Hearkening back to the days of the Revolutionary War, our American forefathers surprised the hell out of the British by being very effective with those old flintlock rifles. Why? Because those Americans had grown up on the frontier shooting at game. The Battle of Bunker Hill (for example) was a victory for the British, but Americans shot so many of them, that it was considered a Pyrrhic victory.
So Bob the blacksmith, and Tom the tailor and Bill the butcher hear the call that "brigand adventurers are tearing up the local tavern", and they grab their rifles and meet up with a dozen friends or so. Sure, the adventurers are up against "level 1 commoners" but what they might not realize is the fact that those expensive firearms are family heirlooms, which means they grew up learning how to fire them. They're all level 2-4 fighters when it comes to "shootin' straight" and some of them might know how to use a tomahawk too (another great frontier weapon)for making an adventurer SORRY they raised a ruckus.
And don't forget either that someone can "ride for help" and get serious help from around the countryside while the townsfolk get up on their roofs and into good shooting positions.
Hearkening back to the days of the Revolutionary War, our American forefathers surprised the hell out of the British by being very effective with those old flintlock rifles.
Emphasis mine, these were often rifles, NOT muskets. Musket barrels are not rifled, so the projectile seldom flies straight. The colonists used rifles because they were accurate for shooting game (and, as it happens, people), but the British largely used the Brown Bess musket.
The problem of muskets vs rifles is reloading time. Muskets were faster to reload and fouled less than rifles. Thus rifles were slower to be adopted into that larger military. The old flintlock rifles were accurate over a much larger range but had an inferior rate of fire. This is one reason why hit and run tactics worked well for rifles and not so well for the stand up and fight tactics the british favored.
- Gauss
Very true, but the British did set up a cadre of riflemen in time for the Napoleonic wars to combat just such skirmish tactics. At Waterloo four hundred men of the King's German Legion armed with rifles held out at the farm of La Haye Sante for many hours against attacks by several French battalions before being overrun when they ran out of ammunition.
here is what i see.
a homebrewed setting that completely invalidates armor by means of making touch attacks drastically more common.
PCs trying to fill the void created by invalidated armor that came from increasing the ease of access to touch attacks by means of playing agile skirmishers that have become the new tanks.
a DM who wants to challenge a mid level group with threats that expire after 1st level such as the angry lynching mob of peasants.
use of a very specific class intended to shine in these circumstances as a means to show a percieved problem with excessively high defenses. the defense in question isn't as high as one thinks.
if you want guns to be lethal, try a different setting.
Dabbler yup. I was making a statement about the general armies the british favored rather than specific exceptions. There have always been exceptions in the military. Frankly, alot of military tech was invented much earlier than people realize but took ages to be adopted by the mass military.
- Gauss
IMHO I think there is a perfectly good system that replicates the idea that only PCs level. Its called AD&D 1st edition.
I haven't personally run a single level NPC since 3.0 came out, short of green recruits and youths just striking out on their own. That lvl 1 fighter NPC? Equivalent to a butter bars (2nd Lt.) Lvl 1 warrior? Conscript/volunteer fresh out of boot camp. Lvl 1 commoner? Dishwasher (lvl 2 is FRY COOK!) Lvl 1 expert? Just started technical school.
Two aid another actions and that 1st level soldier will have a +6 to hit with his gun/musket/whatever. That's a pretty good chance for three CR 1/3 mooks leagues under the PC's level of 6.
Besides, absurd touch ACs where the staple of D20 modern, and guns worked pretty well there. The problem is that pathfinder guns are weaker than crossbows for a hundred times the cost.
As for guns exploding? It seems it was actually fairly common when guns were new and of shoddy craftmanship while being loaded with guesswork powder charges.
Something that is clearly not the case on the campaign world, as guns are common.
How are the guns weaker than crossbows? They have similar damage dice, they are touch attacks, and make better use of deadly aim than crossbows.
Give a +4 bonus like you mentioned.
If someone is trying to snipe someone, give the other person 2 rounds worth of perception checks to noticed or be instant critted. 3-4 rounds of perception checks or be coup de graced.
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you lost me when you said its low level, then started at 6th!!
fireball all the 1st levels and sell their umpteen guns
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If you're tinkering with the rules, you can either buff the attacks or debuff the defense.
Buffing the attacks: Let the low-tech firearms target touch AC even past the first range increment like advanced firearms do. Increase threat range/multiplier. Or both.
Debuffing the defense: Limit what modifies touch AC to dodge, Dex, and cover bonuses only. That rules out monk AC and the myriad ways to get deflection, insight, sacred/profane bonuses, etc. OR, half dodge and Dex bonuses to touch AC against gunfire because hey, bullets are hard to dodge. That would effectively give each character a fourth AC: regular AC, flat-footed AC, touch AC, and gunfire AC.
How are the guns weaker than crossbows? They have similar damage dice, they are touch attacks, and make better use of deadly aim than crossbows.
They are touch attacks... within the first range increment, which is more often than not, 10 to 20 feet. Enjoy standing in front of the threat just so you can deal somewhere between 1d4 to 1d8 damage. Though i guess there is that one that deals 1d12 at 30 feet... Or the other two that make all other firearms useless by being the only two worth a dam
Compare to the firearms in sorcery and steam or D20 modern and you will understand pretty darned quick that the firearms in pathfinder are a mess.
Incredibly underpowered for their price, you are better off buying a wand and getting some skill points in use magic device. Afterall, a wand of magic missile keyed to 3rd level caster is a mere 2250gp (About one and a half times the cost of a single firearm) and it strikes unerringly with two 1d4+1 missiles at 130ft.
Guess what? That out damages and outranges almost all firearms (With the exception of the broken ones that don't follow the rules) and you get to shoot it FIFTY times.
Best part? You don't have to spend a million years or a million feats learning to reload the things or trying to be able to have access in the first place.
The only way these terrible guns would do is if they were a cheap alternative to spells or something. As is? It's like charging 3,000 gp for alchemist's fire.
In fact, it is! you can throw those buggers at twenty feet for touch attacks with the appropriate feat, dealing similar damage to most one handed firearms at similar range. 1d6 and an additional d6 for the fire which can force opponents to loose a turn. In fact, even without the feat, you are better off throwing alchemist's fire at 20gp a shot than firing guns at 11gp per shot + gun investment of almost 2,000 gold.
Guns, as written, are only useful for archetypes revolving around them or the gunslinger (Which has been flavored poorly, a western themed shooter with flintlocks? urgh...). Which was a poor choice.
At least, a crossbow can be fired at targets hundreds of feet away, and they are simple weapons to boot! almost any range you can fire the crossbow at is already past the touch range of the gun anyway. Don't forget, if you are 20 to 30 feet from an opponent, you are a mere move action away from their melee anyway!
Oh, and a crossbow is only 50gp upfront with a 1sp per shot cost. Unless you are hamming it up with the culverin or hackbutt; or using the gunslinger, you are better off using a crossbow.
How are the guns weaker than crossbows? They have similar damage dice, they are touch attacks, and make better use of deadly aim than crossbows.They are touch attacks... within the first range increment, which is more often than not, 10 to 20 feet. Enjoy standing in front of the threat just so you can deal somewhere between 1d4 to 1d8 damage. Though i guess there is that one that deals 1d12 at 30 feet... Or the other two that make all other firearms useless by being the only two worth a dam
Compare to the firearms in sorcery and steam or D20 modern and you will understand pretty darned quick that the firearms in pathfinder are a mess.
Incredibly underpowered for their price, you are better off buying a wand and getting some skill points in use magic device. Afterall, a wand of magic missile keyed to 3rd level caster is a mere 2250gp (About one and a half times the cost of a single firearm) and it strikes unerringly with two 1d4+1 missiles at 130ft.
Guess what? That out damages and outranges almost all firearms (With the exception of the broken ones that don't follow the rules) and you get to shoot it FIFTY times.
Best part? You don't have to spend a million years or a million feats learning to reload the things or trying to be able to have access in the first place.
The only way these terrible guns would do is if they were a cheap alternative to spells or something. As is? It's like charging 3,000 gp for alchemist's fire.
In fact, it is! you can throw those buggers at twenty feet for touch attacks with the appropriate feat, dealing similar damage to most one handed firearms at similar range. 1d6 and an additional d6 for the fire which can force opponents to loose a turn. In fact, even without the feat, you are better off throwing alchemist's fire at 20gp a shot than firing guns at 11gp per shot + gun investment of almost 2,000 gold.
Guns, as written, are only useful for archetypes revolving around them or the gunslinger (Which has been flavored poorly, a...
Eh, some go to 40 to 50ft. Plus you do have the advanced ones that go to 5 times the increment.
The price is also a 1/10 of the price if it's in a setting that's big on guns.
My experience running D20 games in modern times (d20 CoC, D20 modern... yeah, not the greatest systema, but I bought them on release so its not like I had a review of them) is that when you make the common weapons guns, PCs will spend their attribute points on DEX (to hit and avoid being hit). So you are looking at 18-20 dex instead of 18-20 STR you commonly see in muscle powered campaigns. This is even true in other game systems such as dark heresy, where STR is a dump stat since guns are super lethal.
Problem with a gun campaign is STR becomes a dump stat, and Dex, Wis, and Cha become godly due to needing to see the enemy, hit the enemy, or talk your way out of a gunfight. If you raise guns up to be as lethal as IRL, your con even can't keep up (exploding dice are just one system I've seen that makes guns do huge damage), making that a potential dump (if you die with one shot, who cares what your con is).
I'm going to be running a low level game with super common firearms treated as simple weapons.
It is really easy to get a touch AC up above where you can be shot by a first level guy with a gun. Dex +5, Monk level 6 +2, Dodge +1 and Combat Expertise +2 gives you a touch AC of 20,
One issue both Fighting Defensively and Combat Expertise are melee only. He has only 18 if he hasn't attacked anyone yet.
{a lot of good stuff}
Guns IRL did not replace bows and armour because they were effective or efficient. They did so because they were simple. It takes a day to train a man to shoot a matchlock or flintlock musket, it takes a week to train a crossbowman and half a decade to train a longbowman.
Guns had a powerful effect on the battlefield because of morale: while longbows were more effective at dealing death, the musket looked and sounded terrifying when fired in a volley. If you could have a thousand muskets on the field to a hundred longbowmen, you took the muskets. The cost of the muskets themselves might be greater, but the cost of the men is much less and you can raise an army faster that way.
> Lv1 commoners cannot harm Lv6 "tanks"
Well, GOOD. They are not SUPPOSED to any more than a CR1/3 skeleton is supposed to stand before a channeling-specialized cleric with the sun and glory domains.
Also, why doesn't the monk in the example have Wis factored into his AC?
Guns don't need to be made deadlier than they already are, especially in an E6 game. Single bullets on average don't kill all that often unless they perforate something really important - this is called a critical hit.
Make magical healing not available. Someone with 30 something HP that gets hit with 10 damage seems a lot more lethal.
Make firearms deal max damage.
I always thought npc class levels should be easier to gain levels in.
Also about what you said earlier with the begger having 2 levels and the orc bandits only having one.
I always pictured the orc you met in your early encounters as green (lol joke) recruits. Young and new. while the lv 2 beggar and 3 shopkeeper would be much older maybe even middle aged.
