The Campaign Builder's Guild

I want to do a campaign in which the arquebus and bow coexist for some time longer than they actually did, but in the more civilized nations, they are developing the first flintlocks (which are going to revolutionize warfare within the timeframe of the campaign) I was wondering if there are any solid rule systems for 3.5e in regards to gunpowder warfare.

Also, would gunpowder weaponry diminish the strength of a spellcaster? It does much more damage and is powerful enough to pierce armor (which a spellcaster generally can't have) I want my very few (I run a low magic campaign) spellcasters to be devastatingly powerful and i feel gunpowder weaponry conflicts with this.

well, here's what i do:
flintlock pistol: 3d6 damage, ignores first 4 points of AC; reload: 4 actions
flintlock rifle: 3d8 damage, inores first 4 points of AC; reload: 6 actions
(this is a "standard" ~14mm smoothbore weapon. muzzle loaded with homemade blackpowder and a cast lead slug)

if you only look at the damage, you'll most likely say "whoa! too much!" but: it takes ages to reload the weapons (even after i have halved real-world reload times), they won't fire in rain or after getting wet, they have the chance of some really bad misfires, etc...
the point is, in the time it takes a reasonably skilled archer to put three arrows into you, you manage to get off one shot. -> in three rounds, you do the same amount of damage. things like rapid reload can cut down reaload time some more (subtracting 2 actions), but they also cost you a feat and the archer can take rapid shot, potentially doubling his damage output.
unless brought to bear in massive numbers, guns don't outgun the casters, they still have a vastly higher burstdamage output.

I had one other promo supplement re: black powder, but can't find it anymore. This should at least offer a starting point though
File: 1232499726_541_FT62076_gunnes.zip

Are we talking flintlock RIFLES or flintlock MUSKETS?

With a rifled barrel, you'll be (relatively) amazingly accurate at long ranges, and put out tremendous damage.

With muskets, this isn't as much of a problem. Volley fire will, of course, become common.

The Arquebus in 2nd ed. D&D was similar to a crossbow in terms of reload time, but did a special kind of "compounding" damage.  You rolled 1d10 for damage, but if you got a 10, you rolled 1d10 again and added the previous 10 (and so on, so if you rolled a 10, then a 10, and then a 3 you'd deal 23).  Thus, there was no theoretical limit to damage (assuming an infinite number of 10s), but you only had a 10% chance of getting more than 9 and only a 1% chance of getting more than 19.

I seem to remember that the gun had a chance of backfiring, which would deal the wielder 1d6 damage and cause the arquebus to be useless until cleaned out.  I don't remember what you rolled for that, it was probably a 1 or 1-2 on the attack roll.

Quote from: Stargate525Are we talking flintlock RIFLES or flintlock MUSKETS?

With a rifled barrel, you'll be (relatively) amazingly accurate at long ranges, and put out tremendous damage.

With muskets, this isn't as much of a problem. Volley fire will, of course, become common.

my bad i guess. i'm not a native english speaker and the german "gewehr" means something a bit different from the "rifle" it translates to. :)
i don't think they have mass produced rifled barrels, as furor's world still uses wheellocks.
i really don't like the 2nd ed rules for the arquebus, it's just too random for my tastes.

I see.

Then no, I think those'll work fine. You won't be accurate in anything but volley fire at more than thirty feet, really.

Flintlock muskets, militaries are well acquianted with the Arquebus, the matchlock never really took off, though many more advanced countries use it for their skirmishers.

The Argheid empire has invested huge amounts to skip ahead 50-100 years ahead of their rivals in developing their flintlock system and are investing even more to have their 1st Army Group equipped with the new weapon. They are preparing for a Napoleonic War type of campaign to wipe out the former Aurathian Empire states to the north.

Most militaries favor the pikeman/arquebus formation, with less wealthy countries still working with massed groups of archers. A few rifles exist, but they are handmade and extremely rare.

There is a very strange flux of technological levels in Aertica due to constant warfare and recent destabilizations that have served to bankrupt states and have moved most skilled craftsmen to the safety of the Argheid Empire. This has resulted in some countries having armies that are vastly inferior to their neighbors simlply because they have no access or resources to develop the technologies.  

As an example, one of my countries, the Kargheid Palatinate, has a specialized unit that carries carbines, but uses their specialized recurved longbows to fire more accurately on the run. They are primarily for skirmishing.

Another country, the Angolian Empire, trains mostly Horse Archers and focuses on high mobility warfare (think Cossacks) with light dragoons and hussars. Their cannon are specially designed Horse Artillery (light, mobile cannons for use primarily against infantry)


@snargash: Thanks, great little article, my only qualm about using it is i feel its a little too high tech (they're all rifles) but i'll see about adapting the rules.

@Polycarp!: i like the idea of the 2e system, but i don't know if it would streamline well for 3.5

According to d20 Past, early firearms worked like this:

all matchlock weapons take two full-round actions to reload. You don't apply your Dex bonus to the attack roll, though any penalty still applies. The low range increments represent a lack of accuracy, not a lack of true distance. A natural 1 causes a misfire, which means the gun won't work again until you spend ten minutes cleaning it. A matchlock arquebus (circa 1425) deals 2d6 damage and has a range increment of 30 feet. A matchlock musket (circa 1517), which is held steady on the ground by a pole, deals 2d8 damage and has a range increment of 40 feet. A wheel lock pistol (circa 1530) small enough to be fired from horseback deals 2d6 damage and has a range increment of 15 feet. Critical hits are just 20/x2.

Later flintlock weapons still take two full-round actions to reload, but you can apply your Dex bonus to hit if you have one. A natural 1 is just a miss. An early (circa 1570) snaplock musket deals 2d8 damage and has a range increment of 30 feet. A later (circa 1825) Kentucky rifle, with a rifled barrel and all that, deals 2d10 damage and has a range increment of 40 feet. Crits are the same.

But remember, they had these balanced for a setting in which guns are the norm and magic is much weaker. And anyway, it's your setting. But be careful about making the damage greater, even if you make the reload times longer. Players are soon going to figure out the real-world strategy of carrying a whole bunch of loaded pistols at once so they only ever have to reload outside of combat.

Quote from: FurorI want my very few (I run a low magic campaign) spellcasters to be devastatingly powerful and i feel gunpowder weaponry conflicts with this.

A gun can only kill things.

If your low-level 3.5 spellcasters are wasting their precious few spells-per-day on slaughter, they are doing it wrong. That is what bodyguards are for.

As long as your guns can't magically charm folks and make stuff invisible, I wouldn't worry about spellcasters losing their edge.

Edit: My old 3.5 mechanics conversions for the Jade Stage are linked in my sig, and include some custom firearms. Feel free to take a look. Be warned that my guiding goal was "What makes a good game?" and not anything resembling "What is a historically/scientifically accurate depiction of gunpowder?"

I'm with Volk on this one. 3d anything is alot of damage. Personally, I'd go with 2d4/x3 for something one-handed, 2d6/x3 for something two handed, possibly requiring exotic weapon proficiency (if guns are rare). I'd have 'em require a standard action to reload with rapid reload bringing it down to a move action. And like the others I'd give it a short range increment and jams on a fumble.

I've got to admit, the reload times may not be historically accurate, but they're easier to play with in my experience (and people who haven't spent two feats on it still get a dead turn between each shot... which is significant).

And again, you don't have to make a weapon 3dsomething to make it hurt. Especially given "average human beings" are first level, and.. yknow.. sometimes survive gunshot wounds even with todays guns.

A lot of present-day firearms have actually gotten less deadly in exchange for things like reload speed and accuracy. Back in the day, bullets had to be bigger than elephant-gun-sized as a matter of necessity, because it was impossible to work with barrels smaller than that. Civil War era guns were particularly nasty and, when they managed to hit, would leave an exit would you could toss a cat through.

And regarding the issue of guns versus magic, magic still has a big advantage even if guns can do a lot of damage, especially if you're using all of 3.5's mighty save-or-be-taken-out-of-the-fight spells like Color Spray. In fact, magic can pierce armor better than guns, since most of 3.5's damage spells require touch attacks or Reflex saves, therefore ignoring armor entirely. Even the lowly Magic Missile remains pretty awesome simply because it never misses. If you want magic to be even mightier than that, the answer is simply to never let your spellcasters come out and play until they reach a high level.

Quote from: beejazzPersonally, I'd go with 2d4/x3 for something one-handed, 2d6/x3 for something two handed, possibly requiring exotic weapon proficiency (if guns are rare).

I realize "realism" is a different argument from "game balance," but it does seem a bit odd to make guns basically the opposite of what they were - weapons that could be used even by the least trained of levies.  Making them exotic weapons is just a little too much of a stretch for me.

I really agree with you on weapon damage though - in a world where getting hacked by a halberd is only 1d12 damage, there isn't much of a reason to make guns that much better.  Early guns in particular could be blocked by plate armor, and their advantage over bows/crossbows lay in their ease of use (and perhaps their propensity to frighten) rather than any great surfeit of power, accuracy, reliability, or reload speed.  Indeed, in several of these areas, early guns were generally worse than other ranged weapons.

I wouldn't necessarily assume that gunpowder does way more damage than other weapons - I'd probably put an arquebus as a 1d12 simple weapon with a x3 critical (and without 2nd ed's compounding damage) and make up for that with the reload speed of a heavy crossbow, powder that's unusable in wet weather, a rather unremarkable range (maybe comparable to a short bow, or shorter), and the possibility of fouling and/or backfiring on a natural 1 (I usually don't use critical misses, but I'd make an exception for that).  Depending on your setting, gunpowder might additionally be harder/more expensive to obtain than bolts or arrows.

Quote from: Polycarp!I wouldn't necessarily assume that gunpowder does way more damage than other weapons - I'd probably put an arquebus as a 1d12 simple weapon with a x3 critical (and without 2nd ed's compounding damage) and make up for that with the reload speed of a heavy crossbow, powder that's unusable in wet weather, a rather unremarkable range (maybe comparable to a short bow, or shorter), and the possibility of fouling and/or backfiring on a natural 1 (I usually don't use critical misses, but I'd make an exception for that).  Depending on your setting, gunpowder might additionally be harder/more expensive to obtain than bolts or arrows.

i see your point, but that way would make guns obsolete, giving you a glorified short-range heavy crossbow that can't be fired in the rain and makes a hell of a lot of noise (and can blow up in your face). in my opinion, guns should have a distinctly different feel to them than the other ranged weapons in the game. if you aim for a certain degree of historic realism (i *am* incredibly nerdy about history), that means a lot of damage at medium range, but a reload time that will likely allow the enemy to close the gap before you can get off a shot. before the invention of the percussion cap, it took a trained (!) soldier almost 90 seconds to reload a match- or wheellock musket, not accounting for overheating through "rapid" firing. as a tradeoff, it doesn't take a lot of skill to whack the enemy in the gut with a slug the size of a marble, meaning that if you loaded and fired the musket correctly, the other guy *will* go down. remember, those are relatively soft lead balls, not present day bullets, so they don't cut into the flesh, they punch craters, leading to horrible wounds.
due to the painfully long reload time, pistoliers often carried braces or bandoliers with preloaded extra weapons and even sharpshooters sometimes had small stacks of muskets close by, along with a dedicated loader (master and commander does a good job of portraying flintlock combat).
whatever you do, please don't give a musket the reload time of heavy crossbow (even that is a little too short), because there is no way without the aid of magic for someone to do this in 6 or seconds:
add podwder to the pan, lock and clean the pan, set musket upright on the ground, clean the muzzle, fill in powder, load bullet, push it down with the rod, replace the rod, take reset key and rewind the whellock.

Alright, here's how I would do them in D&D.

First, use crossbow stats, but scale up the damage by a die size and make them martial weapons.. Keep the reloads (move for a pistol, full round for a rifle). These will have standard magic enhancing rules ala 3.5.  Or you can leave them simple weapons, keep the damage the same as a crossbow, but change the critical rating from 19-20/x2 to 20/x3 so they're different; I like them to be martial because I would want fighters and rangers to use them.

It doesn't make sense for a gun to be loaded this fast, but anything else is going to require the gun to deal so much damage that it would become overpowered; your archers are going to keep a loaded rifle on them for the first round and then they'll switch to a bow or a crossbow because loading the weapon in combat will be ridiculous.

We're talking about fantastic heroes here, not everyday people. If a hero can learn to load a crossbow as fast as a bow, a hero can learn to load a gun quickly. Make the guns a little further along in tech if you need to, with blasting caps or something.

Then you might want a few bigger and better guns. Use the wand creation rules to assist in making some prices for these magical guns. For instance, the Burning Hands spell can help you price a "shotgun".

Standard wands cost caster level x spell level x 750 for 50 charges, but they're spell trigger so they can only be used if you have the spell on your list. Scrolls are spell completion, and work the same way (must have the spell on your list), but potions can be used by anyone and cost twice what a scroll costs. Thus, doubling the cost of a wand would let anyone use it.

So a "shotgun" that attacks in a 15 ft. cone would cost 3,000 gold and it would have 50 charges. It only deals 1d4 damage, the reflex save is only DC 12, but it deals 1/2 damage on a miss. Now, switching it to an attack roll vs. AC with no damage on a miss seems like a perfectly fine trade off to my eye. If we reduce it's "cartridge" to 5 shots, we can reduce the cost down to 300 gold. That gives me room to increase it's damage so it's actually on par with crossbows and bows; 3d4 would cost 900 gold. For my last bit of ad-hoc pricing, I'm going to set the base price of the weapon at 500 gold, and each cartridge of 5 shots would cost 1,000 gold.

In the end, we have a 500 gold gun that fires a 3d4 damage attack in a 15 ft. cone. A cartridge costs 1,000 gold, and comes with 5 shots. You can enhance the weapon just like any other weapon, adding enhancement bonuses or other magic properties. Reloading the cartridge takes a full-round action. It can be fired with regular attacks, so a high level character could fire it multiple times.

My 3E skills are a little rusty, but how does that sound to you?

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If you keep gunpowder weapons on par with regular weapons, and you use the magic item pricing guidelines to price things like bombs and such (a bomb that deals 5d6 damage in a 20-ft. radius should cost as much as a single use fireball item that doesn't require the spell to be on your spell list, in other words 750 gold), spellcasters won't be weakened. What will happen is that spellcasters won't be a hot commodity any more, so they might lose influence in the setting, but it will still be cheaper for a caster to do it than to use items (now paying the caster is another story entirely).

You need to make sure your guns match up with weapon balance, otherwise they will unbalance your games. Reload times will not compensate, because people will just keep multiple guns or only use them in the first round. Money can be a balancer, but only if you ensure to keep it on the scale of the magic item creation rules (use x charges per day items, wands, or potions as pricing examples).

If you need anything else specifically, let me know. Even though I play 4E now, I still have a pretty good head for 3E character balance; just don't ask me to balance monsters.