Guns in a Fantasy Settings: Tips and Tricks for a GM

[Hugh Neilson]

Hero doesn't usually allow for ranged attacks, (barring line-shaped explosions), doing less damage at long range.

Limited Range (-1/4), loses 1 DC per range increment. Season to taste. It's better than no range and not as good as Ranged, so there is only one increment.

 

Guns in warfare originally made their mark as siege/fortification weapons, most famously at Istanbul (neé Constantinople).  As size dropped and accuracy "improved" they eventually became useful for hunting, another activity where the firer could reasonably be expected to go DCV 0 without getting himself killed.  Firearms of the day were able to either fire shot, improving hit probability, or do more damage, allowing the hunting of larger game, all with a lower STR min than any crossbow or longbow.

This, and the training time, are real world issues that don't translate well into game terms. My character can have 15 years' training in his backstory and spend 8 points to have STR 18. In the real world, governments don't get to write their conscripts' backgrounds and shuffle their CP around.

[Manic Typist]

Perhaps a part of the balance should be the number of forces. For every feudal knight with sorcery that shows up, 2-3 gunners show up to reflect the advantage of the ease of training riflemen.

 

Levy spearmen would be outclassed by a 1-1 ratio with flint/percussion lock weapons, whereas knights with some magical backing would stand roughly even odds.

[Ninja-Bear]

Well, except for the fact that gunpowder and metallurgy gave consistent, reproduceable results. I get your point, but gunpowder is pretty easy to make once you know how its made. Even if the gunpowder priests try to keep it a closely-guarded secret, it's only a matter of time until someone manages to get ahold of some and figure out what's in it. Maybe a few years, maybe a decade or more, but not generations.

 

The flip side of the equation is if your world has the ability to manufacture ACW-level rifles, then their technology is going to be far more advanced than your typical medieval/fantasy society in other areas too. These advances don't happen in a vacuum. (Unless the guns literally fell through a portal from another world, which is what happened in the game I mentioned above.)

 

All of which begs the question: how long have guns been around in this world? If they're pretty new (less than a generation) then the rest of society might not yet have had time to change & adapt. But if they've been around long enough for gun tech to advance to 19th Century levels, then they would likely have had a bigger impact on society.

And the Chinese invented gun powder how many centuries before the West discovered it and made.it weaponized?

[Ninja-Bear]

Speaking of melee weapons against rifles, anybody here watched Zulu Dawn? The British had the best weapons and the best at reloading and still lost.

[Surrealone]

And the Chinese invented gun powder how many centuries before the West discovered it and made.it weaponized?

 

It's a common misconception that the West weaponized gunpowder.  It did not.

 

The Chinese invented gunpowder in the 9th century.  The earliest record of a written formula for it dates back to the 11th century and the Song Dynasty.  The fire lance (dating to the 10th century) is the earliest known weaponized use of gunpowder .... wherein a Chinese spear was outfitted with a tube filled with gunpowder (and often, shrapnel) that was ignited and used as a flamethrower.  (Eventually the tube was used independently of the spear... so you'll also hear fire lances described as just a tube filled with gunpowder and sometimes shrapnel.)

 

The cannon was a Chinese descendent of the fire lance ... and was invented during the Song Dynasty.  The oldest surviving hand cannon dates to 1288 ... and is from the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in China.

 

By comparison, the Moslem world didn't make use of gunpowder or the cannon until roughly 1250 ... while the British didn't make use of it until the late 1320's during its war with the Scots ... and the Brits and French both used it against one another in the 100 Years' War (1337 - 1453)...

[Shadowsoul]

Ah yes the old one-shot flamethrowers. I actually did a write up of a flamespear for my campaign. It's the only 'gun' write-up I still have a file for. I crow-barred a 'Chinese' character into the campaign so I could use it.

 

As it happens one player liked that character so much that he semi-retired his own character and took the NPC over.

 

The weapon itself was supposed to be used for defending fortified cities if memory serves. It didn't take much training to use and could hopefully disable, (or at least upset), one attacker. With luck it wouldn't burn your hands off, much.

[Surrealone]

Ah yes the old one-shot flamethrowers.

 

...

 

The weapon itself was supposed to be used for defending fortified cities if memory serves. It didn't take much training to use and could hopefully disable, (or at least upset), one attacker. With luck it wouldn't burn your hands off, much.

Yup!  Readied fire lances would be racked up for a quick grab by defenders who would use them in volleys (long, long before the Brits ever used volleys with muskets).  The effect was apparently very demoralizing to the burned and shrapnel-laden attackers ... while a morale boost was simultaneously rendered for the defenders.  (Isn't that usually the way of it when superior technology is used to good effect in war?)

[Ninja-Bear]

It's a common misconception that the West weaponized gunpowder. It did not.

 

The Chinese invented gunpowder in the 9th century. The earliest record of a written formula for it dates back to the 11th century and the Song Dynasty. The fire lance (dating to the 10th century) is the earliest known weaponized use of gunpowder .... wherein a Chinese spear was outfitted with a tube filled with gunpowder (and often, shrapnel) that was ignited and used as a flamethrower. (Eventually the tube was used independently of the spear... so you'll also hear fire lances described as just a tube filled with gunpowder and sometimes shrapnel.)

 

The cannon was a Chinese descendent of the fire lance ... and was invented during the Song Dynasty. The oldest surviving hand cannon dates to 1288 ... and is from the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in China.

 

By comparison, the Moslem world didn't make use of gunpowder or the cannon until roughly 1250 ... while the British didn't make use of it until the late 1320's during its war with the Scots ... and the Brits and French both used it against one another in the 100 Years' War (1337 - 1453)...

Ok, but the point is still valid in that it took several centuries from taking it from just powder to a weapon of some sort.

[Surrealone]

Ok, but the point is still valid in that it took several centuries from taking it from just powder to a weapon of some sort.

Putting shrapnel in the tube of the fire lance doesn't count as a weapon?  I'd have to disagree with you on that, as the moment shrapnel was added to the powder in a fire lance what you had was the invention of the world's first (primitive) gunpowder-based shotgun. 

[TheDarkness]

Chinese chess actually has a cannon. Highly recommend the game, it's great fun.

[bigdamnhero]

I'm not talking about training, I'm talking about actual distances in real engagements.  Take Iraq in urban environments: streets and the like might provide 30m of distance, tops, unless someone's lined up to shoot down a street or alleyway, in which case they are likely sniping or acting as a designated marksman (both of which I specifically precluded, since all they tend to do is long-range shooting -- unlike the bulk of those carrying weapons in war).

Sorry for not responding sooner - my week got a little crazy and I wanted to take the time read the link you provided, which was very interesting.

 

I think we may be talking apples & oranges. Average engagement distances of course tend to be shorter than effective weapon ranges, a point I granted in my previous post. In the words of the link you provided "the factor limiting actual engagement ranges is visibility, not the capability of the rifle itself."

 

But your earlier post said "for accuracy reasons most riflemen using iron sights wouldn't take that shot...until Ser Knight was 30m or less away."  Apart from the fact that the linked post says WWI engagement ranges were mostly at 25-50 yards, not 30, accuracy isn't the problem. Most riflemen would love to take a shot at someone 100m+ away - the issue is they are unlikely to be presented with an engageable target at that distance.

 

And the Chinese invented gun powder how many centuries before the West discovered it and made.it weaponized?

But my point is that once one person/country has weaponized it, it's going to be fairly easy for everyone else to copy them.

[TheDarkness]

I think one thing that gets glossed over is, unless sniping, most soldiers are actually not firing their rifles in a way that that gun's accuracy ratings are based at. Yes, aiming by use of the sights when stationary, X accuracy value is achieved. For non-snipers, that is NOT an option. They are not stationary. They are often crouched or moving. When being fired upon, they are often not in a position to make use of their sights in an optimal way.

 

And again, the pressure of combat does not generally improve anyone's aim, it is usually quite worse.

 

This is not that the soldiers are not using the gun to its full range, but that the supposed full range is often assuming if the gun is used in a way that it only can be used in a minority of situations.

[massey]

I think we're talking past one another here.

 

In the real world, firearms made heavy armor obsolete.  Worries about engagement ranges, and how many shots a guy gets before the knight gets in range, it doesn't matter.  In the real world, once guns were on the scene, the knight in shining armor was out the door.  History heavily favors the gun.  And we're talking firearms much more primitive than American Civil War era muskets.  Now true, the Black Death and the destruction of the feudal system definitely helped contribute to that.  But nobody ever goes back to a heavily armored warrior until the invention of Kevlar and other modern materials.

 

So the question appears to be, what justifications do you need to go through to get a fun RPG setting where you've got knights in armor, monsters, wizards, and people using guns.  You don't want firearms to change your medieval society too much or you'll lose the flavor of the game.

 

The problem is, if you take a Union army and put them on the battlefield against basically anybody from an earlier, non-firearm era, the Union guys would slaughter the other side.  They could be outnumbered 10 to 1 and still win.

[Christopher R Taylor]

So the question appears to be, what justifications do you need to go through to get a fun RPG setting where you've got knights in armor, monsters, wizards, and people using guns.  You don't want firearms to change your medieval society too much or you'll lose the flavor of the game.

 

 

Right, this is my basic problem with mixing tech and magic or medieval and guns.  Some tech changes societies, you can't have the basically stagnant society of the medieval fantasy world with guns.  So the guns must either bring their own limitations (using them too much angers local spirits, they are very difficult to get gunpowder for, mages have outlawed them and using a gun makes you a criminal etc) or you are really pushing the limits of plausibility.

[bigdamnhero]

Just came across this interesting video that talks about dragons in Game of Thrones, but compares them to how gunpowder upended the feudal order of early Medieval Europe. I think the author overstates his point a bit (ie - there were other factors at work besides just gunpowder), but it's still an interesting point. Relevant to this conversation, it's also a good reminder that while we've been talking about firearms, it was the early development of canons that really changed things by making castles largely irrelevant.

[Christopher R Taylor]

It took a while for cannons to be terribly useful against castles, they took forever to load, they were packed in with clay that had to harden to get the proper compression and the results were not very impressive.  They fired rocks mostly, and not any more effectively than a catapult (although they scared the crap out of everyone when they went off).  Eventually they got better, but fortresses were still a thing all the way up to WW2 when air planes and parachutes made them useless.

[Manic Typist]

Right, this is my basic problem with mixing tech and magic or medieval and guns.  Some tech changes societies, you can't have the basically stagnant society of the medieval fantasy world with guns.  So the guns must either bring their own limitations (using them too much angers local spirits, they are very difficult to get gunpowder for, mages have outlawed them and using a gun makes you a criminal etc) or you are really pushing the limits of plausibility.

 

Because I'm keenly aware of this, the key detail is that the feudal society has not yet experienced in a serious way this technology. Plus, it has powerful magic.

 

I'm deliberately creating a precarious situation, so that all parties are bringing their own assumptions of how they'd win a war against their hated enemies before Christmas. This is Europe pre-WW1, where horse calvary, machine guns, poison gas, and massed charges are all going to be tossed into the fire at the same time.

 

A war is coming, and nothing will be the same after.

 

 

All I need is enough parity between the two groups is to work at a typical RPG skirmish level, and I think we're close. Playtesting will out though.

[TheDarkness]

I think we're talking past one another here.

 

In the real world, firearms made heavy armor obsolete.  Worries about engagement ranges, and how many shots a guy gets before the knight gets in range, it doesn't matter.  In the real world, once guns were on the scene, the knight in shining armor was out the door.  History heavily favors the gun.  And we're talking firearms much more primitive than American Civil War era muskets.  Now true, the Black Death and the destruction of the feudal system definitely helped contribute to that.  But nobody ever goes back to a heavily armored warrior until the invention of Kevlar and other modern materials.

 

So the question appears to be, what justifications do you need to go through to get a fun RPG setting where you've got knights in armor, monsters, wizards, and people using guns.  You don't want firearms to change your medieval society too much or you'll lose the flavor of the game.

 

The problem is, if you take a Union army and put them on the battlefield against basically anybody from an earlier, non-firearm era, the Union guys would slaughter the other side.  They could be outnumbered 10 to 1 and still win.

I think the point to keep in mind is, the conditions that you describe as ending the use of armor were on the battlefield. Armored knights, outside of stories, were a battlefield thing for the most part. But, in role playing, they're part of the story, wandering alone or with halflings and such.

 

What he needs to model is how it plays out in what are, essentially, skirmishes between a handful of people, and not battlefield conditions where if even twenty percent of muskets missed their chance, huge damage is still done. In game, missing the mark at least one time out of five means some charging knights get through. Those with some magical protection may get through regardless.

 

At such a point, how accurate they would be is an important factor, what ranges they would be facing also being important for designing his world. Unless he's planning on doing full scale battles, in which case, I feel for him...

 

There are a number of factors people have pointed out that would make magic completely change the situation on the battlefield, and how he explains that is important for the story world.

 

But as for the fights the characters will actually have, whether the characters do or don't have guns, the battlefield has little bearing on this.

 

I forget the name of the statistic, but within 21 feet, gun versus a knife wielding attacker is an ugly thing, and guns don't come anywhere near automatically winning unless the threat is known and the gun is already drawn or the draw is somehow given more time(often by trying to kick away the charging knife wielder). Statistically speaking, in the real world of modern firearms, the gun wielder will be badly or fatally hurt more often than not.

 

If the characters are adventuring in wide open fields with absolutely no tall grass, then full range is definitely to the firer's advantage.

 

If corn fields, not so much.

 

If dungeons, not so much, AND every shot will be heard(though, technically, sword fights should also bring attention, okay, we can gloss over that!)

 

Forests, again, not so much, especially given that feudal game worlds commonly have more forest.

 

Castles, again, lots of hallways, secret halls and chambers, lots of cover, for game purposes, everyone has a fair chance.

 

Literally, magic could be built to make an area of effect where the only effect is 'no sparks', and every cannon and gun is useless, so it makes sense that leaders might hedge their bets and not rely too heavily on them alone in battle.

 

Which also might mean that assassinating the lone wizard who is preventing the seige of a keep from succeeding would also happen a lot. Once he's dead, fire the cannons.

[Surrealone]

It took a while for cannons to be terribly useful against castles, they took forever to load, they were packed in with clay that had to harden to get the proper compression and the results were not very impressive.  They fired rocks mostly, and not any more effectively than a catapult (although they scared the crap out of everyone when they went off).  Eventually they got better, but fortresses were still a thing all the way up to WW2 when air planes and parachutes made them useless.

Not really.  Cannon, while uncommon, were a lot more portable than siege engines like the catapult and trebuchet -- and required less skill to use (despite needing more skill and rarer resources to manufacture).  They were also a lot more durable than siege engines made of wood -- able to withstand simple burning via pitch due to their very nature.

 

In the mid 1400's it was the Ottoman Empire's use of the super guns of their day (cannon) that allowed them to besiege and take Constantinople.  Fire enough projectiles at wooden or stone walls and those walls -will- weaken and crumble/fall -- unless they are naturally occurring mesas like, say, Masada ... which is so high as to make cannon and other siege engines relatively useless. (If you want to lay siege to Masada, you just wait out its food and water stores while you build a big ramp ... like the Romans did. )

 

 

 

 

What he needs to model is how it plays out in what are, essentially, skirmishes between a handful of people, and not battlefield conditions where if even twenty percent of muskets missed their chance, huge damage is still done. In game, missing the mark at least one time out of five means some charging knights get through. Those with some magical protection may get through regardless.

I agree with this -- if there's an intent to actually maintain balance.  That said, with a war coming, it sounds like the scales are going to be tipped with no intent to maintain balance.  War, after all, always has an arms (and defenses) race wherein -something- eventually prevails ... usually in a game changing way.  Most modern human technological advances (from nuclear warheads to medicine) are the direct result of -something- improved by human warfare, after all...

[Christopher R Taylor]

Not really.  Cannon, while uncommon, were a lot more portable than siege engines like the catapult and trebuchet -- and required less skill to use (despite needing more skill and rarer resources to manufacture).  They were also a lot more durable than siege engines made of wood -- able to withstand simple burning via pitch due to their very nature.

 

 

Eventually.  The first canons were little more than a VERY thick metal pot that the gunpowder was packed in, a rock put on top, and clay packed into the front to seal it.  Once the clay was dry, the could fire it.  The thing weighed a huge amount, was very expensive to make, and even as thick as it was would creak and even explode because metallurgy wasn't great back then.  After a whlie they got better at it but those early ones were little more than noisy.

[massey]

Right, this is my basic problem with mixing tech and magic or medieval and guns.  Some tech changes societies, you can't have the basically stagnant society of the medieval fantasy world with guns.  So the guns must either bring their own limitations (using them too much angers local spirits, they are very difficult to get gunpowder for, mages have outlawed them and using a gun makes you a criminal etc) or you are really pushing the limits of plausibility.

 

The fantasy genre tends to take a medieval society and keep it in place for longer periods than the actual middle ages.  You get societies that remain unchanged for thousands of years because of undefined reasons.  Perhaps those forces that keep everything kind of the same also prevent firearms from changing things too much.  I knew a GM who declared that the gods in his world wanted a medieval society, and so that's the way it was gonna be.  By divine mandate, feudalism was the way everything worked.  I don't think you have to go that far, but it illustrates the idea.

 

So what were some of the reasons society changed in the real world?  Plague, population migration to urban centers, guns, inability to deal with Viking raids, rediscovery of Greek and Roman sciences, the printing press, etc.  Perhaps the existence of magic suppresses some of these social pressures.  With magical healing, you never get any outbreak on the scale of the Black Death.  You might lose a small village or something, but you aren't losing 1/3 of your population.  As a result, the feudal system can continue, and you don't get migration to the cities.  When a priest can purify the town's water supply, you don't have to worry about proper sewage systems.  The quality of life in a fantasy world could be generally higher than that of real historical civilizations.  This could lower the desire for change within the society.  If your village looks like the Shire from the movies, instead of it being a filthy, yucky place, then you may be inclined to stay there.  If you've got heroic player characters who fend off orc/viking raids successfully, then you don't have the military failures that the real life feudal system did.  You don't feel like you're wasting your money when you pay taxes to the local lord.  And perhaps the existence of real wizardry will draw smarter people towards studying magic, as opposed to developing science further.  It's possible the medieval era is a very stable point for society for some reason.

 

If the only force of social change is a limited introduction of guns, then maybe the fantasy setting can exist mostly unchanged.

 

What I'd suggest (based on my own personal preferences) is that guns are produced by some fairly small, relatively isolated nation.  They could be on an island somewhere, or a city high in the mountains.  Production of guns requires highly skilled labor that doesn't really exist elsewhere, not in large quantities.  Guns are semi-alchemical in nature, you can't really enchant them (they're already as magical as they're gonna get).  That or it's just too much modern science and it doesn't mesh well with spells.  As a result, certain creatures just aren't going to be affected by guns.  A stone golem won't be hurt by anything short of a cannon, while a magic warhammer could break pieces off of it.  Because of the time and resources involved in starting up production of guns, most civilizations don't bother with it.  You're talking about a world that has very little understanding of mass production, and other than this one city, almost everything is made by hand by some guy and his apprentice.

 

While firearms can be effective, the real high end of battlefield combat is still going to be dominated by wizards and dragons and things like that.  If you're going to spare no expense to make the baddest army around, you want a wizard with a wand of fireballs on your side.  While I dislike the way that D&D has made magic items just a thing you can purchase (the magic item list shouldn't be seen as the Sears catalog), it would make sense for a powerful noble to keep a wizard on retainer.  You let the crazy old guy live in one of your castle towers, provide him with strange powders and unguents, ignore the odd sounds that come out of it at night, and then when you ride off to war he comes along.  An invisible mage who casts Cloudkill within the ranks of an enemy army can end a battle before it really begins.  No gun is going to be able to do something like that.

 

In a situation like this, firearms could remain an expensive curiosity.  Sure, a 1st level nobody with a gun is much more effective than a 1st level nobody with a bow.  But he's a lot more expensive, too.  It's hard for a person with a feudal mindset to wrap their head around the idea of something like the American Civil War's Union army.  As a result, guns could exist, and yet still never reach their full potential.  You'd be more likely to encounter a huge levee of peasants backed up by a 6th level wizard with a few powerful scrolls than you would a unit of well trained men with muskets. 

[bigdamnhero]

While I dislike the way that D&D has made magic items just a thing you can purchase (the magic item list shouldn't be seen as the Sears catalog)

QFT

[Old Man]

No gun is going to be able to do something like that.

This. Magic is waaaaay more versatile than guns. Guns kill people. Magic kills them, or charms them, or feeds them, or heals them, or houses them, or turns them into toads, or pretty much anything else you can think of.

[Surrealone]

This. Magic is waaaaay more versatile than guns. Guns kill people. Magic kills them, or charms them, or feeds them, or heals them, or houses them, or turns them into toads, or pretty much anything else you can think of.

Because you can't possibly use a gun for coercion to get the same end result (not effect, but end result) as charm?  And you can't feed yourself with a gun?  And you can't use a gun to acquire shelter?

 

​Sir, I believe the gun is more versatile than you think it is ... depending on how its wielder uses it.  You can absolutely use a gun to get someone to do your bidding (much like you could with magic and charm).  You can absolutely feed yourself deer, boar/hog, fowl, etc. with a gun.  You can 100% for sure acquire shelter with a gun.  You can even clothe yourself in skins/pelts to shrug off some of the elements ... using a gun.  Guns don't just kill people, they can also threaten, intimidate, inspire awe (in someone who has never seen one and, thus, thinks of it as powerful magic/mojo), and the like ... all of which can be used to good effect to do a lot of what magic can do.

 

​But you're right about one thing -- you can't turn someone into a toad with a gun...

[Old Man]

Whatever, dude.