Alternate Firearm Rules

[Koujow]

Tomorrow, my core group of players and I are gathering to discuss a new campaign and I was going to propose a setting that I have been working on for a while that I can only describe as Victorian Fantasy. Not to be confused with Steampunk, which gets a lot of its themes and motifs from the Victorian era, but a setting that I imagine as 'if Lord of the Rings continued for a few hundred more years'. I have been working on it for a bit and several of the players I have mentioned it to seem to like the idea.

This would almost certainly be a 'Firearms Everywhere' setting and while Paizo did an awesome job, I just generally dislike the rules for Firearms. I even posted a few weeks back asking for alternative rules and while I got a few suggestions, I wasn't that pleased and decided to go about making something else. I wanted to post them here and get some opinions on them and tweak them, should this campaign come to pass.

Penetration
While it would change the dynamic of the game, Firearms completely negating an entire aspect of your AC in combat (armor) seems kind of silly. It also annoys me that a derringer could blow through the armor of a dragon just as well as an elephant gun. So I thought of a simple mechanic called Penetration. It is an additional stat on all guns that reduces a targets Armor (either natural or crafted) by its Penetration. Certain high power guns and/or bullets have higher penetration, making them useful for hunting down heavily armored monsters and the like.

I could have sworn there was an armor enchantment that protected against bullets, but I can not locate it. If there really isn't, then I would add an armor enchantment that either either gives the armor a minimum armor bonus (As in, even if a character is using an elephant gun with armor piercing rounds, this armor can not be reduced below X) and/or an armor that can not be reduced at all.

(Note: I am still researching generally era appropriate firearms, so the examples used are just generic 'Old west' weapons. Also, the numbers are going to change as I do more research and find out how powerful these weapons were. For instance, the Penetration of the Colt .45 is based entirely on that one scene in a Fistful of Dollars where the badguy can't shoot through Clint Eastwood's breastplate. Although, in retrospect, I can't remember what gun the badguy used.)
Examples:
Derringer - Penetration (1)
Winchester Rifle - Penetration (6)
Colt .45 - Penetration (4)
Elephant Gun - Penetration (9)

If Character 1 is wearing a Breastplate and Character 2 shoots him with a Colt .45, Character 1 only gets a +2 to his AC rather than the normal +6. If a moment later, Character 3 shows up wearing only studded leather (a duster, of course), he loses the +3 bonus to his AC, but no more since the Penetration can not reduce armor below 0.

Reload
I dislike the base reload rules because it assumes that in a period of six seconds (1 round), you can reach into your pocket, pull out six bullets and slide them into the chamber of a revolver with ease while bullets, magic and other threats happen around you. If you have rapid reload, you can even do this and then fire back. This one might be a bit nickpicky, but I wanted to spice it up and make it different. So it now takes a Full Round Action that provokes to reload a firearm (of any type). You can load a number of bullets equal to your Wisdom mod (minimum 1) (keeping your cool), up to a weapons max capacity. Rapid Reload lets you use Dex. mod instead. It just shakes things up and I think it can help create those classic scenes from movies where a character has to take cover so that they can reload in the middle of a gun fight or a scene where a character who is an excellent shot must face a melee combatant because he can't just reload nonstop. (Pathfinder has a lot of power fantasy, but this isn't a John Woo movie) Also, as far as I can tell, weapon cartridges hadn't been invented yet, but they could be something invented by an NPC or PC during the campaign. This is something I am still looking at. If they are, then I would allow a PC to reload with a cartridge as a Move action.

Gunslinger
Gunslinger needs only a mild tweak. While anyone can use a firearm in a 'Guns Everywhere' setting (they are simple weapons), Gunslingers would still be the 'best' when it comes to be a badass with a gun. The tweaks are just to reflect the above changes.

Deadeye (Ex): At 1st level, the gunslinger can resolve an attack against touch AC instead of normal AC. Performing this deed costs 1 grit point per range increment beyond the first. The gunslinger still takes the –2 penalty on attack rolls for each range increment beyond the first when she performs this deed. (Because firearms no longer completely negate armor, the Gunslinger can spend a grit to complete ignore an enemies armor for one attack.)

Lightning Reload (Ex): At 11th level, as long as the gunslinger has at least 1 grit point, she can reload a single firearm as a move action once per round. If she is using a cartridge, she can reload a single firearm of the weapon as a swift action each round instead. Furthermore, using this deed does not provoke attacks of opportunity. (Because I wanted to keep reloading as a Full Action, the Gunslinger would be the only class that could reload faster than a full round.)

[Cyrad]

You might want to take a look at my firearm rework. It removes touch attacks and misfires, but adds Dex-to-damage for firearms. It also reworks the gunslinger and a couple of archetypes. I wrote this because misfires are stupid and unfun, and full-rounding touch attacks is mechanically broken.

Dex-to-damage felt like a better approach to modeling penetration because:
1) It avoids complicating resolving attack rolls.
2) It makes more sense that penetration simply causes more damage in a game where you can survive multiple stabs in the chest.
3) Easier to balance the weapons.
4) More historically accurate because it wasn't penetration power that made bows obsolete. It was ease of use. An arrow with the right tip could pierce through full plate armor with ease. Plus, I'm not convinced that pre-modern firearms have such significantly more penetration power than a high fantasy hero wielding a bow to warrant changing a fundamental aspect of the game. A longbow wielded by Legolas is as effective as any elephant gun.

Using advanced firearms with my houserules might accomplish what you're looking for.

[Koujow]

Cyrad wrote:

4) More historically accurate because it wasn't penetration power that made bows obsolete. It was ease of use. An arrow with the right tip could pierce through full plate armor with ease. Plus, I'm not convinced that pre-modern firearms have such significantly more penetration power than a high fantasy hero wielding a bow to warrant changing a fundamental aspect of the game. A longbow wielded by Legolas is as effective as any elephant gun.

Damn, those are actually pretty good.

My research suggests that guns became the default weapon of choice not because it made the Bow or Armor obsolete, but because it was cheaper to field a large number of rifleman than it was to field Bowman (who required a great deal of training) or heavily armored troops (who also required a lot of training and had the additional cost of armor, which was way more expensive than a gun). While eventually, firearm would become a superior weapon, it wasn't instantly, like Pathfinder suggests.

I still might keep a portion of the armor penetration rules, but apply it to a type of ammo. Something like "Ignores X armor, but reduces the damage die to a lower die" or something similar for the purpose of balance. We will see.

Thank you for the suggestion. This does indeed help.