Yeah the main part was “ modern” wasteland Wild West setting. Think Fallout New Vegas meets DnD in mid 1800s Southwestern United States. “ modern mostly in the sense of not mideveal but definitely 1800’s . So I gave a quickie rundown of firearms history for th3 1800`s.
Iron Kingdoms: Requiem is perfect if you want Steampunk.
The firearms may break easily the power balance. Let's imagine a D&D group within a shooter videogame, for example Fortnite: Battle Royal. In the real life do read about the battle of Bicoca in 1522. Today Bicoca in Spanish languange means an easy victory or success without much effort.
If there are firearms in the game, then some clases focused to hand-to-hand combat, like barbarians, monks or paladins could become obsoletes.
Or some players, and DMs, could create low-level magic countermeasures against firearms. For example a little piece of ectoplasm to block canons or water gunpowder, summoning swarms, illusory magic to create effects like smoke grenades or decoys. bulletproof summoned warriors from Walhalla sent by war deities to punish gunfighters,
* Other point is if artificer could create artificial muscles to reload crossbows.
Yes, the use of firearms, especially percussion, breach loading and or metal cartridge weapons radically changes the power balance against earlier weapons. This comes from 3 main factors: 1) breach loading weapons can generally match the speed of fire of bow negating this factor. 2) bullets carry far more energy and so have more “killing” power. An arrow and a .45 cal+ bullet have about the same mass but the bullet travels about 3-4 times faster giving it. 9-12 times the kinetic energy/killing power. This also allows the bullet to penetrate armor far more easily. 3) because of the speed the bullet has about 3=4 times the range of an arrow. Many early colts ( and Remingtons/S&Ws/ etc) had effective ranges of @ 100 yds (300 ft) while guns like the sharps rifle had effective (aimed fire) ranges of upto a mile.
And even if the firearms were slow to reload these could be by a simple squire. Or several guns could be ready before the combat.
And in a fantasy world several factions would felt menaced by the firearms: dragons, giants, feys, spellcasters. Firearms could be banned by the war deities.
Some DMs could use more bulletproof monsters like undeads, constructs, elementals, oozes(!?), fiends and plants.
Somewhat overstating the destructive power of firearms, particularly before the Industrial Revolution gets into full swing. Once the mass really starts to scale up, your basic musket or rifle is gonna hurt but isn’t gonna have much stopping power. Dragons and giants probably wouldn’t be particularly impressed by individual shots from anything you’d find someone carrying in the Old West, and practically speaking on the human scale the difference between taking an arrow or bolt and taking a bullet isn’t massive either. The big game changer was how much easier it was to train troops for massed range fire vs bows along with increasing the effective range. Fey and casters won’t like them, but on an individual basis you’re not really looking at a huge “No! This cannot be!” effect- most casters can still put out more damage in a turn than someone can with a firearm, and at approximately equal effective ranges, setting aside all the other options in a caster’s kit. Obviously the larger paradigms of the setting would inevitably change with the advent of gunpowder weaponry, but it’s only in the past century or so IRL that personal weaponry is really going to make fights against notable portions of the D&D roster skew far to the gun-user’s side.
Not really, granted that a dragon or giant is large enough ( and armored enough) that even large caliber weapons today might have trouble doing a ton of damage. An arrow has a mass of 200-400 grains and a speed 200-300 feet per second. A .45 caliber slug has a mass of around 300-400 grains as well. But it’s traveling at supersonic speeds ( welcome to the sonic boom/bang) - that’s 1125 ft/sec so roughly 3-4 times the speed. Kinetic energy is 1/2 mv^2. So mass is roughly the same but KE of the bullet is 3^2 to 4^2 or 9-16 times that of the arrow. At th3 start of the 100 years war the French wore mostly chainmail with occasional plate pieces. These were vulnerable to the bodkin points of English arrows hence the losses to the English early on. By the end the French metallurgy had improved and they ( the knights anyway) were wearing plate mail or full plate made of ( for the time) much better steel in thicker pieces that the bodkins had real trouble penetrating. Muskets are need easier to train raw recruits to use (a major point in their favor) but they are also far superior at penetrating thin steel plates. Hunting arrows have blades and barbs to do additional damage and hold the arrow in the body. But are useless against armor. The bodkin is designed to pierce armor so it’s thin and pointy, it goes in easily but can be pulled out fairly easily to. Arrows do damage on their path but not much around that path so you have to hit a vital organ for a quick kill. Lead is soft and deforms easily so when it hits it tends to mushroom/squash to about 3 times the initial size so that .45 slug blasts a 1.5 inch path thru the body. In addition its shock blast path is about 3 times that of the bullet path so everything within about 4-5 inches of the path gets hit with the shock wave. This is why bullets go in the size of a finger and come out the size of a fist. That shockwave may not destroy organs but it’s certainly going to bruise or damage them. These fairly massive wounds are why militaries agreed to go to full metal jackets on the lead - not nay reduce lead fouling but a fully jacketed slug does much like the arrow- it comes out basically the same size it goes in. The shock path is correspondingly small as well. if anything the damage values I suggested above are low. Still there is room for all sorts of damage description as you can get shot with guns multiple times and not be killed as long as the bullet doesn’t hit major organs or large bones. Emmet dalton recieved 23 bullet wounds in the Coffeyville raid and survived. As for armor, plate armor was typically 1-3 mm thick, by comparison the armor on a Bradley AFV is 1 inch/25 mm thick and modern .50 cal ammo will penetrate it. Welcome to why armor went out as firearms came in. Still there are enough stories of cast iron/steel plow shares etc stopping pistol bullets that armor might have some use especially the scales of a dragon or the thicker armours a giant would wear.
A Wild West setting would see firearms that still use gunpowder instead of nitrocellulose. That means lower-velocity bullets with correspondingly less penetration ability. Even with the most powerful rifles available in the day, hunting big game animals like grizzly bears, buffalo, elephants, or hippos was very dangerous because the low velocity slugs did not penetrate the animals' thick hides or heavy bones well. Against D&D monsters that are considerably better-armored than any modern real animals, firearms would be even less effective.
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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.
Simple question - did the gun make a bang? If it did then the bullet was traveling at or above 1100 ft/sec sonic/supersonic) and the values I’ve listed apply. Modern handguns still mostly have bullets that travel between 1100 and 1500 ft/sec because the recoil is uncontrollable if the forces are any higher. Long guns today typically have bullet velocities between 2000-3000 ft/sec so yes they do have even more stopping power. Even black powder days there were guns designed and used for the largest and most dangerous game ( elephant and tiger guns) and yes they were larger caliber with heavier bullets and much larger powder charges. The standard colt pistol powder charge was 25-40 grains of black powder, the sharps buffalo rifle was typically either .45 -70 or .45-90 meaning a .45 caliber slug pushed by either 70 or 90 grains of black powder. Capable of stopping a bison At over 200 yds at under 100 it could stop even an elephant as long you weren’t trying a head shot from straight on. Such a gun would blast a hole through typical plate armor, and even most dragon hides and giant armors. You might need several shots for a dragon. I once read a cute short story about a mountain man that dealt with a dragon by shooting it with a similar gun with the bullet contains a mix of narcotics and hallucinogens. And yes it was a western mountain man dealing with fantasy creatures.
Simple question - did the gun make a bang? If it did then the bullet was traveling at or above 1100 ft/sec sonic/supersonic) and the values I’ve listed apply.
Not entirely correct. The "bang" comes from the ignition of the gunpowder as well. Bullets propelled by black powder are subsonic.
Modern handguns still mostly have bullets that travel between 1100 and 1500 ft/sec because the recoil is uncontrollable if the forces are any higher. Long guns today typically have bullet velocities between 2000-3000 ft/sec so yes they do have even more stopping power. Even black powder days there were guns designed and used for the largest and most dangerous game ( elephant and tiger guns) and yes they were larger caliber with heavier bullets and much larger powder charges. The standard colt pistol powder charge was 25-40 grains of black powder, the sharps buffalo rifle was typically either .45 -70 or .45-90 meaning a .45 caliber slug pushed by either 70 or 90 grains of black powder. Capable of stopping a bison At over 200 yds at under 100 it could stop even an elephant as long you weren’t trying a head shot from straight on. Such a gun would blast a hole through typical plate armor, and even most dragon hides and giant armors. You might need several shots for a dragon. I once read a cute short story about a mountain man that dealt with a dragon by shooting it with a similar gun with the bullet contains a mix of narcotics and hallucinogens. And yes it was a western mountain man dealing with fantasy creatures.
Yeah, Mad Amos Malone. Though if you remember the story, you should remember that not even his .50 caliber Sharps Buffalo Rifle was sufficient to actually kill the dragon, the hallucinogenic mixture in the bullet just sent it on a mushroom samba and by the time it sobered out it decided that it wasn't worth coming back to Colorado for. The Sharps also wasn't sufficient to kill the super-sized bear he faced in another story, either.
As to your other point, you can also bring down an elephant or buffalo with a single arrow if you hit it with a precise shot using a powerful-enough bow and the right kind of arrowhead. That's because the real world doesn't operate on hit points. For D&D, there's no need to give guns such a serious damage advantage.
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.
When match locks were first introduced in war the armored solder was common. And the lead ball used at the time often penetrated the breast plate.
The lucky solder was given a second breast plate that was hardened and shaped to deflect the ball off to the side. It worked quite well, for shots from the front. It was often just hung over the original breast plate. For the cheap rulers they used them without the original armor. Just cloth under it.
The extra breast plate was peaked down the middle vertically. It stuck out about 6 to 8 inches in the middle. I think they were called a Cuiriass.
Yes black powder can be loaded to be subsonic but of that bang is shock wave. never saw the bear story but yes he wasn’t trying to kill the dragon with a single shot. On the other hand, if you look back at my suggested DnD damages they aren’t exactly. 9-16X that of an arrow either.
Yes black powder can be loaded to be subsonic but of that bang is shock wave.
Yeah, the shockwave of the powder itself burning. If you've never heard a musket fired empty but with a full powder load (instead of the reduced load that most historical reenactments use so as to avoid hearing damage to the actors), I assure you that it's quite loud. But regardless, a gun should not be a one-shot kill on a D&D monster any more than an arrow, sword, or axe is.
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.
Yes, the use of firearms, especially percussion, breach loading and or metal cartridge weapons radically changes the power balance against earlier weapons. This comes from 3 main factors: 1) breach loading weapons can generally match the speed of fire of bow negating this factor. 2) bullets carry far more energy and so have more “killing” power. An arrow and a .45 cal+ bullet have about the same mass but the bullet travels about 3-4 times faster giving it. 9-12 times the kinetic energy/killing power. This also allows the bullet to penetrate armor far more easily. 3) because of the speed the bullet has about 3=4 times the range of an arrow. Many early colts ( and Remingtons/S&Ws/ etc) had effective ranges of @ 100 yds (300 ft) while guns like the sharps rifle had effective (aimed fire) ranges of upto a mile.
It's ... not really about that. Arrows kill people just fine - you don't get any more dead from a bullet.
I mean, I am certainly not an expert, but this is wildly off from anything I've heard. Muskets were adopted, not because they were in any way better weapons, or more dangerous, but simply because you could stick one in the hand of an untrained conscript, and he'd have a decent chance of shooting an enemy, vs basically no chance for the same situation with a bow.
... is what I heard.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Initially it wasn’t , but initially we are talking about muzzle loading single fire short range weapons too. A longbowman could, after years of training, fire 12+ arrows a minute or 3-6 highly aimed arrows over a 100 yd + range and unarmed volley fire out to between 300-600 yds. Penetrating chainmail fairly easily.. a musketeers could be trained in a matter of weeks to load and fire 3-4 rounds a minute with an “accurate range of 50-75 yds but volley fire would penetrate even plate armor out to around 100-150 yds. Put 4 rows of musketeers men doing a slow retreat. Or advance firing row by row and you did the same damage to a charging wall of knights ( or infantry). The penetrating power rendered armor useless and the ability to use “peasant” labor made the bowman and his years of training obsolete.
The issue with generalizing what firearms did to armor to their impact on the entire scope of D&D is we’re talking about at least three different things- what bullets do to sheets of metal whose thickness is measured in millimeters, what bullets do to a house sized magical creature with scales whose thickness is measured with centimeters, and what bullets do to a magical creature whose body is sturdy enough to support human proportions at 20 ft tall. Even allowing for specialized “big game” guns and ammo- which really isn’t covered by 5e- there’s countervailing factors if we’re breaking things down by real world mechanics.
All generalizations have issues because of the range of details that have to be left out. That said your three factors are also problematic for regular DnD weapons, perhaps even more so than they are for bullets. A man that can barely cut or stab through a few millimeters of sheet steel is, realistically, going to find that stabbing or slicing through a Dragon’s skin and scales or a giant’s denser stronger flesh ( and 10s of millimeters of armor) is basically impossible - but we do it with some regularity in the game. Bullets should, generally, do as much or somewhat more damage than arrows and larger bullets should do more damage than smaller bullets.
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Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
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In the mid 1800;s
oops
Yeah the main part was “ modern” wasteland Wild West setting. Think Fallout New Vegas meets DnD in mid 1800s Southwestern United States. “ modern mostly in the sense of not mideveal but definitely 1800’s . So I gave a quickie rundown of firearms history for th3 1800`s.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Iron Kingdoms: Requiem is perfect if you want Steampunk.
The firearms may break easily the power balance. Let's imagine a D&D group within a shooter videogame, for example Fortnite: Battle Royal. In the real life do read about the battle of Bicoca in 1522. Today Bicoca in Spanish languange means an easy victory or success without much effort.
If there are firearms in the game, then some clases focused to hand-to-hand combat, like barbarians, monks or paladins could become obsoletes.
Or some players, and DMs, could create low-level magic countermeasures against firearms. For example a little piece of ectoplasm to block canons or water gunpowder, summoning swarms, illusory magic to create effects like smoke grenades or decoys. bulletproof summoned warriors from Walhalla sent by war deities to punish gunfighters,
* Other point is if artificer could create artificial muscles to reload crossbows.
Yes, the use of firearms, especially percussion, breach loading and or metal cartridge weapons radically changes the power balance against earlier weapons. This comes from 3 main factors:
1) breach loading weapons can generally match the speed of fire of bow negating this factor.
2) bullets carry far more energy and so have more “killing” power. An arrow and a .45 cal+ bullet have about the same mass but the bullet travels about 3-4 times faster giving it. 9-12 times the kinetic energy/killing power. This also allows the bullet to penetrate armor far more easily.
3) because of the speed the bullet has about 3=4 times the range of an arrow. Many early colts ( and Remingtons/S&Ws/ etc) had effective ranges of @ 100 yds (300 ft) while guns like the sharps rifle had effective (aimed fire) ranges of upto a mile.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
And even if the firearms were slow to reload these could be by a simple squire. Or several guns could be ready before the combat.
And in a fantasy world several factions would felt menaced by the firearms: dragons, giants, feys, spellcasters. Firearms could be banned by the war deities.
Some DMs could use more bulletproof monsters like undeads, constructs, elementals, oozes(!?), fiends and plants.
Somewhat overstating the destructive power of firearms, particularly before the Industrial Revolution gets into full swing. Once the mass really starts to scale up, your basic musket or rifle is gonna hurt but isn’t gonna have much stopping power. Dragons and giants probably wouldn’t be particularly impressed by individual shots from anything you’d find someone carrying in the Old West, and practically speaking on the human scale the difference between taking an arrow or bolt and taking a bullet isn’t massive either. The big game changer was how much easier it was to train troops for massed range fire vs bows along with increasing the effective range. Fey and casters won’t like them, but on an individual basis you’re not really looking at a huge “No! This cannot be!” effect- most casters can still put out more damage in a turn than someone can with a firearm, and at approximately equal effective ranges, setting aside all the other options in a caster’s kit. Obviously the larger paradigms of the setting would inevitably change with the advent of gunpowder weaponry, but it’s only in the past century or so IRL that personal weaponry is really going to make fights against notable portions of the D&D roster skew far to the gun-user’s side.
Not really, granted that a dragon or giant is large enough ( and armored enough) that even large caliber weapons today might have trouble doing a ton of damage. An arrow has a mass of 200-400 grains and a speed 200-300 feet per second. A .45 caliber slug has a mass of around 300-400 grains as well. But it’s traveling at supersonic speeds ( welcome to the sonic boom/bang) - that’s 1125 ft/sec so roughly 3-4 times the speed. Kinetic energy is 1/2 mv^2. So mass is roughly the same but KE of the bullet is 3^2 to 4^2 or 9-16 times that of the arrow. At th3 start of the 100 years war the French wore mostly chainmail with occasional plate pieces. These were vulnerable to the bodkin points of English arrows hence the losses to the English early on. By the end the French metallurgy had improved and they ( the knights anyway) were wearing plate mail or full plate made of ( for the time) much better steel in thicker pieces that the bodkins had real trouble penetrating. Muskets are need easier to train raw recruits to use (a major point in their favor) but they are also far superior at penetrating thin steel plates. Hunting arrows have blades and barbs to do additional damage and hold the arrow in the body. But are useless against armor. The bodkin is designed to pierce armor so it’s thin and pointy, it goes in easily but can be pulled out fairly easily to. Arrows do damage on their path but not much around that path so you have to hit a vital organ for a quick kill. Lead is soft and deforms easily so when it hits it tends to mushroom/squash to about 3 times the initial size so that .45 slug blasts a 1.5 inch path thru the body. In addition its shock blast path is about 3 times that of the bullet path so everything within about 4-5 inches of the path gets hit with the shock wave. This is why bullets go in the size of a finger and come out the size of a fist. That shockwave may not destroy organs but it’s certainly going to bruise or damage them. These fairly massive wounds are why militaries agreed to go to full metal jackets on the lead - not nay reduce lead fouling but a fully jacketed slug does much like the arrow- it comes out basically the same size it goes in. The shock path is correspondingly small as well.
if anything the damage values I suggested above are low. Still there is room for all sorts of damage description as you can get shot with guns multiple times and not be killed as long as the bullet doesn’t hit major organs or large bones. Emmet dalton recieved 23 bullet wounds in the Coffeyville raid and survived. As for armor, plate armor was typically 1-3 mm thick, by comparison the armor on a Bradley AFV is 1 inch/25 mm thick and modern .50 cal ammo will penetrate it. Welcome to why armor went out as firearms came in. Still there are enough stories of cast iron/steel plow shares etc stopping pistol bullets that armor might have some use especially the scales of a dragon or the thicker armours a giant would wear.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
A Wild West setting would see firearms that still use gunpowder instead of nitrocellulose. That means lower-velocity bullets with correspondingly less penetration ability. Even with the most powerful rifles available in the day, hunting big game animals like grizzly bears, buffalo, elephants, or hippos was very dangerous because the low velocity slugs did not penetrate the animals' thick hides or heavy bones well. Against D&D monsters that are considerably better-armored than any modern real animals, firearms would be even less effective.
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.
Simple question - did the gun make a bang? If it did then the bullet was traveling at or above 1100 ft/sec sonic/supersonic) and the values I’ve listed apply. Modern handguns still mostly have bullets that travel between 1100 and 1500 ft/sec because the recoil is uncontrollable if the forces are any higher. Long guns today typically have bullet velocities between 2000-3000 ft/sec so yes they do have even more stopping power. Even black powder days there were guns designed and used for the largest and most dangerous game ( elephant and tiger guns) and yes they were larger caliber with heavier bullets and much larger powder charges. The standard colt pistol powder charge was 25-40 grains of black powder, the sharps buffalo rifle was typically either .45 -70 or .45-90 meaning a .45 caliber slug pushed by either 70 or 90 grains of black powder. Capable of stopping a bison At over 200 yds at under 100 it could stop even an elephant as long you weren’t trying a head shot from straight on. Such a gun would blast a hole through typical plate armor, and even most dragon hides and giant armors. You might need several shots for a dragon. I once read a cute short story about a mountain man that dealt with a dragon by shooting it with a similar gun with the bullet contains a mix of narcotics and hallucinogens. And yes it was a western mountain man dealing with fantasy creatures.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Not entirely correct. The "bang" comes from the ignition of the gunpowder as well. Bullets propelled by black powder are subsonic.
Yeah, Mad Amos Malone. Though if you remember the story, you should remember that not even his .50 caliber Sharps Buffalo Rifle was sufficient to actually kill the dragon, the hallucinogenic mixture in the bullet just sent it on a mushroom samba and by the time it sobered out it decided that it wasn't worth coming back to Colorado for. The Sharps also wasn't sufficient to kill the super-sized bear he faced in another story, either.
As to your other point, you can also bring down an elephant or buffalo with a single arrow if you hit it with a precise shot using a powerful-enough bow and the right kind of arrowhead. That's because the real world doesn't operate on hit points. For D&D, there's no need to give guns such a serious damage advantage.
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.
When match locks were first introduced in war the armored solder was common. And the lead ball used at the time often penetrated the breast plate.
The lucky solder was given a second breast plate that was hardened and shaped to deflect the ball off to the side. It worked quite well, for shots from the front. It was often just hung over the original breast plate. For the cheap rulers they used them without the original armor. Just cloth under it.
The extra breast plate was peaked down the middle vertically. It stuck out about 6 to 8 inches in the middle. I think they were called a Cuiriass.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/78/ee/9478ee0ef5661a8a84787d5f75c3f9ad.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/77/85/4a/77854af5ce534e2e0e38544b0b20ed4d.jpg
https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/17256/17425691_1.jpg?v=8D098C45DF21C80
https://i.etsystatic.com/14134862/r/il/8be0cf/1214714841/il_1588xN.1214714841_ff4g.jpg
Yes black powder can be loaded to be subsonic but of that bang is shock wave.
never saw the bear story but yes he wasn’t trying to kill the dragon with a single shot. On the other hand, if you look back at my suggested DnD damages they aren’t exactly. 9-16X that of an arrow either.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Yeah, the shockwave of the powder itself burning. If you've never heard a musket fired empty but with a full powder load (instead of the reduced load that most historical reenactments use so as to avoid hearing damage to the actors), I assure you that it's quite loud. But regardless, a gun should not be a one-shot kill on a D&D monster any more than an arrow, sword, or axe is.
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.
On that we are agreed.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
It's ... not really about that. Arrows kill people just fine - you don't get any more dead from a bullet.
I mean, I am certainly not an expert, but this is wildly off from anything I've heard. Muskets were adopted, not because they were in any way better weapons, or more dangerous, but simply because you could stick one in the hand of an untrained conscript, and he'd have a decent chance of shooting an enemy, vs basically no chance for the same situation with a bow.
... is what I heard.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Initially it wasn’t , but initially we are talking about muzzle loading single fire short range weapons too. A longbowman could, after years of training, fire 12+ arrows a minute or 3-6 highly aimed arrows over a 100 yd + range and unarmed volley fire out to between 300-600 yds. Penetrating chainmail fairly easily.. a musketeers could be trained in a matter of weeks to load and fire 3-4 rounds a minute with an “accurate range of 50-75 yds but volley fire would penetrate even plate armor out to around 100-150 yds. Put 4 rows of musketeers men doing a slow retreat. Or advance firing row by row and you did the same damage to a charging wall of knights ( or infantry). The penetrating power rendered armor useless and the ability to use “peasant” labor made the bowman and his years of training obsolete.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
The issue with generalizing what firearms did to armor to their impact on the entire scope of D&D is we’re talking about at least three different things- what bullets do to sheets of metal whose thickness is measured in millimeters, what bullets do to a house sized magical creature with scales whose thickness is measured with centimeters, and what bullets do to a magical creature whose body is sturdy enough to support human proportions at 20 ft tall. Even allowing for specialized “big game” guns and ammo- which really isn’t covered by 5e- there’s countervailing factors if we’re breaking things down by real world mechanics.
Add in canon and things get a little more tricky.
Solid shot, chain shot and canister shot. Three different damage types, potentially.
All generalizations have issues because of the range of details that have to be left out. That said your three factors are also problematic for regular DnD weapons, perhaps even more so than they are for bullets. A man that can barely cut or stab through a few millimeters of sheet steel is, realistically, going to find that stabbing or slicing through a Dragon’s skin and scales or a giant’s denser stronger flesh ( and 10s of millimeters of armor) is basically impossible - but we do it with some regularity in the game. Bullets should, generally, do as much or somewhat more damage than arrows and larger bullets should do more damage than smaller bullets.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.