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The Ancestry feat table lists "Special 1st," "Heritage 1st," and "Feat 1st." If I'm reading this correctly, "Special 1st" is for something like the Halfing's Keen Senses, "Heritage 1st" is for something like the Half-Elf heritage's Low-Light Vision, and "Feat 1st" is for your first-level ancestry feat? There's some confusion among my friends about whether "Heritage 1st" and "Feat 1st" do as above, or if you get two Ancestry feats at first level.
At last! My work here is done. I dunno if that's a good idea, guns and booze are a bad combination! xD
You know what, Durandal, I am a bit grumpy today (and I'm half certain I was the unwitting model for Lucky Marm ;) ). It IS a blow to the pride for me when I feel like I've submitted, broadly speaking, what I hope is a useful perspective, and the only response I get is a criticism of what I perceive as a tiny part of the greater whole, with no reaction to the rest and the context removed from my statement. But first, what's tiny to some is huge to others and vice versa; second, that's just the nature of discourse on the Internet. And I should be old enough to pull on my big girl panties and accept that. So I apologize for the harsh tone of my response. Carry on and enjoy your thread. :) I acknowledge your maturity and your point with approval, and I also apologize for any perceived offense on my part. Though now I admit I am finding it disproportionally amusing to imagine everything you type as being said by a grumpy little dwarven woman with a stereotypical Scottish accent, sitting at a bar and waving around a half-filled pint for emphasis.
Never before have I encountered a case where someone's forum avatar was so indicative of their temperament. What I said doesn't miss the point of your post. I've found that most DMs that I've had, when thinking about world-building and how various mechanics might fit together, looked for a historical precedent. What I just pointed out was a couple-hundred-year-old historical precedent for firearms existing alongside plate armor and swords. So there's you're verisimilitude.
For example, in the real world, we got rid of metal armors because firearms rendered them obsolete. If you look up the history of plate armor, it didn't start to be phased out of use until the 18th century - well after the introduction of firearms. Historically speaking, Japanese samurai didn't even have plate armor until after the introduction of firearms by the Portuguese, instead using lacquered wood and leather armor, if I recall correctly. We got rid of metal armor because it was expensive to produce and to equip entire armies with, and because powerful rifled longarms could punch through it. The term 'bulletproof' didn't arise from wishful thinking.
This is precisely my grievance. Thank you for re-introducing it to the discussion.
(If you're shocked at how inaccurate smoothbores are, how about modern weapons? 5000 bullets per casualty isn't an unusual figure.) You're forgetting that the vast majority of bullets fired in modern warfare aren't intended to hit anyone. It's suppressive fire, used to keep the opposition behind cover while your allies move in to flank them. Modern firearms are quite accurate.
Gailbraithe, I like you. You point out the flaws in EVERYONE'S arguments.
Why put the effort into developing them when you have something that fills that niche: the caster. Because you can't counterspell a cannonball.
My opinion is this: guns and fantasy just don't mix. It is no longer fantasy to me. Fantasy is swords amd sorcery, the age old unending battle between good and evil, not cannons and catapults, and moral ambiguity. This is just my opinion and by no means indicative of anyone else. I respect that, and that's perfectly reasonable. Though, this is written from the standpoint of someone who is looking at the game with Gunslinger as a core class, who is pointed at the rules for said class and its companion weapons and saying, "I disagree with this, and here's why."
I wasn't talking about scruples, but about scarce and/or expensive resources: mage time or exotic metals. Is there enough advantage to using those to make firearms over traditional magic weapons and armor? Or, in an RPG context, if all firearms are either adamantine or magical how does a low-level character buy one? You can handwave it like they did with the gunslinger, but it doesn't really follow. Good point. I don't really have an answer to that one, and I admit it a noteworthy flaw in my argument.
Though I could argue that while wizards could strengthen metal to make guns or use rare, costly metals like adamantine to do so, why would they? Because they're being paid to. Also, it doesn't actually need to be a wizard; you just need someone with the master craftsman feat, who is likely going to be even less scrupulous about it because his effort isn't going to include re-organizing reality to suit his will. If you're going to say no to this on a flavor basis. that's fine, and I can respect that. As I said a little further up, this was written as someone who is looking at Gunslinger and its accompanying rules as being used as core.
You're a bit innaccurate on several counts. There were Ship to ship weapons that existed before gunpowder. Ballistae and "Greek Fire". He did include ballistae in there, and to be fair Greek Fire was only ranged weapon in the sense that it had longer reach than a ram.
I don't care to have guns for a primary weapon in my fantasy games. I respect that, and that's perfectly reasonable. Though, this is written from the standpoint of someone who is looking at the game with Gunslinger as a core class, who is pointed at the rules for said class and its companion weapons and saying, "I disagree with this, and here's why." If you meant those as completely separate arguments, then fine. Both work separately. But they don't read that way. They read as a progression. That's definitely my scew-up there, but I did warn that my arguments (I may as well use the word generously) were unstructured and unfocused.
Further, you can't invoke the realism argument to claim that given cannon you need to have handguns and then switch to a playability argument that the firearms contemporary to pirate cannon are too weak... My point there was not that they are weak-powered, but that their reload requirements makes them unable to be used as a primary weapon, as is the entire point of the gunslinger class.
...a bunch of Somalians with RPGs... Aaaaaaaaand now I'm picturing a bunch of Somalian pirates, having found an unprotected tanker, are now rolling for initiative...
I hear a lot of people complaining that guns just don't belong in a fantasy setting, and frankly this has always annoyed me. So, I'd like to share my views on it, and hear some of your thoughts as well. Be warned; this post will be neither structured nor focused. I'm writing this as I think about it, so it's not a structured essay. A common argument I hear is that guns are "imbalancing." This is the idea that, somehow, being shot through the heart with a crossbow bolt and being shot through the head with a bullet somehow differ in ways aside from how much of a mess it's going to make. Regardless of your position, I think we can all agree that the end result is typically the same: death. A bullet graze really isn't that different from being grazed with an arrow, and a punctured organ is a punctured organ regardless of cause. Also, some people point out that it's imbalancing to have a weapon that anyone can just pick up and shoot someone with. To this, I answer that that is precisely why crossbows were popular weapons in real life and why they are covered under simple weapon proficiency in-game; anyone can pick a crossbow up and shoot someone with it. So, I fail to understand why anyone would call a gun imbalancing. I find that, for naval vessels, catapults and ballistae fail to excite. They don't evoke the same "coolness" of a galleon bristling with cannons, and well, a catapult on a ship which relies on complex rigging is just begging for something to go horribly wrong and makes no sense whatsoever from an engineering standpoint. What this has to do with my main point is simple: Where there are cannons, there are small arms. I've heard the argument of "Well, they just never made guns strong enough to not explode when fired." To this, I must also call shenanigans, because the setting includes magic. It you can't make the metal strong enough, it will most certainly be strong enough once the wizard gets through with it. Also, adamantine. At this point, some may concede and say that alright, flintlock weapons are allowed. My counter to this is that flintlocks cannot be used as a primary weapon. This is because flintlocks need to be reloaded after every shot. You might say that well, you can always carry multiple of them. My counter to that is to ask just how many attacks one makes in the average fight. With the amount of time it takes to reload a flintlock (down to a move action at best, even with rapid reload), you simply cannot put out enough damage per shot to justify not being an archer and using the Manyshot feat, especially since no matter what, a character armed with flintlocks can only make one attack per flintlock before needing to reload. A flintlock user will be out-damaged by an archer every time, as the archer gets their full amount of attacks per round, plus those granted by feats. As a backup weapon, they're barely justifiable due to the cost of ammunition and the fact that there's always the possibility of it exploding. A flintlock weapon is essentially a bad crossbow with a hand grenade taped to it. I've put a lot of thought into this. You may have noticed. My opinion (and I stress, this is my opinion, and I am not trying to force anything) is that, in a fantasy setting, certain old-west-style firearms fit in perfectly. First off, the single-action revolver. Six-shot, closed frame, single-action weapons like the 1861 Navy and the legendary Colt Single-Action Army. As each bullet has to be loaded individually and each spent shell ejected individually (revolvers with a swing-open cylinder are ridiculously advanced for a fantasy setting, but most people think ALL revolvers are swing-open), reloading the full six shots on such a revolver takes two move actions, each reloading three bullets. Rapid Reload would reduce this to one standard action. Second, on the matter of shotguns... Double-barrel break-actions mostly, but if you want to get fancy, something like the Winchester 1887 lever-action rifle would fit quite nicely; for a -4 to hit, you could wield it one-handed (this is the shotgun used by the T800 in Terminator 2). Now, I should make special mention of shotgun damage. The only place I've seen it done well is in SpyCraft. To represent a shotgun's close-range firepower, shotguns deal multiple dice in damage (in this system, a 12-gauge buckshot shell deads 5d4; the buckshot part is important because this is what we're assuming the ammunition used is), but the shotgun has a relatively short range increment, and loses one dice of damage per range increment. Another point is that, as anyone who has has actually used shotguns will tell you, the spread is actually much too narrow (on non-ridiculously sawed-off shotguns) to hit more than one target. This is something everyone gets wrong, save for the people over at Crafty Games who are actually very good about these sorts of details. The lever-action rifle should reload similarly to the revolver, I think. Moving on to rifles, I propose five-shot bolt-action weapons just as the well-known Mauser Kar98k. I chose bolt-action pretty much exclusively because I like the style of working the bolt. I think it's cool. With this said, I am looking forward to the Ultimate Combat with mixed anticipation and dread. I was woefully underwhelmed by the gimmicky gunslinger class and the disappointing firearms rules (see "bad crossbow w/ hand grenade" comment above), but at the very least we'll have airships and vehicle combat rules. |
