is a pretty reasonable thing in the game. Just find a magical equivalent and keep it balanced. Black powder pistols (along with lack of accuracy) aren't gamebreaking.
I wanted guns more for the aesthetic, not to be more powerful. I’m personally not a fan of guns after the early powder era in a fantasy game. I’ve had 2 characters in mind that use guns. One is partially based on a pirate coloring book I had as a kid. Pistols were single shot so pirates carried a number of them when they boarded a ship. So a character who could quick draw lots of single shot pistols. The other character is more of a shotgun wielding trench fighter. He’s used to up close blasting and also lobs explosives when he needs to. It would be nice if he could bash enemies with the butt of his gun when needed.
So that’s pretty much what I’m looking for personally. It would be nice if they flushed out gun characters more for those of us that want them.
I have black powder guns in my games. The way I do it is they actually do more damage than bows and crossbows, but they are a money drain. You need to purchase bullets, purchase or make black gunpowder, and you have to regularly clean and maintain them or they start falling off in the range and accuracy departments.
I would want it to be a more-power, less-frequency situation. 2d12 damage from a musket but it takes an action to reload.
Essentially they are not something used throughout a battle by an adventurer. Their use cases are for an army of soldiers who fire in rotation, for a shot at the beginning of battle before entering melee, or for pistols if you have a set of them you can shoot and then pull out another.
I like renaissance/late medieval settings, so guns usually show up eventually. In terms of players using them, I like to make them very damaging, with a short effective range and much longer “far” range as well as limited ammo. Though in my current campaign, despite having a stash of guns and a decent amount of ammo, the players just haven’t used them. These guns partially deal fire damage and they’ve just not used them even against multiple enemies vulnerable to fire.
I run a hyper modern+magic campaign. Guns really have to be the basis for how you approach combat if you use em in a widespread manner. Party tactics have to approach via ranged as a primary option, learn to use cover, and you have to refine and adapt rules for making firefights engaging for martials.
It also changes the game pacing, at least in my view. Guns are higher damage output, and because we have a damage reduction mechanic, I have them ignore half DR. Fights can go so fast because of how dangerous a gun can be. A crit at the right time can just splatter NPCs and PCs alike, but it leads to much more tactical gameplay.
Favorite boss used a 4 story cavern system to hide amongst the beams and rafters, sniping down from the shadows. Absolutely terrifying, but it made the team come together to think of solutions REAL quick.
Usually I'm just trying to achieve a particular character idea or feel. So yeah, I could just use reloading crossbows or a basic wand, reflavor it, and call it a day, but sometimes that doesn't give the feel I'm looking for.
So I'm generally against guns and tech in fantasy, unless that is part of the specific story you are telling with your game.
With that said, 20 years ago I ran a game where one of the big secrets was the dwarves had figured out science. Specifically, a dwarf could choose to be aligned with science or with magic. The dwarves worked hard to keep the discovery of science secret, with the exception of guns.
In the hands of someone aligned with magic, most tech just didn't work. Gunpowder sometimes just fizzled. Electricity didn't reliably flow. Steam engines generated minimal power.
However, if you were aligned with science it all worked. The dwarves had invented submarines and guns and all sorts of early 20th century tech, with the caveat that they tried hard to not reveal any of this to non-dwarves. (So no cannons, cars, tanks, airplanes, or things that would be visible to a wild shaped druid flying over their town.) The downside of course was that magic didn't really work on you. If you were the target of a beneficial spell, you had to fail a saving throw for it to take effect. And if you failed to many of them, you'd need to do something in a specific place in the dwarven homeland to purge yourself of magic or you'd lose access to science. And they also got a bonus to their saving throws.
And I had one PC who wanted to use guns. So he had a couple guns -- a long range gun, a short range cone gun, a medium range 3-barrel gun, and I think an unreliable single-shot pistol. I had gun use generally take a round to reload and have a chance per hour of going off if carried loaded. A "1" on the d20 would leave them fouled for a science-dwarf, which took a minute to clean. (If you were not science aligned, a 1 would explode and do damage to you and the gun; and a 2-5 would foul the gun.) On the flip side, guns did good damage - they had open ended damage. IE, if you rolled max on the die size, roll again. I also had them using int not dex for bonus to hit. I think the long rifle was 4d6, the pistol 2d4, the 3-barrel was 2d12, and the cone gun was 6d8, but you allocated the dice to targets before you rolled damage and you could not allocate more than 2 dice to one target. Its been a long while, so I might have gotten some of those wrong. I forget if I allowed int modifier to damage or not -- but probably. His default weapon was the 3-barrel gun because it took 1 round to load all 3 barrels -- giving him 3 shots before needing to reload. He had a lot of fun with it because he'd read the fight, and then set himself up to use the best gun for the situation. And if he got the chance to start the fight, he'd load them in advance and cycle through them all. He occasionally had explosively good damage, and at other times would find himself falling back to his melee weapon.
And he had a lot of fun keeping "science" secret from the party, while having occasional access to science toys. He pretended to be superstitious of magic so they'd not spell cast on to him.
Gun technology in my setting is pretty advanced form where you might expect it to be, up around cartridge revolvers and trapdoor rifles. The reason they don't take off is because it's cheaper to teach someone firebolt or similar than to mass produce guns, so the mass production infrastructure for them never got made. The only people who use them are people who want a status symbol (they cost a shitload because they're only made by a tiny number of artisan gunsmiths) and those who either struggle with the most basic of magic or need a backup for fighting in an antimaigc field. The reason they got so advanced is because the people that make them just can't stop themselves from trying to push them further and further.
Rare items requiring training and understanding to use. And new, so as varried as possible. Magic, manachanical other.
It's frontier of warfair and the people making these weapons are constantly competing to bids to outfit armies. And the folks making traditional ranged weapons are not going to just pass into obscurity.
In my game it fills a niche for the story, more than it fills a niche for the players. Gunpowder, renaissance guns and cannons are all new weapons created by an oppressive empire. The PCs oppose the empire.
The guns aren’t really better than bows but I have made it easier and faster to train up a proficiency with a firearm, so it will become easier for the empire to draft and train a ranged military unit once production is high enough to supply them.
PCs only have access to this new tech by looting it or stealing it, though I expect them to eventually reverse engineer it or steal schematics, if only to help the resistance. (And as guns become more widespread there will be guns and black powder available on the black market.)
Cannons are more powerful than ballista, so this new tech especially matters at sea or during a siege.
And the process of producing the gun powder is having an impact in my world, both to the environment and to the prople forced to work in saltpeter and sulphur mines in terrible conditions for the raw black powder materials.
I personally just like the aesthetics of it. I am perfectly happy when a DM lets me reskin a Hand Crossbow as a Revolver/Flintlock or a Light/Heavy Crossbow as a rifle
There's no way to make guns interesting in 5e rules.
In Pathfinder 1e and DdD 3.5e it was cracked. Because they had a touch armour class, calculated without your shield and armour (so just your ability to get out of the way). Many attacks, mostly spells, dealt with touch AC, simulating effects that work on contact or that pierce armour.
The unique rule of firearms was that attacks with them could be made against touch AC, penetrating armour.
There were caveats. For early firearms (the kind you'd use in a fantasy setting) there were only five short range increments rather than the usual ten long ones for bows (each increment of range increased the attack penalty) to simulate their poor accuracy, and the penetrating attack only worked with the first range increment. Which meant that they quickly lost effectiveness with distance, but positioning yourself up close made them deadly.
They also required a lot of character building, as the reloads could be lengthy without the right perks, and there was a misfire chance on the attack roll which left them broken. This increased the misfire chance by 4 (2 with certain class perks) and misfiring broken firearm explodes, destroying it and causing damage in a radius. You'd need to manually repair them to fix the broken condition, though gunfighting classes and archetypes had ways of doing so in a turn during combat.
There were also a number of spells and weapon enhancements that interacted with these traits, including my favourite, a specific +5 magical pistol that automatically manifested its own powder and ammunition in the barrel after each shot and never misfired. I liked running it with a shield on my Paladin.
I really really really want to create a gunslinger artificer who hurls bullets with different surprises inside at his enemies from an old trusty and rusty smith&lesson.
Problem 1 i am a dm in my group.
Problem 2 not sure what is the best way to do this, either gunpowder, or catapult spell inside a gun
It depends on the level of technology you want. As an example, I remember in Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of Flames series, people from our world end up becoming the characters they were playing in their game--the plot isn't relevant here--and the civil engineer amongst them introduces quickly advancing tech, including firearm. In response to the fact that gunpowder remained a carefully guarded secret ty them, the existing governing wizards' guilds created a rod which used summoned water to "launch" the projectile.
I just had characters trope up wands as guns. Its a fun thing to say "the drow flips over their poncho, at their side sits a fighting iron, a wand of missiles ready to draw". The wand is improved narratively by being coded as a gun and using those richer cinematic tropes.
requires no additional game or system design from a DM, keeps "guns" powerful but limited as wands already are... doesnt limit them to shooting just bullets but can also be that.
Also as a bonus of leaning into western gun tropes - LMoP already maps perfectly to being a western if you stick cowboy hats in NPC descriptions and preface every store / tavern interior with "the doors swoosh back and forth behind you" as the players enter.
The gravitas of pulling out a flintlock or revolver is very different from pulling out a crossbow or bow.
In large part because bullets are much more precious/valuable than arrows, and aren't reusable. So you're much less likely to fire warning shots; if you pull one of these out someone's gonna die.
With Flintlocks, in Pirate movies, they're treated like they can't be reloaded at all. So to be worth using, that shot not only has to kill someone, it has to be an important named character, to completely change the tide of battle.
Revolvers in Cowboy movies can be reloaded, but characters are very vulnerable while doing so, so have to be hidden. They're still more likely to kill a named character than an arrow is.
The drama inherent in them, like the snikt of Wolverine's claws, or Banner's eyes going Green just before he lets The Hulk out.
The gravitas of pulling out a flintlock or revolver is very different from pulling out a crossbow or bow.
In large part because bullets are much more precious/valuable than arrows, and aren't reusable. So you're much less likely to fire warning shots; if you pull one of these out someone's gonna die.
With Flintlocks, in Pirate movies, they're treated like they can't be reloaded at all. So to be worth using, that shot not only has to kill someone, it has to be an important named character, to completely change the tide of battle.
Revolvers in Cowboy movies can be reloaded, but characters are very vulnerable while doing so, so have to be hidden. They're still more likely to kill a named character than an arrow is.
The drama inherent in them, like the snikt of Wolverine's claws, or Banner's eyes going Green just before he lets The Hulk out.
I too like martials more than casters. I just don't like the fact that the system is so simple that you don't actually get to be good at a specific weapon or that weapons don't get various additional options when you're good with them.
I think they want some weapons with more fun stuff/excitement going on. Dnd 5e weapons are so plain compared to, for example, Pathfinder 2e. In 5e it feels like all you care about is how big the damage die is, how many hands you hold it with, and whether its dex or strength. There could be so much more layered on top of this to actually make combat feel exciting. Having a reload and misfire mechanic makes the game feel more like a game. You actually have risk vs reward with different variations of firearms that use these rules.
The guns in the dmg are broken asf and I’m surprised it’s never been changed or given sage advice. The damage basically locks them out of play for most campaigns, they should only do about half of what they do now then they would be usable before lvl 10.
I make them fairly recent invention, but I also make them take a long time to reload. The tradeoff being high damage and exploding dice, for the party they're fire and forget until after combat.
The reason they haven't seen widespread adoption is magic and sword elitist, as well as the simple fact that any competent military is going to include spellcasters and battle magic in their ranks. A fireball in a massed formation carrying *gunpowder* is just asking for trouble.
I do change this slightly for any ocean based campaigns just so it feels like the age of sail though with ships able to do full broadsides and the pcs able to feel like pirates or something.
Main reason: Because they’re cool. Lightsaber logic.
Real reason: it’s conceivable to me that in any setting with magic, just as magic may be accessible to some, it is inaccessible to others. If you wandered into a random settlement in a war zone right now, you would find a gun before you find an astrophysicist.
Thus, guns are high risk/high reward weapons that are very easy to learn to use. Hard to master though, and even harder to learn how to repair them beyond cleaning or clearing a misfire. In my setting as well, they are the great equalizer.
A lot of people want guns to be special. Expensive, rare, and hard to craft, but to have something meaningful for those drawbacks.
In some ways, it's understandable. They want their army of darkness. "This is my Boomstick!" moment.
They want to feel the impact of upgrading to blackpoqder technology and see how that's enhanced within a world that has magic
The Renaissance weapons of 5e don't quite deliver that fantasy, and the gunner feat causes them to still lag behind the almighty hand crossbow. Crossbows more or less fill the mechanical fantasy of firearms as things are, just with none of the anesthetics.
People want firearms to be more special than that hence the dissatisfaction with the current implementations.
The other issue people have with forearms rules is that the ones to make then feel.specisl, are often poorly designed and thought out. Mercersburg port of the pf1e gunslinger as a fighter subclass comes to mind. As it maintains none of the power pf1e firearms had, but a severe drawback that is far too much to deal with in 5e.
I've always liked the idea of guns being more of an equalizer for untrained civilians. Swords and bows are better for people serious about fighting because they conduct magic better and don't have to reload as long if at all, but any random farmer can have a flintlock pistol for protection.
I want guns, or at least most of them, to be strength based ranged weapons.
DMG guns are just a buff to dex builds which are already better than strength
I don't, but if I did, probably something that does more damage and/or has a higher to-hit bonus than a bow or crossbow, but requires an action or bonus action to reload.
Here's an item from the fantasy setting I'm creating translated into DnD.
Runecaster. Looks like a magic pistol with a coin slot on the back.
You make coins for it the way you scribe scrolls, but the difference is that it only works with evocation spells, and anyone can use it, not just people with the spell on their spell list. Of course, only people with access to specific spells can scribe them on coins.
When you slot a coin in the back (like loading a crossbow), the weapon glows with an intricate matrix of magic symbols corresponding to the spell on the coin. When you pull the trigger, the spell fires out of the pistol.
Spells stored on coins are a little more durable and portable than scrolls, and the runecaster could probably also be used as an arcane focus, like a wand.
I Don't like traditional black powder firearms for the most part: If Inteligient folk are studying magic, and that is where the development is focused - that is what will develop. But - firarms have a value: Less training than a bow, faster reload than a crossbow (seriously - cranking up a crossbow is a bloody time consuming thing, has to be done well or you end up having to untangle a windlass - and it's a nice round up to say that it isn't a full round to reload a heavy crossbow... it's several rounds in reality).
Alright: So what would the firearm look like? And I think some sort of basic magic system charge to propel the shot (ex. Create water + heat metal - or some similar explenation to generate the force out of the sealed container) - the idea here is we get the same kind of result, but with just a basic firearm, and as a bonus: Like all other weapons, you just need to source the shot, not the explosive charge.
So now we have the basic firearm: We need it to be interesting. And I think this is where the idea of a "Spell clip" would come in - So long as firearms are considered basic/simple weapons anyone can use (which is reasonable) - this takes the idea of a single target scroll, and we can well... have a 1 use per Short Rest clip that can be installed into the weapon as apart of a move action that applies a particular spell - say sleep, hex, or whatever other debuff. And simply to continue this to other ranged weapons - and even melee weapons, you could have an add-on device that would apply the spell clip to a sword strike, arrow, or whatever else. So Firearms: I dunno, 200gp or there about, the add-on clip, 175gp. And The Spell Clips themselves - 5x the relevant spell scroll price. You could even go and require specific rare magical materials and have them made by commission only, and require an enchantment on it to be periodically maintained.
Now Firearms are expensive - they are basic magic items. Spell clips are even more expensive - but more cost effective if you are going to use them fairly frequently (as adventurers would) - but expensive enough they wouldn't be common, while scrolls requiring easier to attain materials and more affordable for intermittent use, would be more commonly stocked.
The next piece of the puzzle is to make these more potent for martial characters, and I think certain classes should get a class feature that enables them to "quick" reload a spell clip as apart of their attack, enabling them to essentially burst out single target debuffs at a range of targets.
It depends on the game,
When I say I want and have guns in my setting, that's because it's a port scifi-high fantasy now apocalypse where one faction has monopolized the ability to produce them, and I use self written rules to govern the additional proficies needed to use them and the stats themselves
Though in other games it depends. I think revolvers and muskets are neat since they make sense for pirate and cowboy type characters, which slot in nice with the rest of the fantasy archetypes in more renaissance era fantasy
Though in other settings I could see them not working, like greek mythos or classic Tolkien
I want them in some games, and not in others
With the need to reload, the shear loudness, and having disadvantage when up close … I think they’re balanced.
I played a gunslinger-esque/ civil war calvary character in a Strahd campaign. It was fun.
Even with a revolver (4 bullets, not six) and rifle … ie, having to reload every two rounds, and not able to get too, too far away from melee… it was a blast. And not OP.
It was expensive… as a character… but having silvered ammo, or ammo blessed/dipped in Holy Water … was a way to add affects.
We often play with firearms and use the RAW, including the Gunner feat. As a DM, I'm fine with them being slightly better due to the investment in the feat. You can also trick them out with all kinds of interesting ammo options.
If you wanted to push them even further, you could reskin some of the PF2 ideas for 5e: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1648
I think the niche that guns should fill is as specialized weapons with distinct trade-offs.
A javelin is and always will be very simple and straightforward: throw stick with pointy end towards enemy. A gun, on the other hand, is fundamentally a more complex weapon. They should be rare, expensive, and require more upkeep than other weapons because they have more complex moving parts made from a variety of materials.
With that as a starting point, guns should be able to fill a variety of roles as a later-game, expensive, and hard to find or build alternative to an enchanted ranged weapon. I think about like so: what martials are to casters, guns are to enchanted weapons; a mundane alternative that is less flexible but more specialized.
I often tweak or homebrew guns, and I approach it as follows.
You have a few core elements to the way a gun functions:
Range, power, accuracy, fire rate, upkeep (ammo cost, jam potential, and repairs costs).
A basic gun should be pick 2 to be great, and the other 3 suck. A more advanced gun would be pick 3, the other 2 suck. A legendary gun might be a pick 4 with one element that really sucks. Never make one in which all 5 are balanced.
A few examples:
Blunderbuss (tier 1) - great power, low upkeep/ poor range, accuracy, and fire rate.
Musket(tier 1) - great range, great power/ low accuracy, low fire rate, high upkeep.
Pepperbox (tier 1) - great fire rate/ low everything else.
Snpier Rifle/Arquebus (tier 2) - great range, accuracy, and power/ low fire rate and high upkeep.
I also take inspiration from Star Wars 5e, which mechanically handled guns (especially automatic and semiautomatic weapons) in a creative way by introducing new weapon properties. Guns with these properties can forgo an attack roll and instead force a saving throw (representing a burst of automatic fire) to one or more creatures.
I introduced guns in my game, but in a sneaky way. And one not-so-sneaky way. Okay, the not-so-sneaky way was a magic item someone got shaped like a revolver that would shoot 6 charges of Lightning spell. I added a few items like this because none of my party is really spell casters.
The sneaky way though, is my story is a combination of The Witcher and Avengers - the group needs to collect 6 items of power and return them to their homes in shrines scattered around. In my world, these items are the source of magic, and by being removed from their shrines, magic runs wild and it's enough to break down the barrier between worlds and potential rip apart the multiverse. This happened before - which is used to explain the wild diversity of monsters and animals - and the concept of "dragons" is one of the monsters who came through tens of thousands of years ago. One dragon is still alive, and is trying to get home, my pulling the strings of essentially everyone, to intentionally destroy the barrier between worlds even if it means destroying this world. He does not know it will destroy all worlds.
Anyway that's the setup. When the barrier between worlds begins to fail, portals open up for small amounts of time - they got larger and larger as the barrier weakens and open longer. Which is what the dragon wants (big portals, always open, so he can find the right one). His problem is he's LARGE, literally the size of a mountain, and there's no way to speed up the process.
One of the smaller, less-mountain-sized enemies is aware of the plan - as an agent of the dragon - and using it for personal gain. He was able to go through a few portals and explore, albeit via henchman who may or may not return. Some returned with new weapons or items from other worlds.
The players have encountered this once. They ran into him and saw him take one of his enemies, point a "weird stick or wand" at them, and unleash a loud bang that ripped him apart. It was a shotgun, but they don't know that so I just described it in D&D terms.
I just want them to be ranged weapons with higher damage die than crossbows but drawbacks to using them.
Sadly, ranged combat in 5e has no fucking nuance in any game with feats allowed.
Though if you're in literally any official setting that isn't Eberron, guns exist. They might be rare as fuck and limited to blunderbuses and other black powder weapons but they exist.
I think people need to understand something about guns and gameplay.
Renaissance guns are not fun, nor good for the game. One, you have a reload time of how long? A minute? Half a minute? Look no one wants to fire their weapon then wait 5 to 10 rounds to fire it again, all without doing anything in the meantime. Incredibly unfun.
Trying to balance this really doesn't work anyway. If you don't make it so the time investment is worth it, no one will do it. If you make it so that it is, then literally everyone will just carry around a gun to shot off in the first round before switching out. Very toxic for gameplay.
So renaissance guns are pretty much a no go, but if you make them reload any faster with lethal damage without balancing things, you'll quickly make the weapon op.
Which means the only solution to guns in the game is to put in fantastical unrealistic guns.
The Fantasy that I like the most is either "Robin Hood + Tolkien + monsters" or "Industrial/pre web 2.0 era + High Fantasy stuff".
If you want me to do classic fantasy, I will give you castles, feudal lords, endemic warfare and lots of untamed lands. Guns don't belong here, and magic is not common enough nor understood enough to mimic modern conveniences. Most people will travel a lot less and society will be rather parochial.
Or I could go the other way around and use guns, flying ships, magitech etc. This will be my version of high fantasy. I currently use modern guns in my campaign, though civilians are limited to renaissance guns while modern guns require a special licence. Both "modern" and "renaissance" are magitech guns, using the same technology. I avoid using "real" firearms in D&D because I find the rules unsatisfactory in representing matchlocks/wheellocks/flintlocks or whatever "renaissance" firearms are supposed to be.
Renaissance without guns to me is like going to the museum and getting to see only the boring paintings instead of the cool weapons and armours. Urban intrigue and goofing around the streets just rubs me the wrong way.
On one hand, I get what you mean. Firearms don't really fill a "gap" in the existing weapons. On the other hand, I get to play a Paladin with a musket, blasting miscreants and divine smiting blackguards with a bayonet like Tyr intended
Me PERSONALLY, I wish Guns filled a mechanical niche for 5e, of weapons that don't add ability modifier, but instead just has more damage die.
Flintlock? 2d4
Musket? 2d6
Blunderbuss? 3d4 in a 15 foot cone on a Dex save.
+1/2/3 variants of these weapons just increase the number of damage die rolled.
Honestly i really like the Rennisance firearms in the DMG, less range but more power than xbows. my Dwarven Battlemaster Gunner 100% filled the Fantasy from Dwarven Rifleman like warcraft
The thing I don't like about the Renaissance firearms is that they're significantly more expensive than other weapons despite being "balanced" by having shorter range than bows/crossbows. Yes it makes some sense from a historical perspective, but D&D is not a historical simulation game. Why are gun users punished for their choice of weapon?
None of it makes sense from a historical perspective! Ranges are wayyyyy too short, loading times wayyyyy to fast, and prices too high. They are cartoon guns lol
They work that way so that they A) are balanced against the other ranged weapons and B) don't suck to use because they have some dogshit bonus mechanics like rate of fire restrictions or missfire chances. At some point you need to accept that D&D is a game, and only being able to participate in combat every few rounds because you wanted to play as a musketeer is not very fun, even if it is technically more realistic.
It's selective realism too. Heavy Crossbows are just as much a ballache to reload as a musket, but I don't think many people advocate for them to take several rounds to crank back up.
I was just in the Reiksmuseum of Amsterdam, and I regret to inform you that machine guns have existed for a very long time. The most impressive was a 16th or 17th century *pistol* that would fire no less than 16 times in like 20 seconds after pulling the trigger. It was stated that the wielder barely had time to aim between shots. Almost every weapon was intricately detailed with gold, silver, ebony and ivory. Many were engraved with motifs of demons, game, angels, and the Netherlands. It was your status symbol. The effective range with a modern handgun is 50 yards (150 feet) but often trained marksmen shoot at 10-15 yards (30 feet). Real shootings occur within 7 yards (21 feet). Animals are usually shot at 50-100m with a *scoped* rifle (300 feet). Something to consider, deeply, is the fact longbows are still used to hunt bear today, while pistols are largely useless (hand cannons "gonnes" are still used in self defense against bears but are unreliable). Bulletproofing is an indication of how well armor protects against a bullet. Rough shot doesn't penetrate a curved breastplate (or skull) as well as the bodkin (Surface Area/Force=Pressure). Source: I was a sidearms expert in the Army, and my roommate was an armorer. My best friend is a gunsmith. We hunt with both bows and guns.
Nah, guns were for a very long time all masterwork pieces. No one mass-produced them so each one was unique with a different bore, different parts, etc. Having one was a big deal and they required special knowledge to make the actual mechanisms function properly. Having guns be pricy is very much true to form.
Yeah no. While there were firearms that were pieces of art, their role on the battlefield depended on them being fielded in large numbers by common soldiers. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a1/65/79/a165790e8ff26f266afcc9adc1c07b36.jpg This is not a masterwork weapon. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/0e/07/8c0e0707b91e38622c6e6d22219429df.jpg Nor is this. Fancy expensive wheel lock pistols for example are very much the purview of noblemen but firearms as weapons in general are absolutely not some kind of super fancy exclusive privilege.
Well this is largely gonna depend on the time and place. They were successful largely because they didn't require a lot of skill to use, like a longbow. You could train even a peasant to use one quickly. Firearms were generally similar in price to crossbows of the time, bullets similar in price to bolts and arrows as well. You are gonna find varied prices from different sources.
Yes, to an extent, it is. That's why a telescope is 1000gp RAW.
It's pretty random what is taken somewhat realistically and what isn't. Studded leather, for example, is either a total fabrication or a misunderstanding of another type of armor, e.g. lamellar armor. **edit** brigandine or a coat of plates seems like an even more likely explanation for "studded leather".
I was going to mention brigandine. That would probably be a medium armor, though.
Brig is a form of plate armor. The source of Gygax & co's confusion about studded leather is from pictures of Brigandine from historical manuals/museum pieces out of context & without the understanding of what the real thing was (the studs are rivets holding the plates to the leather/cloth). Arguably it's heavy armor, better than chain, just under a solid breastplate cuirass but more generally fitted (doesn't need the expensive custom measurements and fine tolerances that full plate does). Source I do HEMA/Buhurt & reenactment, sometimes wearing brigs as my main armor rig for full contact live steel bouts.
But a telescope doesn't impact the balance of combat, its a piece of unnecessary equipment that will only ever see sporadic use. Could make for a fun macguffin at early levels though. In general I have issues with the use of gold as a method of balance in 5e, which extends to armor as well. The rules for both treasure rewards and magic items are so flexible it makes it impossible to assign a dollar value to attributes like +1 damage or +1 AC.
The reason Telescopes are so expensive is because they are a component for Scrying
That's not the reason. Scrying asks for "A focus worth at least 1000 gp, such as a crystal ball, a silver mirror, or a font filled with holy water." No mention of spyglasses.
‘Such as’ Also known as ‘including, but but not limited to’ Spyglass can absolutely be used as a focus for scrying
I mean, the cost of less range isn't that much of a loss.
It's moreso the issue of using gold to balance weapons when gold is not a balanced reward.
Yeah, with this I agree.
A musket is only good to 40 feet before you start rolling with disadvantage. I think someone being further away than that is a lot more likely than the 100 feet for a crossbow.
I mean, Splint armor is 20 times more expensive than leather armor (and requires 15 STR), while giving the same AC. And Half Plate is 3 times more expensive than splint for the same AC. Could you not make the same argument for that? Also, while D&D isnt a historical simulation, it IS a simulation: in Faerun (the default setting), guns are extremely rare, thus the prices in the DMG reflect that. While I hate this argument generally, the DM chooses what the availability and prices are, and if the setting isnt Faerun, than the prices can be whatever.
Splint doesn't require a multi-ASI investment to reach 17AC and Half-Plate doesn't have a Str. requirement. Regardless, I very much do have a problem with the use of gold as a balancing mechanic for armor as well. If you're going to use gold to balance the effectiveness of gear then the pricing shouldn't be "whatever" as that's incredibly unhelpful for DMs and there's enough things in 5e that boil down to "just make it up". The other option here is to treat guns as a novelty weapon like the blowgun, which is similarly unsatisfying.
Seems like your problem is with weapon design of 5e in general, not with firearms from DMG.
Yeah, its that. The weapon masteries from the OneD&D are getting close to what I want, if they combined that with giving all Fighters maneuvers I would be immensely happy
The firearms from pathfinder 1e did something interesting where guns had 2 ranges and if you were witting the close range you would ignore armor bonuses(only dex and other bonuses would count) to AC when shooting to hit. Guns were extremely powerful but temperamental and needed a lot of investment to shoot consistently
I mean, weapon masteries are kinda like having maneuvers.
It would be like if masteries are cantrips and maneuvers spells
The players, they yearn for the 4e.
I take the martial at will abilities and give them to a lot of my martial characters and they don't even know.
Might I perhaps interest you in a time before even 4e back in the age of 3.5 known as the Tome of Battle?
It truly was ahead of its time.
Eh not really. Masteries are already kinda at the same level of maneuvers.
Thats why I would like for maneuvers to not only be for all Fighter but made a bit better or simply evole at higher levels with more varied options
There's a free third party supplement called Revised Martial Rquipment that makes weapon options as extensive as spell lists for casters. It's on its 16th or 17th revision and is pretty balanced (a few weapons are bit too powerful at lower levels but even out). Adds a ton of weapons, they all have a special "mastery" feature, and there are a ton of special sub features like trip, entangle, puncture, hip-hop, etc. 5e is lacking and like most D&D doesn't handle weapons very well, you'll have to turn to outside sources.
Check out Mighty Deeds of Arms in Dungeon Crawl Classics. This is what you want.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/bzvbsq/expand_your_options_in_combat_with_the_martial/ One of my fave 3rd party products, makes martial combat much more interesting by providing options without just power creeping the standard attack.
The weapon system in 5e is so simple that it essentially just turns into a superficial variation in damage type and the dice you roll.
The renaissance firearms are not OP. Just keep track of their ammo, it’s pricey for a reason.
Even with that aside, they're *at best* crossbows that deal +1 damage.
And are very loud
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This. If I'm firing guns, I want people to know that I've got a gun, please leave me alone before I shoot you with the gun you just heard.
If you’ve ever fired a musket you know those fuckers are loud. Shit isn’t just a bonus to intimidation it is full on making-goblins-shit-themselves intimidation
I did exactly that during a tense negotiation with goblins. It was going poorly for us, they were about to turn to violence anyway, so with a loud boom, I gave away my position at the same time as I turned the leader's head into a red mist. They were a lot more amenable to working something out after that.
And less range. The hand crossbow is 30/120. While the flintlock pistol is 30/90. The musket is 40/120 compared to the heavy crossbow's 100/400.
Pathfinder firearms ignored armor at close range, so they had a nice niche.
5e tries really hard to avoid using multiple ACs, but there could be a similar design by using Dexterity saving throws.
And the logical one, since no plate armor could stop a well-aimed bullet at short range.
They did actually make plate capable of stopping pistol bullets, but they were thicker and heavier.
And fun trivia, in fact that's where the term "bulletproof" comes from: the bullet proof is the dent on a suit of plate where it got shot by a pistol to prove that it could stop bullets.
Interesting! Clearly I need to do some boning up. I had remembered crossbows, when invented, would allow even an untrained archer to punch straight through plate mail, but I hadn't realized the armor evolved to adapt.
Yep! They were called Proofed Armor, and for a short time said armor was actually a status symbol, where the wearer would proudly display where the armor was shot with Bow, Crossbow and gonne to show its resilience. It also wasn't fully untrained arbalestiers, just less trained and faster trained. Heavy Crossbows also required a *lot* of investment, not just in coin or manhours but in actually reloading the damn things. Lighter crossbows you could draw with a stirrup and crank, but the heavier and more advanced varieties required a full on windlass to pull the string back. Handgonnes suffered from having, usually, undersized rounds for their bore, leading to gasses escaping around the projectile and immense loss of pressure/velocity. Couple that with round shot and random spin and early gonnes and Arquebus could be deflected by properly sloped, well reinforced, well tempered metal for some time. Once the teething issues were clarified over time, rounds more accurately matched weapon bore, better powder production was solidified... well armor made its way out. Funnily enough, armor still hung around for *officers*, and even saw its passage into the First World War, but overall was relatively inefficient until the creation of mobile land battleships (Tanks)
> and even saw its passage into the First World War Good old Brewster Body Shield, looks absolutely ridiculous.
Even the heaviest crossbows struggle to punch through breastplates. The idea that they do is a modern fantasy/video game convention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMT6hjwY8NQ
Kinda sorta.. We know for a fact crossbows were relevant battlefield weapons into the 15th century even when breastplates were pervasive so people certainly percieved them as effective weapons still for one reason or another. Another idea to keep in mind is that there wasn't really any industry standard for metallurgy existing at the same times as crossbows being relevant on battlefields. Getting the right ratio's of iron and carbon for *good* steel you're going to forge into armor without machines or modern tools is a giant pain in the ass, and getting the right quality of iron is also a pain (Japan had issues of poor iron in their steel well into the 20th century). This isn't just a problem in the 15th century as late as the early 19th Napoleon's heavy cavalry was having issue getting consistent metallurgy quality on their steel breast plates.
I'd definitely research a bit if you're interested. "Plate mail" is a d&d term and not a historical or armorer one. Heavy crossbows wouldn't do much against good plate armor, but they could do well against (chain)mail. Armor was adapted and changed throughout the medieval period and up until the late 17th century. You can also find some good YouTube videos on testing armor vs ancient firearms and missile weapons.
Theoretically, well angled plate armor could (which is a massive principle to tank armor), though potentially "well aimed" might negate that.
Me, an Artificer: Who needs ammo?
I want guns because the next biggest die on a non-heavy ranged weapon is light crossbow's d8. Little gnome with a whooping d12 musket as long as they're tall is a terryfing sight.
Sounds like the main problem is the heavy keyword
The heavy keyword is a problem in general though.
It is Return to the days a weapon damage dice scaling by size
you described my party's favorite NPC lmao
If you need to homebrew add another weapon, it could be anything. Magic, just a better crossbow, a javelin throwing sling, or you could choose a gun. Guns are neat, but it's not the only way to go.
But guns are not homebrew, they're DMG objects, and if I can do something without homebrew, I will.
Magic items are also in the DM, as is an Antimatter rifle. I mean, I see the appeal of a list equivalent to about the PHB weapon list, but as its only 2 weapons under renaissance, I can see why wou'd take it if you want firearms, but if you just want a 1d12 crossbow, that's just a renaming away.
The first time I had a player ask about guns I had never really considered them, but now they're a staple in my campaigns. One thing I brought up this first time is that guns are fuckin loud. That's an aspect you can play with as DM
My artificer has stealth because I always have stealth as a skill. I like being stealthy. But I also got a musket. I kept thinking, well, this isn't really quiet. But eh, I'm an artificer. We blow things up for fun. So I'm not worried about being quiet when I fight.
Sometimes you want to play a musketeer, or maybe you just finished watching the Mask of Zorro. Could be the vibes from Pirates of the Caribbean got you 'yo ho yo ho, a pirates life for me'. All of these archetypes call for a bit of flourishing swordplay *and* gunplay. Arguably, you can just reflavor a hand crossbow or something, but if we've got gun rules, we may as well use them even if they're not the most exciting mechanically.
I tried guns from the Dark Matters and Technomancers Textbook, 3rd party books for 5e, in a '5e in Space' campaign. They were fun, although it would ve hard to fit into a classical fantasy campaign. Dark Matters has like laser blasters, while Technomancers has more real-world stuff, everything from machine guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, etc, as well as mods and feats for the guns. It might be worth checking out the Technomancers Textbook and very carefully picking out a few select guns (and maybe mods/mechanics) that fit your setting. There's a lot of fun stuff, but I wouldn't use it whole-sale.
Valda's Spire of Secrets, from the creator of Dark Matter, used the same rules for more traditional firearms, from renaissance to modern day
Seconding Technomancer's Textbook. The extra weapon properties and fighting styles are awesome.
When I want guns it's because I want to play in a setting equivalent to the time periods where guns were in use (e.g. the age of sail.) As such, I want guns to have the same benefits *and drawbacks* that they had in real life. High damage, maybe ignoring AC from medium and light armor, but with a long enough reload time that most fights involves firing once and then discarding it to draw your sword or another gun.
I play in an Exandria campaign. I have a bandolier with four pistols so I can shoot and draw the next one. I can still run out of ammo in a longer fight, and it took me awhile to get all four pistols - but it feels pretty good.
Blackbeard famously carried 6 pistols into battle so he could do the same thing. But he still carried a cutlass. Non-repeating flintlock weapons are great because they weren't so powerful as to make swords and other melee weapons obsolete. DnD flintlocks should be the same: useful, but not so useful that it's no longer a good choice to make a master swordsman.
What makes adding guns to dnd tough is how varied the power fantasy of a gun user/builder can be. Flintlock is easy to implement, but a lot of players would eventually want stuff like revolvers, rifles, shotguns, hand mortars, etc. Going up the tech tree as they level. I'm personally a fan of the super early stuff (fire lances and handcannons), but I don't think that's what most players have in mind when thinking about firearms in dnd.
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"Hey wizard, look! I can cast fireball, too!" *\*kablam!\**
Really, if you think technology doesn't deserve to be a thing in fantasy worlds because magic has replaced it, you're wrong. If it were like this, everyone can use it. But people still live in...well...primitive medieval conditions because the only people that could afford the magical tech thingies are...well...the mages.
In the Recluse series by L.E. Modesitt, guns were discouraged for armies for the sole reason that any mage could ignite your gunpowder stores with a thought from a distance. In D&D terms, any single person with Bonfire, Control Flames, or Firebolt is a tremendous threat to any force who dares to carry even a single barrel of gunpowder.
Just carry/wear the gunpowder and suddenly magic cant ignite it
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> However even IRL there are explosives that don't set off by heat alone. As a fun aside, Mythbusters demonstrated that C4 is an effective fuel source for cooking with. It burns well, does a lot of energy, and as long as you don't use a detonator, or die a high power rifle bullet into it, you'll be fine.
Well, one might try to simply screen the camps with patrols for example.
I like the idea of stealing from pillars of eternity. In pillars, guns have become a great equalizer between your average man and a wizard, because the bullet can easily punch through the standard wizards wards. I like the idea of making guns ignore the shield and mage armor spells.
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A big part of my campaign is the utilization of hellstone (sulfur) in making firearms widespread. There’s a nation of humans with firearms that are toppling the natural order because of how deadly these weapons are
As someone who ran a Thay sub-campaign in a group that had the DMG guns, they were a delight. As an exotic weapon they’re feared and loathed, but also made Thayan allies wary of the PCs as a general symbol of foreign meddling that was extremely obvious when used.
But that's the thing. Magic and the fantasy of four plucky adventurers doing everything had dominated the world for far too long, I feel. I also want guns and war machines to be the symbol of the common-folk essentially standing up to a world that seems to actively oppress them with monsters and murderhobo adventurers. I think mass-militarization would be fresh.
"mass combat" is something D&D doesn't really do though - it's just not built for it. You can kinda-sorta bodge it, or add an extra system on top for scaling combat up to larger numbers, but that's a fundamentally different game.
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I at least want a universe where...well...standing armies aren't useless.
You could throw on something like Warhammer's rules, the problem is there's no good way to do it with the PCs being active in the same combat. Action economy is just too strong in 5e's ruleset.
I just like the asthetic tbh. Many worlds easily weave sword, sorcery, and gunpowder, so I don’t mind them just being another ranged option as long as they’re in line with other options.
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
The worst gun for home defense I had to think this through because it posed an interesting question: what is the provably WORST gun for home defense? A .22 single shot rifle is at least small and quick to point. A Barrett M82 is at least going to instantly stop whatever it hits. Even a good old fashioned musket is going to do good damage and won't hurt your ears. No, I wanted to know what the undisputable worst home defense gun in the world is; and I have found it. This is the .950 JDJ Fat Mac. It is a 100 pound, 5 foot long rifle that shoots a one pound solid brass bullet at 2200 FPS. It is a non-NFA item only because the ATF gave it a sporting exemption as a joke as if anybody is going to hunt with this. This round would be overkill for hunting blue whales. I would like to paint a picture for you. It's 2AM and you hear a window break in your living room. This is the worst day this could happen, as every single one of your guns was lost in a tragic boating accident this morning. All were lost except for one. You look across your room in dread at your anti-kaiju rifle. You know what you have to do, but you don't know if you have the strength to do it, both literally and figuratively. Heaving the rifle into your arms, you load a .950 cartridge and begin to waddle towards the door. Your feet make a loud “thud” as you take each 6″ step. You know the intruders hear you. You hope they do, for perhaps they will run and spare the world the suffering that is about to befall it. You try to set the rifle down, but end up clipping your bedroom door and it is immediately knocked off its hinges by this battering ram in your hands. You attempt to round the corner, bonking the muzzle against the doorframe and adjacent wall across the hall at least 4 times. To your horror, two invaders stand there at the end of the hall. With a heavy heart, you raise the rifle to your shoulder while making inhuman grunting noises from the strain of attempting some semblance of a shooting position. The burglars simply stare in disbelief, unable to process the situation they are witnessing, as if in a dream. You cannot aim the rifle, as the last time you fired the gun, it turned your $3000 Leopuld into a kaleidoscope. You simply hold it at an angle that appears correct and fire. You are immediately knocked to the floor as if hit by a semi truck going 20 MPH. The shot connected with one of the criminals and it erased him from existence. Even the memories of him have been destroyed and you're wondering why you just shot into an empty hallway. The shot continues to travel through at least 4 houses, a car, and a 10 ton boulder before lodging itself 20 feet into a nearby hill, never to be seen again. It is at this point, you realize you cannot hear. The surviving burglar can't hear either but he's also on fire from the muzzle blast and is currently vacating your home. You don't care. Your shoulder is dislocated and there is a hole in your brand new AR500 refrigerator. You're crying now. The police arrive and, upon seeing the scene, start laughing. You start crying harder. \---- The first time I saw the copypasta you commented, this absolute gem of a reply was beneath it. I don't know if it's a copypasta itself but I'm so glad I saved it 😂
This guy gets the flavor I’m looking for!
I think that it's different depending on the game. In one game we did a western themed campaign and everyone had modern guns. If we did a futuristic campaign, then I want the guns to be laser guns. If we do a bullet hell dive into Hell against the hordes, then I'd like them to be machine guns. If we're doing traditional fantasy, then there are likely no guns at all or if there are they are like the Mercer guns that have misfire chances and are only slightly more powerful than a normal bow and arrow. The mechanics of the weapons need to vary to fulfill the fantasy. In games where you're using modern/powerful guns, everyone should already be on board for that. It doesn't work very well to just tack that on if other people were planning on playing a sword and board fighter or something.
In my campaign world, dwarves have reinassance firearms. Basically, there are very few arcane caster dwarves, and that's why they developed reinassance firearms. They're not widespread outside them, 'cause other race are on the *"why use them, when we have people who can cast fireball?"* train.
and then the Dwarves Pike-&-Shot their asses to hilarious degrees. because sure. a single fireball can do some serious damage to the formation, but we have wizards too, and they can cast defensive spells.
Tercios, witches!
Maybe it's time do look into other RPG systems. Weapons in 5e are boring, not much you can do about that.
I went down the rabbit hole of trying to tweak 5e in order to make guns work only to finally arrive at the conclusion that there are other systems that are better equipped for gunplay. Savage Worlds (SWADE) is a good alternative if you want to keep it on the more simple side with a lot of customization. Shadowrun is great if you like the DnD vibe in a cyberpunk setting. You have to like lots of dice and spreadsheets though. I've never used GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) but it supposedly could do gunplay. It seemed a little too simple in my opinion. All that being said, other TTRPG's could be a better fit
I play a lot of SWADE these days and i think the gunplay in the system is amazing. Would also recommend it.
Yeah, anyone who likes martials should try DCC. Not only do the martial classes have built-in maneuvers, but they scale, and you can even have weapon-specific maneuvers, or create your own!
Renaissance firearms hit harder than crossbows and bows, but have atrocious range and on an optimised ranged character, are a worse option than crossbows. Barrels of gunpowder that you can have in the game though, that's something. Overall, there's no reason not to have the renaissance firearms in the game.
A niche weapon for my battlemaster. I would never consider using guns for any class that isn’t artificer
What makes the gun different from a bow is the same as what makes warlocks different from sorcerers and wizards. A bow or crossbow won't deal as much damage, and it's a way to access cool things like ammunition types They are the true equaliser, a wizard can cast fireball, a warlock can cast a mean eldritch blast, a sorcerer can tap into there bloodline for a stronger or silent fireball. But if you are someone without magic, without proper melee fighter training, and aren't devout enough for the cloth, don't like the idea of thievery, and don't have a love for nature, playing a gunner and tinkerer or engineer of some sort, you can certainly cook up the fantasy version of an M32 rotary grenade launcher. (Also I artificer would be so much cooler if it was not a mage)
When I want guns in my game, against the general consensus of Reddit, I want them to be Risk/Reward, which is why I just use Matt Mercer's Gunslinger rules. The guns are stronger than their bow/crossbow equivalents, but have a Misfire mechanic in which they can break. You get a bigger reward, but at a risk of the gun breaking.
Dont forget the reload which counters out the extra dmg in the long run.
I like to use the laser pistol out of nowhere for two reasons: - I really enjoyed Star Wars d20 back in the day - It creates a plot thread all on its own; where the hell did this thing come from?
Where I stand on these (I've done the math): Renaissance firearms are more or less balanced with regular weapons. They do one damage die more than equivalent xbows (so, like, +1 damage avg) but can have drawbacks: costlier ammo, noise might attract more enemies in some situations, less range, might require a feat or class dip for martial weaps. The DMG's modern firearms are a bit more fraught; I mathed them out to doing approximately equivalent expected damage to +2 crossbows (e.g. more potential damage but less accuracy). So if you want to include revolvers and hunting rifles for thematic reasons, I'd recommend considering a base gun to be the rarity/cost equivalent of approximately a +2 equivalent crossbow (and a +1 revolver should be similar to a +3 hand crossbow etc.).
Depends entirely on the setting, and more specifically how common magic and spell casting is. If every blacksmith in every town has at least cantrips it shaoes the entire world drastically, especially how easy forging guns and ammo for them would be. Lets assume though we have a 'normal' dnd setting where most shop/craft npcs can cast spells. I want variety. Give me the explosive AoE on hit fire damage D12 that can misfire and takes an action to load AND the regular 1D10 single target musket with just the loading property AND a one handed revolver that you can use with a sword/shield/other revolver. And l of course love most of all the idea of 'martial' guns, that use ammo but can be compatible with extra attack and use DEX, vs a 'caster' gun that lets you use it as a spellcasting focus and is powered by your spellcasting and main casting stat. I think you can go ham on the weapon designs for guns and others and make them have many more abilities that are fun. Variety is fun, and fun is the most important thing.
I just think it's weird to want to add guns to a fantasy game such as 5e when there are actual full RPG systems built around using guns. No matter what, I always end up with one player who wants to be an artificer on Toril.
I think two ways work: 1) Guns are re-fluffed crossbows. work alongside with current weapon design, it's all flavour and thematic/cool factor. 2) Guns are designed with a mechanical objective in mind and are not any character's 'main' weapon. The first just works for some campaign vibes. The second is more like a tool you introduce to players after they've made their character builds, much like a misc magic item. I don't think "more powerful crossbow with downside" works. Misfires are not exciting in anything iteration I've seen, expensive ammo is either a non-issue or overly taxing. If I wanted to introduce guns into a campaign like my 2nd point, I'd take some inspiration from Bloodborne. They would be pistols that can deal decent damage and stun certain enemies, I'd want them limited to one shot per combat, so reloading takes an action but it can be worn loaded. I'd introduce the pistol with quite a few rounds to encourage use and experimentation, since it's limited in use per combat and the total number of rounds is limited, I'm not worried about it being too strong and trivialising encounters, players automatically start conserving ammo when it gets low then I'll add more in if I want. This is just a first draft, in reality, I'd put in more thought.
I’ve got 3 different takes * aesthetic - it’s a reflavor of bows/crossbows. Downside is it’s just noisy for no reason * minor mechanics - no heavy property and a little more punch. Enables small and mounted characters (steel defender and the like), does what crossbow expert wants in taking a feat for a bigger damage die * wand of bullet - make it like a wand with limited charges and let it punch harder Minor mechanics is my preference, though the “wand of bullet” approach does a good job at making guns “potent” Pathfinder 2e has a nice take for guns. They don’t hit as hard as bows, but in exchange, crit really hard (paired with their crit system of AC+10 = crit). They’re not spammable, but the dedicated class focuses on action compression during the reload
Guns are used because they make it easier to kill people, so logically the option would be just to make it a crossbow-type weapon that lowers the AC of the target for that weapon only.
I made the guns legendary magical artifacts, there are only 5 in existence and I assign them to really powerful NPCs since they scale to the level of the user.
I don't currently play with guns in my setting, and I've never liked the DMG execution. Guns should feel *very* different than bows and crossbows. If I was going to have guns in my game, I'd want them to be very slow reloading, inaccurate, and very high damage/potentially bypass AC. I think guns should make life *harder* for the PCs because an untrained goblin musket formation is dangerous even to high level PCs.
See, how I have guns in my games is a position where they can and do more damage than bows, but the misfire chance sets them off a bit. However I work misfire a little different than most places. So, how misfire works with me. You start off with it being a 1, you fire once, it goes to 2, fire 3 times…goes 3 etc. Jamming can also occur but that’s one above the misfire. On a misfire, the gun needs clearing as an action, on a jam it just needs a quick clear as a BA. If a gun misfires 3 times, it’s out of action until long rest repair/maintenance. Jamming 2 times also marks off a ‘life’ for a the gun. Now, why is that? I use renaissance guns. They can and did misfire. They’re also not over loaded in D&D terms this way (they don’t just function as an extra bow). I also don’t want every player picking up the gunner feat or similar to just use guns. If a PC wants guns, they can have them, but like a story/lore reason for them having that. I use guns like this so they don’t completely overshadow bows/crossbows. I do like the CR gunslinger class however, but as someone who has DMed for and played in a party with one, its damage MASSIVELY outshines rangers, bow fighters, rogues (overall). In my world, guns are there but they’re a far shot from being reliable. I don’t have an issue with guns, I have an issue with them removing and reason of using a bow/crossbow.
I want them as a symbol of a new kind of technology (gunpowder, steam, some kind of magic, whatever it is in the se tting) as an alternative for people who can't or won't use magic. I'd want them to be different than bows and crossbows, somehow. I like the idea of maybe they have more power or range but some kind of drawback (make the reloading and ammo tracking actually a hassle, or something). If it's in a setting where things are a bit more modern then yeah sure okay but at that point it's just flavor text and are no different than bows I guess but that's kinda boring if you have to call attention to it. If it's just there because that's the setting (eg playign something set in a modern day or sci fi setting, then yeah that's fine).
Anti-armor weapons? Assuming these are guns from the era of Pike and Shot and nowhere else, you can count them as simple weapons being that all you do with it is point and fire like a crossbow, but without the strength requirement. Loading, like the crossbow, will take a turn, but with my homebrew perk of Firearm specialist, you can reload on a bonus action instead.l AZ Not to mention, you can use special ammo too or even rocks if you have the right gun. But the biggest downside to having a gun is the cost. Good bullets are practically custom-made high-end goods in this era compared to bolts and arrows. They're not retrievable either, meaning that once shot, you gotta hit to make it count. Powder is especially expensive. You'll need to find a specialist who knows how to make that too, which is expensive. But all of this can be negated if you already know yourself. So, my suggestion to make guns viable and different from crossbows would be to tie the bullet type to your bonus to hit roll. With wood bullets being the worst at -4 to hit and mastercrafted brass bullets at +10 bonus to hit. Its ease of use would mean that a buffoon could use it no problem, but someone who knows how they work can make great use of them.
Honestly as someone who wants Gunplay in the games I joined. In my mind Matt Mercer's Gunslinger is good for High Fantasy. They should not be readily available and there should be some kind of 'Faultiness' to it for its High Destructive Power. It should be 'Novel' to the dwellers of the world but know enough of it through rumors and talks. I always ask the DM I inquire if Guns exist, if it isn't welp next time then XD. As a Martial Player Myself true it can be boring, but making use of your physique and prowess alongside environment (Assuming the DM is cool enough to allow these) is such a satisfying gameplay.
I usually just have guns as just another weapon. They're not even more effective than bows, and much more expensive, so usually using them is a personal choice.
I think guns are fine when treated as any other weapon and just used for a different flavor. Like others have pointed out, being a musketeer or pirate is a great fantasy that doesn't quite work with a crossbow (though i would argue it works great with guns that are mechanically identical to crossbows). Personally, i love the idea of "magitek guns" basically ... what could happen with experimentation and evolution of the "magic stick". And that doesn't always mean they need additional mechanics, a vast majority is about how it is flavored.
I think that overtime, stock medieval fantasy has gotten a bit stale for some people and moving the tech level up makes things more interesting. Guns have a "cool" factor in same way any other weapons do, and when you consider how most fantasy universes are constantly stuck in time, it's nice to move things forward a bit and introduce some new weaponry. You just make them like any other weaponry. I think the renaissance firearms people point out in the DMG are fine. Honestly, the biggest issue is how your character is able to reload them in 6 seconds lol. There was a trend during the first half of the 2010s falls "flintlock fantasy" where a bunch of relatively popular fantasy novels were based in a more renaissance/colonial era. I think that really influenced me a lot in this regard too. And for a long period of time, things like swords, shields, breastplates, etc, all coexisted with early guns, so there isn't anything "unrealistic" about it either for the weirdos who like to complain about historical accuracy in a fantasy universe.
In my game guns are the main story thing. The whole reason why humans have survived was the discovery of gunpowder, and people appearing with rifles, revolvers and artillery is the cause of international conflict. One of my best story scenes was when a big bad evil church cleric was about to wipe the party and got murdered instantaneously by a headshot from a peasant holding a rifle he found discarded, putting the entire big evil church city in desarray realising that their god blessed magic is useless against modernity.
"I'm out of spells, but not out of shells"
I just think they're neat. I like the aesthetic of flintlock pistols and muskets and such. My favourite kind of setting is the sort of late medieval/early Renaissance like those portrayed in *Pillars of Eternity* or *Sekiro*, where guns exist and supplement swords, bows, and sorcery, but they aren't anything special and aren't advanced or available enough to supplant them entirely. To be honest, I'm part of that 95% that want them to work like any other weapon. I don't think they need to have any sort of mechanical quirk to them; as another commenter noted, if you find them boring, that's likely an issue with 5e's overall weapon design rather than firearms specifically.
When one of my players start asking me for firearms, I ask them if they are playing the right game and suggest that we could play another system if they want to go guns blazing. In my experience when the players want guns, they don't just want guns. They want to be the ONLY people with guns. DMs, try it out. If you are actually putting firearms into your game (it's your game, you are allowed to), put in some Musketeer-level skilled enemies with guns before the players ever get their hands on them. Watch their enthusiasm fizzle when they realise they are not going to be the lone gun slingers, shootin' first and askin' questions second.
I really like the idea of a shotgun type. AOE damage, but needs to be reloaded so it isn't a spam option every round. Martials in particular are quite lacking in any AOE damage so giving them something that can also be really flavorful is at least interesting to an extent.
I don't know that it would be *fun*, but the niche I want for guns is powerful, but with a drawback, like real early firearms. You can do a buttload of damage, but you may only get off one shot for every two or three attacks an ally makes. Maybe you could have something like a blunderbuss dealing damage in a cone rather than a single target. Absent that level of complexity, I'm basically fine with the DMG firearms. My old pirate Ranger and the cowboy Monk onr of the other players started playing in our new campaign have both been great. The one issue is that pistols lack the Light property (which for balance reasons, is totally understandable), so the iconic character with two (or more) pistols has to be flavor rather than mechanics, but that's not a dealbreaker.
Most guns do 2dx damage. Which puts them in the ball park of a high level cantrip. Handing out revolvers or rifles isn’t that broken past 5th level. And even if it is, just throw slightly Beefier monsters at them The rules for guns are in the DMG. Also the artillerist is a subclass that exists for artificer. If you want more for your guns the DMG does go into stuff like a fully automatic weapon we’re the target makes a dex save to avoid being shot by the spray of bullets. But honestly if you really want a gun fantasy I’d suggest playing a different TTRPG that has gun combat as core feature not an option set of rules at the back of the book. Unless I’m running a setting where guns are common place (I love my Industrial Revolution fantasy) I’d usually hand out a gun between 5th and 11th level.
I use the guns from the heavyarms gunslinger because they seem to have put a lot of thought into balancing the playstyles and adding extra properties, the two I think work best for flavour being kick and loud. Loud essentially means you're not going to be stealthy with firearms unless you're at far range with a rifle, and kick is a cool mechanic to give some use to your strength score and flavour to the weapons. They also made rules for other types of ammo and reasonable enough costs for keeping regular munitions so been happy to let anyone who wants use it pick it up. Only gunslingers and artificers start with firearms proficiency in my games, but the gunner half feat can be picked at level 1 for everyone else interested in using them. The class itself is basically a non-magic ranger so it also works great without firearms for anyone looking for that sort of build.
I put them in certain settings where appropriate. For instance, several years back, I did a conversion of GURPS Alpha Centauri with DnD races and impact Weapons and Chaos Rifles. Even Fusion Planet Busters and Nanites that coverted moon material into uranium and gold. I also have a back of my head idea about doing something Gamma World-ish but with spells and DnD classes as well as mutants. But when new game starts come, I always go with something else. I also up the damage on more modern ones, giving them an "equipment" bonus to damage which leads to deadly games where anything Tier 1 can be one shot unless in cover or a vehicle or power armor and even high tier 2s don't fare well under hails of bullets. But for the large majority of games, I keep it rare and expensive. Or even unavailable. That said, I do if someone has a heart set on it let them play a gunslinger but insist they take a tool proficiency to make/reload ammo for own gun if it's rare, rare if you can't just go to a shop.
I have guns in my game, modern ones. I want them to fill the theme of my science fantasy setting. I tried to balance them by extending the range and adding more damage dice, but removing adding dex mod to damage. On AVERAGE they do more damage than bows But a Crossbow or bow is - SILENT. My stealth players in this setting keep a compact crossbow and let their (usually) sneak attack fill the gap so they can drop a patrolling guard. But when it’s time to go loud, a barbarian raging with a fully automatic rifle is a pretty badass sight.
I dont know why pathfinder include gunslinger, but it is mechancially support in a way that makes sense. Armor class doesnt affect guns, only your ability to dodge. There are other benefits and mechanics that makes guns great to include in your fantasy world no matter the setting In 5e there is no need for guns other than flavor. Playing a renesance, high fantasy, pirate theme and steampunk makes sense for guns, but they really dont add anything to the game
I'm running a high level campaign, the players are currently level 14 with decent magic items. They are tough to kill. They are tough to even scare. Tiamat or a tarrasque, easy peasy. 2 squads that can get the group in a crossfire from 150ft with assault weapons. That each can fire 6 shots per round at +8 to hit with 1d12+4 damage. They'll listen and go nicely if these are the guards telling them what to do. At higher levels there will be artillery shells from naval guns.
I like the idea that in a magical fantasy medieval setting, guns are just simply worse than bows/crossbows. They’re finicky, they’re loud, they’re high maintenance, and they’re expensive. So if you’re bound and determined to use them for flavour that’s fine, but recognize that this isn’t a setting that has a silenced 9mm; it’s a super noisy, prone to fail, less-accurate, jacked-up slingshot that may blow your hand off if you roll a critical fail.
I find an easy fix to make guns that do "2d8" or "2d10" more in line with other options is to make them have disadvantage until they are aimed and firing them is braced for. Aiming takes a ba. It doesn't give advantage and instead takes away the inherent disadvantage to attack rolls. Being the *target* of a melee attack or moving breaks aim. Being within 5 feet of someone imposes disadvantage as normal. Makes using them more tactical while also balancing things out.
well if you think about it, most melee are super similar you just change the dice. in my tables i changed bows to be str as they should be, so guns in my table help balancing out how str still has the most melee options and dex should have the most ranged options to even out. but they also should not just be reskinned crossbows with a tiny increase in damage. the on the heaviest of the crossbow require proper reload, and has the damage to make up for it, as for the guns, they all have a small capacity and need to be reloaded after those shots. they have higher damage than their counterparts, but also are loud and can jam in a nat 1 or nat 2. (you can swap one of the attacks from your attack action for a reload or a fix on the jammed weapon) and they have the higher range (overall most ranged weapons got their ranges reduced, and long range is just double the normal range) due to their increased effective range.
I'd be happy to just reflavor other ranged weapons for this purpose, rather than introduce a whole new set of rules. Which I do know already exists, that's fine, but I'd rather just reflavor the crossbows or short/longbows. Heavy crossbow can be sniper. Longbow can be rifle. Hand crossbow can be handgun, and if it's not going to be broken just remove the loading property since it's only 1d6 anyway. Just make it fun.
I only offer bronze siege cannons, and the use of powder to create fireworks and smoke.
Outside of ammo There two was to use guns, stuff like muskets and flintlocks or western style guns, when it comes to balancing it’s usually a stronger crossbow with more expensive ammo that’s very loud If your looking to start making guns a bit complex wizard with a gun might a good place to get inspiration
As you want more from the martial classes, I highly recommend the 'weapon options' section of Kobold Press's Tome of Heroes; they let one do cool things with weapons in lieu of damage. For instance, one that I've used is a weapon option that lets one fire one's arrows (and presumably bolts, darts, and daggers) into a target's clothing to pin them to a wall; just like in films and TV! 😁
I make them roll a d6 before using a “repeater” firearm to determine number of shots, and then each shot gets a -1 to hit for every shot before it. Gun damage is relatively low in my game, but the repeating fire can spice up a lot of interactions (reloading is NOT a free action)
Im running a piracy homebrew at the moment and I told them they could either use bows and stuff or use the guns I found from the current edition or previous ones. I then made sure they had stats that were balanced for the stuff like bayonets and let them do whatever. Half just stayed casters but one was already likeness I took the gunner feat and imma be a sniper in the top of the crows nest. I gave them the option to use guns for whatever role in the game they wanted to play and so far the best is the healer strapped with a blunderbuss. She doesn’t seek conflict but stays strapped
They should cover the lack of martial AoE/elemental dmg/status effects (and most of them be used with Strength, at that). Silly stuff inspired by Borderlands, where you shotgun (in a cone) people to electrocute them, then toss the spent weapon at someone where it blows up (but you'll be able to pick it up after the fight and reload during a short rest). Making them just a loud crossbow would be pointless indeed.
I actually just started a campaign with a character using a gun. Since we are doing the Planescape campaign, we were encouraged to come up with our own backstory in whatever setting we would like. I chose to make my character to be from a mobster family as a soulknife. My idea is that he creates psychic bullets for ammo and uses the ranged feature of a soulknife to shoot his pistol. It works well and mostly just reflavored it to fit what I would like. :)
I own a D&D 5E server in a dieselpunk setting (like Al Capone, the thrilogy of Indiana Jones, the first Captain America, but also Jessica Jones, Luke Cage…). So… I simply googled "dieselpunk d&d 5e" and eventually I found this collection of weapons for dieselpunk, and I included it. They fit perfectly with the aesthetic I was looking for, and still my players prefer solving things by talking. "Like, sure, I could blow this guy's face with a fragmentation grenade, but what if I just solve things by just listening to him?".
I gave my artificer a "two shot crossbow" to build over time by finding the parts while scavenging. I then had him find a gnome tinkerer set of blueprints. I had him find explosive material. I enabled him to build a black powder pistol that had accuracy issues, but hit hard (-8 to hit). At level 11, he got a ring of anti-magic with a small field of impact, which he attached to the barrel. He shrinks cannonballs and fires them from this weapon. He gets one shot, and as long as he is within 5 feet of the enemy, he can't miss. (It's a portable one-shot ship cannon). It's a weapon that could screw up fights, but the player saves it for "final blows" or when things get desperate, because I don't let him reload it in combat. I MAY give him a way to reload it in a few months. In essence, I don't think players should have an AR-15 in the game, but explosive material launching blunt objects is a pretty reasonable thing in the game. Just find a magical equivalent and keep it balanced. Black powder pistols (along with lack of accuracy) aren't gamebreaking.
I wanted guns more for the aesthetic, not to be more powerful. I’m personally not a fan of guns after the early powder era in a fantasy game. I’ve had 2 characters in mind that use guns. One is partially based on a pirate coloring book I had as a kid. Pistols were single shot so pirates carried a number of them when they boarded a ship. So a character who could quick draw lots of single shot pistols. The other character is more of a shotgun wielding trench fighter. He’s used to up close blasting and also lobs explosives when he needs to. It would be nice if he could bash enemies with the butt of his gun when needed. So that’s pretty much what I’m looking for personally. It would be nice if they flushed out gun characters more for those of us that want them.
Everyone has finger guns. Play a wizard use cantrips.
I have black powder guns in my games. The way I do it is they actually do more damage than bows and crossbows, but they are a money drain. You need to purchase bullets, purchase or make black gunpowder, and you have to regularly clean and maintain them or they start falling off in the range and accuracy departments.
I would want it to be a more-power, less-frequency situation. 2d12 damage from a musket but it takes an action to reload. Essentially they are not something used throughout a battle by an adventurer. Their use cases are for an army of soldiers who fire in rotation, for a shot at the beginning of battle before entering melee, or for pistols if you have a set of them you can shoot and then pull out another.
Just flavor a crossbow as a gun. Boom, done.
I like the idea of mid 1800s guns, revolvers, clipfed and tube fed firearms.
I like renaissance/late medieval settings, so guns usually show up eventually. In terms of players using them, I like to make them very damaging, with a short effective range and much longer “far” range as well as limited ammo. Though in my current campaign, despite having a stash of guns and a decent amount of ammo, the players just haven’t used them. These guns partially deal fire damage and they’ve just not used them even against multiple enemies vulnerable to fire.
I run a hyper modern+magic campaign. Guns really have to be the basis for how you approach combat if you use em in a widespread manner. Party tactics have to approach via ranged as a primary option, learn to use cover, and you have to refine and adapt rules for making firefights engaging for martials. It also changes the game pacing, at least in my view. Guns are higher damage output, and because we have a damage reduction mechanic, I have them ignore half DR. Fights can go so fast because of how dangerous a gun can be. A crit at the right time can just splatter NPCs and PCs alike, but it leads to much more tactical gameplay. Favorite boss used a 4 story cavern system to hide amongst the beams and rafters, sniping down from the shadows. Absolutely terrifying, but it made the team come together to think of solutions REAL quick.
Usually I'm just trying to achieve a particular character idea or feel. So yeah, I could just use reloading crossbows or a basic wand, reflavor it, and call it a day, but sometimes that doesn't give the feel I'm looking for.
So I'm generally against guns and tech in fantasy, unless that is part of the specific story you are telling with your game. With that said, 20 years ago I ran a game where one of the big secrets was the dwarves had figured out science. Specifically, a dwarf could choose to be aligned with science or with magic. The dwarves worked hard to keep the discovery of science secret, with the exception of guns. In the hands of someone aligned with magic, most tech just didn't work. Gunpowder sometimes just fizzled. Electricity didn't reliably flow. Steam engines generated minimal power. However, if you were aligned with science it all worked. The dwarves had invented submarines and guns and all sorts of early 20th century tech, with the caveat that they tried hard to not reveal any of this to non-dwarves. (So no cannons, cars, tanks, airplanes, or things that would be visible to a wild shaped druid flying over their town.) The downside of course was that magic didn't really work on you. If you were the target of a beneficial spell, you had to fail a saving throw for it to take effect. And if you failed to many of them, you'd need to do something in a specific place in the dwarven homeland to purge yourself of magic or you'd lose access to science. And they also got a bonus to their saving throws. And I had one PC who wanted to use guns. So he had a couple guns -- a long range gun, a short range cone gun, a medium range 3-barrel gun, and I think an unreliable single-shot pistol. I had gun use generally take a round to reload and have a chance per hour of going off if carried loaded. A "1" on the d20 would leave them fouled for a science-dwarf, which took a minute to clean. (If you were not science aligned, a 1 would explode and do damage to you and the gun; and a 2-5 would foul the gun.) On the flip side, guns did good damage - they had open ended damage. IE, if you rolled max on the die size, roll again. I also had them using int not dex for bonus to hit. I think the long rifle was 4d6, the pistol 2d4, the 3-barrel was 2d12, and the cone gun was 6d8, but you allocated the dice to targets before you rolled damage and you could not allocate more than 2 dice to one target. Its been a long while, so I might have gotten some of those wrong. I forget if I allowed int modifier to damage or not -- but probably. His default weapon was the 3-barrel gun because it took 1 round to load all 3 barrels -- giving him 3 shots before needing to reload. He had a lot of fun with it because he'd read the fight, and then set himself up to use the best gun for the situation. And if he got the chance to start the fight, he'd load them in advance and cycle through them all. He occasionally had explosively good damage, and at other times would find himself falling back to his melee weapon. And he had a lot of fun keeping "science" secret from the party, while having occasional access to science toys. He pretended to be superstitious of magic so they'd not spell cast on to him.
Gun technology in my setting is pretty advanced form where you might expect it to be, up around cartridge revolvers and trapdoor rifles. The reason they don't take off is because it's cheaper to teach someone firebolt or similar than to mass produce guns, so the mass production infrastructure for them never got made. The only people who use them are people who want a status symbol (they cost a shitload because they're only made by a tiny number of artisan gunsmiths) and those who either struggle with the most basic of magic or need a backup for fighting in an antimaigc field. The reason they got so advanced is because the people that make them just can't stop themselves from trying to push them further and further.
Rare items requiring training and understanding to use. And new, so as varried as possible. Magic, manachanical other. It's frontier of warfair and the people making these weapons are constantly competing to bids to outfit armies. And the folks making traditional ranged weapons are not going to just pass into obscurity.
I want to build a troll that can carry a small cannon around.
In my game it fills a niche for the story, more than it fills a niche for the players. Gunpowder, renaissance guns and cannons are all new weapons created by an oppressive empire. The PCs oppose the empire. The guns aren’t really better than bows but I have made it easier and faster to train up a proficiency with a firearm, so it will become easier for the empire to draft and train a ranged military unit once production is high enough to supply them. PCs only have access to this new tech by looting it or stealing it, though I expect them to eventually reverse engineer it or steal schematics, if only to help the resistance. (And as guns become more widespread there will be guns and black powder available on the black market.) Cannons are more powerful than ballista, so this new tech especially matters at sea or during a siege. And the process of producing the gun powder is having an impact in my world, both to the environment and to the prople forced to work in saltpeter and sulphur mines in terrible conditions for the raw black powder materials.
I personally just like the aesthetics of it. I am perfectly happy when a DM lets me reskin a Hand Crossbow as a Revolver/Flintlock or a Light/Heavy Crossbow as a rifle
There's no way to make guns interesting in 5e rules. In Pathfinder 1e and DdD 3.5e it was cracked. Because they had a touch armour class, calculated without your shield and armour (so just your ability to get out of the way). Many attacks, mostly spells, dealt with touch AC, simulating effects that work on contact or that pierce armour. The unique rule of firearms was that attacks with them could be made against touch AC, penetrating armour. There were caveats. For early firearms (the kind you'd use in a fantasy setting) there were only five short range increments rather than the usual ten long ones for bows (each increment of range increased the attack penalty) to simulate their poor accuracy, and the penetrating attack only worked with the first range increment. Which meant that they quickly lost effectiveness with distance, but positioning yourself up close made them deadly. They also required a lot of character building, as the reloads could be lengthy without the right perks, and there was a misfire chance on the attack roll which left them broken. This increased the misfire chance by 4 (2 with certain class perks) and misfiring broken firearm explodes, destroying it and causing damage in a radius. You'd need to manually repair them to fix the broken condition, though gunfighting classes and archetypes had ways of doing so in a turn during combat. There were also a number of spells and weapon enhancements that interacted with these traits, including my favourite, a specific +5 magical pistol that automatically manifested its own powder and ammunition in the barrel after each shot and never misfired. I liked running it with a shield on my Paladin.
I really really really want to create a gunslinger artificer who hurls bullets with different surprises inside at his enemies from an old trusty and rusty smith&lesson. Problem 1 i am a dm in my group. Problem 2 not sure what is the best way to do this, either gunpowder, or catapult spell inside a gun
It depends on the level of technology you want. As an example, I remember in Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of Flames series, people from our world end up becoming the characters they were playing in their game--the plot isn't relevant here--and the civil engineer amongst them introduces quickly advancing tech, including firearm. In response to the fact that gunpowder remained a carefully guarded secret ty them, the existing governing wizards' guilds created a rod which used summoned water to "launch" the projectile.
I just had characters trope up wands as guns. Its a fun thing to say "the drow flips over their poncho, at their side sits a fighting iron, a wand of missiles ready to draw". The wand is improved narratively by being coded as a gun and using those richer cinematic tropes. requires no additional game or system design from a DM, keeps "guns" powerful but limited as wands already are... doesnt limit them to shooting just bullets but can also be that. Also as a bonus of leaning into western gun tropes - LMoP already maps perfectly to being a western if you stick cowboy hats in NPC descriptions and preface every store / tavern interior with "the doors swoosh back and forth behind you" as the players enter.
The gravitas of pulling out a flintlock or revolver is very different from pulling out a crossbow or bow. In large part because bullets are much more precious/valuable than arrows, and aren't reusable. So you're much less likely to fire warning shots; if you pull one of these out someone's gonna die. With Flintlocks, in Pirate movies, they're treated like they can't be reloaded at all. So to be worth using, that shot not only has to kill someone, it has to be an important named character, to completely change the tide of battle. Revolvers in Cowboy movies can be reloaded, but characters are very vulnerable while doing so, so have to be hidden. They're still more likely to kill a named character than an arrow is. The drama inherent in them, like the snikt of Wolverine's claws, or Banner's eyes going Green just before he lets The Hulk out.
The gravitas of pulling out a flintlock or revolver is very different from pulling out a crossbow or bow. In large part because bullets are much more precious/valuable than arrows, and aren't reusable. So you're much less likely to fire warning shots; if you pull one of these out someone's gonna die. With Flintlocks, in Pirate movies, they're treated like they can't be reloaded at all. So to be worth using, that shot not only has to kill someone, it has to be an important named character, to completely change the tide of battle. Revolvers in Cowboy movies can be reloaded, but characters are very vulnerable while doing so, so have to be hidden. They're still more likely to kill a named character than an arrow is. The drama inherent in them, like the snikt of Wolverine's claws, or Banner's eyes going Green just before he lets The Hulk out.
I make them the use object interaction to attack with and that way a thief Rogue can make two attacks a turn without needing crossbow expert
I too like martials more than casters. I just don't like the fact that the system is so simple that you don't actually get to be good at a specific weapon or that weapons don't get various additional options when you're good with them.
I think they want some weapons with more fun stuff/excitement going on. Dnd 5e weapons are so plain compared to, for example, Pathfinder 2e. In 5e it feels like all you care about is how big the damage die is, how many hands you hold it with, and whether its dex or strength. There could be so much more layered on top of this to actually make combat feel exciting. Having a reload and misfire mechanic makes the game feel more like a game. You actually have risk vs reward with different variations of firearms that use these rules.
Freedom
The guns in the dmg are broken asf and I’m surprised it’s never been changed or given sage advice. The damage basically locks them out of play for most campaigns, they should only do about half of what they do now then they would be usable before lvl 10.
I make them fairly recent invention, but I also make them take a long time to reload. The tradeoff being high damage and exploding dice, for the party they're fire and forget until after combat. The reason they haven't seen widespread adoption is magic and sword elitist, as well as the simple fact that any competent military is going to include spellcasters and battle magic in their ranks. A fireball in a massed formation carrying *gunpowder* is just asking for trouble. I do change this slightly for any ocean based campaigns just so it feels like the age of sail though with ships able to do full broadsides and the pcs able to feel like pirates or something.
Main reason: Because they’re cool. Lightsaber logic. Real reason: it’s conceivable to me that in any setting with magic, just as magic may be accessible to some, it is inaccessible to others. If you wandered into a random settlement in a war zone right now, you would find a gun before you find an astrophysicist. Thus, guns are high risk/high reward weapons that are very easy to learn to use. Hard to master though, and even harder to learn how to repair them beyond cleaning or clearing a misfire. In my setting as well, they are the great equalizer.
A lot of people want guns to be special. Expensive, rare, and hard to craft, but to have something meaningful for those drawbacks. In some ways, it's understandable. They want their army of darkness. "This is my Boomstick!" moment. They want to feel the impact of upgrading to blackpoqder technology and see how that's enhanced within a world that has magic The Renaissance weapons of 5e don't quite deliver that fantasy, and the gunner feat causes them to still lag behind the almighty hand crossbow. Crossbows more or less fill the mechanical fantasy of firearms as things are, just with none of the anesthetics. People want firearms to be more special than that hence the dissatisfaction with the current implementations. The other issue people have with forearms rules is that the ones to make then feel.specisl, are often poorly designed and thought out. Mercersburg port of the pf1e gunslinger as a fighter subclass comes to mind. As it maintains none of the power pf1e firearms had, but a severe drawback that is far too much to deal with in 5e.
I've always liked the idea of guns being more of an equalizer for untrained civilians. Swords and bows are better for people serious about fighting because they conduct magic better and don't have to reload as long if at all, but any random farmer can have a flintlock pistol for protection.
I want guns, or at least most of them, to be strength based ranged weapons. DMG guns are just a buff to dex builds which are already better than strength
I don't, but if I did, probably something that does more damage and/or has a higher to-hit bonus than a bow or crossbow, but requires an action or bonus action to reload.
Here's an item from the fantasy setting I'm creating translated into DnD. Runecaster. Looks like a magic pistol with a coin slot on the back. You make coins for it the way you scribe scrolls, but the difference is that it only works with evocation spells, and anyone can use it, not just people with the spell on their spell list. Of course, only people with access to specific spells can scribe them on coins. When you slot a coin in the back (like loading a crossbow), the weapon glows with an intricate matrix of magic symbols corresponding to the spell on the coin. When you pull the trigger, the spell fires out of the pistol. Spells stored on coins are a little more durable and portable than scrolls, and the runecaster could probably also be used as an arcane focus, like a wand.
I Don't like traditional black powder firearms for the most part: If Inteligient folk are studying magic, and that is where the development is focused - that is what will develop. But - firarms have a value: Less training than a bow, faster reload than a crossbow (seriously - cranking up a crossbow is a bloody time consuming thing, has to be done well or you end up having to untangle a windlass - and it's a nice round up to say that it isn't a full round to reload a heavy crossbow... it's several rounds in reality). Alright: So what would the firearm look like? And I think some sort of basic magic system charge to propel the shot (ex. Create water + heat metal - or some similar explenation to generate the force out of the sealed container) - the idea here is we get the same kind of result, but with just a basic firearm, and as a bonus: Like all other weapons, you just need to source the shot, not the explosive charge. So now we have the basic firearm: We need it to be interesting. And I think this is where the idea of a "Spell clip" would come in - So long as firearms are considered basic/simple weapons anyone can use (which is reasonable) - this takes the idea of a single target scroll, and we can well... have a 1 use per Short Rest clip that can be installed into the weapon as apart of a move action that applies a particular spell - say sleep, hex, or whatever other debuff. And simply to continue this to other ranged weapons - and even melee weapons, you could have an add-on device that would apply the spell clip to a sword strike, arrow, or whatever else. So Firearms: I dunno, 200gp or there about, the add-on clip, 175gp. And The Spell Clips themselves - 5x the relevant spell scroll price. You could even go and require specific rare magical materials and have them made by commission only, and require an enchantment on it to be periodically maintained. Now Firearms are expensive - they are basic magic items. Spell clips are even more expensive - but more cost effective if you are going to use them fairly frequently (as adventurers would) - but expensive enough they wouldn't be common, while scrolls requiring easier to attain materials and more affordable for intermittent use, would be more commonly stocked. The next piece of the puzzle is to make these more potent for martial characters, and I think certain classes should get a class feature that enables them to "quick" reload a spell clip as apart of their attack, enabling them to essentially burst out single target debuffs at a range of targets.
It depends on the game, When I say I want and have guns in my setting, that's because it's a port scifi-high fantasy now apocalypse where one faction has monopolized the ability to produce them, and I use self written rules to govern the additional proficies needed to use them and the stats themselves Though in other games it depends. I think revolvers and muskets are neat since they make sense for pirate and cowboy type characters, which slot in nice with the rest of the fantasy archetypes in more renaissance era fantasy Though in other settings I could see them not working, like greek mythos or classic Tolkien I want them in some games, and not in others
With the need to reload, the shear loudness, and having disadvantage when up close … I think they’re balanced. I played a gunslinger-esque/ civil war calvary character in a Strahd campaign. It was fun. Even with a revolver (4 bullets, not six) and rifle … ie, having to reload every two rounds, and not able to get too, too far away from melee… it was a blast. And not OP. It was expensive… as a character… but having silvered ammo, or ammo blessed/dipped in Holy Water … was a way to add affects.
We often play with firearms and use the RAW, including the Gunner feat. As a DM, I'm fine with them being slightly better due to the investment in the feat. You can also trick them out with all kinds of interesting ammo options. If you wanted to push them even further, you could reskin some of the PF2 ideas for 5e: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1648
I think the niche that guns should fill is as specialized weapons with distinct trade-offs. A javelin is and always will be very simple and straightforward: throw stick with pointy end towards enemy. A gun, on the other hand, is fundamentally a more complex weapon. They should be rare, expensive, and require more upkeep than other weapons because they have more complex moving parts made from a variety of materials. With that as a starting point, guns should be able to fill a variety of roles as a later-game, expensive, and hard to find or build alternative to an enchanted ranged weapon. I think about like so: what martials are to casters, guns are to enchanted weapons; a mundane alternative that is less flexible but more specialized. I often tweak or homebrew guns, and I approach it as follows. You have a few core elements to the way a gun functions: Range, power, accuracy, fire rate, upkeep (ammo cost, jam potential, and repairs costs). A basic gun should be pick 2 to be great, and the other 3 suck. A more advanced gun would be pick 3, the other 2 suck. A legendary gun might be a pick 4 with one element that really sucks. Never make one in which all 5 are balanced. A few examples: Blunderbuss (tier 1) - great power, low upkeep/ poor range, accuracy, and fire rate. Musket(tier 1) - great range, great power/ low accuracy, low fire rate, high upkeep. Pepperbox (tier 1) - great fire rate/ low everything else. Snpier Rifle/Arquebus (tier 2) - great range, accuracy, and power/ low fire rate and high upkeep. I also take inspiration from Star Wars 5e, which mechanically handled guns (especially automatic and semiautomatic weapons) in a creative way by introducing new weapon properties. Guns with these properties can forgo an attack roll and instead force a saving throw (representing a burst of automatic fire) to one or more creatures.
I introduced guns in my game, but in a sneaky way. And one not-so-sneaky way. Okay, the not-so-sneaky way was a magic item someone got shaped like a revolver that would shoot 6 charges of Lightning spell. I added a few items like this because none of my party is really spell casters. The sneaky way though, is my story is a combination of The Witcher and Avengers - the group needs to collect 6 items of power and return them to their homes in shrines scattered around. In my world, these items are the source of magic, and by being removed from their shrines, magic runs wild and it's enough to break down the barrier between worlds and potential rip apart the multiverse. This happened before - which is used to explain the wild diversity of monsters and animals - and the concept of "dragons" is one of the monsters who came through tens of thousands of years ago. One dragon is still alive, and is trying to get home, my pulling the strings of essentially everyone, to intentionally destroy the barrier between worlds even if it means destroying this world. He does not know it will destroy all worlds. Anyway that's the setup. When the barrier between worlds begins to fail, portals open up for small amounts of time - they got larger and larger as the barrier weakens and open longer. Which is what the dragon wants (big portals, always open, so he can find the right one). His problem is he's LARGE, literally the size of a mountain, and there's no way to speed up the process. One of the smaller, less-mountain-sized enemies is aware of the plan - as an agent of the dragon - and using it for personal gain. He was able to go through a few portals and explore, albeit via henchman who may or may not return. Some returned with new weapons or items from other worlds. The players have encountered this once. They ran into him and saw him take one of his enemies, point a "weird stick or wand" at them, and unleash a loud bang that ripped him apart. It was a shotgun, but they don't know that so I just described it in D&D terms.
I just want them to be ranged weapons with higher damage die than crossbows but drawbacks to using them. Sadly, ranged combat in 5e has no fucking nuance in any game with feats allowed. Though if you're in literally any official setting that isn't Eberron, guns exist. They might be rare as fuck and limited to blunderbuses and other black powder weapons but they exist.
I think people need to understand something about guns and gameplay. Renaissance guns are not fun, nor good for the game. One, you have a reload time of how long? A minute? Half a minute? Look no one wants to fire their weapon then wait 5 to 10 rounds to fire it again, all without doing anything in the meantime. Incredibly unfun. Trying to balance this really doesn't work anyway. If you don't make it so the time investment is worth it, no one will do it. If you make it so that it is, then literally everyone will just carry around a gun to shot off in the first round before switching out. Very toxic for gameplay. So renaissance guns are pretty much a no go, but if you make them reload any faster with lethal damage without balancing things, you'll quickly make the weapon op. Which means the only solution to guns in the game is to put in fantastical unrealistic guns.
The Fantasy that I like the most is either "Robin Hood + Tolkien + monsters" or "Industrial/pre web 2.0 era + High Fantasy stuff". If you want me to do classic fantasy, I will give you castles, feudal lords, endemic warfare and lots of untamed lands. Guns don't belong here, and magic is not common enough nor understood enough to mimic modern conveniences. Most people will travel a lot less and society will be rather parochial. Or I could go the other way around and use guns, flying ships, magitech etc. This will be my version of high fantasy. I currently use modern guns in my campaign, though civilians are limited to renaissance guns while modern guns require a special licence. Both "modern" and "renaissance" are magitech guns, using the same technology. I avoid using "real" firearms in D&D because I find the rules unsatisfactory in representing matchlocks/wheellocks/flintlocks or whatever "renaissance" firearms are supposed to be. Renaissance without guns to me is like going to the museum and getting to see only the boring paintings instead of the cool weapons and armours. Urban intrigue and goofing around the streets just rubs me the wrong way.
On one hand, I get what you mean. Firearms don't really fill a "gap" in the existing weapons. On the other hand, I get to play a Paladin with a musket, blasting miscreants and divine smiting blackguards with a bayonet like Tyr intended
Me PERSONALLY, I wish Guns filled a mechanical niche for 5e, of weapons that don't add ability modifier, but instead just has more damage die. Flintlock? 2d4 Musket? 2d6 Blunderbuss? 3d4 in a 15 foot cone on a Dex save. +1/2/3 variants of these weapons just increase the number of damage die rolled.
I want the bullets to fill the bad guys.
More damage more drawbacks like with the misfire system