Last year I was running a Curse of Strahd campaign and, in the catacombs, the players found a weird wooden stick with a hole on the tip, a few metallic spheres and a bag o black dust (or something like that). The book says is a musket, and if I remember it right the book says that is something the players shouldn´t be familiar with (I think the tomb in question belonged to an inventor).
Fast forward a few months and we are currently running a WD Dragon Heist Adventure, and when they encountered Zardos Zord for the first time, most of its crew wielded firearms. My players were confused (they are not that deep into DnD lore) and I told them that the musket itself was rare, but those firearms were kinda common.
My question is, How common are firearms in DnD? Considering that it´s mostly a medieval setting with a few touches of steampunk (automatas and such).
Entirely depends on the campaign setting. Most published campaigns don't incorporate them, but there is nothing stopping them from being commonplace.
The main thing for me is that there are already other systems for "modern" and "future" settings, so if I wanted to include guns heavily in my own game, I'd want to use a system with more robust support for them. Once you bring out the "big guns", players will predictably start asking about all of the other technology that are associated with them in popular media.
So, guns are kind of like deep ocean civilizations, they are assumed to exist in an abstract sense, but are generally ignored until the DM is ready to deal with the consequences of opening Pandora's Box.
It would be less of a hassle to introduce a "Wand of Catapult", which can fill the role of firearms without introducing a new mechanic to the game.
Guns are disproportionately powerful compared to nearly any other kind of weapon, so mechanically speaking, they are comparable to rare+ magical weapons. Making them too common will throw off combat balance pretty significantly.
They are pretty rare in most settings (certainly the ones in 5e so far). In many cases the only firearms in the realm will be from other realms (not other planes, literally a different cosmology like how eberron is to forgotten realms).
They're in a few books as a one-off, meant to surprise players with their presence. Taken as a whole, I guess that means they're not as uncommon as they seem. But I think they're basically intended as a novelty.
I am currently running ToA, and I have incorporated imported firearms. My setting is about the same as yours, with a touch of steampunk vibes.
Personally, I like to put them in ONLY when they could be reasonably acquired by whomever they are wielded by. For example, a pirate ship may have some because they stole a shipment of them earlier, or in your case, and inventor may provide some. Think about whether or not your NPCs would have ran across a place to acquire and learn about them, and then disperse them accordingly.
Hope this helps!
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Last year I was running a Curse of Strahd campaign and, in the catacombs, the players found a weird wooden stick with a hole on the tip, a few metallic spheres and a bag o black dust (or something like that). The book says is a musket, and if I remember it right the book says that is something the players shouldn´t be familiar with (I think the tomb in question belonged to an inventor).
Fast forward a few months and we are currently running a WD Dragon Heist Adventure, and when they encountered Zardos Zord for the first time, most of its crew wielded firearms. My players were confused (they are not that deep into DnD lore) and I told them that the musket itself was rare, but those firearms were kinda common.
My question is, How common are firearms in DnD? Considering that it´s mostly a medieval setting with a few touches of steampunk (automatas and such).
Entirely depends on the campaign setting. Most published campaigns don't incorporate them, but there is nothing stopping them from being commonplace.
The main thing for me is that there are already other systems for "modern" and "future" settings, so if I wanted to include guns heavily in my own game, I'd want to use a system with more robust support for them. Once you bring out the "big guns", players will predictably start asking about all of the other technology that are associated with them in popular media.
So, guns are kind of like deep ocean civilizations, they are assumed to exist in an abstract sense, but are generally ignored until the DM is ready to deal with the consequences of opening Pandora's Box.
It would be less of a hassle to introduce a "Wand of Catapult", which can fill the role of firearms without introducing a new mechanic to the game.
Guns are disproportionately powerful compared to nearly any other kind of weapon, so mechanically speaking, they are comparable to rare+ magical weapons. Making them too common will throw off combat balance pretty significantly.
They are pretty rare in most settings (certainly the ones in 5e so far). In many cases the only firearms in the realm will be from other realms (not other planes, literally a different cosmology like how eberron is to forgotten realms).
They're in a few books as a one-off, meant to surprise players with their presence. Taken as a whole, I guess that means they're not as uncommon as they seem. But I think they're basically intended as a novelty.
I am currently running ToA, and I have incorporated imported firearms. My setting is about the same as yours, with a touch of steampunk vibes.
Personally, I like to put them in ONLY when they could be reasonably acquired by whomever they are wielded by. For example, a pirate ship may have some because they stole a shipment of them earlier, or in your case, and inventor may provide some. Think about whether or not your NPCs would have ran across a place to acquire and learn about them, and then disperse them accordingly.
Hope this helps!