Firearms in D&D Part 3: Getting Old School

So, in the first part, we discussed what issues we need to consider when adding black powder weapons to a D&D-derived fantasy world.

In the second, we checked out D&D and Pathfinder's current iterations of firearms to see if we could steal anything fun.

In this one, we will delve into the dark, murky and sometimes controversial world of the OSR to see what we can glean.

Starting with a personal favourite, Small But Viscous Dog - the rotten lovechild of B/X and WFRP.

Firearms are fairly deadly (as befits a WFRP-alike). They ignore armour at close range, which is more difficult to model in games where you fight monsters. They also have high damage dice, which can be a swingy way of representing the damage of firearms.

I had considered ignoring armour, but as the game is a swashbuckling pirate game, most people won't be wearing armour at all, so it's a bit of a moot point. I would like armour to be something worth using, so I will keep AC against firearm attacks. Makes more sense to me, at least.

AD&D 2e had the famous "Green Books" - the Historical Reference collection. We are interested in A Mighty Fortress, which covered the Elizabethan Age (and a bit after that as well). As with most things AD&D, there are a collection of awkward, exception-based rules for firearms which make them somewhat difficult to track on the tabletop.

At close range, firearms once again ignore armour; at medium range, the target's AC is penalised by 5, and at long range AC is penalised by 2. There are very loose rules for cover (i.e. it must be more "substantial" to qualify for the cover bonus; no rules are given past that. These firearms also given exploding damage dice, which is a fun idea and a good way to represent the inherent deadliness of firearms.

There are also rules for misfires, hang fire, fouled weapons from excessive use and point-blank firing. It's fairly extensive, but feels like it might bog down the game.

I can see allowing exploding damage die for crits with firearms, rather than simple double damage; that could be a fun little wrinkle. Otherwise, the other rules feel a bit excessive, and I don't mind combining fouling, hang fire and misfires into the fiction of rolling a natural 1.

The Ladies of LotFP, Preparing For a Fight!

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is another Black Powder Fantasy game, of sorts. I wouldn't recommend spending money on these rules, for a number of reasons, but luckily they are free!

As part of the Early Modern setting that became part of the game as it developed, LotFP includes pistols, muskets and arquebuses, in matchlock, wheellock and flintlock varieties. It even has rules for rifling!

Again, firearms ignore armour at close range. 

This brings the idea as to what sort of firearms I want present. I like the idea of having all three firing mechanisms present; it's a little bit anachronistic, but I like having the option of some areas being underequipped, while some are able to afford much nicer weapons. You can find small smithies cranking out simple arquebus-style guns, but if you want a proper rifle, you need to find a professional gunsmith.

We'll end on Adventurer Conqueror King (ACKS). Now, I generally don't recommend the system - the author is not only kind of a shitty dude, but he also supports a lot of other shitty dudes. It's also obsessed with minutiae and detail, in a way that isn't as much fun as it thinks it is, and the rules aren't free in any respect.

If you really want to read ACKS, my advice would be to read what sort of game this is for and act accordingly. Yo ho!

ACKS has the Guns of War supplement, which feels very similar to LotFP's (no doubt a result of using the same historical basis of the Pike & Shotte era). All firearms do 1d8 damage, pistols have ranges of 25ft/50ft/100ft, while rifles are 50/100/200. Weapons have detailed time to reload (for both trained and untrained soldiers), with bonuses to reload times for high Dexterity, penalties for being over burdened, items to reduce the loading time, several types of ammunition...

It's just a bit much, honestly. There's nothing here that wasn't covered elsewhere, better.

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!

Firearms in D&D - What's the Deal?

So, this is a topic I have covered before on this blog. But, as I come towards working more on my Pirate Saltbox game, I am back to researching alternatives that help capture the "sword and pistol" mode that a real Pirates game requires.

So - why were firearms so revolutionary? Well, there's a few points to consider.

• Ease of use - even the most basic firearms can be considered "point and shoot". Bows require strength to pull back, adjusting for wind and arcs over distance, and longbows compound both those factors - King Edward III supposedly said "If you want to train a longbowman, start with his grandfather". You needed the right height and build to have a chance at using it correctly. But anyone can point a stick and pull a trigger, even a peasant. They weren't as accurate as a trained bowman, but when you could field so many easily-replaceable troops, who cares?
• Penetrating Power - warfare always results in a arms race, particularly between weapons and armour. Firearms managed to overtake armour in a way that made almost anything short of steel plate completely useless (yeah, D&D's full plate armour? That was made as a reaction to firearms). Seeing as the rank and file couldn't be fully decked out in half-inch thick steel, most stuck to simpler cloth armour. Even then, they found that bullets would tear pieces of clothing and force it into their wounds, resulting in serious infections that were more likely to kill you than being shot. So, firearms were either deadly in the moment, deadly a few days later, or incredibly dangerous and disabling if you were lucky.
• Scalability - you can only make a sword so big. Firearms started as cannon, and advances in one area could be backported to the other fairly easily. Indeed, you could make cannons big enough to destroy castle walls, leading to yet another arms race that ended with the star fort. 
• Unintentional Advances - firearms also pushed new advances in metalwork and engineering, making them part of a larger set of developments that drove technology forward. Black Powder could be used for firearms, explosives, and many other applications. .

Now, how do we go about representing these in a game? There are a few options, some of which work better than others.

First off, ease of use. This one is easy to model - everyone who can use a sword can use a gun. I would say Fighters, Rangers, Paladins and Barbarians are all fair for using them, Wizards and Clerics not so much, though they along with Thieves and Bards *might* be limited to pistols; I can see it going either way.

This is for adventurers, of course - many of the knightly classes saw firearms as dishonourable (anything that lets those stinking peasants be equal to their betters must be bad, right?), and most of the lower class wouldn't have access to firearms outside of military service. Of course, many would abscond with a few choice pieces for use when money is a little tight, setting themselves up as highwaymen. Many places did not require licenses or anything of the sort to own firearms, meaning they could easily spread through trade and barter.

For penetrating power, there are a few options. Reducing AC, high damage, forcing saves... all of them are a bit fiddly in practice. Indeed, one set of rules that would give firearms their due is the AD&D Weapon Speed Factors and differing Damage vs Armour Type. 

Firearms should be roughly the same SF as crossbows (time to lift, aim, etc), maybe a point or two faster to balance out the longer reloads, and should have something to represent their penetrating power (maybe +1 vs light armour, +2 vs medium and +3 vs heavy armour - armour always has a chance to help stop it, but in most cases it will blow straight through, with half-plate and full-plate being the best possible protection but not total protection).

But seriously, ain't nobody got time for that.

As for scalability and other advances, those I can work into the background as I develop the setting more.

Next time, I will go through some of the options laid out in other games, to see what appeals and what might work.

Thud & Blunder - CLASH Done Right!

So, long-time readers might remember I was working on CLASH - The Generic Fantasy Skirmish Game, built on the engine used in In The Emperor's Name. I had planned on making a game that could be played with any sort of miniatures you had lying around, from old armies to a DM's collection of pre-painted minis. Almost anything could be quickly and easily statted up, and the core of the game was to be simple, quick to learn and fast enough to fit a couple of games in a night, or even a quick one while you waited for your gaming group to finally get together.

Well, turns out I got one-upped by the guys at The Ministry of Gentlemanly Warfare, the original writers of In The Emperor's Name. Over the course of a few games (In Her Majesty's Name, Daisho, and Blood Eagle), they tweaked the system (they need a name for their house system!), and finally turned their attention to the fantasy genre full-force (both Daisho and Blood Eagle are closer to "mythic" than truly fantastical).

Thud & Blunder is slightly more in-depth than your standard skirmish game (the combat feels like a stripped-down RPG, with options for disarming, mounted combat, and an interesting campaign system). However, it flows fairly well, with a phased you-go-I-go system reminiscent of GW's classic skirmish games. The extra complexity is mostly optional - you can run it stripped-down, or as complex as you like.

As far as my goals for the game go, it hits every note - not only is it easy to stat up any mini in your collection, with formula for new weapons, a bunch of pre-made warband lists to crib from and tweak to your hearts content, it's also easy to pick up and play with minimal fuss.

Even if you don't plan on using the system as-is, I would heartily recommend picking this up for the Scenarios, Complications and Landscapes- a massive list of plot hooks, weather conditions, alternate win conditions and changes you can add to any skirmish game to completely change the game! There are thousands of combinations you can create, meaning every game plays that little bit different. And it's incredibly easy to add your own, so you could never play the same game twice!

All in, it's an amazing little game! Well worth a tenner, even if just for the Scenarios / Complications / Landscapes section.

Hopefully, I should be able to get a few games in over the next few months, so keep your eyes peeled for more T&B content!

Gygax 75 Challenge - Week 5: The Larger World

We are in the home stretch - the last section! Time to draw the rest of the fucking owl, as they say.

Introduction

Week 1 -  The Concept

Week 2 - The Surrounding Area

Week 3 - The Dungeon

Week 4 - Town Features

Now, we tackle the longest part yet - detailing out the rest of the setting, even in sketches. This allows us to drop hints about what else may be out there, waiting to be discovered and played with.

This next session is long, so go get a snack and prepare for the absolute brain-vomit that ensues. This setting has been mostly knocking about in my brain for quite some time, so some bits were already half-filled for me; the other half is being lifted out of the Skulls & Shackles adventure path, though often through a remixed lens.

Remember, you can play along at home - head to Ray Otis' itch.io store and download the workbook (for free!) to get started!