A bullet cost the same as 3 cows. Also, from Renaissance to modern the damage jumps a bit, I would say the damage between the two would be more similar but the range on the modern would be better
Modern weapons have significantly more penetrating power than Renaissance era muskets from all the advances in machining, metallurgy, and chemistry. If anything, the book might be underselling the damage differential.
A bullet cost the same as 3 cows. Also, from Renaissance to modern the damage jumps a bit, I would say the damage between the two would be more similar but the range on the modern would be better
Modern weapons have significantly more penetrating power than Renaissance era muskets from all the advances in machining, metallurgy, and chemistry. If anything, the book might be underselling the damage differential.
Eh, there's a lot of different variables that go into that.
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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.
A bullet cost the same as 3 cows. Also, from Renaissance to modern the damage jumps a bit, I would say the damage between the two would be more similar but the range on the modern would be better
Modern weapons have significantly more penetrating power than Renaissance era muskets from all the advances in machining, metallurgy, and chemistry. If anything, the book might be underselling the damage differential.
Eh, there's a lot of different variables that go into that.
It's not an absolute law of nature, no, but if we assume both the firearm lists represent the military standard models of the appropriate period, I believe the point stands.
In this case, Scylla is making firearms weirdly underpowered and overpriced, but Charybdis is making them render nearly every other weapon and most forms of armor outright irrelevant. Like Odysseus, Wizards chose Scylla. There's something to the fact that the inaccuracy of early firearms makes them a lot clumsier out of formation, and the changes in tactics brought about by the prevalence of magic in D&D makes formation a bad idea. But that's not really how they statted it, other than the limited range. So... from a gameplay perspective, guns are gonna be a showy but inefficient luxury item outside some specific applications.
Everything about them was hand made and individual to the gun. From the hand make small batch black powder to the ball mold made specifically for each gun. No two guns even from the same gun smith had the exact same bore so each gun came with its own ball mold. The guns were not rifled so they pretty much missed 80% of the time at 10 paces. This contributed to the gun duel, your bravery and thus honor was tested by just standing there and being shot at. 80% of the time you were missed and 80% of the time you were hit it did not kill or maim you.
Also fire arms had a real problem. Rain and water. In any wet condition you more than likely could not used a firearm. Thats why most gunners also carried a blade and shield. They were also very slow, very slow compared to any bow. Archers could fire 5 to 10 times faster, and had a better chance at hitting and a better range.
Guns didn't beat out bows until the mass produced cartridge was invented.
Heck long bows out penetrated guns pretty much until the cartridge was invented. Arrows can still out penetrate some thin ballistic vests better than bullets.
In my opinion adding guns in any form to D&D is a very complex thing to do. Well, at least to do in any realistic way. If you make them equal in power to a crossbow/hand crossbow just half as fast to load, I would accept them no problems.
Early firearms had issues, the match lock / hand cannon type had lots of accuracy/ range power issues, the large lead balls they fired were devastating to the target if hit. The main change to the firearms advancement was to the ease of loading and accuracy, flint/percussion style. With even the smooth bore muskets gaining accuracy that out passed bows at range. Also, moving to muskets the 54 cal ball was less damaging than the hand cannon shot but was more accurate and still destroy a limb if hit. More modern design firearms with self contained carriage reduces damage to target even more with smaller cal shot but drastically increased range and accuracy allowing shot placement to be a thing. So how you could target hart/ lungs of an animal at long range and expect to hit it instead of having to put a massive bullet that devastated the entire animal to kill it as with a muskets or early rifle damaging hide and meat.
But as to how hard it is to make a firearm in a DnD setting I would say it's probably trivial. With access to spells like fabricate and some proficiency in tools to make lock you could produce them with a precision and in quantities that would put to shame modern high precision cnc manufacturing. And remember the in our history,using basic blacksmithing technology's with out larg scale productions infrastructure, multiple nations were able to equip entire armys with accurate firearms .
So in my opinion the cost for firearms is okay, the ammunition cost is outrageously high ( probably cost on par or less than arrows since the mfg is so much simpler)the normal range is way to short, even a smooth musket could out shoot a crossbow/short bow accuracy ) and if you have a rifle the range is even more, damage could be slightly higher. The other issue I see is one shot per round (6s) firearms and crossbows have this issues. It should be multiple rounds to load and fire them, firearms have load power and ball then seat them, 1 round to load, 1 to seat, 1 to aim fire which is why historically people caried multiple firearms if the needed fast followup shots. Cross bow are in the same light, a cross bow of the era 5e is based in were 100s of lbs draw and needed mechanical tools to draw them which took time to use , hand an light crossbow probably should take a turn to load, heavy 2-3 to reload
Making a firearm with Fabricate has some issues. The first and most obvious point is that, as a 4th level spell, there's going to be a relatively small proportion of spellcasters who can use it in a typical setting, and the need to have tool proficiency/knowledge of how to create a complex object will drop that pool much further. And it's honestly debatable if the complex mechanisms are within the scope of Fabricate, and regardless you're spending a 4th level spell to produce a single firearm. And that ignores the production of the gunpowder, which is far outside the scope of Fabricate. If you want to write a setting where everyone is using magic to mass-produce firearms go for it, but the premise involves several assumptions about what is doable that a strict RAW reading of game features doesn't necessarily support.
The fabrication spell would be for the firearm itself or even just the barrels, the trigger and firing mechanism are simple clock work that any gnome could make level1 (tinkering). But based on the dmg ammo prices 10 bullets per 2lb and 3gp, lead should cost 1.5gp/ lb which is super high since steel is 1sp/ lb and the Renascence Weapons would be using a 0.95in bore, which is the size of a small cannon mounted used on ship rails not personal fired. With a more realistic 50-54cal you'd get about 30 bullets per lb not the 5 the dmg states. As to powder core books say 35gp/2lb ( very high priced) but with normal load for a 54cal would get 70 shot per lb or total cost per shot of about 30 copper( which is higher than it should)
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Modern weapons have significantly more penetrating power than Renaissance era muskets from all the advances in machining, metallurgy, and chemistry. If anything, the book might be underselling the damage differential.
Eh, there's a lot of different variables that go into that.
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.
It's not an absolute law of nature, no, but if we assume both the firearm lists represent the military standard models of the appropriate period, I believe the point stands.
Yeah, definitely true for military firearms.
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.
In this case, Scylla is making firearms weirdly underpowered and overpriced, but Charybdis is making them render nearly every other weapon and most forms of armor outright irrelevant. Like Odysseus, Wizards chose Scylla. There's something to the fact that the inaccuracy of early firearms makes them a lot clumsier out of formation, and the changes in tactics brought about by the prevalence of magic in D&D makes formation a bad idea. But that's not really how they statted it, other than the limited range. So... from a gameplay perspective, guns are gonna be a showy but inefficient luxury item outside some specific applications.
Medium humanoid (human), lawful neutral
Renascence fire arms were awful.
Everything about them was hand made and individual to the gun.
From the hand make small batch black powder to the ball mold made specifically for each gun. No two guns even from the same gun smith had the exact same bore so each gun came with its own ball mold.
The guns were not rifled so they pretty much missed 80% of the time at 10 paces. This contributed to the gun duel, your bravery and thus honor was tested by just standing there and being shot at. 80% of the time you were missed and 80% of the time you were hit it did not kill or maim you.
Also fire arms had a real problem. Rain and water. In any wet condition you more than likely could not used a firearm. Thats why most gunners also carried a blade and shield. They were also very slow, very slow compared to any bow. Archers could fire 5 to 10 times faster, and had a better chance at hitting and a better range.
Guns didn't beat out bows until the mass produced cartridge was invented.
Heck long bows out penetrated guns pretty much until the cartridge was invented. Arrows can still out penetrate some thin ballistic vests better than bullets.
In my opinion adding guns in any form to D&D is a very complex thing to do. Well, at least to do in any realistic way.
If you make them equal in power to a crossbow/hand crossbow just half as fast to load, I would accept them no problems.
Early firearms had issues, the match lock / hand cannon type had lots of accuracy/ range power issues, the large lead balls they fired were devastating to the target if hit. The main change to the firearms advancement was to the ease of loading and accuracy, flint/percussion style. With even the smooth bore muskets gaining accuracy that out passed bows at range. Also, moving to muskets the 54 cal ball was less damaging than the hand cannon shot but was more accurate and still destroy a limb if hit. More modern design firearms with self contained carriage reduces damage to target even more with smaller cal shot but drastically increased range and accuracy allowing shot placement to be a thing. So how you could target hart/ lungs of an animal at long range and expect to hit it instead of having to put a massive bullet that devastated the entire animal to kill it as with a muskets or early rifle damaging hide and meat.
But as to how hard it is to make a firearm in a DnD setting I would say it's probably trivial. With access to spells like fabricate and some proficiency in tools to make lock you could produce them with a precision and in quantities that would put to shame modern high precision cnc manufacturing. And remember the in our history,using basic blacksmithing technology's with out larg scale productions infrastructure, multiple nations were able to equip entire armys with accurate firearms .
So in my opinion the cost for firearms is okay, the ammunition cost is outrageously high ( probably cost on par or less than arrows since the mfg is so much simpler)the normal range is way to short, even a smooth musket could out shoot a crossbow/short bow accuracy ) and if you have a rifle the range is even more, damage could be slightly higher. The other issue I see is one shot per round (6s) firearms and crossbows have this issues. It should be multiple rounds to load and fire them, firearms have load power and ball then seat them, 1 round to load, 1 to seat, 1 to aim fire which is why historically people caried multiple firearms if the needed fast followup shots. Cross bow are in the same light, a cross bow of the era 5e is based in were 100s of lbs draw and needed mechanical tools to draw them which took time to use , hand an light crossbow probably should take a turn to load, heavy 2-3 to reload
Making a firearm with Fabricate has some issues. The first and most obvious point is that, as a 4th level spell, there's going to be a relatively small proportion of spellcasters who can use it in a typical setting, and the need to have tool proficiency/knowledge of how to create a complex object will drop that pool much further. And it's honestly debatable if the complex mechanisms are within the scope of Fabricate, and regardless you're spending a 4th level spell to produce a single firearm. And that ignores the production of the gunpowder, which is far outside the scope of Fabricate. If you want to write a setting where everyone is using magic to mass-produce firearms go for it, but the premise involves several assumptions about what is doable that a strict RAW reading of game features doesn't necessarily support.
The fabrication spell would be for the firearm itself or even just the barrels, the trigger and firing mechanism are simple clock work that any gnome could make level1 (tinkering). But based on the dmg ammo prices 10 bullets per 2lb and 3gp, lead should cost 1.5gp/ lb which is super high since steel is 1sp/ lb and the Renascence Weapons would be using a 0.95in bore, which is the size of a small cannon mounted used on ship rails not personal fired. With a more realistic 50-54cal you'd get about 30 bullets per lb not the 5 the dmg states. As to powder core books say 35gp/2lb ( very high priced) but with normal load for a 54cal would get 70 shot per lb or total cost per shot of about 30 copper( which is higher than it should)