rabidwombat's page

Totally stealing this for my campaign. (Except the grenades won't have touch attacks, trying to hurt somebody by throwing a grenade is the same as throwing a rock, the explosion is what you're really after.)

Sorry, my fingers were running ahead of my brain at that point. You are right.

The sticking point about guns in a fantasy setting is, for me, at what tech level do you introduce them? And what keeps them there? There has to be some kind of underlying internal logic.

First, some bright spark figures out that if you stick some alchemical reagents into a tube and shove some rocks down there, then set it on fire, and you get a big kaboom. Congratulations, the earliest firearms are born. They are expensive, unreliable, inaccurate, and slow.
Is this the right place to keep them?

Guns like that aren't much fun, so most people will want to move things along by a couple of hundred years to smoothbore flintlocks. Now the guns are handmade by skilled craftsmen, the powder is reasonably common, and accuracy is greatly improved by sights, but the guns are still slow, taking perhaps 30 seconds to reload after each shot. Anyone can learn to use one with a couple of days training, so finding someone who bothers to practice with a sling or a longbow should be really rare. At this point we begin hearing cries of protest from the magic-loving folks: "but I WANT my longbow. Its faster, and my character spent a lot of years learning it. Why? umm...because its faster?" "doesn't that mean there is starting to be industry polluting the wilds and making the druids and elves angry?" Maybe it does. On the other side are the players who really insist they can still use their high base attack bonus and attack 3 times in a round with a pistol in either hand, even though I would personally love to see someone post a Youtube video of someone simultaneously loading 2 flintlock pistols in the middle of a melee. At any rate, this seems to be the point that Paizo is thinking about with the Gunslinger, and it does cause complications, but not nearly as many as when someone insists on setting up the magical assembly line and advancing to....

The repeating firearm. Break out the ten gallon hats and gaslights, because now we have a weapon that trumps swords, bows, and most magic, can only be produced with the help of an extensive industrial base that doesn't fit into most published settings, and suggests something like Randall Garret's "Lord Darcy" novels, or the Deadlands game.

So the question for me is, where do you stop the progression, and why there? There has to be a reason not to let them progress along to become the driving force in the setting. Arcane magic spells in Pathfinder are cast by an elite few, who carefully guard their secrets, or who have a gift carried in the blood. Divine spells are given directly by the gods to their chosen champions. Skill in muscle powered weapons comes from years of dedicated training. Guns are the product of human innovation, and are the Great Equalizer. They rendered the warrior who trained for combat his whole life obsolete, because by picking up a gun, a peasant could kill him by squeezing one finger (remember Indiana Jones facing the big guy with the impressive sword skills in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"? bang. No more swordsman). In a game that is supposed to be about being a special hero, someone who can change the course of nations by facing deadly foes, that aspect of the game becomes harder to convey the more guns come into play, and the more sophisticated they are.

I don't have a problem with adding guns, but I do think not enough people are thinking about the door they are opening in a fantasy setting. You may want to gun down the ogres with your new hand-cannon, but what stops somebody from selling the ogres some guns? BIG guns. For that matter, there should be no complaints when the dragons start strapping on cannons to use during their strafing runs, or dropping bombs from high altitude. Kobolds will happily pull out some grenades to get touch attacks and AoE damage on those mean ol' adventurers.

If you think the players complained about a spiked pit trap they didn't expect, how are they going to like it when you tell them their torches just set off those barrels of gunpowder the goblins threw down on them?

1. Firearms themselves. I'm fine with the mechanics, except for the fact that you can't use Deadly Aim with them. That makes NO sense, and any sane DM would allow it. The wording of Deadly aim is obviously to prevent someone from using it with Polar Ray or the like. Guns are not Ranged Touch attacks. They're normal ranged attacks that, as a weapon property, ignore armor and shields within 1 range increment. If you rule that's a ranged touch attack, I'm going to start using metamagic with my flaming longsword, because it's obviously touch-range fire spell.

I would tend to agree with you regarding Deadly Aim. It is a Weapon-Related feat, and would be applied in this instance. The Gunslinger is clearly intended to function best at close ranges, as would be appropriate for a non-rifled firearm.

Having built and practiced for a while with a sling, I will state that you are overestimating the size of sling bullets in saying that it uses ammunition the size of a baseball. A rock or chunk of metal that large would be awkward to carry several of, and would have a shorter effective range increment than the 50' in the Core Rulebook. A metal ball about an inch to an inch and a half in diameter is closer to the correct size. That, though, is still about twice the diameter of the sort of lead shot that an early smooth-bore firearm might use.

While I see many very good ideas in the Gunslinger, I also see a couple of glaring flaws and omissions.

The greatest flaws are the Covering Shot and Targeting deeds.
Specifically, as written, a target cannot resist the effects of these deeds by any means except(for Covering) being hit, or (for Targeting)total immunity to sneak attacks or not having a body part. Therefore, a 7th level character can knock an overflying colossal red dragon out of the sky with a pistol by spending one point of grit and making a ranged touch attack on the dragon's wing. There is no game balance. A pit fiend could spend many consecutive rounds being confused as he is repeatedly shot in the head (assuming that same 7th level Gunslinger took Rapid Reload and had a decent wisdom score). To give these sorts of disabling abilities no save, or even a combat maneuver defense check, does not make sense with the rest of the rules. An analogous ray spell to force an creature to automatically drop a weapon or to confuse a creature for one round without a saving throw might be 4th level, and therefore available to a 7th level caster, but it would also subject the caster to attacks of opportunity, do no hit point damage, and have spell resistance applied. Normally in Pathfinder, the stronger the opponent, the stronger its resistance to spells and to weapons will be. Where the Gunslinger is concerned, the stronger the opponent, the weaker it appears when someone just shoots it and spends a point of grit. Unlike a monk's ki powers, which increase the monk's abilities, the Gunslinger apparently expends his inner reserves of will to make the rest of the world into stumbling morons.

The most glaring oversight to me is that, as far as I have read, no one has yet mentioned in the discussions of this class just how incredibly annoying it would be to attempt to actually use a muzzle-loading black powder gun on a battlefield where magic use is common. What happens if you are hit with a fire spell while reloading? Instant explosion for your whole powder horn right in your hand is a distinct possibility. How do spells that create very damp conditions (like Fog Cloud, Sleet Storm, Obscuring Mist or even Create Water) affect your chances of getting your powder to light? Wet black powder can be a total loss.

Personally, I like the idea of a d'Artagnan or a Rob Roy getting to strut their stuff in a fantasy setting, but I think a class that relies entirely on a single weapon with hard-to-acquire ammunition is a deeply limiting concept. Perhaps this class should also be redesigned to take in crossbows. William Tell with a repeating crossbow?