You are so far out of the normal expectations, I'm afraid I have no useful advice to you.
If I were to give you advice it would be to ditch everything you have, play using the races available in the advanced race guide (without using the race builder), and without the templates. And to adjust for the party's high point buy by running every encounter with enemies having max hp, the advanced simple template, and possibly 50% more enemies in every encounter.
sigh and let him kill everything
Deflect Arrows and/or Protection from Arrows.
You can limit the effectiveness of the gunslinger (in some battles, I wouldn't suggest doing it all the time otherwise you end up going the opposite and making it no fun for the gunslinger) without making the enemies too tough for the other characters.
Easiest way is to use low level kobolds and make the game so easy for him that he quits and reroll.
Second easiest way is Fickle Winds
Oh, and grapplers. I'm not entirely sure of the penalty of using a ranged weapon to strike a grappling creature (it's GOTTA be more than when in melee, right?), or at least with the Body Shield feat.
A little late to tell you, don't give the players so much power if you won't be able to challenge them consistently. This is outside what I'm used to, so the only advice I can give is general:
You could let them smash through their first few challenges with ease, but ensure they become (in)famous in the process. Set up their overarching adversary as someone intelligent and with a lot of resources. That way, he (and therefore you) can plausibly ensure that his henchmen are well-tailored the task of bringing down your party - using high Touch AC and magical Miss Chance to avoid getting hit, for example. Or using spells to target each of their weakest saves, if any (or not bothering with save spells if the party has a reputation for being magic resistant). He may simply want to slow down / misdirect the party while he completes his goal, and the challenge goes from "can you defeat this encounter" to "can you plow through all these enemies fact enough, and in the right direction?"
Barring that? Throw higher CR enemies at them until they feel challenged again. All this piling on of stats and templates does is skew "Power Level" further away from Character Level. Either way, you have to find enemies that match their Power Level, and now you can rely even less on CR to do it.
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What you're suggesting is like going:
"hey go ahead and play a demon. So they do. then say, okay all demon's are hated and instantly attacked by everyone that sees them. Like, if you don't want them to be a demon don't let them."
what I mean is, you let them have the tools to make super broken characters. Now you're going to try and shut down all the toys you gave them. Why not just play where there are no allowed options that you're going to negate in game?
DR will help at first. It will at least make his bullets more expensive.
Monks are another foe to challenge the gunslinger. High touch AC and they can use deflect arrows to stop the first bullet each round.
Bad guys who can teleport right next to them.
The dampen powder spell.
Amulets of bullet resistance.
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% miss chance.
It's the best way to deal with most OP ranged characters.
Spell or natural effect that break line of sight are wonderful too.
Also look into the weather rules for weather in the game mastery guide.
Here some ideas:
-Rain and snow can give -4 to ranged attacks.
-Severe wind can actually blow away your tiny player and give a -4 to ranged attacks.
-Fog can give concealment (20% miss chance)
-Have monsters use cover and arrowslits
-Have monsters chug potions of blur (20% miss chance)
-Have monsters get the feat "dodge"
-Have monsters learn spells like or spell like abilities like mirror image
-Have monsters use illusion magic to create fake barriers (total concealment thus 50% miss chance for at least one attack)
You said he was fine sized, right? So, what, a grain of sand? How much damage is he set to do with his guns anyway? 1D1? Who is even going to craft these weapons of his? Forgive me if these are silly questions, but if someone told me they were going to be the size of a fly and attack a dragon with guns his own size, I think I'd laugh.
well, aside from the fact that making a gun that small with any kind of firing power is impossible (the size of the charge would be insufficient, or would blow the tiny gun apart) the following are counters to such a build:
-any kind of wind spell will mess with him and his flight, and projectiles that small will be easily blown off course.
-entanglements or anything requiring a strength score to overcome are doom for him. Getting hit by a tangle-foot bag is nearly death since his strength is abysmal.
-environments that are ill suited to ranged combat or gunpowder. Not every corridor is 10ft wide and not every room is 30ftx30ft. Mist will dampen powder, fog obscures vision, blinders do the same.
-Contrary to popular belief, there were forms of armor that were effective vs early firearms. These were primarily cotton and fabric based, and caught the bullet rather then tried to wall it. In my campaign there are armors that apply their ac to touch specifically when dealing with firearms.
Also, villains are smart. A rug could be dropped on him he's fked.Getting drenched will likely prevent his flight too, and create water is a divine cantrip which can drop buckets of it right on top of him. Once his enemies know he is a diminutive flying pixi thing they can easily counter.
Of course, your players may be displeased with these counters... However, nothing says they are the only one of their species in the world. All that high ac would be pointless vs a swarm of the diminutive pixi gunslingers. All of a sudden their uber powerful race is now an uber powerful enemy and general hard counter to the group, expecially the big guy.
Limit the availability of guns. Plus, getting a fine sized guns / ammo should be even harder (armor too, its not like there is likely high demand for fine sized weapons/armor). On top of that their damage with a fine gun should be like 1d2 or 1d3.
until lv5 when he gets dex to damage and it becomes obscene (my guess is he has a super super high dex) plus with the bonuses from being fine his to hit is even better than a normal gunslinger's.
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I think combat maneuvers will be your friend on top of the other things suggested. Being a fine creature, his CMD should be abysmal compared to his (assumed) small or larger enemies. Disarm could be a way to disable him for a turn or two, grapple could make life difficult unless he spends a lot in escape artist, dirty trick can steal his move actions (standard at higher levels). Another thing to consider is instead of using average HP for monsters, you could bump them up to max HP per Hit Die (something I've had to do constantly for my broken Reign of Winter players), and of course there's the "throw higher CR creatures at them." Be sure you know what you're throwing at them though: you probably don't want to send them against a pack of CR5 monsters at first level, but a few CR3 creatures could provide them a decent challenge. Once it gets into higher levels you can probably jack up the creatures more without worrying too much (again from my Reign of Winter group, the group of 6 at 11th level just took on an ancient white dragon, a CR15 creature, which ended up being an epic fight that they all ultimately walked away from in one piece).
I feel you have 3 good options
1)Let him play the gunslinger as is and not change anything because he picked gunslinger instead of a different class. Thus giving him value for his choice.
2)Make the only legal gunslinger be the bolt ace
3)Ban the gunslinger and all guns.
The reason for this is the gunslinger's thing is doing quite ridiculous amounts of damage very easily. Hitting touch AC with full bab and bonuses means pick deadly aim and anything that gives you extra attacks for penalties to accuracy and go to town. If you feel this is too strong I suggest picking option 3. If you feel it's maybe too strong go with option 2. If you want your characters to do whatever they want this game go with option 1.
option 4 is let him be a gunslinger and have everything in the world randomly be able to stop the gunslinger. I suggest to stay away from 4.
Water, the rules say if his powder gets wet it is useless. That includes paper cartridges.
I agree with this. I would argue rain would wreck his shots.
There are also spells that wet someone. Having a mephit breathe water damaging stuff ont he party wrecks his shot and damages him
underwater would nerf him too.
Let's not forget Fickle Winds
How do you stop a good guy with a gun? A bad guy with a gun.
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Swarms.
Rust Monsters.
Rust Monster swarms.
Swarms are only good if he doesn't have a blunderbuss or a dragon pistol.
That depends on the size of the swarm, doesn't it? Immunity to weapon damage is immunity even if it's an area effect.
Stay... like... 30 ft away from him. Now he can't target touch AC and suffers a -2 to attack rolls. Or do the opposite and stay right next to him... Now he gets smacked every time he shoots.
He can get the "distance" (or whatever it's called) enhancement... But that makes his gun exponentially more expensive.
Next time, simply ban firearms or remove the idiotic "target touch AC" rule...
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If he's "optimized," then that means he has all kinds of weaknesses, namely, everything he didn't "optimize" for. There's this stupid, yet mostly unchallenged, meme going around that treats characters like power tools that only exist to serve one function. This is a serious mistake born of narrow thinking, and such a player's weakness is anything that exists beyond their narrow scope of interest, like a 1-dimensional being in a 4-dimensional universe. Exploit the s#$! out of it.
If he's "optimized," then that means he has all kinds of weaknesses, namely, everything he didn't "optimize" for. There's this stupid, yet mostly unchallenged, meme going around that treats characters like power tools that only exist to serve one function. This is a serious mistake born of narrow thinking, and such a player's weakness is anything that exists beyond their narrow scope of interest, like a 1-dimensional being in a 4-dimensional universe. Exploit the s$&* out of it.
Where can I find this meme? You aren't taking the DPR Olympics as characters intended for general play, are you?
It's always been recognized that the most powerful characters are the ones that can deal with the widest variety of situations, including being on the receiving end of attacks. I could count on no hands the number of people I've read who think that DPR is everything. The same is not true for the number of people who say "those dirty optimizers think DPR is everything" when they couldn't be further from the truth.
If he's "optimized," then that means he has all kinds of weaknesses, namely, everything he didn't "optimize" for. There's this stupid, yet mostly unchallenged, meme going around that treats characters like power tools that only exist to serve one function. This is a serious mistake born of narrow thinking, and such a player's weakness is anything that exists beyond their narrow scope of interest, like a 1-dimensional being in a 4-dimensional universe. Exploit the s%&% out of it.
This is half true. A good optimization allows them to apply their optimization horizontally.
I have plenty of optimized characters and they are caught helpless much less than everyone I play with.
