Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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And I am saying there is no basis for a statement that the intent is to prevent it. I can hit a creature, force them to save versus Topple, stow the topple weapon, free object interaction to draw another weapon, maybe a cleave one, and then spend the rest of my attack action attacking a prone enemy with advantage. This isn't a loophole because it gets the same effect of a Vex weapon without using one.
If I use advantageous positioning to get advantage on my attack, it's not another loophole invalidating Vex.
The developers gave everyone a free object interaction. The developers gave characters the ability to equip or unequip with each attack during the Attack action. The developers gave characters with Dual Wielder feat to equip and unequip double the weapons. The developers absolutely intended you to draw and stow weapons, changing between weapons.
You don't have to like it, but the developers designed changing weapons into the game. The developers absolutely intended you to use them. Your RAI claims are unfounded.
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My houserulings.
Do dm's consistently enforce the loading property with firearms?
"Loading: You can fire only one piece of ammunition from a Loading weapon when you use an action, a Bonus Action, or a Reaction to fire it, regardless of the number of attacks you can normally make."
The CrosbowExpert feat allows the pc to ignore the loading property, but only for crossbows.
If firearms can only shoot once per action, even if the pc has ExtraAttack, and this was enforced consistently, then firearms would be far less offensive.
@SmiteMakesRight_3_5 you really 180'd from your original "should not be able to reach more than 2 attacks per turn" stance here, huh? Lol.
Look, as I've said, weapon juggling shenanigans are - obviously - possible. I'm just trying to give reasonable arguments for a GM to disallow such things. If you don't want that at your table, and instead want to allow for characters to make 4+ attacks with types of weapons that were designed with - what I would argue - is the intent to only be able to make 1 or 2 per turn, then you do you.
Beyond that, all I can say is, if you think that WotC automatically intended for something to work a certain way just because they designed the rules in a way that makes it possible... oh, my sweet summer child.
Why wouldn’t you enforce it? It’s a basic part of balancing the fact crossbows and firearms are more powerful than the equivalent short bow or longbow and if the player isn’t happy there’s feats to take so long as they are willing to pay the cost
Nope. My stance hasn't changed. There are ways. I never said they shouldn't. I asked, "how are they doing it?" I then said it's the same as a crossbow with less range and an average +1 damage per attack. We went down a rabbit hole of an edge case, but the typical way around Loading is the Gunner Feat or Crossbow Expert. Crossbow Expert allows you to ignore the free hand requirement of the Ammunition property while Gunner does not, make dual wielding pistols less practical compared to crossbows.
OP's players must have made some investment into attacking multiple times per turn or it's not possible. Did OP forget about the Loading property or did the players sink money and/or a feat or feats into this playstyle?
If you think that WotC explicitly included rules that work a certain way and didn't expect players to use them ... oh, my sweet summer child.
This isn't as detailed and keyword laden as 3.x, but the rules are relatively solid. Weapon and item juggling was possible in 2014, but not to the degree as 2024 and there was less of a reason to. Like changing drinking potions to Bonus Actions, changing the weapon equip and unequip rules reduces the action tax on characters with multiple attacks in certain cases. For example, thrown weapon users were limited on the number of attacks they could actually throw a weapon with - not in 2024.
If you are ignoring the Loading property, this is your problem. Tasha's Cauldron of Everything has a Gunner Feat that ignores the Loading Property for Firearms. If you ignore the Loading property, you are almost giving Firearm players a free feat.
If they have multiple attacks, let them shoot and then throw something with their other attacks or something unless they make an investment to actually make multiple attacks.
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My houserulings.
Why are yall arguing about RAW and RAI in a forum about if firearms should be allowed?
Well, yes, and this is the issue. The changes in 2024 to equipping and unequipping weapons was a band-aid attempt to fix the lack of ability to really swap weapons at all in 2014, which was obviously a problem - and a well documented and argued one - for many reasons. As such, they made a haphazard change that has lead to all sorts of confusion; this forum alone is full of a dozen different 20 page long threads arguing about what is and isn't possible with crazy weapon juggling shenanigans. The band-aid application of this "solution" has completely invalidated the Loading property, which was actually hampering - as intended - in 2014. Now, however, all you need to do is carry around an equal amount of copies of the weapon to however many attacks you have, and you can almost completely ignore the property. This is just bad game design, and I personally refuse to believe that their intent was bad game design. It was - in my opinion - a haphazard over-correction.
No RPG is or ever has been perfect, especially not D&D. I think the basic principle in the hobby is, "we did the best we could, here is the book, fix anything you don't like yourself".
The idea that people use the PHB, DMG and MM as a bible that instructs you on how to play the game to the letter and that the game can be played RAW or RAI is a silly D&D culture concept; it is not at all how this works or has ever worked.
You get the rules, you use them, and if you run across something you don't like or doesn't work for you, you change or remove it.
I understand that theorycrafting about it on a forum is a part of the fun, but if you think there will ever be a consensus or some sort of final solution on "how D&D should be", trust me, I have been at this for 40 years... it ain't happening.
Its not a bad design, its just an oversight in a mostly well designed game and that is as good as any RPG can ever hope to be.
As for whether firearms should or shouldn't be in D&D, the answer to that is simple.
D&D was once a very specific type of adventure fantasy; it was not generic. It was designed to be a human-centric, medieval fantasy game, and all settings written for it initially were created around that concept. As the game evolved over the years, it started to include a wider and wider range of fantasy and that started even as early as 1st edition D&D. Including science-fiction fantasy like Spelljammer, post apocalyptic fantasy like Dark Sun.
In that construct of expanding and evolving inclusion of a wider and wider types of fantasy, Firearms most definitly has a place in D&D. If they weren't included it would require players to create them, because they are needed in certain types of D&D fantasy settings.
So yes, Firearms have to be there.
The question then is, does it belong in your game, meaning, your setting, your world, in the current campaign. When you ask that question, its not just about wether firearms belong... but do Dragonborn? Do Clerics exist? . Anything can potentially be excluded, but I don't think anyone would argue that Clerics don't belong in D&D, its more about wether Clerics belong say in ... Dragonlance. Depending on the era of your campaign, the answer might be no. Healing magic for a time did not exist in Dragonlance so neither did Clerics.
Hope that makes sense, but, what is in the book is not nescessarly everything that should be in your current campaign. Its coverage, which as we get more settings, needs a wider net.
Oh man, this argument again. Thank you for the attempt at mansplaining RPG creation, but... no. It is entirely possible to create a game that is ostensibly perfect, and at the very least has no glaring oversights or prominent loopholes that can be easily exploited. For some reason people love to give D&D a free pass with a "they tried their best," but as a former game designer, I very much disagree. I love this game, but a tonne of design decisions are poorly thought out at best. They were in 2014, and while the upgrade to 2024 fixed some things, it also broke others simply out of careless attempts to fix problems without delving into the complexities of them.
The ability to homebrew and modify what you want is great - and it's a thing in some form in all game media, such as modding videogames - but it shouldn't be used as an excuse for forgiving poor design choices.
Anyway, I don't even know why I'm responding at this point. The ability to use and abuse firearms can be messy given these oversights in the rules, but - as has been said - it's up to a GM whether they want to include them in their setting at all. It's also - unfortunately - up to a GM to decide what (if any) balance restrictions they want to impose on them.
Ok Have to add my 2 cents as I am currently playing a gunslinger in one of my campaigns. I like the idea that guns can be a weapon in DnD especially when you start looking the the Artificer class as a means of constructing these weapons. That being said, I agree that automatic rifles and laser weapons are going a little too far. I would never ask for something like that and want to play into a scenario that will not be too far fetched. Fire Arms have been around since the 12th century and evolving ever since. So the Technology had evolved with suits of armor and different types of swords and other things. So it is not all that unrealistic.
Now what it does come down to, is the DM. In my campaign I would allow a revolver or other types of fire arms that are simple and easy to understand for say an artificer, but only allow minor modifications depending on what they were using to modify them. For example if a player wants to modify a pistol with say a wand of magic missiles, then they would definitely need an artificer and run the outcome of that mod past me. then we can come up with something together. After all the max output of a fire arm is 2 d10. So a gunslinger needs some perks to keep up damage with spell slingers or even a fighter with a legendary sword that has effects that last multiple rounds.
My opinion, nothing more.
Having multiple avenues to get around a limitation for a cost is not bad design. Whether using multiple weapons, like people historically did, is intentional or not is debatable. The fact that at least one method was explicitly allowed and intentional (the Gunner feat, which took you from nonproficient in firearms to a speed-shooter) shows that the limitation was never meant to be an unsurmountable one.
If you don't like the treatment of firearms, or crossbows, that's fine. You can change them how you like. However, you haven't made a case for using multiple weapons being unintentional or a "loophole".
Declaring that it is bad game design doesn't make it so. It's not. You are expending resources to bypass the property. Sure, you might be saving on a Feat but carrying around 4 Pistols costs 1000 GP and weighs 12 pounds plus ammunition. A single Repeating Shot Pistol costs 650 GP, gives +1 to hit and damage, and produces its own ammunition. How exactly is carrying around multiple pistols an exploit? Two Pistols are still 500 GP and are significantly worse than one Repeating Shot Pistol. If you can craft it yourself, the Repeating Shot Pistol is cheaper at 450 GP. If you have an Artificer in the group, it's free. Multiple weapons would only be a better choice if you ran out of attunement slots.
When trying to bypass the Loading property with a financial investment, your "loophole" is the worst option. This isn't a loophole. This isn't an exploit. This is a moderately bad build choice that has a niche use case.
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My houserulings.
Alright, the financial investment is the reason it's fine, you say? Okay, forget about guns; you brought up crossbows, so how about them? 50 GP for two Light Crossbows, and you can now make two 1d8 damage attacks. The same cost as a Longbow, and now you can do multiple attacks with a simple weapon at the same damage as a harder to learn/earn proficiency martial weapon. Good game design right there.
And yes, I know, the weight is more and the range is less, but both of those barely ever matters in a D&D game; tell me you can't count on one hand the amount of times you've had a monster more than 80 feet away from a character. If those "restrictions" are good enough for you to call this balanced, well, alright then, but I disagree.
Even the cost of pistols & muskets I don't agree with being a real issue, because in the majority of games 500 or 1000 GP is nothing by level 5, and now you've got d10 or d12 weapons instead of d8.
I know for the crossbows it is rather niche that such a build would actually grant much benefit, as most of the time if you have extra attack you have proficiency in Martial weapons anyway. But not ALWAYS, and it's a very strange loophole. If you want to believe that's intentional, you do you, but I definitely don't.
Anyway I feel like I am really bogging down this thread, so I might stop responding here, but if you want to keep chatting about this feel free to PM me.
I'm not arguing that there aren't better games than 5e, because there are, they are called 1e and 2e AD&D, nor am I saying there is no such thing as bad game design, there is, I offer 1e and 2e AD&D as perfect examples. What I am saying is there are such a thing as a perfect games, they are called 1st and 2nd edition AD&D, which are coincidentally also examples of terrible games with terrible game design.
You get where I'm going with this?
When I started my current campaign, I made it explicitly clear that firearms (muzzleloaders only) were available, though proficiency required a feat unless your character was a rock gnome, giff, or artificer.
Despite having a total of ten players come and go so far, I've had zero people who actually wanted a gun.
Also, while I don't make players track encumbrance, I limit characters to no more than one ranged and one melee two-handed weapon. You're not juggling greatswords, you're not running around with multiple heavy crossbows that are ready to fire at the same time.
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.
What about hand crossbows? Can you have 2-3 preloaded to shoot?
RAW it says “you can expend one piece of ammunition from a loading weapon as an action, bonus action or reaction”. So you can only use one loading weapon a turn (unless you have a bonus action, which would fire another crossbow).
Technically, no. The way Loading and Ammunition work, there's no such thing as a pre-loaded weapon. You have to meet the requirements at the time you attack, whether you're using bows, crossbows, or guns. (But cycling through several is legit. The predominant interpretation of the Loading property is that it's per weapon.)
Arguably, this is an artifact of the mechanics being abstracted so you don't need special rules for each type of weapon. But also, you wouldn't be able to keep a crossbow loaded -- the bolt would fall off.
I don't think folks have mentioned the +1 Repeating Shot Pistol which is pretty common if your game includes Artificers (replicate magic item or infusions).
I wish there were better firearm enhancing feats in 2024 that allowed dual wielding. Since the Pistol is not light the only benefit to it being one handed is that you can use a Shield with it (not a bad bonus honestly).
Sharpshooter is obviously good as is getting Weapon Mastery with Pistol to get Vex but progression kinda stops there.
I mentioned it a several comments up (post 33).
Archery Fighting Style as well.
Is that any different for Crossbows or Bows?
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My houserulings.
Crossbows get crossbow master it allows you to use bonus action as an additional crossbow attack as well as ignoring loading not sure about bows though