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I see two fundamental problems with any attempt to make a Gunslinger class, and the first is with the nature of Guns and their development. I'm not really going to talk about the Gunslinger class itself here because the problems I'm talking about are in the weapons themselves.

Guns in the real world are an inherently unbalanced mechanic, that's actually what we love about them. Heroic Fantasy games are about well trained and growing characters taking on extreme challenges to change/improve the world around them. The fact that a cabin boy with almost no training can take an already loaded pistol and have a decent chance of outright killing or mortally wounding a highly trained person (like a Hero) before that person can get in the room is why Guns are called The Great Equalizer.

It takes almost no training or life dedication to become almost as lethal as is possible with a gun in the era of weapons we are talking about. It takes much better equipment and intensive training to get better effective range, but 10 to 20 feet away, if your opponent isn't actively making it difficult with cover or erratic movements they are almost certainly dead or dying after one shot. These guns did have terrible reload times relative to game combat speed (musket takes a well trained soldier 1 to 2 minutes to reload), but those reload times were still worth the lethality they brought and would then be followed up with sword/knife/bayonet work. Even older firearms that took several minutes to load, several seconds to fire with an unpredictable fuse, and terrible aim, were still worth bringing to larger engagements just because if you fire into a crowd someone is likely dead/bleeding out meaning one less fighter your forces have to actually contend with when you get into melee.

But melee isn't really where we should be making our comparisons.
Archery & Crossbows: Any ranged weapon is a massive improvement since you can deal damage without putting yourself at direct risk of retaliation. But they generally weren't very accurate without intensive training. Contrary to the way they are used in games and movies, almost all ranged weapons required both high DEX and STR. But Crossbows overcome the STR requirement by taking extra time to reload, often with a foot, fulcrum, or crank assist. Guns don't care about your STR, and as some have said here, aiming with a gun is less about your DEX than it is your sight (Perception), so should be WIS based.

The only way I see Guns being viably added in Heroic Fantasy are as one-shot per fight tools that are extremely lethal, so use it at the most opportune time. Another part of the power of a Gun is the intimidation factor. Because they are so lethal it makes everyone worried about being the one who makes you decide it's time to use it. Until you get to things like revolvers, the threat basically goes away for the rest of the fight (at least with how short Heroic Fantasy fights are) once it is fired.

Gunslingers: Heroic Fantasy really doesn't have place for a Gunslinger as that didn't even become a real concept until revolvers allowed rapid fire of several shots before requiring reload. Otherwise, your only option was carrying several loaded guns and quickly going through shooting each one, but that is something any sufficiently wealthy character can do.

Snipers: If you had a dedicated sniper they would basically only get one shot from long range to almost guarantee killing an unaware enemy as it not only takes time to reload, but also needs time to take aim and account for the wind and cover. With these weapons you aren't getting a second shot in the typical 3 round fight unless you have a second gun, and even then, the enemies are now aware and will be much harder to hit.


graystone wrote:
Dubious Scholar wrote:
graystone wrote:
kaid wrote:
The versatile option models the fact that in old style fire arms you could often shove other random stuff down the barrel and fire them.
It isn't versatile they use for this but modular B, P, or S: Hand Cannon is the only one you can shove random objects into and fire: "a hand cannon can be used to fire almost anything that can be packed into its barrel." Versatile is there because the bullet is SO awesome it somehow acts like a large blunt object. Makes me wonder is a sand storm deals blunt damage too, you know from all those blunt projectiles. :P

What doesn't make any sense at all about the Hand Cannon though is Modular means you need to spend an action to change the damage type, and an action to load it. Which... eh.

I think it may need a new trait for that effect that's basically "Variable Ammo" - choose a damage type as part of loading the weapon.

It just takes a small rework of modular: Add "If a weapon with this trait is a ranged weapon, the interact action to switch damage types also counts as an action to reload.

This makes sense for the Hand Cannon and the Blunderbuss, but I still don't think it makes sense for most of the guns here to be dealing bludgeoning at all.