Firearms in D&D Part 2: What's Already Out There?

In the first part of this series, I looked at why guns were such game changers, and how that might be represented on the tabletop. This time, we'll be looking at what the bigger fantasy games have done with black powder weapons.

As I am using Blood & Treasure as my base for the game, it makes sense to look at there first.

In B&T, black powder weapons are designed with higher damage in mind - each has a +1 to their dice, making them slightly more lethal than bows (the game does the same for crossbows). In exchange, guns have a much shorter range than bows; in practical terms, most fights won't take place over long enough distances for range bands to matter all that much in most games.

For a pirate game, they might matter if someone is trying to shoot from one ship to another, but that's why you have cannons!

Both firearms and crossbows have a Reload score; to reload one of these weapons, you need to roll under this chance in 6 to reload the weapon in that round (for instance, a hand crossbow has a 3 in 6 Reload, while a musket is 1 in 6). This offers a good balance between semi-auto flintlocks and being completely unable to reload in a fight, but can lead to frustration when reloading is up to the dice. Indeed, it should encourage the classic "brace of pistols", wearing three or four pistols to prevent needing to reload during a fight, but give some tension to those "last shot, better make it count" sort of fights.

I might alter this so your Reload rate increases by 1 each round, making it more and more likely that you will succeed. So, a Reload of 1-in-6 becomes 2-in-6 after a failed roll, then 3-in-6 and so on. At a rough guess, average reload times will go up by a round or two. Might need to do some math to work out how that changes things. This might make things more fast-paced, and less is needed to balance guns when everyone has them. 

These are a few mechanics that interact with firearms - notably, some subclass options that increase your Reload rate, and even a 1% chance of getting a magical gunpowder weapon in a random treasure hoard. It doesn't have any specific magic firearms or ammo, which is a bit of a missed opportunity.

There's also Pathfinder's take on firearms, which I covered in my original post on this topic (almost a decade ago, Christ).

Does Pathfinder give you combat bonuses for being absolutely covered in random shit?

To look at Pathfinder 2e, we can see that things have changed quite a bit. Guns no longer cost a king's ransom (1000gp for a flintlock pistol? Now down to 6gp), and the mechanics have morphed into their own sort of divergent 5e-esque form. While I can't lift most of the mechanics from 2e, one idea I really love is Beast Guns.

Building weapons out of monster parts, like in Monster Hunter, is always cool as shit. I would happily convert the idea over; maybe allow these parts to be used to make unique magical weapons and items. Blood & Treasure already has a more involved system for making magic items, where monster parts can easily be used in conjunction with other ingredients (so long as you know someone able to make magic items). It might also give a mechanical difference between magic weapons and magic firearms, as if magic hasn't caught up to technology, so you need to use a more directly magical thing to get it to work.

Over in 5e land, there are two black powder weapons available; pistols and muskets. For 250/500gp, you can net yourself a 1d10/1d12 ranged weapon, with decent range, and the Loading tag (and Two-Handed for the musket). It's effectively a slightly better crossbow, that costs 5 times as much. Not the best representation, with nothing to really set them apart from other weapons (it feels like 5e really dropped the ball with its weapon tags).

So, not a lot to really pull from in the Big Two, but next time we will start peeling through other OSR games for some more ideas!