Fantasy and Firearms

[Mike Holmes]

This is why certain elements tried to have crossbows banned from the field of battle. It makes commoners able to kill knights, and that just will not do. Crossbows are equivalent to guns for most practical purposes of these discussions. Yes, if allowed, they can make a PCs very dangerous that first shot. Which can subsequently make the action less personal as it becomes all about pointing crossbows at each other. Ends up more like an action flick (I'm imagining a "Mexican standoff" with crossbows).

Mike

[Thor Olavsrud]

A favorite statistic of mine is that an English longbow is more lethal than a musket in battle. So why go to guns? Because only 1in 100 men or something like that could be trained to use a longbow effectively. Any fool can be trained to be realtively lethal with a firearm.

Would a workable rule be to limit the skill someone could aquire in muskets?

If the game is skill based, you could cap the firearms bonus to +3 or whatever a small amount would be in the given system.  On the other hand, the longbow skill would not be capped, you could increase its effectiveness to a far higher level.

With this, the longbow would require a large investment in training time (read character creation currency) to be as lethal as a firearm, but has the potential of developing into a much more lethal option.

The smooth bore musket was actually incredibly deadly at close range, but was limited by the fact that there was little uniformity in bullets, and because of this the bullets did not snuggly fit the bore. This meant that bullets rarely flew in a straight line when fired. The musket was acceptably accurate to about 50 paces or so.

This is why the musket was a formation weapon. Soldiers didn't aim with a musket, they just loaded it, raised it and fired. The only real exceptions were the skirmishers, like voltigeurs, whose role was to attempt to disorder the enemies lines before the main infantry engaged.

However, that's not to say that training time and skill was not required. Depending on the army you're dealing with, actually loading the musket was a drill that had anywhere from 33 to 200 moves. Making those moves into an unconcious response was essential, because you had to do it correctly, fast, while enemy troops marched within 50 paces. Crack troops could fire 4 shots a minute.

That explanation is a long-winded way of saying that muskets wouldn't really be much use in the traditional RPG "squad." Pistols would be, though they were really for close up work and not too useful at a distance. After that, it's time to rely on your sword.

[Valamir]

To clear up a few things about black powder firearms.

1) the reason armor disappeared was emphatically NOT because they were not effective against firearms.  Most breast plates and helmets showed dents where they were proofed (i.e. tested by the craftsman) to demonstrate how WELL they protected against firearms.  The actual penetration ability of a slow moving large ball of soft lead was notably inferior to that of cross bows and long bows.

2) the statement that "flintlocks were accurate" is somewhat incorrect but very misleading.  The term flintlock refers to the method of discharging the weapon and had less to do with the accuracy of the weapon than did the length of barrel or presence of rifling in the barrel.  Flintlocks were marginally more accurate than matchlocks because there was usually less delay between trigger pull and discharge.

3) black powder weapons varied dramatically in degree of accuracy.  Short barrel smooth bore weapons (such as mass produced and issued to most armies) were so inaccurate they couldn't be relied upon to hit a stationary target at 50 meters more than one shot in 3 (or perhaps 1 in 5 I can't recall precisely).  The kind of weapon used by frontiersmen to fill the cook pot were generally a) very long barreled some almost absurdly so, b) rifled, and c) carefully crafted by master craftsman usually by hand to obtain a higher degree of precision than early mass produced models.

4) The idea of "accuracy" especially in these old weapons are largely a function of an individual's expertise with a specific rifle.  The degree of windage (gap between shot and barrel) had great impact on accuracy and differed substantially between pieces.  Familiarity with a specific weapons quirks and features could lead to an experienced rifleman making accurate shots, but this is more a feature of the skill and practice of the individual, than any inherent accuracy of the weapon.  In truth, how careful you were in loading the weapon (getting the wadding right, getting the shot firmly seated with ramming, having the right amount of primer) would make a dramatic difference in the accuracy of the shot...so no the weapons themselves were not very accurate beyond a fraction of their total potential range (that fraction being higher for rifled barrels than smooth bore).

Anyway, just the pedantic repressed simulationist in me :-)

[greyorm]

I normally don't do this, and just try to steer things back on course with topical discussion, but as the posts about the history and real-world application of firearms pile up with no end in sight, I must make note: folks, you have hi-jacked this thread.

Bad.  Very.
Stop it.

[Christoffer Lernö]

This is why certain elements tried to have crossbows banned from the field of battle. It makes commoners able to kill knights, and that just will not do. Crossbows are equivalent to guns for most practical purposes of these discussions.

It might be interesting for the discussion to mention that use of firearms in battles was banned in Japan for a period of time just because of such concerns. (Can anyone fill out the details? I'm very vague on the exact time period)

edit:
How does this carry into the question about firearms in fantasy? Well, maybe I should clarify. If the concern is mechanics, then you already have a precedent in crossbows, so if crossbows are ok and works in the system, then primitive firearms should work fine as well. Just think of them as a crossbow variant in terms of system.

[contracycle]

I think the sword-and-pistol model can work very well, it adds an extra option which can be fun in its own right.  And as we have discussed, the musket is not of too much use for the typical RPG character, so I would not be too worried about having black powder weapons.

OTOH, where players show the tendency to be over-armed, gunpwder gives them a lot of opportunity in the form of explosives.  I think that part of the problem is the anticipation that our mindset would lean toward that easily and perhaps implausibly (like the frequency with which explosives show up in Robin Hood movies).  So I think there has been a hesitancy to set up that sort of situation, but I don't think its a very serious problem, in that a number of games have incorporated black powder weapons.

[b_bankhead]

That explanation is a long-winded way of saying that muskets wouldn't really be much use in the traditional RPG "squad." Pistols would be, though they were really for close up work and not too useful at a distance. After that, it's time to rely on your sword.

  That reminds me,I've actaully seen some specemins of flintlock pistols with knives on the end of them to  use when you discarged your only shot  and have to go to melee at once!

[Jonathan Walton]

Interestingly, in Warhammer 40K, most pistols are considered "close combat weapons" as soon as you get into hand-to-hand range.  You may not be able to shoot worth a damn from far away (especially with Orks), but once you get close enough, a pistol acts just like a sword.  You can hack someone's arm off or you can just blow it off.

Ah, the things I learned from hanging around during my brother's miniature games... :)

Later.
Jonathan

[UnSub]

Since no-one else has mentioned it...

One issue of Dragon (the Steampunk Cover; issue # unknown) did look at adding firearms to D&D 3rd Ed. The rules had these weapons reduce the effectiveness of most armour types; magic bonuses still applied to armour.

In regards to firearms versus magic and their use in fighting, why would you use them? What advantages do they bring to the battle? Is there a cultural reason why one would dominate?

If magic is more efficient, why use guns? If firearms are more effective, why use magic on the battlefield? Traditionally magic is very powerful and relies on a high level of training and is widely destructive. Guns may be the common soldiers' ranged weapon. Maybe firearms (by virtue of gunpowder's properties) are immune to magic. Maybe races that don't have magic have developed firearms to attempt to balance their capacity on the battlefield. A lot of maybes, but then it is up to you to make a decision about it.

In the original post, guns were stated to be rare and expensive. So what advantages do they have to balance that? If the only thing they profer is status, the players will stick to their arrows. But if a bullet is capable of dropping any mage in the land because their magic won't work against it, then it becomes useful.