TROS black powder guns?

[Eamon Voss]

Matchlocks and wheellocks.  Any stats for those handy?  What about the damage tables?  Will this be in the Flower of Battle?

[Shadeling]

Matchlocks and wheellocks.  Any stats for those handy?  What about the damage tables?  Will this be in the Flower of Battle?

Various people have worked on guns in TROS. Perhaps they will share their work with you.

[Eamon Voss]

Matchlocks and wheellocks.  Any stats for those handy?  What about the damage tables?  Will this be in the Flower of Battle?

Various people have worked on guns in TROS. Perhaps they will share their work with you.

Thanks!  Errr... can anyone provide me with their invented gun stats?  Or direct me to a website for TROS black powder weapons?

[Thor Olavsrud]

I did up some flintlock pistol stats for my Three Musketeers-esque game.

I came up with:
Prep time: 20 (figuring three shots a minute is about right)
ATN: 7
Range: +1/5 yards
Dmg: 4 (though I'm considering pumping this up to 6).

[Eamon Voss]

I did up some flintlock pistol stats for my Three Musketeers-esque game.

Flintlock?  That is way in the future for the Musketeers.  During Louis XIII (or was it Louis XIV?) all they had were matchlocks and wheellocks.  Still, you have my thanks!

[Thor Olavsrud]

Very true. My setting, in some ways, is closer to late 18th-early 19th century than it is to the Musketeers, though Dumas himself had a flexible sense of time. ;)

[murazor]

I did up some flintlock pistol stats for my Three Musketeers-esque game.

I came up with:
Prep time: 20 (figuring three shots a minute is about right)
ATN: 7
Range: +1/5 yards
Dmg: 4 (though I'm considering pumping this up to 6).

It should some armour piercing, at least equal to war hammers, I believe. +2 damage against armour, isn't that the number?

[Eamon Voss]

It should some armour piercing, at least equal to war hammers, I believe. +2 damage against armour, isn't that the number?

Not necessarily.  1500s firearms simply weren't that good at penetrating armor.  Even in 1600 you could still buy bullet-tested armor.  It was around 1650 that two factors saw the reduction of armor on the battlefield:

1. Rise of professional armies (it was more economical to have a troop of men armed with muskets and pike than a single armored knight).  In my opinion, this was the death-knell of the armored knight, and could have been done with crossbows and pike, instead of guns and pike.

2. The armor the man was wearing might be capable of stopping the bullet, but the armor the horse was wearing generally was not.

3. Even the best armor could fail under a massed volley.

Remember, the disappearance of armor on the battlefield was a slow event that took generations, and did not wholly occur because of the appearance of gunpowder. It was a complex sociological event that is generally misunderstood as a simple process, much like fencers seem to think that their sport is the 'evolution of western swordplay'.

Therefore, considering the technological level of Riddle of Steel, I would not give guns an armor-piercing trait.  I might give them an increased shock rating of 1 or 2.

[Valamir]

Yup, somewhere around here is a thread where I made the claim that the disappearance of armor had more to do with cost than with the effectiveness of firearms as an armor penetrating weapon.

[murazor]

You make a good case, Eamon Voss.
I concede that pistols are probably too weak to penetrate armour - especially the armour redesigned to cope with firearms. I certainly don't want to imply that early smoothbore firearms could shear through armour like butter. The change to mass tactics is indeed more important than guns, as testified by the presence of the armoured dragoons from the napoleonic wars.
But what about muskets? No armour piercing at all for them either?

It's probably more important to accentuate ease of use and higher shock values than armour piercing. Come to think of it, it occurs to me that the fragile large caliber bullets of early guns could make it even harder for them to penetrate armour, though the wounds would be horrible.

[Valamir]

It's probably more important to accentuate ease of use

To be nitpicky, this would probably be more accurate as "ease of training" than ease of use.  Arquebus's were actually a pretty big pain in the ass to use.  But it was much easier to train a couple thousand people to use one through rote memorization.

[Nick the Nevermet]

Who do you think would have guns, and how would they get used?  Are people planning on introducing them to the campaign, or edit the world that guns exist?

I don't have my book handy, but one of the barbarian groups in central Weyrth has firearms.  No stats on them, but it struck me as unusual they had them.

[Eamon Voss]

To be nitpicky, this would probably be more accurate as "ease of training" than ease of use.  Arquebus's were actually a pretty big pain in the ass to use.  But it was much easier to train a couple thousand people to use one through rote memorization.

A bow or crossbow is nealy infinitely simpler than an arquebus.  But...

Bows took a lot of muscle power, and very specific muscles at that.  That meant meat-fed archers who had the time to practice enough to build up the muscles required.  This sort of stuff was expensive in the long-term strategic sort of view, and even the English weren't quite as good as we would like to believe.  

Crossbows are difficult to make compared to an arquebus.  One is a metal tube with a match attached to a hinge.  The other is several pieces of different materials that during the draw and firing come under amazingly different types of stress during each process of loading, holding, and loosing.  This meant skilled craftsmen and that meant added expense.

Guns, when you had a bunch of people working on them at once, were easy to make.  Gunpowder was easy to make once you got the hang of it.  Ammunition could be lead, rocks, bits of iron, or nails.  Any bonehead who could lift one and follow a drill could shoot it, unlike the harder-to-master pike drills.  Accuracy didn't matter so much, as the Japanese proved in the pivotal battle of Segikahara, where they used the just invented rotating ranks of fire system, which the Portuguese brought back to Europe.  Guns allowed you total logistical domination on and off the battlefield, so long as you kept your powder dry!

[Thor Olavsrud]

Yup, somewhere around here is a thread where I made the claim that the disappearance of armor had more to do with cost than with the effectiveness of firearms as an armor penetrating weapon.

I suspect this is true, becoming a real factor as the age of Imperialism necessitated the support of much larger standing armies to control extensive areas of land.

With the increase in standing armies, knights -- who required plunder and land grants to make their service worthwhile -- would have lost importance.

Also, each knight required multiple horses and servants to maintain him, creating a logistical nightmare. Provisioning large armies was extremely difficult to begin with (Napoleon's advances in that regard were one of the reasons for his rapid conquest of Europe).

As for wounds, during the Napoleonic Wars, when gunsmithing had advanced from the early days, muskets were quite capable of punching through the breast plates worn by heavy cavalry, like the Cuirassiers. But I believe the range had to be fairly close.

Muskets did create awful wounds, because the shape of the bullets meant they rarely exited the body, often lodging on and breaking bones. But those wounds rarely killed. The real killer was wool!

When the bullet struck, wool clothing the victim was wearing would disintegrate, entering the wound and becoming next to impossible to remove. The wounds invariably turned septic, especially since the tools a surgeon would use to try to remove a bullet (if attempted at all) were also dirty.

That's why, in the Napoleonic Wars, officers would almost always wear silk clothing, since silk was much easier to remove from the wounds.

[Eamon Voss]

Who do you think would have guns, and how would they get used?  Are people planning on introducing them to the campaign, or edit the world that guns exist?

I love TROS already.  But I am not so enamored of the world.  So I will probably create my own new world.  If I did want to set it in Wyerth, it would be easy enough to introduce guns.  They have the metallurgical skills to use the stuff.  

I don't have my book handy, but one of the barbarian groups in central Weyrth has firearms.  No stats on them, but it struck me as unusual they had them.

I thought it kind of neat.  We always have this idea that it is 'advanced civilizations' that invent the kewl stuff.  What if this were not the case?  Heck, the Turks and Mongols used awesome bows that were wieldier than the longbow and have more power.  And even though the Mongols created the 300 year Yuan dynasty in China, developed the first postal system, opened up trade routes between Asia and Europe, made reading and writing mandatory for soldiers, and were the first to have freedom of religion, we still think of them as destructive barbarians who never did anything.