Guns in Fantasy


Pathfinder Second Edition General Discussion


Given that a default game of PF2 has a roughly 16th century level of technology*, it seems odd that firearms are generally excluded from the core rules. There was never a time when the knight in full harness astride a stead existed in a world without gunpowder or firearms. Is the distaste some people have for them simply a byproduct of early genre pieces and early fantasy RPGs excluding firearms or is there some other cause of this distaste? Moreover, should we simply accept that firearms are too 'spicy' for core rules or should we seek to correct the inaccuracy and include them fully and from the start of whatever the next big fantasy game/new edition is?

*Judging by the designs of plate armor available as well as the existence of the rapier and some of the polearms listed.


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Starfinder Superscriber

PF2 is already a phone book, so no matter what you're a fan of, something's going to wind up getting cut. Firearms for Pathfinder 2e especially represented a problem because they struck against touch AC which was always a lot lower than normal AC. Then PF2e abolished touch AC -- so now you've got to figure out how you're going to balance firearms. I don't think they had the answer to that question when PF2 core was released 3 years ago.

I think it's fair to say your question is more "Why are firearms considered uncommon/rare", in which case yes it's a thematic choice on the part of the writers. If you disagree with it, well, that's what Guns & Gears is for.


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Leon Aquilla wrote:

PF2 is already a phone book, so no matter what you're a fan of, something's going to wind up getting cut. Firearms for Pathfinder 2e especially represented a problem because they struck against touch AC which was always a lot lower than normal AC. Then PF2e abolished touch AC -- so now you've got to figure out how you're going to balance firearms. I don't think they had the answer to that question when PF2 core was released 3 years ago.

I think it's fair to say your question is more "Why are firearms considered uncommon/rare", in which case yes it's a thematic choice on the part of the writers. If you disagree with it, well, that's what Guns & Gears is for.

Of course, one book shouldn't seek to contain everything a game will ever need but it would be nice if an entire type of weapon wasn't always on the cutting room floor with an edition change. Firearms aren't just rare, they don't seem to be considered a core of the game by any major developer even when the lore has shown them to exist as fairly common items in some corners of its world. If the same happened with full-plate or druids people would be up in arms even though druids as portrayed in fantasy likely never existed and plate armor was of the same level of hard to obtain as firearms.

I also don't buy that it took two years of development for the game to get the niche and class-restricted firearms that we did wind up with but I find most post-CRB content to be a bit lacking in terms of delivering what the fluff promises. YYMV on that issue.


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Norade wrote:

Given that a default game of PF2 has a roughly 16th century level of technology*, it seems odd that firearms are generally excluded from the core rules. There was never a time when the knight in full harness astride a stead existed in a world without gunpowder or firearms. Is the distaste some people have for them simply a byproduct of early genre pieces and early fantasy RPGs excluding firearms or is there some other cause of this distaste? Moreover, should we simply accept that firearms are too 'spicy' for core rules or should we seek to correct the inaccuracy and include them fully and from the start of whatever the next big fantasy game/new edition is?

*Judging by the designs of plate armor available as well as the existence of the rapier and some of the polearms listed.

Lots of people aren't really interested in playing with firearms. Others are and they're available for them.

I don't think it has anything to do with "inaccuracy". Fantasy RPG worlds are generally a kitchen sink pile of weirdness anyway, so pushing to require firearms be ubiquitous based on "historical accuracy" seems weird to me. They're available, but walled off mechanically so those who don't like them can avoid them.

As for the inaccuracy itself, the game really is a genre-based game, not a reality based one and the genre has been full of knights in shining plate without guns since before it was really even a genre. (Think Mallory's Arthur.)

My problem with guns from a "realism" standpoint is that guns change the world and they did so long before they advanced enough to be useful for heroic adventurers. If you were emulating reality, you might have plate armor and rapiers and guns, but the guns would be mostly confined to cannon and slow firing arquebuses or the like. That makes the guns things that transform warfare long before they'd be effective for adventuring. You'd run into bandits or other humanoid enemies attacking you with a volley, rather than being able to use them yourself.

Unless of course you ignore historical accuracy with guns the way Paizo has, but then there's no reason that everyone hasn't traded in their swords and bows for guns and that gives a very different feel than I want in my fantasy.

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I generally don't like guns in fantasy games. There are exceptions (I prefer to play pirate games with guns and cannons, for instance, and I am working on a Victoriana-style adventure which includes repeating rifles and revolvers), but in general I really dislike it without specific buy-in. If firearms were ubiquitous in Pathfinder, I never would have bought the game to begin with. It wouldn't be the game I wanted to play, so I simply... would have discarded it entirely.

I suspect that's a good part of why things are separated the way they are in Golarian. Things are generally modular, so you can bring in the aspects you want more easily while excluding things that aren't part of the base assumption.

Now, my own attitude toward gunslingers and the like has softened a little, I allowed a gunslinger in my Night of Gray Death campaign that just started, but I generally dislike them in games of the sort. I think that the adventure lends itself to a feel that makes guns feel more acceptable to me, but that could just be internal quibbling.

Anyway, yeah. If Paizo ever goes all-in on guns everywhere in-setting, I'll probably stop buying anything set in Golarion.


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Pathfinder is not a historical setting, and it’s also not trying to be a setting slavishly bound to internal consistency; it is first and foremost a vehicle for tabletop games, meant to easily fit whatever tastes a table might have. This is why there’s a Horror Movie Land right next to Demon Invasion Land and Alien Technology Land without a ton of overlap, and it’s why guns are secreted away to their designated places - some people really dislike firearms in fantasy, and just like any other variable, they make it easy to include or ignore.

2e actually has integrated guns more than before! We’ve seen them spread across large parts of Garund in art and lore, and the first look at any wide region of Arcadia had them as a major part of local culture. I like guns in fantasy, and I’m glad to see them gain more prominence, but there will always be a contingent of grognards who balk at anything that wasn’t in LotR.

Liberty's Edge

I guess things would have been different if the original game those many years ago had been Guns and Dragons.


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thejeff wrote:
Others are and they're available for them.

Two years post-launch, on basically one class.

Quote:
I don't think it has anything to do with "inaccuracy". Fantasy RPG worlds are generally a kitchen sink pile of weirdness anyway, so pushing to require firearms be ubiquitous based on "historical accuracy" seems weird to me. They're available, but walled off mechanically so those who don't like them can avoid them.

By all means, do that. I'm asking that they be made a core item that people are free to ignore rather than an add-on that people need to wait to use.

Quote:
My problem with guns from a "realism" standpoint is that guns change the world and they did so long before they advanced enough to be useful for heroic adventurers. If you were emulating reality, you might have plate armor and rapiers and guns, but the guns would be mostly confined to cannon and slow firing arquebuses or the like. That makes the guns things that transform warfare long before they'd be effective for adventuring. You'd run into bandits or other humanoid enemies attacking you with a volley, rather than being able to use them yourself.

Those would likely be at least mid-level foes as guns, and more to the point a good supply of gunpowder should be a rare resource on par with a magic item; incidentally, I also feel the same way about plate armor.

Quote:
Unless of course you ignore historical accuracy with guns the way Paizo has, but then there's no reason that everyone hasn't traded in their swords and bows for guns and that gives a very different feel than I want in my fantasy.

Building up the industry needed to have firearms be that common takes a long time. That won't change too much if guns are just better than they should be.

As for your idea that either guns are NPC-only items or ahistorically good, I don't think that needs to be entirely true. I'd just have PC guns be well-made prototypes that their owners tinker with to make them more accurate. Keep the very long reload times and high lethality and make guns the equivalent of a mid-level spell like Scorching Ray. You fire your shot and either drop your weapon, fix your bayonet, or take cover for a while and try a series of skill checks to see how quickly you can reload. Even enemies might volley once with muskets hoping for a few lucky hits and then drop them for polearms or bows, or else they'd have to fire smaller volleys and exchange empty guns for loaded ones to keep up a once every few rounds rate of fire.

In any case as long as guns are rare outside of armories they shouldn't overwhelm the flavor of a more traditional fantasy game.


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Cydeth wrote:

I generally don't like guns in fantasy games. There are exceptions (I prefer to play pirate games with guns and cannons, for instance, and I am working on a Victoriana-style adventure which includes repeating rifles and revolvers), but in general I really dislike it without specific buy-in. If firearms were ubiquitous in Pathfinder, I never would have bought the game to begin with. It wouldn't be the game I wanted to play, so I simply... would have discarded it entirely.

I suspect that's a good part of why things are separated the way they are in Golarian. Things are generally modular, so you can bring in the aspects you want more easily while excluding things that aren't part of the base assumption.

Now, my own attitude toward gunslingers and the like has softened a little, I allowed a gunslinger in my Night of Gray Death campaign that just started, but I generally dislike them in games of the sort. I think that the adventure lends itself to a feel that makes guns feel more acceptable to me, but that could just be internal quibbling.

Anyway, yeah. If Paizo ever goes all-in on guns everywhere in-setting, I'll probably stop buying anything set in Golarion.

Do you have a reason for this strong dislike? I'm not baiting, just genuinely curious as to why so many people dislike them as much as they do.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

You keep referring to guns being class locked. Why? They aren't.


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What about numerian stuff then?

"You call that a gun? THIS is a gun!"


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thejeff wrote:
Unless of course you ignore historical accuracy with guns the way Paizo has, but then there's no reason that everyone hasn't traded in their swords and bows for guns and that gives a very different feel than I want in my fantasy.

I hate this argument. Fireball ignores historical accuracy. Dragons ignore historical accuracy, why have huge castles and towers when dragons can fly over your walls and slag your castle? Buying resurrections from your friendly neighborhood temple ignores historical accuracy.


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Tristan d'Ambrosius wrote:
thejeff wrote:
Unless of course you ignore historical accuracy with guns the way Paizo has, but then there's no reason that everyone hasn't traded in their swords and bows for guns and that gives a very different feel than I want in my fantasy.
I hate this argument. Fireball ignores historical accuracy. Dragons ignore historical accuracy, why have huge castles and towers when dragons can fly over your walls and slag your castle? Buying resurrections from your friendly neighborhood temple ignores historical accuracy.

Avistan is a continent that has androids from another galaxy and still-extant mammoths living one border away from each other and people still trot out "historical accuracy." It's frustrating, to say the least.


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Pathfinder has a certain high fantasy aesthetic. The setting has a lot of different ideas and stuff that might be questionable for high fantasy but that's why those options are uncommon. The setting is high fantasy first. That's what you expect. I think Paizo has done a decent job incorporating different genres and stuff in their setting for GMs to utilize if they so choose.


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To the topic: I've never cared about guns in my fantasy, so they've always been an option. I prefer to yes-and with my players when I run games.

I'd also echo the general sentiment from the OP that it feels like there's been hesitance to just put stuff out there and make it more broadly available to everyone by default. I'd certainly like more and more varied content. I wonder how much this situation is QA-feels-like-restriction-when-people-disagree-on-target.


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"Uncommon" basically means that "this thing is found in some places but not others" which makes a lot of sense for guns. In the real world, black powder weapons proliferated from China through trade routes to the Middle East then to Europe and so on. Golarion has a little less cultural and technological exchange across meta-regions than a real place would (in part to allow for different types of games) but Golarion seems to be operating at the point in technological history where "some people have guns but other people do not."

In general most uncommon things are either "you ask your GM if these level 1 options are okay" (you probably should not play an Anadi Gunslinger in the Saga Lands without pre-clearnace, but it might be okay in Alkenstar) or "you find one along the way or you don't." Unlike in PF1, PF2 characters don't really need to be built around specific items- if you're good with one type of martial polearm, you're just as good with the rest of the martial polearms.


Tristan d'Ambrosius wrote:
thejeff wrote:
Unless of course you ignore historical accuracy with guns the way Paizo has, but then there's no reason that everyone hasn't traded in their swords and bows for guns and that gives a very different feel than I want in my fantasy.
I hate this argument. Fireball ignores historical accuracy. Dragons ignore historical accuracy, why have huge castles and towers when dragons can fly over your walls and slag your castle? Buying resurrections from your friendly neighborhood temple ignores historical accuracy.

But that's not really my argument. My argument is that because this is how guns in history really were, you can't use the "historical accuracy" argument to demand that if you have plate armor you should be able to go adventuring with guns.

I don't have a problem with historically inaccurate firearms or effects of firearms on the world, but you can't argue that you need guns to be historically accurate and argue that you don't need to be historically accurate with those guns.


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But having plate armor doesn't preclude adventuring with guns

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Norade wrote:
Do you have a reason for this strong dislike? I'm not baiting, just genuinely curious as to why so many people dislike them as much as they do.

I have to assume it's mostly due to aesthetics (I can't say for sure because it's a gut feeling thing). While full plate and rapiers fit an era where guns existed, they feel like they fit in fairly well with the high fantasy aesthetic. Some series I have read use guns in fantasy settings in ways I don't mind. It fits the world, so I can go along with it without issues. Similarly, some universes use guns and I don't mind those at all. Heck, I write a series of novels that has technology at or superior to Starfinder as well as more powerful magic in it, so it isn't that I dislike genre-mixing.

I think the main thing is that when I'm going for a high fantasy fix in a RPG, guns don't fit into my baseline assumption. If someone offers me a chance to play in one where guns are a part of things, I'd consider and decide, but it isn't my first choice. I suppose it might just be that I don't consider it traditional, but I don't know. It's easier for me to add in something that's optional than it is to excise something that's part of the core assumption.

Likes and dislikes can be a really messy subject.


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Cydeth wrote:

I generally don't like guns in fantasy games. There are exceptions (I prefer to play pirate games with guns and cannons, for instance, and I am working on a Victoriana-style adventure which includes repeating rifles and revolvers), but in general I really dislike it without specific buy-in. If firearms were ubiquitous in Pathfinder, I never would have bought the game to begin with. It wouldn't be the game I wanted to play, so I simply... would have discarded it entirely.

I suspect that's a good part of why things are separated the way they are in Golarian. Things are generally modular, so you can bring in the aspects you want more easily while excluding things that aren't part of the base assumption.

Now, my own attitude toward gunslingers and the like has softened a little, I allowed a gunslinger in my Night of Gray Death campaign that just started, but I generally dislike them in games of the sort. I think that the adventure lends itself to a feel that makes guns feel more acceptable to me, but that could just be internal quibbling.

Anyway, yeah. If Paizo ever goes all-in on guns everywhere in-setting, I'll probably stop buying anything set in Golarion.

And this is basically the reasons guns have the place they do. They're controversial enough that too much emphasis loses more players than it gains.

They likely didn't want to put a restricted/uncommon class in the core rules and wanted to work out the firearms rules along with the class design, so here we are.


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Tristan d'Ambrosius wrote:
But having plate armor doesn't preclude adventuring with guns

I didn't say it did.

Oh I see: "demand that if you have plate armor you should be able to go adventuring with guns."
I meant "If plate armor exists, guns must also exist, because that's the historical timeline."
Which is nonsense not only because fantasy doesn't have to match history, but also because the guns tied to plate armor development wouldn't have been good for heroic adventuring, but would change warfare.

You can certainly have PF style firearms, but that's "because fantasy", not because they're historically accurate.


or plate armor was used into the 17th century overlapping with guns so if you have plate armor you can have guns since they were in use for some of their existence together, but watch out for dragons metal gets really hot you could get slagged.


Tristan d'Ambrosius wrote:
or plate armor was used into the 17th century overlapping with guns so if you have plate armor you can have guns since they were in use for some of their existence together, but watch out for dragons metal gets really hot you could get slagged.

I mean, sure. I never intended to suggest plate armor meant you couldn't have guns.


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Norade wrote:
thejeff wrote:
Others are and they're available for them.
Two years post-launch

You keep saying that, but where would you have put them? Firearms are not core enough to the setting to belong in the APG. The magus and summoner were much more generally popular than the gunslinger, so it stands to reason that Secrets of Magic came before Guns and Gears.

Two years post-launch is remarkably fast for reintroducing firearms, actually. It’s only the second post-core ruleset book after all.


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I think the next iteration of firearms will be closer to CRB. The designers mentioned that there was a lot of discussion about how guns would even work, mechanically, that prevented them from winding up in either the CRB or APG. The final iteration is a lot more conservative and in line with current weapons than some of the more out here possibilities, like the example in the first AP. As long as it remains true that firearms simply don’t work much different than other weapons, there’s much less of a need to table them to after the extended-core.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Norade wrote:

Given that a default game of PF2 has a roughly 16th century level of technology*, it seems odd that firearms are generally excluded from the core rules. There was never a time when the knight in full harness astride a stead existed in a world without gunpowder or firearms. Is the distaste some people have for them simply a byproduct of early genre pieces and early fantasy RPGs excluding firearms or is there some other cause of this distaste? Moreover, should we simply accept that firearms are too 'spicy' for core rules or should we seek to correct the inaccuracy and include them fully and from the start of whatever the next big fantasy game/new edition is?

*Judging by the designs of plate armor available as well as the existence of the rapier and some of the polearms listed.

There's actually an in-universe explanation that covers everything you're talking about. You can find it in Guns and Gears. You should check it out.


RexAliquid wrote:
Norade wrote:
thejeff wrote:
Others are and they're available for them.
Two years post-launch
You keep saying that, but where would you have put them?

In the core book alongside other contemporary technologies as high-cost one-shot burst damage weapons that take rounds and multiple skill checks to reload. Something a dedicated character might own a few of but at a cost in gold and skill investment that makes a real choice to build a character around.

Sovereign Court Director of Community

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Removed a few personally harassing posts and subsequent quotes. I'm locking this thread, as the OP noted they have not read any of the source material. I consider this baiting the community and against guidelines.

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