With the partnered content adding another gunpowder class to what we've already got (i.e. CR's gunslinger class and the pseudo-firearms artificier,) I figured I'd take a moment to reflect on RL weapons history and how they relate to gameplay.
Believe it or not, the original use of gunpowder in China was as an anti-personnel weapon. Rockets strapped to javelins were launched en mass, they couldn't be aimed (no to hit roll) and where they hit was largely unpredictable. When the Koreans came out with the Hwacha, (the original rocket launcher,) they were slightly less likely to hit their own troops.
Eventually, come the late middle ages, Europeans figured out how to make gunpowder. These early weapons like the aquebussier and the early renaissance musket made a lot of noise and smoke ("the fog of war") but rarely hit single targets (attack roll at 3d20 disadvantage), which led to large groups of firearms being used together with the thought that if you put enough lead into the air, you'll hit SOMETHING. This gunpowder tactic would persist until the mid 20th century.
Around the time that buccaneers and the American colonies came along, we had developed flintlocks and the first true rifles. Both of these 1700s firearms could be reloaded in only a minute! (9 rounds to reload). There was a reason pirates wore a brace of pistols.
The Flintlock was only slightly more accurate than the musket, (attack at standard disadvantage at range greater than 15'). The cutting of grooves inside the barrel, i.e. "rifling," was discovered to keep the ball on target-hence the first rifles (normal ranged attack) and snipers were invented (bow or sling "snipers" were called ambushers, because they shot from the bush.) these weapons, in spite of their speed in reloading still had a delay between when the trigger was pulled and the volley discharged. In game terms this would relate to enabling a reaction to any target with a moderate passive perception before the attack roll is made.
By the early 1800s the delay caused by the flash pan had been eliminated and the first cartridge rounds; prepackaged gunpowder and the minneball came into use, cutting the reload time in half. (4 rounds to reload.)
By the 1860s the first firearms that could be fired multiple times before reloading started coming into use. 1880 saw cowboys and widespread use of the revolver, and the first instances of smokeless powder. (Any gunpowder usage from a previous era should be treated as a fog cloud .) repeaters & 6-shooters fell prey to jams and misfires, though misfired were less common than earlier firearms due to standardized ammunition.
Automatic pistols, semi and fully automatic weapons didn't come into popular use until the 1st world war. Modern firearms have more in common with WWI firearms than anything previous, though they are lighter and have a wide range of special options that earlier weapons lacked, like silencers, flash supressors and laser sighting (3d20 advantage attack.)
Shotguns have seen a parallel development. From the blunderbus in the 1600s to the modern AA12, these weapons were originally designed to fire a large number of projectiles at the same time in an area effect cone. The difference among buck, bird and snake shot is the size of the projectiles, while the choke of the bore determines how wide the area of effect. e.g. An open choke or "sawed-off" shotgun has the widest (90 degree+) cone at a cost of decreased range. In game terms the easiest way to realistically treat the damage from these weapons is as if they cast conjure volley or conjure barrage . I prefer to roll the total damage applying the highest dice to the closest targets and the lowest to the farthest.
Shotguns can also shoot slugs, which are really just really big bullets. When characters use slugs, treat the weapon as a rifle with decreased range (unless the weapon is using the AA12's futuristic mini-missile round.)
Please feel free to comment or correct me where i am in error.
There's nothing obviously wrong with what you're saying, but too much realism makes the game less fun. The current set of firearms in 5e are balanced for use every round. One could allow a character a more powerful weapon that takes a minute to reload, but that's really more like a spell than a weapon, and could end up unbalanced in the multi-gun pirate scenario you mention. With the current damage scales, a rifle that takes a minute to reload is worthless.
If I were to change firearms in any way, I might consider some interaction with armor, as firearms were mainly useful for taking down slow, heavily armored enemies that could be hard to crack with bows and swords. Unfortunately, I don't know how I would implement this rule, as advantage is too powerful, and flat bonuses are counter to the 5e ethos.
I think you're right on about using conjure barrage (for direct fire) and conjure volley (for indirect) to simplify things. Large volleys associated with continental warfare are really more setting pieces and hazards than attacks. If players are trying to accomplish something while two armies are firing at each other, I would resolve the situation as a series of traps (or lair actions for a commander) and leave the rest to environmental factors--think difficult terrain/blast craters, concealment, etc. I'm reminded of the trailer and battle sequence for Assassin's Creed 3, where the main character passes directly through a series of British redcoat volleys by exploiting cover and the timing of enemy attack patterns.
One could also adapt mass combat rules from, say, the 3.5e Heroes of Battle supplement, which provides for volley rules, which allow a DM to easily substitute area attacks for multiple single attacks, ie every ten soldiers create a 10 ft. square effect or something like that.
Whenever I think about this topic and introducing firearms I am always reminded of a line from the TV series "Sharpe" which is set during the Nepoleonic Wars. In it Sharpe is drilling his men and says that the French can fire 3 rounds a minute so that is what they should aim for, so one shot every 20 seconds on average....makes D&D firearms of multiple shots every 6 seconds sound positively machine gun like.
A large part of that is due to D&D's long history of sliding back and forth between realism and ease of gameplay when it comes to weapons like crossbows and firearms. Having a musket that you shot and then spent three rounds reloading wouldn't be terribly fun.
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.
A large part of that is due to D&D's long history of sliding back and forth between realism and ease of gameplay when it comes to weapons like crossbows and firearms. Having a musket that you shot and then spent three rounds reloading wouldn't be terribly fun.
My action this round? Ill tamp down the powder I poured in my rifle last round...
You left out 'rifling' which was made the Minié ball work. It gave a huge increase in accuracy and range. Muskets could hit something at 100 meters, rifle+ Minie ball could hit at 200-250 meters. Which only really became important if you used smokeless powder, otherwise you could not see 10 meters in front of you after you fired your first shot.
You did not mention any of the more modern stuff, such as the less-lethal ammo (shotguns can fire a taser bullet, bean bags, rubber bullets, pepper balls, etc), not to mention the stranger stuff such as the Dragon's Breath, or the Fully Automatic Shotgun
You left out 'rifling' which was made the Minié ball work. It gave a huge increase in accuracy and range. Muskets could hit something at 100 meters, rifle+ Minie ball could hit at 200-250 meters. Which only really became important if you used smokeless powder, otherwise you could not see 10 meters in front of you after you fired your first shot.
You did not mention any of the more modern stuff, such as the less-lethal ammo (shotguns can fire a taser bullet, bean bags, rubber bullets, pepper balls, etc), not to mention the stranger stuff such as the Dragon's Breath, or the Fully Automatic Shotgun
I did mention rifling, the first rifled barrels predated the American revolution. This was one of the major reasons that Rodger's Rangers were so effective in that conflict; they had rifles instead of muskets.
The Minne' ball (not really a ball, the first modern bullet) saw widespread use durring the war of northern aggression. Smokeless powder (American term for cordite or white powder) wasn't invented till 1884, almost 20 years after that conflict. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Marie_Eugène_Vieille
Automatic shotguns I did mention. The AA12 is a devastating weapon at the peak of firearms technology. There are lots of vids of it on YouTube, check it out & be amazed. Earlier fully auto shotguns like the USAS suffered terribly from auto-fire induced barrel lift, resulting in the 3rd and subsequent rounds in a burst being wasted. The AA12 also has solved the problem of kickback. While a normal 10 guage chambered for magnum loads can knock you on your backside when you fire it, the AA12 has less kick than just about any firearm.
I did fail to mention exotic ammo, (except for the mini-missile round.) dragonfire or "Dragon's Breath" (TM) rounds effectively let you use your weapon to cast Dragon's Breath (original copyright by me, 1993 Re:Quests magazine). Other exotic rounds include flechette (range bonus) & breaching rounds ( Knock .)
Tracers also act like guiding bolt, no? I ask because I know next to nothing about guns.
Hm, not really, but the do help to zone in on your target. I'd say the person using tracers would give that person advantage after the first round as long as they kept firing at the same target.
Where to start. First of all, a lot of what you've said are over-simplifications and many of the dates are simply wrong. Flintlocks were a type of musket and it was developed in the early 1600s. Or rather, "flintlock" describes what kind of lock, or firing mechanism used. The Minni ball wasn't around until the 1840s, prepackaged powder came around a lot earlier than that. The delay between pulling of the trigger and the shot being fired would not be enough for a person to be able to react to the shot "before the attack role is made".
You can, with a bit of training, easily reload a musket in under a minute. Rifled muskets were actually often slower to reload due to the fact that you had to have a tight fighting ball for the groves to catch on to. British riflemen during the Napoleonic wars actually had a mallet to ram the ramrod all the way. Using a sling from a bush would probably also be, let's call it 'problematic'.
The range on which to get disadvantage in your example is ridiculously short. 15 feet is the size of a living room. Muskets were accurate on ranges way above that. But then again, all ranges of ranged weapons in D&D are rather short. Weapons that could be fired multiple times, from simply double-barreled pistols and muskets to semi-automatic air rifles, were around long before the 1880s.
Semi-automatics pistols were around in the late 1890s. Churchill credits his 1896 Mauser Broomhandle with saving his life at the Battle of Omdurman, for example. Automatic machineguns in the form of Gatling guns were around from the 1860s. The Maxim machine gun was invented in 1884.
That said, I do like the idea of blackpowder weapons obscuring vision. Although the smoke from only a handful of shots wouldn't be enough to obscure vision for any amount of time, a few round tops in an outdoors enviroment. And as Heartofjuyomk2 mentioned, too much realism in the game usually means less fun. It's hard to balance realistic firearms in a game meant for fireballs and magic swords.
The delay between pulling of the trigger and the shot being fired would not be enough for a person to be able to react to the shot "before the attack role is made".
I defer to greater knowledge on all points but this one. It's exactly the reason the percussion cap was invented.
The delay between pulling of the trigger and the shot being fired would not be enough for a person to be able to react to the shot "before the attack role is made".
I defer to greater knowledge on all points but this one. It's exactly the reason the percussion cap was invented.
No, not really. There were many reasons for the percussion cap. Reliability, especially under foul weather was probably the main one. "Minimizing the delay between pulling the trigger and the gun going bang so that the enemy can't Matrix-dodge out of the way" was not one of them.
I think the easiest way to do it would be to change the attack into an effect that targets one square, half damage on a dex save. As an alternative, keep it as an attack, but have it deal some damage even on a miss. For fully automatic big guns, make it a cone.
I don't think a burst fire is enough to be an area-effect. Full auto, definitely, but burst should just be a choice between a bonus to hit or a bonus to damage.
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.
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With the partnered content adding another gunpowder class to what we've already got (i.e. CR's gunslinger class and the pseudo-firearms artificier,) I figured I'd take a moment to reflect on RL weapons history and how they relate to gameplay.
Believe it or not, the original use of gunpowder in China was as an anti-personnel weapon. Rockets strapped to javelins were launched en mass, they couldn't be aimed (no to hit roll) and where they hit was largely unpredictable. When the Koreans came out with the Hwacha, (the original rocket launcher,) they were slightly less likely to hit their own troops.
Eventually, come the late middle ages, Europeans figured out how to make gunpowder. These early weapons like the aquebussier and the early renaissance musket made a lot of noise and smoke ("the fog of war") but rarely hit single targets (attack roll at 3d20 disadvantage), which led to large groups of firearms being used together with the thought that if you put enough lead into the air, you'll hit SOMETHING. This gunpowder tactic would persist until the mid 20th century.
Around the time that buccaneers and the American colonies came along, we had developed flintlocks and the first true rifles. Both of these 1700s firearms could be reloaded in only a minute! (9 rounds to reload). There was a reason pirates wore a brace of pistols.
The Flintlock was only slightly more accurate than the musket, (attack at standard disadvantage at range greater than 15'). The cutting of grooves inside the barrel, i.e. "rifling," was discovered to keep the ball on target-hence the first rifles (normal ranged attack) and snipers were invented (bow or sling "snipers" were called ambushers, because they shot from the bush.) these weapons, in spite of their speed in reloading still had a delay between when the trigger was pulled and the volley discharged. In game terms this would relate to enabling a reaction to any target with a moderate passive perception before the attack roll is made.
By the early 1800s the delay caused by the flash pan had been eliminated and the first cartridge rounds; prepackaged gunpowder and the minneball came into use, cutting the reload time in half. (4 rounds to reload.)
By the 1860s the first firearms that could be fired multiple times before reloading started coming into use. 1880 saw cowboys and widespread use of the revolver, and the first instances of smokeless powder. (Any gunpowder usage from a previous era should be treated as a fog cloud .) repeaters & 6-shooters fell prey to jams and misfires, though misfired were less common than earlier firearms due to standardized ammunition.
Automatic pistols, semi and fully automatic weapons didn't come into popular use until the 1st world war. Modern firearms have more in common with WWI firearms than anything previous, though they are lighter and have a wide range of special options that earlier weapons lacked, like silencers, flash supressors and laser sighting (3d20 advantage attack.)
Shotguns have seen a parallel development. From the blunderbus in the 1600s to the modern AA12, these weapons were originally designed to fire a large number of projectiles at the same time in an area effect cone. The difference among buck, bird and snake shot is the size of the projectiles, while the choke of the bore determines how wide the area of effect. e.g. An open choke or "sawed-off" shotgun has the widest (90 degree+) cone at a cost of decreased range. In game terms the easiest way to realistically treat the damage from these weapons is as if they cast conjure volley or conjure barrage . I prefer to roll the total damage applying the highest dice to the closest targets and the lowest to the farthest.
Shotguns can also shoot slugs, which are really just really big bullets. When characters use slugs, treat the weapon as a rifle with decreased range (unless the weapon is using the AA12's futuristic mini-missile round.)
Please feel free to comment or correct me where i am in error.
There's nothing obviously wrong with what you're saying, but too much realism makes the game less fun. The current set of firearms in 5e are balanced for use every round. One could allow a character a more powerful weapon that takes a minute to reload, but that's really more like a spell than a weapon, and could end up unbalanced in the multi-gun pirate scenario you mention. With the current damage scales, a rifle that takes a minute to reload is worthless.
If I were to change firearms in any way, I might consider some interaction with armor, as firearms were mainly useful for taking down slow, heavily armored enemies that could be hard to crack with bows and swords. Unfortunately, I don't know how I would implement this rule, as advantage is too powerful, and flat bonuses are counter to the 5e ethos.
I think you're right on about using conjure barrage (for direct fire) and conjure volley (for indirect) to simplify things. Large volleys associated with continental warfare are really more setting pieces and hazards than attacks. If players are trying to accomplish something while two armies are firing at each other, I would resolve the situation as a series of traps (or lair actions for a commander) and leave the rest to environmental factors--think difficult terrain/blast craters, concealment, etc. I'm reminded of the trailer and battle sequence for Assassin's Creed 3, where the main character passes directly through a series of British redcoat volleys by exploiting cover and the timing of enemy attack patterns.
One could also adapt mass combat rules from, say, the 3.5e Heroes of Battle supplement, which provides for volley rules, which allow a DM to easily substitute area attacks for multiple single attacks, ie every ten soldiers create a 10 ft. square effect or something like that.
Whenever I think about this topic and introducing firearms I am always reminded of a line from the TV series "Sharpe" which is set during the Nepoleonic Wars. In it Sharpe is drilling his men and says that the French can fire 3 rounds a minute so that is what they should aim for, so one shot every 20 seconds on average....makes D&D firearms of multiple shots every 6 seconds sound positively machine gun like.
A large part of that is due to D&D's long history of sliding back and forth between realism and ease of gameplay when it comes to weapons like crossbows and firearms. Having a musket that you shot and then spent three rounds reloading wouldn't be terribly fun.
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.
My action this round? Ill tamp down the powder I poured in my rifle last round...
You left out 'rifling' which was made the Minié ball work. It gave a huge increase in accuracy and range. Muskets could hit something at 100 meters, rifle+ Minie ball could hit at 200-250 meters. Which only really became important if you used smokeless powder, otherwise you could not see 10 meters in front of you after you fired your first shot.
You did not mention any of the more modern stuff, such as the less-lethal ammo (shotguns can fire a taser bullet, bean bags, rubber bullets, pepper balls, etc), not to mention the stranger stuff such as the Dragon's Breath, or the Fully Automatic Shotgun
I did mention rifling, the first rifled barrels predated the American revolution. This was one of the major reasons that Rodger's Rangers were so effective in that conflict; they had rifles instead of muskets.
The Minne' ball (not really a ball, the first modern bullet) saw widespread use durring the war of northern aggression. Smokeless powder (American term for cordite or white powder) wasn't invented till 1884, almost 20 years after that conflict. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Marie_Eugène_Vieille
Automatic shotguns I did mention. The AA12 is a devastating weapon at the peak of firearms technology. There are lots of vids of it on YouTube, check it out & be amazed. Earlier fully auto shotguns like the USAS suffered terribly from auto-fire induced barrel lift, resulting in the 3rd and subsequent rounds in a burst being wasted. The AA12 also has solved the problem of kickback. While a normal 10 guage chambered for magnum loads can knock you on your backside when you fire it, the AA12 has less kick than just about any firearm.
I did fail to mention exotic ammo, (except for the mini-missile round.) dragonfire or "Dragon's Breath" (TM) rounds effectively let you use your weapon to cast Dragon's Breath (original copyright by me, 1993 Re:Quests magazine). Other exotic rounds include flechette (range bonus) & breaching rounds ( Knock .)
Tracers also act like guiding bolt, no? I ask because I know next to nothing about guns.
Hm, not really, but the do help to zone in on your target. I'd say the person using tracers would give that person advantage after the first round as long as they kept firing at the same target.
Where to start. First of all, a lot of what you've said are over-simplifications and many of the dates are simply wrong. Flintlocks were a type of musket and it was developed in the early 1600s. Or rather, "flintlock" describes what kind of lock, or firing mechanism used. The Minni ball wasn't around until the 1840s, prepackaged powder came around a lot earlier than that.
The delay between pulling of the trigger and the shot being fired would not be enough for a person to be able to react to the shot "before the attack role is made".
You can, with a bit of training, easily reload a musket in under a minute. Rifled muskets were actually often slower to reload due to the fact that you had to have a tight fighting ball for the groves to catch on to. British riflemen during the Napoleonic wars actually had a mallet to ram the ramrod all the way. Using a sling from a bush would probably also be, let's call it 'problematic'.
The range on which to get disadvantage in your example is ridiculously short. 15 feet is the size of a living room. Muskets were accurate on ranges way above that. But then again, all ranges of ranged weapons in D&D are rather short. Weapons that could be fired multiple times, from simply double-barreled pistols and muskets to semi-automatic air rifles, were around long before the 1880s.
Semi-automatics pistols were around in the late 1890s. Churchill credits his 1896 Mauser Broomhandle with saving his life at the Battle of Omdurman, for example. Automatic machineguns in the form of Gatling guns were around from the 1860s. The Maxim machine gun was invented in 1884.
That said, I do like the idea of blackpowder weapons obscuring vision. Although the smoke from only a handful of shots wouldn't be enough to obscure vision for any amount of time, a few round tops in an outdoors enviroment. And as Heartofjuyomk2 mentioned, too much realism in the game usually means less fun. It's hard to balance realistic firearms in a game meant for fireballs and magic swords.
I defer to greater knowledge on all points but this one. It's exactly the reason the percussion cap was invented.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussion_cap
No, not really. There were many reasons for the percussion cap. Reliability, especially under foul weather was probably the main one. "Minimizing the delay between pulling the trigger and the gun going bang so that the enemy can't Matrix-dodge out of the way" was not one of them.
It's also an accuracy factor.
How do you think automatic weapons would work in game?
A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
My Improved Lineage System
You'd need to create rules for burst fire and fully automatic fire.
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 think the easiest way to do it would be to change the attack into an effect that targets one square, half damage on a dex save. As an alternative, keep it as an attack, but have it deal some damage even on a miss. For fully automatic big guns, make it a cone.
Barrages are typically cones. I think that would work fine with a lot of bullets shot in a general direction.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I don't think a burst fire is enough to be an area-effect. Full auto, definitely, but burst should just be a choice between a bonus to hit or a bonus to damage.
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.