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Guns are handled incorrectly in all games, usually by the addition of new or separate rules, classes, and other complexities. This is bad, and in 3ed/PF, it is particularly needless. The below demonstrates that the Core Rules are already sufficient to handle any and all ranged weapons, from bows to GAUs, smoothly, with no additional steps, and in most cases no additional rules or feats. Look for the numbered bullets for the Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). Note that this is not an attempt to make guns "balanced with" medieval-style and melee weapons. Guns are generally superior battlefield weapons to their medieval melee and ranged counterparts and have appropriately supplanted the same in warfare and personal defense. However, the superiority of the gun stems not from anything so simple as "superior damage," but from other factors. Read on.
1) Guns are very simple. A gun is simply a ranged weapon which brings its own strength score. You should make a ranged attack (see below), but for your damage you use the gun's strength score.
For instance, a pistol might be a +2 STR pistol with a 1d6 damage die. The damage roll is 1d6+2 (+ other mods). This is the same as using composite bows, except your ability to apply the weapon's strength score is not dependent upon your own strength.
Firearm damage dice and strength scores need not be extravagant. The strong majority of people struck by pistol rounds survive with medical attention. A strong majority of battlefield casualties survive with proper Tactical Combat Casualty Care (or, in our case, good Heal checks and magic). (See Pre-Hospital Trauma Life Support)
In the real world, most people are level 1 through 5. Most NPCs are level 1. Above level five, you're getting into heroic characters, based more on characters in epic poems than on realism. Some basic statistics: A modern pistol single hit should be fatal* to level-1 NPCS about 20-30% of the time, depending on cartridge used. A center-fire rifle single hit should be fatal* to level-1 NPCS about 70-90% of the time, depending on cartridge used. In reality this is very comparable to melee weapons. A pistol wound and a wound from a fighting knife have different physical profiles but very similar lethality.
(* "Fatal" meaning it should take said level-1 character from full health to -1 or lower HP, giving him the Dying condition, representing a wound which is generally incapacitating and will generally be fatal without medical intervention.)
Firearm range increments need not be extravagant either. A DM could keep it as simple as this: Pistol, 30 feet. Carbine, 100 feet. Precision rifle, 300 feet. One range increment is the distant to which a proficient user can get combat-effective hits without having to take special care. A more firearm-savvy DM running a game for gun-nerds could modify these based on the gun's configuration and optics and the character's feats, and could apply a maximum effective range based on caliber, but these simple numbers would serve perfectly well.
2) Gun and bow attack rolls should use DEX or STR (whichever is higher) out to one range increment.
Action shooting (quickly acquiring a target and addressing with volume of fire with a carbine, pistol, or bow at relatively close range) is very much an applied gross motor skill action, and that is really what 3rd Edition/Pathfinder means by STR. A stronger character is a better swordsman as a rule. He is also a better carbine shooter, better able to drive his rifle. This comports with reality. It takes a feat (Weapon Finesse) to replace STR with DEX in these scenarios.
What 3rd Edition means by DEX is applied fine motor skill action, specifically very sensitive actions such as picking locks. This applies to long range or extreme precision shooting, such as shooting a squirrel through the eye with a rimfire rifle, or having a perfect trigger press on a thousand yard shot.
To reiterate, this absolutely should apply to bows as well. A character should be able to use STR or DEX (at his option) out to one range increment for bow attack rolls.
3) Semi-automatic fire is already handled by the rules. Full Auto is the only thing that needs special treatment.
Semi-Auto fire is fully handled by iterative attacks and rapid-attack feats currently extant (Rapid Shot). Iterative attacks represent in abstraction the statistical likelihood of applying more effective damage to a target, moreso than they represent actual swings of a sword or arrows from a bow, one-for-one. Additional hits scored during a Full Attack Action represent the ability of a trained combatant to control recoil and achieve effective volume of fire from any given repeating firearm, be it semi-auto, lever-driven, pump-driven, etc. In any world where guns exist, any character with a proficiency and a base attack bonus will be training these fundamentals, just as all fantasy characters train the fundamentals of swords and learn to make combination attacks if they are proficient with swords.
Full Auto is another story. It should be treated as a full round action always. It should generate an Area effect, similar to a Hail of Arrows trap, making a single attack roll against the ACs of all exposed targets within the area. Most fully automatic fire is suppressive. It is not expected to generate nor often generates numerous hits on any one target.
You might make an exception for highly trained personnel who can direct fully-automatic fire with enough control to generate more hits on target than they would achieve firing semi-auto. This could work similarly to Two-Weapon Fighting. For instance, a select-fire M4 in burst or auto mode would allow a user to make a bonus attack roll at his highest bonus on a Standard Attack (e.g., after taking a Move action), and two bonus attack rolls at his highest attack bonus in a Full Attack action (before continuing with iterative, haste, flurry, and other attacks). However, the first bonus attack would always be at -6 (in a standard or full attack) and the second at -10. You could then offer a combat feat ("Mag Dump") which reduces these penalties so that the bonus attacks from automatic fire are both made at a mere -2 off of full attack bonus. This is a feat your tier 1 and 2 warfighters take (Tier 1 SOF, Marine RECON, EOD, etc.) by specifically being trained on and practicing magazine dumps on the range and controlled fully automatic fire in the shoot-house.
Some systems introduce a special rule for "suppressive fire," codifying that targets make a Will Save against being "suppressed" (i.e., not moving or returning fire for the duration of suppressive fire). This is not necessary. In a world of firearms, all characters are seeking cover whenever opportunity and doctrine permits (i.e., not to include late 1800s musket formations marching into the barrage, or WWI troops charging hopelessly across no-man's land). A DM should be able properly to represent a character either seeking cover and ceasing effective return fire, or risking getting ****ing shot. This is a matter of realistically representing the psychology of NPCs based on their stats.
If you want a special rule for suppression, simply apply the shooter's suppressive attack roll to each target on the target's turn. A target is any character in the affected area who exposes himself by his actions to less than full cover or, if exposed, does not move immediately to full cover as his first action on his turn. Such a rule would also be sufficient to cover suppressive fire from other types of firearms.
4) Guns make sneak-attacks more effective, but not so much moreso as you might think. The only change needed is to the range at which Sneak Attacks, Coup de Grace actions, and Assassinations (such as the Assassin's Death Attack) may be executed.
The common complaint about guns is that the rules don't allow for a sniper to make an instantly fatal head shot on a leveled character. This is true. The rules also do not allow for a knife to make an instantly fatal neck or heart shot on a leveled character. This is not a failure of the rules so much as a failure to understand the basic presumption of the rules: that the target is tactically alert and participant in his own defense.
In 3ed/PF, as in life, it takes one lethal hit to kill a character of any level. A foreign body to the heart is always fatal. A high level character is not more capable of enduring a heart shot or massive extremity hemorrhage. Rather, he has several layers of defense which prevent a blow from striking to his vital organs: His armor and dexterity to avoid all injury, and his HP which represents his ability to be active, instinctive, and strong, even when surprised, to twist away, flinch, or flex at the last moment to prevent the blade from reaching his heart, lungs, major arteries, etc. All characters not Helpless are presumed to have and to be using these various layers of defense to stave off death to the best of their ability. In readiness terms, goblins on patrol are at least at "Condition Yellow." They are at least making Perception checks for threats, and though they may be caught unawares, actually catching one so by surprise as to make him helpless even to flinch is so difficult as to be generally impossible. Where even the most instinctive defenses, the HP bar, are not available, a character has the Helpless condition, and is thus subject by the rules to Coup de Grace.
The failing of players and DMs is to realize that there are circumstances under which a character may be Helpless while conscious and mobile. Under what circumstances are a knife-assassination feasible in reality and fiction? The basic precondition is that the target be in "Condition White," completely unaware not only of the threat but that a threat may exist. An untrained, noncombatant character in a non-threatening setting--or even a trained character in a completely comfortable setting--where he may be approached with absolute stealth or with no absolutely recognition of threat could be subjected to a knife or even a sword/axe CdG depending on circumstances. We might call this the Altair CdG (think "Assassin's Creed"). A guard character who has no expectation of a threat (such as a perfunctory guard on a non-vital base deep within his own nation) may be subject to CdG by a rogue or Assassin who can execute a perfectly stealthy approach. We might call this the Sam Fisher CdG.
With firearms, what changes is only the precision with which the ranged attack can be applied. Whereas a bow can only be used to apply a CdG from within 10 feet, proficient characters could apply a CdG with a firearm out to a full single range increment. In combat, those characters with Sneak Attack or Assassination abilities would be able to apply such abilities out to a full single range increment as well. To incorporate snipers, one could allow a character with the appropriate feats to attempt a coup de grace at arbitrary range. This might take a bit of extra adjudication, but some simple guidance might be this: With Far Shot and Precise Shot as prereqs, a sniper could take a Sniper feat which allows him to make a ranged attack roll against a situational DC (determined by the DM based on the target's size, activity, cover, concealment, etc.) to score a CdG on a distant Helpless target.
Note that the "target" in this situation would be not a character, but a specific body part or object. One can generate some simple math for this: Base DC 10, minus 5 if stationary, plus 2 for the chest or 4 for the head, 8 for eye, ear, armor gap, etc. (from AC size bonus rules), plus cover (percentage of target covered, not percentage of victim covered), plus circumstance penalties by rule of 2s, such as shooting through glass, shooting without a rest, etc. Shooter is subject to normal range penalties, and to Combat While Mounted penalties if shooting from a moving platform. I'm not making these numbers up.
I'm just applying the combat rules which are already there in Core PF. But they generate nice totals. Taking an 800 yard lethal chest shot on a diplomat as he walks from his car to his front door (a standard sniper-assassin shot): DC 10+2, shooter at -7 for range (with Far Shot). That's an effective DC of 19. If that seems low to you, remember your probabilities. A modern scout sniper can hit that target on the first try perhaps 75% of the time, meaning he's rolling in the neighborhood of +14 on his attack. That's a level 7 fighter properly kitted and feated. That's about right for a highly trained, top notch scout sniper. A sniper-assassin, a Carlos Hathcock, must hit that shot every time, barring bad luck. He's rolling +20 on his attack, as befits a level 10-11 infamous sniper. It's actually quite fair, especially given the three feats the character has spent to access this capability. And it allows legendary (i.e., fictional) characters of the third quadrant, and demigod characters of the fourth quadrant (rolling +30 and above) to attempt "impossible" shots with reasonable confidence. (I.e., the "Wanted" shot.)
Summary: The ranged weapon rules--specifically, the composite bows--already provide a perfect template for workable firearms. Firearms simply supply their own strength score for purposes of damage rolls. The mechanics and feats are already there, for the most part. An archer or shooter should be allowed to make attack rolls with his Strength score out to one range increment. Even sniping/assassination and suppressive fire are already handled by the Core rules, if the rules are well understood and well applied. The only additional feats you might need for the vast majority of gunslinger gameplay are a Sniper feat to allow CdGs beyond one range increment and a Mag Dump feat to allow characters to benefit from select-fire capability in a targeted engagement.
Are these above the be-all, end-all of bows and guns? No. They're a demonstration that the Core Rules contains sufficient framework to play with these toys efficiently and without the inclusion of new material. There is plenty of room to tweak and add details to satisfy your level of gun nerdery, to the extent you can without bogging down your game. Examples follow:
You could change the number of bonus attacks allowed by Mag Dump or the number of suppressive attacks per target in suppressive fire based on the rate of fire of the weapons. A modern Gatling gun might roll three attacks per target in suppressive fire. Suppressive fire with a lever gun might only roll attacks against fifty percent of targets in the area of affect.
You could allow players to add upgraded optics, bed actions, and tune triggers, to improve their range increment. You could say that a high power scope costs a character one iterative attack per round, representing reduced rate of fire due to reduced rate of target acquisition. You could allow a player to stat out his carbine with a six-power scope on top and a 45-degree offset red-dot for close-quarters work.
Note, adjusting range increment is a finer way to tune a ranged weapon's attack roll than applying full +x/-x to attacks. In a game where weapons aren't magical, adding accessories and upgrades could grant +1 to +5 and other effects, working in place of magical enhancement boni and special magical qualities. However, in the real world a scope is not so much a +x to the likelihood that a weapon will strike and do damage as it is a change in the distance at which making a hit is feasible in a given scenario. If your guns can also be magic weapons, then mundane accessories should not add enhancement boni. They should modify range increment and other fine characteristics. Spending skill points to hand-load cartridges could also slightly improve range increment, or...
...using specific bullets (Speer Gold Dot for pistols, or Nosler Accubond in a high power rifle) might at +1 to the STR of the weapon, though possibly in exchange for less ability to penetrate hardened barriers.
Hardened penetrator bullets would grant a simple +1 or +2 to attack roll, as armor penetration is abstracted in the attack roll mathematics.
Adding a laser to a pistol does not affect its attack bonus, but might allow the character to make attack rolls from non-standard shooting positions, such as from the hip, without penalty. Adding a laser (e.g., a PEQ) would also allow a character to make attack rolls without penalty while using Night Vision devices.
A recoil compensator or muzzle brake might add +1 to attacks after the first in a full attack action.
Suppressors, contrary to most game rules, have almost no down-side. A suppressor reduces the sound signature of the muzzle blast significantly, generally eliminates muzzle flash, reduces recoil (marginally for rifles, dramatically for pistols), and increases range increment by about 10% (increases effective range while having no negative effect on accuracy). With a pistol or carbine, a suppressor is so effective at mitigating recoil that, like a recoil compensator, it might add a +1 to attacks after the first in a full attack action. With a precision rifle, a precision suppressor's +10% range increment becomes significant for sniping. At night, weapons without flash-hiders or suppressors might impose a penalty on shots after the first in an engagement, as the shooter is blinded and deafened. Suppressors would eliminate that.
Really, there's no downside to suppressors except cost and size/weight. So many games try to "balance" a silencer's stealth bonus with a penalty to range or damage, but this is inaccurate. In short, if you can afford a suppressor, and afford to carry it, you should. If your carbine is not suppressed, you're wrong.
Regarding stealth, suppressors significantly reduce the distance at which a gunshot can be detected by sound. As a rule of thumb, unsuppressed pistols can be heard by anyone within a city block, high-powered rifles by anyone within a mile or two (terrain dependent). With suppressors, pistols can be heard by people in adjoining rooms of a building or on the same property out of doors. Suppressed rifles and carbines can be heard by people within the same building indoors or on neighboring properties out of doors. Loading subsonic rounds might reduce a rifle's strength to that of a high-powered pistol (think 300 BLK subsonic loads), but will also reduce its suppressed sound signature to that of a suppressed pistol, while only marginally reducing its range increment.
The other aspect of silencers which a DM must consider is whether or not characters who can hear the report will recognize it as a gunshot. As much as they reduce the sound of a gunshot, suppressors also change its character, into a more pneumatic snap or hiss. Think of an 18-wheeler's pneumatic brake pistons venting. An enemy downrange of a supersonic suppressed weapon, such as a high power rifle or a high-velocity 9mm pistol, might still recognize the crack of the bullet's "sonic boom" shockwave as the bullet goes by, but may not be able to detect or identify the report of the weapon which issued it. An enemy hearing a suppressed carbine firing subsonic rounds in the next room may not even recognize it as an attack. It would sound like a gentle clattering, noticeable only to the attentive listener.
Drawing a pistol from holster or engaging with a rifle from sling arms is as drawing a weapon in the extant rules: a move action which may be concurrent with a movement, reduced to a swift action if you have the Quickdraw feat. This means that Quickdraw allows you to draw from holster or raise a rifle from sling arms and perform a full attack, and execute a five foot step (off the X, as they say).
Single-handed shooting of pistols and carbines carries a -4 penalty. Heavy rifles and shotguns, -8. Carbines and rifles also get heavy after one round, so for them the one-handed penalty increases by an additional -4 each round.
Magazine changes (speed reloads) on most modern personal weapons are a move action which can be executed concurrent with a movement, similarly to drawing a weapon from sheath/holster.
Magazine size and ammunition expenditure can be handled roll by roll for most single and full attack actions, but becomes more abstract for suppressive and full-auto fire. One full round of combat is six seconds (10 combat rounds per minute). One could assume that in suppressive fire, a trained combatant will be firing controlled bursts totaling one to two seconds of the six-second round. You can then calculate total ammunition expenditure from the weapon's rate of fire. A 600 round-per-minute weapon would expend 10 rounds per second. An M4 carbine would expend about 12 rounds per second, and an M240 would be similar. A GAU-21 or M2 (modern) would be 15 to 17 rounds per second. These high ROF machineguns might also earn two attacks per target in suppressive fire. A modern Gatling gun (GAU 17, 19, 8) may fire 30 to 60 rounds per second. These might be treated more like true area effects, such that they make a simple damage roll (on the order of, say, 5 or 10 bullets of the appropriate caliber), and exposed targets make a Reflex Save for half damage.
By the way, the discussion of heavy weapons inevitably leads to a discussion of vehicles. Remember, a vehicle is just a Huge or larger monster. You can stat it out like a monster. Armor class and HP need not be extravagant. Your average car can be taken out of commission with just a few pistol rounds or a couple of rifle rounds. One again, remember that it only takes one hit to kill any monster. The HP just represents that monster's size, and the relative improbability of your bullet or blade reaching one of its vital organs. In a monster, decreasing HP represents the creature's stamina declining, its reactions slowing, steadily increasing the likelihood that your next attack will slip through to heart, lung, or major artery. In a vehicle, it represents the deflective integrity of its overall structure. As the vehicle continues to take rounds that penetrate its armor, and becomes more riddled with holes, "sooner or later" one of those bullets will get into something mechanically vital. There's no need to write excessive new rules for vehicles. Just treat them as monsters with pilots and barding and move on.
Make your life easier, rather than harder. Use already extant Core Rules whenever you can.
Malfunctions should probably only occur on an attack roll of natural 1 except with a specifically low-reliability weapon (such as a crappy pistol scrounged in the field). Any proficient character is going know malfunction drills for his weapon as part of his proficiency, so it is not necessary to make him roll to clear his weapon. A better model would be for the DM to roll on a simple table of possible malfunctions to determine the cost of the malfunction in time and resources. For semi-automatic weapons, there are four basic malfunctions. Failure-to-fire, stove-pipe, and failure-to-go-to-battery each cost a move action to remedy. Failure-to-fire also costs the one wasted round as the shooter executes a "tap, rack, shoot". Double-feed requires a full round action to remedy and requires the shooter to strip and drop the current magazine and chambered round, so it costs all the rounds remaining in the gun at the time of malfunction. (In theory, he could recover the magazine, but it is likely that the magazine caused the problem, so he would not wisely reuse it unless he was otherwise out of ammo.)
Tactical reloads are a standard action.
Transition to a secondary (i.e., from carbine to pistol if the carbine goes down) is handled as a normal draw of pistol from holster, a move action which may be performed while making movement. (The primary weapon is simultaneously lowered to sling arms if it has a sling, or otherwise dropped or held in the weak hand. The latter means the pistol will be shot single-handed, with appropriate penalty.) With Quickdraw, as above, the draw becomes a swift action, allowing the shooter to transition to his pistol and finish a full attack action he began with his carbine.
These are all I can think of for now.
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Looks like new rules to me...?
if this thread is about PF2 playtest ignore this post
STR to hit with guns makes no sense, STR is physical strength, ability to aim is DEX. Stronger character is better swordsman is because they can hack at enemy armor harder, the fencing technique is Weapon Finesse DEX type fighters. The only justification i can think of for STR is to counteract recoil of a firearm.
"Own STR" makes sense, but you might just say its damage dice is 1d6+3 instead of 1d6 to have the same effect.
Addendum:
One hit from a shotgun (12 ga) should be lethal 60-70% of the time. The dispersion of a shotgun is not so great that it needs to be treated as an Area Effect. You can abstract the fact that it is slightly easier to hit a vital area with a shotgun as a part of its strength score. You could also incorporate it as a +1 to hit, but you might as well also add -1 to hit for its reduced penetration, so it comes out a wash. The statistics speak for themselves, in that shotguns are slightly more lethal than pistols but slightly less lethal than centerfire rifles.
In reply to DarkPhoenixx: Thank you for your reply. To your point that weapon damage rolls could simply be listed as a dX+Y for brevity, you are absolutely correct. I only wish to give an understanding of the conceptual derivation of stat's structure. In my own homebrew, I add the gun's STR mod to the damage roll as described above, and also to the character's attack roll, above and on top of his str or dex bonus. In this case, the gun's strength score is replacing magical enhancement bonus in the overall game balance, as I prefer to run modern settings without magic items.
Regarding your interpretation of STR and DEX, it is with this that I respectfully disagree.
STR is "applied strength." It is the statistical likelihood that a character will succeed at an applied gross motor action with the intent to apply controlled force. If it represented purely the force available, then we would require DEX or a DEX-based skill in addition every time someone tried to lift a heavy object, because heavy lifts of free weights or arbitrary dead weights (objects in the field, bodies, lifting a cart off of a pinned commoner, etc.) requires strength applied with intense and subtle coordination in order to be performed without injury. Requiring only STR for lifts and contests of strength implies that the learned base skills for applying strength properly, with full recruitment, full efficiency, and without self-injury, is abstracted under the STR stat. Similarly, actions to break objects (such as forcing a door with a swift kick or pry-bar) are also abstracted as simple STR checks, when these too are coordination-intensive.
All of this is as it should be for ease of play. STR is the applied strength that results from muscular power and practiced coordination and athletic skill.
This bears out in shootings sports. A muscularly weak person may make an excellent long-distant rifle shot, or an excellent precision small-bore competitor, as these disciplines are not dynamic and involve removing muscular interference from the shot process, developing a bone-to-bone-to-ground position, and isolating the very finest motor skills and attention to detail. Action shooting sports and combat shooting disciplines, however, require coordinated powerful gross motor movements which overpower the weight of the weapon and direct it with reasonable precision and absolute authority and speed. The shooting of competitors and operators in these arenas benefits tremendously from free-weight lifting routines which develop the type of applied strength described above.
I know that it is a nonconventional interpretation of the rules, since it positions both stats in what would conventionally be considered a "dexterity space." I argue that it is a better interpretation, one which improves players' understanding of their system/character and which is more in keeping with the original design of the 3ed system as a combat simulator first and foremost. I urge everyone to try it (i.e., to consider it as they explain the stats to new players and make judgements on which stats to apply to which checks). I think one will find that allowing strong characters to use their strength for gross motor actions will do much to improve the recruitment of the meat-head characters into a greater portion of the gameplay. No statistical abstraction of something as complex and interrelated as the workings of the human body in combat is going to be perfect. The 3rd Edition model is quite good. I'm saying it's slightly better if read slightly differently from convention, and more in keeping with the original text as a whole.
It is important to remember that ultimately, any stat is nothing more than a statement of statistical likelihood that a character will succeed against a certain class of problems. Why, flavor-wise, that character is good at that particular problem-set is up to the player and DM to narrate. Thus, high charisma may imply good looks, or it may imply excellent people skills, or maybe it's just dumb Horatio Hornblower luck in leadership. High STR may represent big muscles, or one of those annoying people who aren't big and never have to train but are just incredibly strong, or may represent the supernatural power of a vampire or super. Or it may, in a more outlandish interpretation, be interpreted as a weak person who thinks he's strong because he happens to be blessed by fortune every time he tries a test of strength. Every time he forces a door, someone happens to open it from the other side at that exact moment, and every time he tries to lift a heavy rock, an earth elemental just happens to be popping up under it at that exact moment for a look around. Obviously this last interpretation might be prohibitively taxing on the imaginations of the player and DM, but the example serves. The statistic is merely the statistic.
As such, the statistic is best defined holistically, by looking at the class of problems the designers direct it to solve. My basic argument is that the overall class of tactical problems against which STR is directed without the need to roll supplemental DEX implies that STR incorporates the coordination/control/recruitment aspect of applied strength. From this, I conclude that the only reason the designers did not include close-range ranged attacks in this set is because they were not sufficiently educated or experienced in these disciplines to know that close-range shooting and archery are more akin to lifting weights and kicking doors than to lock-picking and long-range shooting.
This particular tweak has had the effect of making strong characters not feel completely helpless in a ranged engagement, while still preserving sniping to the dex-focused specialists. As a compromise to dexterity-based character archetypes, I concede that a character could be allowed to use DEX for close-range shooting or archery on the premise that he could find a way to maneuver dexterously to achieve the same effect, so as not to hamstring dex-focused archers and gunslingers by forcing excessive multi-spec'ing of stats.
Moriakul wrote: One hit from a shotgun (12 ga) should be lethal 60-70% of the time. GM: Okay, last session we spent two hours rolling up our characters. This session is your first encounter. The town of Uselessville hired you to clear out a pair of highwaymen. You are approaching their last known location on the road. Roll Perception.
PLAYERS: 2 ... 14 ... 9 ... 12.
GM: None of you spot the highwayman before he stands up from the brush. He shoots at Sir Guy. Does a 16 hit?
AMY: Yes.
GM: He rolls 14 damage.
AMY: Sir Guy is down.
OTHER PLAYERS: We charge the highwayman.
...
GM: Okay, both highwaymen are dead. Amy and Gary, you need to make a new characters to replace Sir Guy and Bruno the Brute, since they died.
AMY: I'm out. Two hours making Sir Guy and his backstory, and he died before his first action.
We don't want a lethal hit 60% to 70% of the time. That is no fun. We want a solid chance of survival for our characters.
Black powder firearms have good damage and a terrible reload time. Neither are suited for Pathfinder adventures, where we want our characters to have a better than 95% chance of surviving an average challenge and to not have to spend most of combat reloading for a second shot.
In addition, some game settings are no place for firearms, but players have an implicit assumption that everything is Ultimate Equipment is available everywhere. And a GM won't necessarily mind one exotic gunslinger from the Mana Wastes joining the party, but he does not want firearms to replace all the bows and arrows of his Sherwood Forest setting.
Therefore, Paizo deliberately designed firerarms different from their real-world counterparts. Guns and gunpowder are rare. They do less damage than real firearms. They can be reloaded in a single round. They misfire and jam 5% of the time and without gunslinger abilities they have to be rebuilt to unjam.
Moriakul wrote: Malfunctions should probably only occur on an attack roll of natural 1 except with a specifically low-reliability weapon (such as a crappy pistol scrounged in the field). We are talking matchlock and wheellock firearms here, not modern ones. Also, no rifling in the barrel for extra range and accuracy.
1) The shotgun being "lethal" 60-70% of the time doesn't mean your character dies--you forget there is healing magic in the game. So long as it doesn't take you down below the actual death point you should be ok.
2) Suppressors will be an accuracy issue with pistols. The problem is the diameter of the suppressor interferes with the small sights on a handgun.
3) This model completely fails to account for burst fire. I think this could be modeled by a burst fire weapon getting three shots for every attack, I would say with a cumulative -1 per extra shot (applies to subsequent attack rolls also.)
I thank you both for your considered replies. I will attempt to answer you both to your satisfaction.
Speaking to Mathmuse, your reply gets to the heart of the purpose behind my post, which is to demonstrate that firearms can be incorporated by recognizing that they are fundamentally not different from composite bows. Given this, a DM can incorporate firearms of any era, from primitive to hypermodern, thereby using the 3ed/PF system to run campaigns in a variety of settings from traditional medieval fantasy to Shadowrun-style near-future+magic or even realistic modern and futuristic. Recognizing that a basic template for guns is already present and well-balanced, a DM can simply make a decision about the aesthetics, function, and prevalence of guns in his game world and go from there.
They are "well balanced" in that even modern guns are only slightly more powerful than composite bows. They offer marginally superior precision (the ability to perform sneak attacks at beyond 10'), and they are not as dependent on user strength. Damage-wise, they are on par with composite bows. In the standard Pathfinder setting, simply making them realistically primitive would make them weaker than most medieval weapons. A musket in the hands of a commoner would have the damage potential of a sword in the hands of a warrior, but it would take a standard action to fire and a full-round action to reload. Eminently inferior to what the PCs are wielding. And this is realistic enough. The real warfighting power of muskets was their smoke and thunder, not any tremendous lethality.
All of this means that no Gunslinger module is required. Guns really aren't that special. A gunslinger is just a character with ranged attack combat feats in a world where guns exist. The only new Feat I've proposed for guns in the Pathfinder world would be the Sniper feat, which allows a sniper to score precision damage at farther than one range increment. One could just as easily do without, saying firearms in one's setting are not significantly more accurate than bows at distance.
If a DM wants to run his game in a setting where firearms are the dominant weapon, again, no real changes are necessary. The DM simply has to use the proper strength scores and rates of fire, and guns will dominate medieval weapons naturally. He will have to account for fully automatic weapons if they exist, but again, he might need only one new feat to allow accurate automatic fire, and he could just as easily do without, saying automatic weapons are not accurate and automatic fire produces only an area of effect as described in the original post.
A shotgun being one-hit-lethal to 60-70% of level-1 NPCs is very comparable to a sword. (Again, lethal in our context means "reduced target to sub-zero HP, rendering the Dying condition.) A first level commoner averages about 5 HP. (He does not have an automatic max-roll on his first damage die.) A sword swung by a strong character (1d8+2) delivers a fatal wound 75% of the time. And this stands to reason. A full-strength sword cut, delivered against a body with deadly intent by a trained user, is a horrifically injurious event that will usually result in disemboweling or arterial bleeds requiring life-saving treatment. This would be the same damage roll you'd give to a musket. A shotgun might be 1d6+2, giving you at least 5 damage 66% of the time. Under the percentages given in my original post, a pistol would be a 1d6+0. A small-caliber pistol might even be a 1d4+1.
The primary complaint against my approach to firearms would be that they are too weak, and too uninteresting, to make worthwhile. However, the one-hit lethal wound percentages given above are realistic. Their parity with melee weapons and composite bows is also realistic. Essentially, recognizing that firearms--especially personal weapons--are not all that grand compared to traditional medieval weaponry allows us to incorporate them under the existing rules, without having to introduce a new class and a new weapon structure.
["But with these damage rolls, guns are super weak! It becomes impossible for a pistol to kill even a level-1 PC in one shot. That makes no sense. What if he got shot in the head?" Just as it makes no sense that a level-1 PC cannot receive a lethal blow from a knife. A knife to the heart, the carotid arteries, or driven into the base of the brain is every bit as lethal as a 9mm round to the face, yet a 1d4+2 knife cannot kill a first level fighter or barbarian.
Except that's not exactly true. Refer to the original post and its discussion of HP. The rules presume a non-helpless target, and account for Helpless targets under Coup de Grace rules. Player Characters in a d20 system are modeling the heroic archetypes of heroic literature (from Cu-Chulainn and Odysseus to John "Yippie Kai Yay" McClane), and the heroic story style, rather than stories of a more realistic or nihilistic vein. HP protects them from death by dumb misfortune such as claims the lives of real soldiers and police officers, so that the story may go on. Coup de Grace accounts for those situations where a completely unaware hero may still be assassinated.
This becomes more of a literary discussion than a crunch discussion, but suffice to say that you can have that kind of realism, but you can't also have persistent PCs repeatedly exposed to life-threatening situations. Even our saltiest warfighters only endure a few seriously life-threatening situations, situations where a roll of the dice made the difference, before they rotate home or get shipped home under a flag. Experienced warfighters survive by managing risk to minimize their exposure to "heroic" scenarios. A game in which all PCs remained realistically one-hit-killable would be a game in which PC turnover was high, and players spent their time carefully avoiding dramatic situations. As Mathmuse would say, a realistic game, but not a terribly fun one.]
Given the above, the question now is, "Are guns still any fun if they're no better than other weapons?" This, again, comes back to how they are handled by the DM. You could run a PF game with a Gunslinger class if you wanted to, or you could just as easily run a game in the musket era or the modern era, with or without magic, without the addition of misfire rules, a new class, or any other increase in complexity. Modeling guns by strength score and treating rate of fire intuitively (a full round action to reload a musket, for instance), a DM could easily create a campaign in any era of firearm technology without having to read a new book. What need have we for special malfunction rules if guns are no more powerful than bows? What need have we for a d20 Modern rulebook if an AR-15 is just another ranged weapon?
And that's really my point: to dispel the widespread assumption that guns are powerful or, in game terms, complex to balance, by showing how d20 core rules and the principles thereof already account for them. No need to worry about countless +1s and -1s from various accessories, or coming up with separate ballistic and impact armors, or an AP rating for a weapon. It's all already well abstracted, and the game would play perfectly smoothly using guns with strength scores and the traditional AC system. Which brings me to Loren's points.
Speaking to Loren: I have found there to be little practical difference between burst fire and unlimited automatic fire. The effect of a burst mode is to prevent the user from firing more than a "burst" of automatic fire--i.e., to prevent the unskilled user from executing a full magazine dump when firing in automatic mode. Now, how does the skilled user, using a fully automatic (non-burst) weapon, achieve controllable automatic fire? He fires in bursts. So, you have a burst-fire weapon which fires three to five rounds. You have a trained shooter with a full-auto weapon, firing bursts of three to five rounds. Give the trained user the burst gun, and he's going to fire... three to five round bursts. The untrained user, with either gun, is not going to hit his target more than once per automatic burst at most ranges, regardless of how many rounds a burst contains, because the burst gun is no more controllable than the full auto gun for the duration of the burst, and all of them are hard to control.
(Videogames, I should note, do a very good job of simulating the effect of full auto muzzle drift... for an extremely skilled and experienced operator. The average soldier is going to have feet between individual bullet impacts even at seemingly reasonable distances, in either mode. I've watched it. I've done it! I myself still have to concentrate on the fundamentals to keep a burst on target beyond three to five yards, as I don't get the chance to practice but once every year or more.)
The real effect of the burst-fire limitation is that the conscript only wastes two to four rounds per trigger pull, rather than eight or ten. Put another way, the burst mode does not make the conscript soldier better able to take advantage of the benefits of automatic fire. Rather, it serves to reduce his overall ammo expenditure during suppressive fire evolutions, to make it on par with that of better-trained users. It's a limit to make Private Schmukatelli's magazine last longer, and a control against the temptation to spray rounds with wild abandon. In no way does it make him more accurate even with the the one or two rounds after the first in a burst.
As such, burst and full auto need not be treated differently for purposes of our game, where we want abstraction and smooth play. Most users will only be able to use automatic fire for suppressive effect, creating an AoE wherein the attack roll is applied once to each exposed target. If you want to account for the difference between burst fire and full auto, it would look like this: In suppressive fire, a conscript with a burst weapon would expend about 15 rounds of ammo per round of suppressive fire, whereas with a fully automatic weapon, he would expend about 30 rounds of ammo per round of suppressive fire. Which is the difference between one and two rounds of continuous suppression before he has to break for a mag change.
A trained operator will fire a fully automatic weapon the same way he would fire a burst weapon, whether firing destructively or suppressively, and so will have the same ammo expenditure with either weapon.
And of course, as given previously, the trained operator (with the right feat) will also gain benefits from automatic fire in the form of added attack rolls if firing destructively (i.e., at a specific target, rather than at an area for suppressive effect). There's no need to distinguish between burst and full auto in this case, either, because the trained operator will use the fully automatic weapon in bursts to achieve his result. Meanwhile, the untrained user, firing burst or full auto for destructive effect (i.e., at a specific target), will expend either three to five rounds per trigger press or more, depending on mode, but will achieve no more hits than he would have in semi-auto mode. That is, he'll expend more ammo, but still only get his normal number of attacks.
All of which is to say we can safely ignore the difference between burst and full auto, or, if we want to incorporate it, then simply charge the untrained user a lot of wasted ammo if he tries to use any automatic fire on a person, or fully automatic fire on an area, in either case for absolutely no benefit.
Regarding the accuracy of suppressed pistols, there is something to this, at long ranges. I said in the original post that one range increment for a typical modern pistol could be established as 30 feet. That's ten yards, and is the outside window of you typical engagement range for a pistol, especially with volume of fire. That's also the range beyond which sights begin to be necessary even for the trained operator. At seven yards, with practice, kinesthetic alignment will get you decent hits on center mass. At ten yards, you'll find yourself starting to look for that front sight at least.
That said, take my USP CT as an example. It is equipped with normal-profile Trijicon dot sights. The height of the sights is subtended by the suppressor (in this case an AAC Evo 45), the radius of which makes its dorsal peak just a hair taller than the front sight. However, they are still very useful for precise aiming. You still have all three dots in view, so you can still create sight alignment. And the gun with suppressor, overall, occludes very little more of the downrange picture than it did without the suppressor. I can't see what's immediately to the left and right of the front sight dot, between it and the rear sight dots, but I absolutely can create perfect sight alignment and then place the center dot just below the center of your forehead. Out to ten yards, the suppressor occludes nothing that I need in order to make shots as precise as the pistol will allow. I've had more than one new shooter try it out (I try always to bring a fun toy for a new shooter), and express surprise at the discover that the suppressor has no impact on his or her ability to aim with sights at nominal distances, despite the fact that sights themselves are subtended and backdropped by the body of the suppressor.
If I were to address this in game terms, I would describe it as a doubling of range penalties beyond the first range increment, or a halving of the range increment, and nothing more. That's a pretty nitty-gritty rule, but if you're running a game for gun nerds, there you go. Still, it demonstrates that most gun tweaks can be handled with range increment adjustments, rather than bogging oneself down in floating mods to attack and damage rolls.
Thank you again for your replies and comments.
Moriakul wrote: Guns are handled incorrectly in all games... I am interested in what you are saying, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Seriously, do you have any other "hacks" for the game? What other house rules do you use? I am planning on running an introductory adventure for a group of new players, and have been debating what game system to use.
I would like to use Pathfinder, but I tend to let the rules get in the way, and some common sense house rules and/or a new way of looking at the existing rules might help me.
Anyway, really awesome post, and thanks for the ideas!
I wonder if semi-automatic shouldn't have the ability to fire more in a full round action, but at a significant penalty to non-trained (ie: no feat), like -5,-10,-15, etc.. The ability is there to fire in rapid succession, but your shot is likely to go all over the place following the initial.
As an aside...not sure why this went to Rules, as opposed to Homebrew, or Advice
Thread should certainly not be in the rules forum.
And it is a bunch of new rules.
I think they wouldn't be horrible rules for a Pathfinder: Modern setting, but they don't seem to really deal well with early firearms and lack anything to make firearms special, which is sort of what you are looking for if you are going to add guns to your fantasy.
Sam Phelan wrote: Moved to Rules What?
...
Why?
Thank you for the correction. Moved to Homebrews.
I think the method of gauging the proper level of a highly trained sniper is really faulty, here. It's also part of the reason why people run into realism issues (particularly with firearms) when we somehow see real world people as 7th level hero class equivalents.
The sniper in your example isn't actually using a weapon modeled as a sniper rifle, but a long ranged firearm being called a sniper rifle. Borrowing any low level sniper rifle from Starfinder, they have a minimum "sniping" range of 2,500 feet, as in no penalty. Where as in your example the sniper is using the something closer to a rifle with only the iron sights, something not designed to be modeled in such a way. Using these new values, a sniper can now hit the target 75% of the time 800 yards away with only a +4 modifier, which is easy even for a 1st level (ignoring the -2 "chest shot," while logical, it isn't supported by the game).
Let's just do the "ammo" thing for shotguns. You get D12 damage for a slug. You get 6d2 for birdshot. Both can kill you just as well, but I know which I'd rather get "winged" by IRL. I'd rather not get "winged by" 6 pellets bouncing around randomly inside me. One clear chunk of flesh gone from a slug. At no point would I want to be shot (chest or head) by either kind of ammo. And maybe I just need to "level up", but D12 seems plenty lethal.
ps. yeh this is all "new rules"
I generally disagree with all of this. The inbuilt strength modifier is a bit hacky but a reasonable attempt at a model, but everything else models guns worse than we have already. One of the bigger problems is the "attacks per round" with the iterative penalty. For melee weapons, a combat round is fine- it's reasonably abstract, and the hit penalty represents how it is harder to land multiple attacks in a short time. Fundamentally a character with 4 attacks with a sword per round isn't doing anything differently than someone with 1 attack with a sword per round if they full attack a target: he merely has a chance to score more telling blows in the brief combat round. All ammunition based weapons suffer, however, as they tie shots to individual actions. A semiautomatic pistol does not take a high level character, or special training, to fire more than once every six seconds. That abstraction is built into the system, but other aspects act to compensate.
I don't think these gun rules are more accurate, or better in really any way at all.
cfalcon wrote: I generally disagree with all of this. The inbuilt strength modifier is a bit hacky but a reasonable attempt at a model, but everything else models guns worse than we have already. One of the bigger problems is the "attacks per round" with the iterative penalty. For melee weapons, a combat round is fine- it's reasonably abstract, and the hit penalty represents how it is harder to land multiple attacks in a short time. Fundamentally a character with 4 attacks with a sword per round isn't doing anything differently than someone with 1 attack with a sword per round if they full attack a target: he merely has a chance to score more telling blows in the brief combat round. All ammunition based weapons suffer, however, as they tie shots to individual actions. A semiautomatic pistol does not take a high level character, or special training, to fire more than once every six seconds. That abstraction is built into the system, but other aspects act to compensate.
I don't think these gun rules are more accurate, or better in really any way at all.
I agree I'm not a massive fan of this system... But I will say one thing. the "Inherent Strength Modifier" thing is something that I think is better for Crossbows than firearms (since a mechanical weapon can be tuned to whatever strength the wielder desires without having aiming issues, though realistically it might make reloads harder
I'm not gonna argue about how setting-inappropriate any firearm that takes less then 3 full rounds to reaload by a expert with lots of training is, but I have one question:
What exactly ist the difference between this "own strength score" and a mere bonus to weapon damage? Why misuse an ability score?
Derklord wrote: I'm not gonna argue about how setting-inappropriate any firearm that takes less then 3 full rounds to reaload by a expert with lots of training is, but I have one question:
What exactly ist the difference between this "own strength score" and a mere bonus to weapon damage? Why misuse an ability score?
I'd assume the strength score thing is because of how Bows handle things. with a Composite Bow you choose a certain strength rating
Strength rating ≠ strength score.
Derklord wrote: Strength rating ≠ strength score. well that's probably what he meant
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