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Given that pathfinder is already using paper cartridges, already has precursors to proper repeating arms in the form of slide guns, and that revolvers were successfully made in the 16th century IRL; would you allow an inventor to create revolver based repeating arms in your game? If so would you allow for revolving rifles or would you limit things to pistols? Would you consider allowing tube-fed lever actions or pump shotguns if you were already allowing revolvers?
If you wouldn't allow an inventor in your game to develop a revolver would it be for strictly balance reasons or do you have some logical reason why the necessary technological groundwork hasn't been laid to allow for a single adventurer to make that breakthrough?
I ask because it feels like Golarion should be very close to things like revolvers and Gatling guns based on what they already have. Not to mention literally having access to gods of the forge and other magical means to gain advanced technological secrets.
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I can see Weapon Breakthroughs being written up that enhance firearms in ways that make them more able to replicate things like Revolvers.
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Being an inventor is a prime opportunity to reflavor your equipment. A couple of weapons that could easily be reflavored to a revolver are slide pistols and air repeaters. As long as you keep the stats of the equipment, go nuts with how it works in game.
Why stop at reflavoring? You can make a literal clockwork automaton but we're supposed to believe that a single-action revolver is beyond an inventor? What about a simple weapon but larger such as a 4-bore rifle or a punt that's attached to a mount's saddle?
Paizo has opened a can of worms with how they chose to give us firearms and their lore justification for why they reload as swiftly as they do. It seems only logical that a highly intelligent inventor could take them to their real-world extremes.
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We have laser pistols and rocket launchers and chainsaws in-setting. Sure you can make a revolver, it just needs to align with the rest of the weapon rules and get GM approval.
What's the point if it doesn't improve on anything? We don't invent things IRL just for the sake of it, so why should a class based upon doing such be limited to only what is 'balanced'?
Did Sam Colt care that his guns were 'overpowered' compared to what was out there?
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Paizo has opened a can of worms with how they chose to give us firearms and their lore justification for why they reload as swiftly as they do. It seems only logical that a highly intelligent inventor could take them to their real-world extremes.
Fun story, I had a player in my RotR game who knew enough about guns to carefully explain to me that his character would make a machine gun. In fairness, he had a very intelligent character with plenty of points in (and I kid you not, he wrote in on his sheet) Craft: Gun.
This isn't an unusual question and it's one that I feel every GM gets at some point in their career: "X items and Y items exist in this universe, so why can't I use them to make Z?" And the answer to that will likely vary from GM to GM. That's why you're not going to get a singular answer to this question. Some GMs might work with their player to homebrew something. Others might call that strict metagaming and tell the player that it's not going to happen. Others will give full creative control over to the player.
Me? I think this question isn't new and that this should really be moved over to homebrew or advice.
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You are improving things with your modifications. Making a whole new base weapon would be a homebrew question. You could probably homebrew a revolver that fits with the repeating weapons but honestly, an air repeater with complex simplicity is already a pretty good literal 6 shooter. Things don't always have to be "better" to be fun or interesting.
So do I need a feat to stick a sponge full of poison over the barrel and load up hollow points to make a poisoned revolver? Or, what if I want to make a scaled-up air repeater, why is that not an option when logically it should be something any gunsmith has tinkered with?
I'm curious as to what the in-universe logic for the lack of development is. Are the people of Golarion just lazy, are they all lackwits, do the gods smite anybody who tries to invent things? Why can't anybody take what exists and extrapolate that into something new and useful as happens daily in real life?
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Making a "scaled up" air repeater definitely is an option. That's what the class does. Everything is scaled up. You decide the flavor. The inventors inherent power is in it's modifications and feats. You're always inventing things. Making wholly new things with new mechanics not described in the text isn't typically what it does. You have to decide that with a GM. You'll have better luck with this thread in the homebrew section.
I don't care about the rules that much, so this isn't homebrew. I'm more interested in what the logic behind disallowing such obvious item A + item B should allow for item C type inventions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTQQfKxkZpk
Is this capped at 1d12 damage?
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"What's the point if it doesn't improve on anything?"
Because this is a cooperative game.
"I ask because I don't respect the need for balance in games and I want to see people show me the logical hoops they need to jump through to justify why everything in PF2 has to stay within a tiny little box."
What hoops? It's a game.
If you don't care for nor respect the rules and balance then this discussion on mechanics (aka rules) is utterly pointless.
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Paizo has opened a can of worms with how they chose to give us firearms and their lore justification for why they reload as swiftly as they do. It seems only logical that a highly intelligent inventor could take them to their real-world extremes.Fun story, I had a player in my RotR game who knew enough about guns to carefully explain to me that his character would make a machine gun. In fairness, he had a very intelligent character with plenty of points in (and I kid you not, he wrote in on his sheet) Craft: Gun.
This isn't an unusual question and it's one that I feel every GM gets at some point in their career: "X items and Y items exist in this universe, so why can't I use them to make Z?" And the answer to that will likely vary from GM to GM. That's why you're not going to get a singular answer to this question. Some GMs might work with their player to homebrew something. Others might call that strict metagaming and tell the player that it's not going to happen. Others will give full creative control over to the player.
Me? I think this question isn't new and that this should really be moved over to homebrew or advice.
Ah, yes. The player using OOC knowledge to get ahead of the setting's state of the art to gain IC benefits.
Squash it like a bug and with extreme prejudice.
I remember some buddies who were studying finance and tried to convince the magical shop's owner to lease them the items rather than sell them. I believe they also proposed to make him a shareholder in their adventuring company so that they would get the items for free.
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Inventor pick Air Repeater as a weapon innovation, calls it revolver prototype.
Choose Complex Simplicity as the first modification, now your air repeater is stronger than normal ones.
Choose Advanced Ragefinder, now it have more range.
In the end get Deadly Strikes, completing the prototype.
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Ah, yes. The player using OOC knowledge to get ahead of the setting's state of the art to gain IC benefits.
Squash it like a bug and with extreme prejudice.
Yep, that about sums it up, and would likely be my reaction as well once player intent was clear.
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There's actually an explanation as to why not in the Guns and Gears book but I'm not going to waste my time because Verdyn is a troll.
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Nah, I wouldn't allow it.
Why? When I allow firearms, it's because Paizo has done a good job of taking a variety of older styles of firearms and fitting them into a fantasy setting. If a player comes along insisting on brushing past all that to play Samuel Colt, then they're probably not a very good fit for the game.
As presented here, it's a very spotlight-hogging request- asking to not just have innovated some improvements (a balanced reskin like weapon innovation on the air repeater), but to have developed a whole new class of weapon better than anything else in the world? It's also not very interesting.
Nah, I wouldn't allow it.
Why? When I allow firearms, it's because Paizo has done a good job of taking a variety of older styles of firearms and fitting them into a fantasy setting. If a player comes along insisting on brushing past all that to play Samuel Colt, then they're probably not a very good fit for the game.
As presented here, it's a very spotlight-hogging request- asking to not just have innovated some improvements (a balanced reskin like weapon innovation on the air repeater), but to have developed a whole new class of weapon better than anything else in the world? It's also not very interesting.
What if the setting was a steampunk setting?
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There's actually an explanation as to why not in the Guns and Gears book but I'm not going to waste my time because Verdyn is a troll.
This so freaking hard.
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The whole point of the weapon inventor is you take something that already exists and you refine it over the course of your character's career. You don't get to make up a new thing. Now if you wanted to be a gun inventor, and did something like the air repeater build that Kyone posted about that's totally fine.
But you can't make up a new weapon and say your inventor has one. That's totally against the premise of the class (you don't start out having invented the revolutionary thing.)
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What if the setting was a steampunk setting?Nah, I wouldn't allow it.
Why? When I allow firearms, it's because Paizo has done a good job of taking a variety of older styles of firearms and fitting them into a fantasy setting. If a player comes along insisting on brushing past all that to play Samuel Colt, then they're probably not a very good fit for the game.
As presented here, it's a very spotlight-hogging request- asking to not just have innovated some improvements (a balanced reskin like weapon innovation on the air repeater), but to have developed a whole new class of weapon better than anything else in the world? It's also not very interesting.
If I made/ran a steampunk setting that had revolvers, then yes. If I made/ran a steampunk setting that did not have widespread guns, then no. But I probably wouldn't make/run a steampunk setting- my custom settings are generally massive setups for a bad joke, and further back on the tech timeline than Paizo writes.
I wouldn't allow them to simply because the rules don't permit it. That is, the rules don't let Inventors create a completely unfounded and unruly weapon from scratch as the OP is asking to do.
The rules are simple for what a Weapon Inventor can do with their weapon inventions. They take an approved weapon from a set list and apply breakthroughs at the appropriate levels to said weapon. That's it. No "completely make a brand new weapon," no "take an old weapon and transform it into something completely different," just "take this and add these at these set levels."
Granted, Inventor as a class (name) doesn't actually invent things. They are still stuck by the same rules and limitations as any other PC. I would have preferred they have been called Tinkerers or Technomancers or something that is literally not false advertising or contradictory to their assumed identity.
Regardless of such opinions, though, the RAW is clear.
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Don't feed the trolls.
I love the idea that trying to do [insert logical thing here] is something a lot of GMs and players here are against just because it pushes against the out-of-the-box balance of a setting. These same GMs will bend over backwards to tell you how to adjust Paizo's own works for use with your group but wouldn't let you craft a pipebomb out of some gunpowder, primer, and a blunderbuss barrel sealed shut at both ends; or if they did it would deal like 1d8 points of damage splash 1 because it can't compete with the Alchemist's bombs. I don't get the style of games they must play.
Of note, a horn of gunpowder, not even a properly made bomb but just loose horn of gunpowder, is specifically stated to do a 5-foot burst of 1d6 damage.
As for an actual crafted bomb... well, I mean, it depends on the size of the pipe, how well it's sealed, the effectiveness of the primer, to a degree even the composition of the powder itself. In short: It would depend on the Crafting check. If it's a poorly made pipe bomb, yeah, it might not do more than 1d8, Splash 1 (notably, still enough to royally ruin the day of, and in some cases even straight up kill, your average Level -1 NPC). Heck, since this is a straight up explosive rather than the napalm-esque Alchemist's Fire that is the most obvious point of comparison, I'd probably bump up the Splash damage to 2 or even 3 rather than the Persistent Fire Damage. A well made one might rival the 3 or even 4d8 of high-level bomb. If it's an exceptionally made bomb, a really high DC but then high-level adventurers can make high DCs, I might even bump the damage higher, something like 6d8, splash something like 12-18 because Percussion Bomb, something roughly equivalent to taking a non-Critically direct hit from a cannon it you're the direct target, easily enough that the splash is going to slaughter most NPCs if they aren't lucky (probably extremely so, it would probably take a nat 20 not to crit fail that save against a high-level PC's DCs.)
In short: there is a level of needing to keep in mind just what the numbers mean in scale (your average bystander is probably a Level -1, threat, with 6-12 HP as far as I can tell, what's just a scratch to a high-level character reduces them to a red smear) but also a factor of things can scale up and sometimes should. But that's what skill checks and things are for. So really... it all does come down to work with your GM. But expecting your weapon to be orders of magnitude better than any other existing weapon "because why not?" is not a great place to start the conversation.
And as for questions about "why has no one in setting thought to combine these two things to make this third thing?", well, I will note that IRL it took a bit less than 500 years from the first firearms to the first revolver, and a typical side-effect of many of the long-lives of certain Ancestries (note that firearms on Golarion are mostly the purview of Dwarves, not the much shorter-lived Humans) is they can sometimes be rather slow to change and innovate. And when they can already reload their firearms in about two seconds, having the gun capable of firing those six times before you need to reload it might not be as big of a concern as our world where flintlocks took a couple minutes to reload.
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I love the idea that trying to do [insert logical thing here] is something a lot of GMs and players here are against just because it pushes against the out-of-the-box balance of a setting. These same GMs will bend over backwards to tell you how to adjust Paizo's own works for use with your group but wouldn't let you craft a pipebomb out of some gunpowder, primer, and a blunderbuss barrel sealed shut at both ends; or if they did it would deal like 1d8 points of damage splash 1 because it can't compete with the Alchemist's bombs. I don't get the style of games they must play.
If you were actually interested in this topic, you'd buy the book and read the explanation they give about the very thing you're talking about. But that's not whay you actually care about, is it?
Not sure why people don't answer Verdyn's questions instead of assuming he's a troll.
We don't invent things IRL just for the sake of it, so why should a class based upon doing such be limited to only what is 'balanced'?
You only get to play with people who share the same idea of fun as you. If you want to bring a weapon that's ten times as good as any other party member's, you have to find people willing to live with that discrepancy.
Paizo has spent a considerable amount of effort to balance the game, so that as many people can play the game with each other. If you want to play a homebrew game with nuclear bombs, all you need is to find a group that shares that desire - and a GM that is willing to put in the legwork into re-balancing the game around that.
Pathfinder is not a real life simulator. If it were, two staves would have only slightly more Bulk than one staff; underwater combat mechanics should include weakness to electricity depending on the salinity of the water; etc. Players are expected to suspend disbelief in order to keep the game moving.
And if you end up playing Pathfinder with a bunch of physicists and want to homebrew some rule where characters can Telekinetic Projectile at an angle to increase its range, feel free to homebrew it so long as you understand nobody will want any other cantrip and it will make ranged combat way easier for arcane and occult casters played by high-INT players who can quickly calculate Vo*sin θ.
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People did answer though.
A lot said no and some said that would use air repeater with innovations like complex simplicity.
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If they are doing this I'd only make the stipulation that this kind of work would be possible in the world-class workshops that can be found in Alkenstar itself.
If that's part of the adventure they're playing, cool, if it's not I'd work with them during some significant downtime that would allow them to travel there to get access to those experts, resources, and workshops so they can make this.
Lore wise, to me it makes sense that this kind of breakthrough is somewhat reasonable for a PC to invent, especially as an INVENTOR, but it's a bit too much of a stretch to allow that to happen outside of the one place that is ACTUALLY an appropriate location for that kind of technological leap to happen. If you're just kicking around Castrovel or the River Kingdoms and want to do this with a forge so you can upgrade your stats though I would disallow it.
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Not sure why people don't answer Verdyn's questions instead of assuming he's a troll.
Read enough of his posts and you can see for yourself. He has no interest in the game, has barely played it, doesn't like the system, likes to instigate, parrots back negative views of the game regardless of validity, doesn't argue in good faith, continuously moves the goalposts... I'm going to stop the list there because I would be here all day if I continued.
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I fundamentally think that leaving "design your own weapon" guidelines up to players is a can of worms that we should not open. Like the Weapon Master's Guide in PF1 had some rules for it that were easily abused.
You're better off taking an existing weapon and altering it either as a GM or a Weapon Inventor. If you wanted to reflavor an air repeater or a slide pistol so that it looks different in the collective imagination of the table, that's fine (but talk to the GM about it so they know too).
Like if your pitch is "I've modified the slide repeater design to, instead of moving the firing mechanism from side to side, I've instead put the ammunition chambers into a rotating pentagonal cylinder" then you basically have a revolver (with 5 rounds instead of 6, but w/e we don't have fine machine tools yet.) You have a weapon that is mechanically identical to another one, the flavor can be more or less whatever you want it to be.