Ok, the down side to being an engineer is the brain starts thinking about stuff like this and won't stop. My party is finishing "Fires of Creation" tomorrow and I want to give them some rewards other than: Here is 400K, split it and spend it. We have a gunslinger in the party who was very ineffective against a robot and the gargoyle because she couldn't break it's DR. (not like you can power-attack with a pistol)
I noticed the following: Glaucite is only as hard as steel. Glaucite is 150% the weight of steel which makes it a hair denser than lead. Glaucite can be shaped once the torch is turned back on. Firing a steel bullet in a primitive gun is dangerous because of imperfect fit BUT a lead jacketed round would function the same as a solid lead round. (Not a musket ball but a shaped bullet)
So, I'm thinking that without changing the weight of the projectile an intelligent gunsmith could make a 'lead jacketed sharpened glaucite core' projectile that would mushroom and act similar to regular projectile on soft targets but would shed the lead like a sabot and the glaucite would act like a depleated Uranium tank-buster (Without the issues of radiation poison).
A solid Admantine bullet (which should score up the barrel badly but who is counting) ignored DR 20. I was thinking Glaucite bullets might be good for 5 or 10, not sure which.
What say you all? Cool idea or just a gun-nut playing D&D?
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I don't think primitive firearms are designed to shoot anything but a round bullet ball, especially not modern-type shaped bullets. Probably a good way to destroy wour weapon, nothing more.
Also, glaucite does not overcome hardness like adamantine does. You can't forge a sword from it either and expect it to ignore hardness. By the way, adamantine does not ignore DR 20, it ignores hardness less than 20. Similar, but different beast.
And you can actually power attack with a pistol, only it's called Deadly Aim.
Could be. There is a cross-over ammunition, the Minié ball. It is bullet shaped with rings to engage rifle barrels when the hollow back is expanded by the gunpowder but before shooting it's smaller size makes it easy to muzzle load. To the best of my knowledge you can shoot minié balls out of anything that can be muzzle loaded.
The Minié ball is circa American civil war or 1861 while musket balls are more rev-war in 1775 and the 3 Musketeers is 1660-ish. D&D guns are post musketeer matchlocks but I suppose minié balls are just too late an adaptation, especially as a saboted round.
Still, Glaucite is much more common in Numeria than pure admantine. It's only 3 times as expensive to make things from glaucite rather than 61 times for admantine. Glaucite is as hard as steel and as dense as lead. Admantine bullets do exist in the rules. Seems that Glaucite balls are about the only useful thing you could make from the material (other than wanting a strong as steel space-ship hull that is as dense as lead to protect against space radiation or that some how needs the mass for artificial gravity, both of which are possible reasons for it to be used to build starships.)
And you can actually power attack with a pistol, only it's called Deadly Aim.
This. It sucks to be an ranged martial during the first five levels or so, but once you get the necessary prereqs, you just take off.
Your gunslinger will be very effective in the upcomming books, especially once he gets some technical guns. Also your PCs are probably on their way to the Scrapwall, where they won't face to many Robots at first. You could have them craft some round glaucite bullets, but I doubt that they will be needed.
I essentially let Glaucite be "adamantine lite" in my campaign. Specifically because the gunslinger and sword/board fighter were really sucking it up against robots and were pretty much: "Well, time to buy adamantine everything."
Seemed a little too binary. I figure Glaucite's adamantine content makes it hard to work, but with the right tools possible.
The end result being they could craft, but not conveniently buy, glaucite weapons that would bypass Hardness less than 15 (I.E. 1-14). That's enough to take the place of adamantine weapons for robot killing.
With the hardness working against elemental damage it pretty much made robots immune to ranged attacks, even from elemental technological weapons.
Now the gunslinger has to decide whether to get the penetration of the physical firearms or the range from the elemental ones.
For my part it was more to do with player frustration of finding out there was one thing that could hurt robots. Even with the electricity vulnerability, the constant resist 10 means something like the Warden with good saves can shrug off multiple lightningbolts but get tore up by a rogue with an adamantine dagger.
This way they still have some issues against things with DR/Adamantine or hardness greater than 14, but it doesn't come down to one guy in the whole party can actually do regular damage to a large percentage of the enemies unless they all go out and buy one kind of weapon.
Once your gunslinger gets to level 5 and can add dex to damage they'll be fine.
He can also purchase adamantine ammunition for his gun, and it wont damage his gun in any way. It's just very expensive to do so.
Also, once he gets access to other types of technological guns that shoot lasers and what not he'll be able to deal energy damage of various types.
You're gunslinger will be fine, eventually.
Some of these challenges are in fact meant to be challenging, and that means not everything can be solved by easily just spamming attacks.
I had to teach that to my party in Fires of Creation:
Spoiler:
Most specifically against the Gearsman on the final floor. Hardness 10, in a party where no one is playing a two handed weapon damage dealer. Unless players scored critical hits almost no one could do more than 10 damage in a single hit.
Party consists of a TWF Hunter, TWF shield master slayer, wizard, and an alchemist. It was a rough time all around because energy damage is still reduced by hardness, unless DR. Sometimes thems the breaks.
My party eventually decided to use a tanglefoot bag to glue the Gearsman in place, grab the keycard they needed and leave the room.
They were less threatening. They had less ability to hit the PCs, less hp, and less ability to heal themselves comparatively. They struggled against them as well, but it was sort of a stalemate because the collectors couldn't hit the party well (wizard and alchemist stayed out of reach) and the party could deal much damage at a time. The Hunter's animal companion did most of the heavy lifting in terms of dealing damage because of the large number of attacks being rolled gave a greater chance to crit. The battles were largely slog fests that resulted in slowly whittling down the robots. Slayer is built extremely defensively, with combat expertise and using a shield his AC is around 25 or 26. The Hunter's animal companion with natural armor, improved natural armor, and light armor on has an AC of around 23/24 so the party just basically tanked those fights. Thankfully the rooms are small enough that the robots could maneuver around the unhittable enemies to the squishier members of the party. However, there were definitely times when party members went unconscious and were risking death. Though typically the AP also makes a point to say that they don't actually want to kill them but capture them to "heal" them.
However, earlier on the player of the slayer had previously been playing a two handed weapon using (before he chose to change) and in those fights he just annihilated them.
I think the AP is written with the assumption that someone will play a two handed weapon user early on, which will have no trouble dealing with hardness 10.
As our gunslinger is only level 3 and I need to squeeze in some random encounters before scrapwall I'm gifting her with a dozen glaucite bullets that have half the penetration power of admantine. I figure that between that and the inferno pistol (which I retconned to take charges from batteries not nanites) she will have some options until she is adding Dex to damage and rolling for all attacks and combining them into a single shot. As it happens she is a tech-slinger (And we have a cool background including a technic league assassin who killed her father to take the laser rifle back to the league and is not a recurring villain hunting her) so I suspect she will be using the inferno pistol more anyway.
