I really don't want this to turn into homebrew, but why do people designing firearms in D&D always make them deal more damage?
Realistically, a hole through your digestive system or lungs will kill you. A hole in your leg probably won't, unless it gets infected. Losing a limb won't change that. Musketballs aren't more dangerous than arrows.
Arrows/bolts deal 1d6 to 1d10 damage. Firearms on the other hand deal 2d4 to 2d12 damage... then there's the idea that more modern firearms should deal even more damage.
Being more deadly is never what allowed firearms to take over the battlefield. Their ease of use and added momentum did. The ability to punch entirely through metal did. The fact that aiming with one ready didn't take additional strength to hold it ready (as when holding a bow drawn) did. Firearms are not more deadly than a 7lbs great-sword. They're just harder to dodge and protect yourself from.
Just a tiny bit of googling (so proving me wrong might be easy), but even if we include modern compound bows, a typical arrow will fly 225 to 300 feet per second. Black powder weapons shot musketballs between 390 and 1,200fps. The body doesn't take more damage because the projectile moves faster.
So why do people thing a bullet has to deal 1 to 8.5 more damage per attack on average when using a comparable bow?
Because a lot of people insist on demanding "realism" in a game full of elves and goblins and freaking magic, and it's accurate real world science that even a medium caliber handgun does more damage than a longbow. The incredibly massive difference in velocity of the projectile more than makes up for the smaller mass and results in much greater force on impact. Additionally most bullets that aren't specifically designed to penetrate armor (modern armor, which is designed to stop bullets instead of swords and arrows) will rapidly deform and expand on impact because of that extremely forceful impact, even with soft flesh so the exit wound from a half inch wide musket ball will often create a baseball sized exit wound. And if the armor is made for deflecting swords and arrows the bullet will either penetrate and already be mushroomed out as it goes in or, best case for the target, all of that force still impacts on the armor as it flattens so it feels like they're getting kicked by multiple horses all at once.
Short answer, guns are &$%#ing deadly.
They also realistically deal a lot more damage than the mechanics of D&D 5e are designed to accommodate to if you're being "realistic" they throw off game balance by hitting disproportionately harder than anything else. So unless you want any characters wielding firearms to be intentionally extra deadly compared to literally everyone else you either nerf them to unrealistic proportionate damage so, for mechanical purposes, they're just reskinned crossbows or you just don't use them in your game.
The body doesn't take more damage because the projectile moves faster.
This is absolutely incorrect. Force equals mass times velocity. That musket ball is made of lead, one of the heaviest naturally occurring substances in nature, and typically weighs at least as much if not more than a longbow arrow. It's heavier and going four times faster so it hits harder. Additionally it also is soft enough to expand as I mentioned above. Even if a bullet stays mostly intact, the force of impact is spread beyond the path of the projectile itself in waves just like the splash you get from throwing a rock into water. Bullets hit really hard.
For a visual example, skip to 6:40 in this video and watch the way the ballistic gel reacts when the musket bullet hits it. Then imagine the inside of a human body experiencing that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0AxKGRKY3g
There are multiple reasons that armies stopped using longbows and crossbows when even simple, inaccurate muskets that only fire maybe three times a minute could be mass produced. The main ones are the relatively simpler training required and the fact that a bunch of high power projectiles traveling in the general direction of an enemy formation will absolutely do more damage than multiple volleys of more precisely aimed arrows.
I could get into ballistics data, wound cavitation, and all that other Bullet Science junk, flex my brain muscles and explain why guns are dangerous. Nobody would care, though. That's not why people make guns deal more damage in D&D.
The reason is that people perceive guns as being more dangerous than blades/bludgeons/bows, and the only thing you can do inside typical 5e rules to make a weapon more dangerous is to give it a bigger damage die. So that's what they do.
Modern firearms especially, even discounting all that Bullet Science bunk nobody cares about, should have the trait "you can make twice the number of attacks with this weapon that you can with an ordinary weapon" because fire rate and rapid reloading are where their advantage comes in. That and reliability, but hey. A war archer that can get one aimed shot off every six seconds is a very good war archer - and no, videos of some trick shot [REDACTED] using a twenty pound draw child's bow at half draw to stick a bunch of lightweight arrows into targets ten meters away within frame on a camera shot does not 'prove' rapid archery. A war archer being able to say "I want this shortspear in that guy two hundred yards away and I don't particularly care about all the leather and chainmail in the way" once every six seconds would be horrifying in Ye Olden Tymes. Meanwhile I've seen quite a few people su7ccessfully pull off standardized drills in which they put eight rounds into a target in significantly fewer than six seconds with a modern handgun. It takes practice and training, certainly, and these are close-quarters drills, but they can do it.
However. Attack rate is a function of class, not a function of weapon, and so without delving into some seriously janky homebrew firearms will never work "correctly" in D&D. How the black-powder garbage in the DMG should work is that you can become proficient in it in, like...a week. Even if you have absolutely no martial training prior. Anybody can be proficient in Gun, but reloading a blackpowder firearm is 1d6+3 rounds of concentration during which you cannot move. A peasant village presenting a sudden wall of rifles to aggressors because somebody trained a New Model Militia would be quite the defensive surprise, but those peasants are not adventurers and never will be. They can simply defend their homes much more effectively than the average D&D Tragedy Farmer.
That isn't fun to play though, so instead people treat guns as exotic, difficult to master weapons that deal exceptional per-hit damage because that's simply more fun for the people who want to do it. That lets them be masters of a secret, forbidden weapon the masses barely even comprehend - or it lets them delve into some of the cool Old West archetypes that traditional D&D is super shit at letting people monkey with. 'Crossbowslinger' just doesn't have the same panache as gunslinger, ne?
The way HP functions isn't entirely analogous to physical well-being, and more models a combination of factors that are otherwise hard to represent in a hard ruleset; willpower, morale, grit and determination, heroism, physical wellbeing, injury, action tropes in fiction, they're all rolled into HP which, because of the way we use them, are often misconstrued as just your character's health.
(An exercise to demonstrate this: Picture two combatants in melee with swords. What does a turn look like? What does a hit look like? What does a miss look like? What you should not be picturing is two guys taking turns stabbing each other in the gut, spouting blood like Monty Python's black knight, occasionally just missing wildly and swinging their swords in the opposite direction. What you're probably picturing is an epic sword duel where the combatants parry, dodge, block, graze, dive, feint, glance blows of the other's armor, gain/lose footing, with much gritting of teeth and determined looks passing between them. The second example would be impossible to model accurately without a system of rules as complicated as actual swordfighting technique, so the game relies on simplified language to make it work)
The increased "damage" firearms do over bows and crossbows is just meant to represent that increased efficiency and power in a system that uses HP to model those things.
Balance wise, if the reload and misfire properties are kept in like with the gunslinger subclass description I think it works. It can be interesting to have guns pack a bigger punch but come with drawbacks to balance it out. Just making them 'better bows' though without a downside is kind of lame balance wise.
Guns do have downside in the Forgotten Realms. They use “Smoke Powder” not gun powder. Smoke Powder is a magical item and is subject to dead magic zones and antimagic field spells.
Why? Because they're better weapons than what those savage natives have. And better weapons means more damage. The barbaric bow and arrow is no match for the thinking man's firearm!
Sarcasm aside, the idea of "hit points aren't meat points" actually supports guns hitting harder, I think. Let's say you could accurately break down HP into "energy left to dodge and parry points (EP)," "morale points (MP)," and "blood left in your body points (BP)." Well, you can't really dodge a gun, so a gun needs to be able to only target BP. Cool, cool. Say a sword does 5 to all 3, maybe a gun does 10 just to one. But that's not how it works. You have to hit them all, because HP doesn't differentiate. Thus, the gun simply does more damage. It has to, otherwise your ability to deflect and parry, or your will to fight, could protect you from the gun, and that's just uuuuuunrealistic.
Finally... Guns are cool. Especially if they're rare. Yeah, the logical thing would be to make them simple weapons whose damage rivals martial ones. But then they're not for expert weapon users, they're for noobs. That's not cool! My fighter wouldn't even be better with a gun than he is with a crossbow! You're really going to BrEaK tHe ImMeRsIoN just to add a thing that's not even cool?
I really don't want this to turn into homebrew, but why do people designing firearms in D&D always make them deal more damage?
Realistically, a hole through your digestive system or lungs will kill you. A hole in your leg probably won't, unless it gets infected. Losing a limb won't change that. Musketballs aren't more dangerous than arrows.
A hole through your leg has a very high chance of hitting your femoral artery, which will kill you very quickly from blood loss. Contrary to decades of action movies, you really can't shoot someone in the arm or leg to safely wound them without risk of death.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I really don't want this to turn into homebrew, but why do people designing firearms in D&D always make them deal more damage?
Realistically, a hole through your digestive system or lungs will kill you. A hole in your leg probably won't, unless it gets infected. Losing a limb won't change that. Musketballs aren't more dangerous than arrows.
Arrows/bolts deal 1d6 to 1d10 damage. Firearms on the other hand deal 2d4 to 2d12 damage... then there's the idea that more modern firearms should deal even more damage.
Being more deadly is never what allowed firearms to take over the battlefield. Their ease of use and added momentum did. The ability to punch entirely through metal did. The fact that aiming with one ready didn't take additional strength to hold it ready (as when holding a bow drawn) did. Firearms are not more deadly than a 7lbs great-sword. They're just harder to dodge and protect yourself from.
Just a tiny bit of googling (so proving me wrong might be easy), but even if we include modern compound bows, a typical arrow will fly 225 to 300 feet per second. Black powder weapons shot musketballs between 390 and 1,200fps. The body doesn't take more damage because the projectile moves faster.
So why do people thing a bullet has to deal 1 to 8.5 more damage per attack on average when using a comparable bow?
Black powder muskets deal 1d12 damage. What are you talking about?
I really don't want this to turn into homebrew, but why do people designing firearms in D&D always make them deal more damage?
Realistically, a hole through your digestive system or lungs will kill you. A hole in your leg probably won't, unless it gets infected. Losing a limb won't change that. Musketballs aren't more dangerous than arrows.
A hole through your leg has a very high chance of hitting your femoral artery, which will kill you very quickly from blood loss. Contrary to decades of action movies, you really can't shoot someone in the arm or leg to safely wound them without risk of death.
That is exactly as true for a war arrow as a musket ball. That's my point. Guns should add to your to hit, not your damage. Even if it's just their damage die to your to hit.
And Yurei has a great point about the rate of learning firearms.
I really don't want this to turn into homebrew, but why do people designing firearms in D&D always make them deal more damage?
Realistically, a hole through your digestive system or lungs will kill you. A hole in your leg probably won't, unless it gets infected. Losing a limb won't change that. Musketballs aren't more dangerous than arrows.
A hole through your leg has a very high chance of hitting your femoral artery, which will kill you very quickly from blood loss. Contrary to decades of action movies, you really can't shoot someone in the arm or leg to safely wound them without risk of death.
That is exactly as true for a war arrow as a musket ball. That's my point. Guns should add to your to hit, not your damage. Even if it's just their damage die to your to hit.
And Yurei has a great point about the rate of learning firearms.
The arrow stays in the wound plugging it up to help prevent blood loss. A bullet leaves a permanent tunnel behind it. It’s part of that “bullet science bunk nobody cares about” that Yurei and I mentioned earlier.
And then there's the issue of a musket ball striking bone. One of the reason amputations were so common in the American Civil War was that if a musket ball hit a leg or arm bone, you now had a 4-6 inch segment where the bone no longer existed. It would just be pulverized by the impact.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Let's compare a Maul to any firearm. Best cast scenario for both. Point blank at a still target. A maul to the head, any part, any direction, the only head bones that remain are teeth, but they're over there. Compare that to anything other than a shot gun. Skull will remain.
The damage is extrapolated for HP. That's why a sledge hammer deals 7 (really 10) damage on average, and light hammer used by the same person deals 2.5 (really 5.5). As others have pointed out, HP isn't just about blood points. It's also luck and endurance. You aren't going to dodge a bullet any more than an arrow... which just leaves luck... and what guns come with rabbits feet?
Games need mechanics, and while a short bow dealing 1d6 and a longbow dealing 1d8 with the same arrow is bonkers, I get the whole, "it's a game" thing. That's why the designers made every weapon use one die, except for two which hsed the most common die x2... so why do guns do 2d4, 2d8, etc weird damage? 2d6 is fine. 1d12 is fine. Firearms can't do more than a sledge hammer to a body. Maybe a brick wall, but not a squishy body.
Let's compare a Maul to any firearm. Best cast scenario for both. Point blank at a still target. A maul to the head, any part, any direction, the only head bones that remain are teeth, but they're over there. Compare that to anything other than a shot gun. Skull will remain.
That’s irrelevant if the cavitation from the bullet has turned the brain inside the skull to soup.
Erokow. Trust me. Firearms, in real life, are vastly more dangerous than you're giving them credit for. The maul looks like it will do more damage. "Damage", in the sense of physical trauma to the body, is a function of kinetic energy. No human muscle ever born can match the kinetic potential of a powder charge. If someone offered you a terrible choice of 'take a maul to the face" or "take any combat-grade firearm shot to the face", you take the maul. You'll bend under the blow and have a much higher chance of surviving. I guarantee it. There's a reason that modern combatants favor firearms even in close quarters combat, if they can manage it.
Let's compare a Maul to any firearm. Best cast scenario for both. Point blank at a still target. A maul to the head, any part, any direction, the only head bones that remain are teeth, but they're over there. Compare that to anything other than a shot gun. Skull will remain.
There are actual studies on this. To quote a key line: "Assault with firearms often led to fatality whereas with assault involving blunt weapons the survival rate was higher." In addition, blunt weapon homicides generally involve more than one strike, whereas it rarely takes more than one bullet to the head to be fatal. There are several reasons for this, but vastly higher energy is one of them.
In D&D terms, it's just a case of "firearms are better than primitive weapons, and we have to reflect that somehow; our choices are a bonus to hit and a bonus to damage".
Let's compare a Maul to any firearm. Best cast scenario for both. Point blank at a still target. A maul to the head, any part, any direction, the only head bones that remain are teeth, but they're over there. Compare that to anything other than a shot gun. Skull will remain.
That’s irrelevant if the cavitation from the bullet has turned the brain inside the skull to soup.
There would likely be very large exit hole as well.
Let's compare a Maul to any firearm. Best cast scenario for both. Point blank at a still target. A maul to the head, any part, any direction, the only head bones that remain are teeth, but they're over there. Compare that to anything other than a shot gun. Skull will remain.
That’s irrelevant if the cavitation from the bullet has turned the brain inside the skull to soup.
There would likely be very large exit hole as well.
Maybe, it depends on the caliber. A .22 will probably just rattle around in there doing even more damage, a .45 will likely leave an exit wound the size of a grapefruit.
I really don't want this to turn into homebrew, but why do people designing firearms in D&D always make them deal more damage?
Realistically, a hole through your digestive system or lungs will kill you. A hole in your leg probably won't, unless it gets infected. Losing a limb won't change that. Musketballs aren't more dangerous than arrows.
Arrows/bolts deal 1d6 to 1d10 damage. Firearms on the other hand deal 2d4 to 2d12 damage... then there's the idea that more modern firearms should deal even more damage.
Being more deadly is never what allowed firearms to take over the battlefield. Their ease of use and added momentum did. The ability to punch entirely through metal did. The fact that aiming with one ready didn't take additional strength to hold it ready (as when holding a bow drawn) did. Firearms are not more deadly than a 7lbs great-sword. They're just harder to dodge and protect yourself from.
Just a tiny bit of googling (so proving me wrong might be easy), but even if we include modern compound bows, a typical arrow will fly 225 to 300 feet per second. Black powder weapons shot musketballs between 390 and 1,200fps. The body doesn't take more damage because the projectile moves faster.
So why do people thing a bullet has to deal 1 to 8.5 more damage per attack on average when using a comparable bow?
Because a lot of people insist on demanding "realism" in a game full of elves and goblins and freaking magic, and it's accurate real world science that even a medium caliber handgun does more damage than a longbow. The incredibly massive difference in velocity of the projectile more than makes up for the smaller mass and results in much greater force on impact. Additionally most bullets that aren't specifically designed to penetrate armor (modern armor, which is designed to stop bullets instead of swords and arrows) will rapidly deform and expand on impact because of that extremely forceful impact, even with soft flesh so the exit wound from a half inch wide musket ball will often create a baseball sized exit wound. And if the armor is made for deflecting swords and arrows the bullet will either penetrate and already be mushroomed out as it goes in or, best case for the target, all of that force still impacts on the armor as it flattens so it feels like they're getting kicked by multiple horses all at once.
Short answer, guns are &$%#ing deadly.
They also realistically deal a lot more damage than the mechanics of D&D 5e are designed to accommodate to if you're being "realistic" they throw off game balance by hitting disproportionately harder than anything else. So unless you want any characters wielding firearms to be intentionally extra deadly compared to literally everyone else you either nerf them to unrealistic proportionate damage so, for mechanical purposes, they're just reskinned crossbows or you just don't use them in your game.
This is absolutely incorrect. Force equals mass times velocity. That musket ball is made of lead, one of the heaviest naturally occurring substances in nature, and typically weighs at least as much if not more than a longbow arrow. It's heavier and going four times faster so it hits harder. Additionally it also is soft enough to expand as I mentioned above. Even if a bullet stays mostly intact, the force of impact is spread beyond the path of the projectile itself in waves just like the splash you get from throwing a rock into water. Bullets hit really hard.
For a visual example, skip to 6:40 in this video and watch the way the ballistic gel reacts when the musket bullet hits it. Then imagine the inside of a human body experiencing that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0AxKGRKY3g
There are multiple reasons that armies stopped using longbows and crossbows when even simple, inaccurate muskets that only fire maybe three times a minute could be mass produced. The main ones are the relatively simpler training required and the fact that a bunch of high power projectiles traveling in the general direction of an enemy formation will absolutely do more damage than multiple volleys of more precisely aimed arrows.
I could get into ballistics data, wound cavitation, and all that other Bullet Science junk, flex my brain muscles and explain why guns are dangerous. Nobody would care, though. That's not why people make guns deal more damage in D&D.
The reason is that people perceive guns as being more dangerous than blades/bludgeons/bows, and the only thing you can do inside typical 5e rules to make a weapon more dangerous is to give it a bigger damage die. So that's what they do.
Modern firearms especially, even discounting all that Bullet Science bunk nobody cares about, should have the trait "you can make twice the number of attacks with this weapon that you can with an ordinary weapon" because fire rate and rapid reloading are where their advantage comes in. That and reliability, but hey. A war archer that can get one aimed shot off every six seconds is a very good war archer - and no, videos of some trick shot [REDACTED] using a twenty pound draw child's bow at half draw to stick a bunch of lightweight arrows into targets ten meters away within frame on a camera shot does not 'prove' rapid archery. A war archer being able to say "I want this shortspear in that guy two hundred yards away and I don't particularly care about all the leather and chainmail in the way" once every six seconds would be horrifying in Ye Olden Tymes. Meanwhile I've seen quite a few people su7ccessfully pull off standardized drills in which they put eight rounds into a target in significantly fewer than six seconds with a modern handgun. It takes practice and training, certainly, and these are close-quarters drills, but they can do it.
However. Attack rate is a function of class, not a function of weapon, and so without delving into some seriously janky homebrew firearms will never work "correctly" in D&D. How the black-powder garbage in the DMG should work is that you can become proficient in it in, like...a week. Even if you have absolutely no martial training prior. Anybody can be proficient in Gun, but reloading a blackpowder firearm is 1d6+3 rounds of concentration during which you cannot move. A peasant village presenting a sudden wall of rifles to aggressors because somebody trained a New Model Militia would be quite the defensive surprise, but those peasants are not adventurers and never will be. They can simply defend their homes much more effectively than the average D&D Tragedy Farmer.
That isn't fun to play though, so instead people treat guns as exotic, difficult to master weapons that deal exceptional per-hit damage because that's simply more fun for the people who want to do it. That lets them be masters of a secret, forbidden weapon the masses barely even comprehend - or it lets them delve into some of the cool Old West archetypes that traditional D&D is super shit at letting people monkey with. 'Crossbowslinger' just doesn't have the same panache as gunslinger, ne?
Please do not contact or message me.
The way HP functions isn't entirely analogous to physical well-being, and more models a combination of factors that are otherwise hard to represent in a hard ruleset; willpower, morale, grit and determination, heroism, physical wellbeing, injury, action tropes in fiction, they're all rolled into HP which, because of the way we use them, are often misconstrued as just your character's health.
(An exercise to demonstrate this: Picture two combatants in melee with swords. What does a turn look like? What does a hit look like? What does a miss look like? What you should not be picturing is two guys taking turns stabbing each other in the gut, spouting blood like Monty Python's black knight, occasionally just missing wildly and swinging their swords in the opposite direction. What you're probably picturing is an epic sword duel where the combatants parry, dodge, block, graze, dive, feint, glance blows of the other's armor, gain/lose footing, with much gritting of teeth and determined looks passing between them. The second example would be impossible to model accurately without a system of rules as complicated as actual swordfighting technique, so the game relies on simplified language to make it work)
The increased "damage" firearms do over bows and crossbows is just meant to represent that increased efficiency and power in a system that uses HP to model those things.
Balance wise, if the reload and misfire properties are kept in like with the gunslinger subclass description I think it works. It can be interesting to have guns pack a bigger punch but come with drawbacks to balance it out. Just making them 'better bows' though without a downside is kind of lame balance wise.
Guns do have downside in the Forgotten Realms. They use “Smoke Powder” not gun powder. Smoke Powder is a magical item and is subject to dead magic zones and antimagic field spells.
Short answer: “bullet science bunk nobody cares about.” 😉
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Why? Because they're better weapons than what those savage natives have. And better weapons means more damage. The barbaric bow and arrow is no match for the thinking man's firearm!
Sarcasm aside, the idea of "hit points aren't meat points" actually supports guns hitting harder, I think. Let's say you could accurately break down HP into "energy left to dodge and parry points (EP)," "morale points (MP)," and "blood left in your body points (BP)." Well, you can't really dodge a gun, so a gun needs to be able to only target BP. Cool, cool. Say a sword does 5 to all 3, maybe a gun does 10 just to one. But that's not how it works. You have to hit them all, because HP doesn't differentiate. Thus, the gun simply does more damage. It has to, otherwise your ability to deflect and parry, or your will to fight, could protect you from the gun, and that's just uuuuuunrealistic.
Finally... Guns are cool. Especially if they're rare. Yeah, the logical thing would be to make them simple weapons whose damage rivals martial ones. But then they're not for expert weapon users, they're for noobs. That's not cool! My fighter wouldn't even be better with a gun than he is with a crossbow! You're really going to BrEaK tHe ImMeRsIoN just to add a thing that's not even cool?
A hole through your leg has a very high chance of hitting your femoral artery, which will kill you very quickly from blood loss. Contrary to decades of action movies, you really can't shoot someone in the arm or leg to safely wound them without risk of death.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Black powder muskets deal 1d12 damage. What are you talking about?
That is exactly as true for a war arrow as a musket ball. That's my point. Guns should add to your to hit, not your damage. Even if it's just their damage die to your to hit.
And Yurei has a great point about the rate of learning firearms.
The arrow stays in the wound plugging it up to help prevent blood loss. A bullet leaves a permanent tunnel behind it. It’s part of that “bullet science bunk nobody cares about” that Yurei and I mentioned earlier.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
And then there's the issue of a musket ball striking bone. One of the reason amputations were so common in the American Civil War was that if a musket ball hit a leg or arm bone, you now had a 4-6 inch segment where the bone no longer existed. It would just be pulverized by the impact.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Let's compare a Maul to any firearm. Best cast scenario for both. Point blank at a still target. A maul to the head, any part, any direction, the only head bones that remain are teeth, but they're over there. Compare that to anything other than a shot gun. Skull will remain.
The damage is extrapolated for HP. That's why a sledge hammer deals 7 (really 10) damage on average, and light hammer used by the same person deals 2.5 (really 5.5). As others have pointed out, HP isn't just about blood points. It's also luck and endurance. You aren't going to dodge a bullet any more than an arrow... which just leaves luck... and what guns come with rabbits feet?
Games need mechanics, and while a short bow dealing 1d6 and a longbow dealing 1d8 with the same arrow is bonkers, I get the whole, "it's a game" thing. That's why the designers made every weapon use one die, except for two which hsed the most common die x2... so why do guns do 2d4, 2d8, etc weird damage? 2d6 is fine. 1d12 is fine. Firearms can't do more than a sledge hammer to a body. Maybe a brick wall, but not a squishy body.
That’s irrelevant if the cavitation from the bullet has turned the brain inside the skull to soup.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Erokow. Trust me. Firearms, in real life, are vastly more dangerous than you're giving them credit for. The maul looks like it will do more damage. "Damage", in the sense of physical trauma to the body, is a function of kinetic energy. No human muscle ever born can match the kinetic potential of a powder charge. If someone offered you a terrible choice of 'take a maul to the face" or "take any combat-grade firearm shot to the face", you take the maul. You'll bend under the blow and have a much higher chance of surviving. I guarantee it. There's a reason that modern combatants favor firearms even in close quarters combat, if they can manage it.
Please do not contact or message me.
There are actual studies on this. To quote a key line: "Assault with firearms often led to fatality whereas with assault involving blunt weapons the survival rate was higher." In addition, blunt weapon homicides generally involve more than one strike, whereas it rarely takes more than one bullet to the head to be fatal. There are several reasons for this, but vastly higher energy is one of them.
In D&D terms, it's just a case of "firearms are better than primitive weapons, and we have to reflect that somehow; our choices are a bonus to hit and a bonus to damage".
There would likely be very large exit hole as well.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Maybe, it depends on the caliber. A .22 will probably just rattle around in there doing even more damage, a .45 will likely leave an exit wound the size of a grapefruit.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting