Game Design 101 - Guns in D&D
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- Опубліковано 1 жов 2024
- A little trip into the mind of a game designer. Scary? Maybe. Fun? You Bet!
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Matt: "This is not an entertaining process"
Me: *Thoroughly entertained* "oh no"
one of us
I crave TTRPG design thoughts. I knew Matt through his series of videos "one fighter at a time"
Yeah, this design process is really fun to me. I love making fun weapons.
Yeah, same; I love game design! Nothing satisfies me quite like a well balanced probability matrix! Matt is really good with this kind of thing and that's absolutely why I subscribed. The fact that his excited personality makes it all entertaining is just the ice cream on the pie.
Thing is I have never played D&D nor contemplated making my own game, but anything Matt talks about is just riveting to me.
While I also thought Pirates before Cowboys, for those of you who think that D&D ISNT a western:
You stride into town, hit up the tavern (saloon), hear about someone causin a ruckus, go and stop them, and ride off into the sunset.
Every town has an issue.
Every villain has a schtick.
Every mark has a bounty.
Western.
oh no, my paladin carries a shotgun and a lever action. its a western. just the medieval Texas Ranger kind. you never know whats through the next portal ya berk, but if you got enough scratch you may just keep yourself out of the dead book. mayhaps even earn yourself some jink while your at it.
I love the fuck outta this. I gotta use it now.
I remember hearing Gygax or Arneson were real fans of westerns and used some of the tropes from Wild Westerns to frame their planning. Also, the early D&D space was kind of based in Westerns since those were some of the larger properties in the late 70s/early 80s and those stories and conventions seeped into the hobby.
Absolutely, I mean the lost mines of phandelver is pretty much a western.
That's general mercenary stuff tbh.
my favorite d&d firearm factoid is that, technically, rapiers are more recent than firearms
They are in real life too! At least in terms of when they became popular. The first firearms used in European combat were in the 1200's!
And plate mail!
@@darrinscott6612 hell plate mail as we understand it was in part a response to guns.
@@fabulous_finn7810 wait really? thats super cool actually! now i gotta research this lol
@@fabulous_finn7810 If memory serves, it is sort of inverse, though I am going off memory so I may be wrong.
Matt: "What kind of fantasy are we imagining for pistols."
Me: "Pirates."
Matt: "Six guns."
Me: ... "Okay. I wasn't going that direction, but it's a cool direction. I'd like to hear more." :)
Same here xD
Yeah, i think pretty much everyone here was thinking pirates.
@@JWonn Yar not wrong.
Same!
... I thought 6 gun...
"when you think of blunderbuss, you don't think cool"
Excuse you. Blowing away your enemy in a blast of shrapnel with a resounding and satisfying crack and boom, followed by saying "fear my boomstick" is the definition of cool.
I definitely designed a blunderbuss for my 4e game years ago and the players loved it.
Misfiring and saying "oh shit" at an incredibly inconvenient moment.
Agreed. Blunderbuss are amazing. The best part of Pillars of Eternity, after the cipher class, was black powder firearms.
Amen. And call it a rod of fireballs. 😎
Yeah, Warhammer perfectly captures cool pre-modern firearms.
Hot take: D&D's standard world isn't "medieval Europe". It's Renaissance Europe in big cities and the Wild West everywhere else.
I like it to be a mix of late medievalism in terms of technology, philosophers born far ahead of their time, dark age politicians, postmodern realpolitik, wild west frontiers, chivalric/bushido codes of honor for the common soldier, Emmanuel Levinas inspired codes of honor for paladins and magical realism through the lens of Jean Baudrillard.
Forgotten Realms especially, but even the less advanced official settings skewed this way. Even the more advanced D&D settings skew this way. Even Star Wars skews this way. People just associate wizards and dragons too much with medieval times to notice.
A lot of games that I’ve played in embrace the industrial revolution as a good setting for fantasy.
Pike and Shot.
Rorkes Drift.
@@dvklaveren you just described more succinctly than I think I ever could’ve EXACTLY the blend of shit I try and use in my game
Reload bonus is perfect for the "slight of hand" skill.
*Sleight
It really is, huh? Finally a way to make that skill useful
And then at 20th level you load 12 bullets into your 6-gun XD
@@sirquestgiver8550 unless you have Expertise.
@@RiotKurhein oh dear
"The fantasy is that you are cool." Thanks for aptly summarizing my whole life, Matt.
honestly i was expecting "pirates", not six shooters, but i'm happy to have been wrong
Flintlock pistols was my first thought, which made me think of pirates as well.
Yeah when he was asking those questions I defaulted to pirates and flintlocks not cowboys. Says a lot about how much of a gun fantasy I have. Lol
I thought Cowboys first then Pirates. I was hoping for pirates. Lol But this is cool.
The first campaign I ran was a Wild West campaign, so that's where my brain immediately goes.
Eh... Six shooters are too out there for it to fit in my world. I only have one six shooter in my game, and it's the quest reward for an inventor who was way ahead of his time and also a very skilled Articifer with magic at his disposal.
"Design isn't entertaining"
Me listening and enraptured with my brain firing on full: wait what?
Gamers aren't like most people. Strange things entertain us which normal people would find boring.
I feel like almost all DM's are game designers in some regard. I definitely enjoy it!
I can totally see a blunderbuss, with sails, rope, & and a terrifying jolly roger!
A pirate with a brace of pistols is definitely in-genre.
@@TheodoreMinick Aye, pirates and flintlocks came to my mind before westerns that’s for sure!
@@Ihileath you probably don't need a whole lot of design for flintlocks either - just a ranged weapon with the loading stat that maybe does higher damage in exchange for shorter range or a chance of misfiring/jamming.
Pirate was exactly where I went when he was asking about gun genre.
I love how none of the people replying to you have pointed out that a blunderbuss is a type of gun, not a ship.
As someone who has been watching your vids since the beginning, I LOVED this video and would love to see more game design processes and lessons
6:45 "What do they have a fantasy about?"
Me: Pirate pistols and Spanish Conquistadors era.
MC: Sixshooters.
Me: No... but let's see where this goes.
I was also thinking Bloodbourne guns...
AC black Flag's one-shot pistols up to 4 in your self for a quick strike
Listening now, almost identical thought pattern lol
I thought a fighter with a special harness in place of armor with a bunch of flintlocks or gnomish clockwork pistols so he can rain bullets for awhile before spending half an hour to reload :)
Also, there's plenty of technology in the base game of 5e, like rapiers, that only existed in history after the invention of firearms.
There was the Bilgewater homebrew cross over with League of Legends
I’m relieved everyone else was thinking “pirates” for the historical era.
Great video Mr. Colville!
I feel like I've just been given the tools to turn my ideas into real, usable game mechanics. I think this is the most inspired I've been after watching an MCDM video. A whole new way to interact with gaming has been opened up to me. Thank you so much for this video, I'm so excited!!!!
Hey! That's freaking awesome, man! (Or woman. Or other.)
Honestly, blunderbuss/flintlock is way more interesting for "fantasy" than a six-gun, to me. Six-gun makes it Weird West or something, which is cool, but definitely a different genre.
Yeah, but in pirate movies, a given character might unload two pistols and maybe take out a mook or two before the cutlasses come out and the real fight begins (Jack Sparrow's revenge bullet notwithstanding). So in the fantasy of pirate fiction, flintlock pistols are really just more grounded and serious handcrossbows. They're a softening-up weapon, not one you build a character concept around (again, 5e broken Sharpshooter builds notwithstanding).
The way they do guns in Warhammer fantasy, i.e. Vermintide games, works really well for some reason, same thing with darkest dungeon
There are renaissance guns with multiple barrels that would work in a similar way than what matt is proposing
@@mrcatface6860 To be fair, warhammer guns are 16 century guns, just like most of the empire's tech
I feel like d&d is already pretty western + romanticized, medieval fantasy.
"Long and rambling." Those are my favorite videos, honestly! I'm playing a gunslinger in an up-coming one shot. You gave me a lot to think about!
I love how everyone in the comments agrees that we want pirate guns
I would argue that a lot (if not most) of modern D&D games and settings more closely fit within the realm of Renaissance era Europe moreso than Medieval Europe, making firearms even more at home in the world
I definitely don't think most games are Renaissance era. At least not in my personal experience or the dms I commonly see posting online.
Those games certainly exist, but I wouldn't call them the majority by any means
@@bmike3000 I think a lot of what people commonly consider to be "medieval" is actually quite a lot later. As ohthreefiftyone mentioned above, full plate armor and a lot of the technology you see in games is emblematic of very late middle ages on through the Renaissance. I don't see many people running in medieval feudalist settings, most settings (a great example would be D&D's default setting, Forgotten Realms) feature independent city states and large unified nations or regions not splintered into the small locally controlled counties and duchies under a feudalist hierarchy. And you also tend to have things like artisan guilds and factions like the Harpers, very much Renaissance concepts IMO
though of course this is Fantasy Land and not actual historical Europe
@@bmike3000 Forgotten Realms, at least for 5th edition, presumes a Renaissance setting.
Much like Emma Lucas pointed out, I think that's mostly due to a warped perception of what the Middle Ages were like. There are games set in, and embodying the fiction and fantasy of, the European Early Modern Period - mercenaries, pirates, religious conflict, intrigue among a trans-national tangled mess of aristocratic families, the end of chivalry and the start of massive mechanized warfare, bloated decentralized empires with even more bloated debts desperately spilling over into oversea colonies in search of wealth, and so on. It's a big world full of small people, and games about it usually have that inform their design - Zweihander, WFRP, etc.
D&D, while not quite "medieval", still embodies the (modern) fantasy of a magical world of legends, knights, kings, honorable duels... It's a small world full of big people, and that structure is precisely what collapses at the onset of the Early Modern Period. You could say that D&D is _spiritually_ medieval, even though the trappings it presents are anachronistic.
@@ikaemos Yeah, I agree, most D&D tends towards medieval or even heroic-age in *thematics,* even if it's usually renaissance *aesthetically.*
Matt, I'm gonna tell you right now . . .
You're completely wrong about 'firing a blunderbuss' not being a fantasy. Always have to remember, Pirates are cool. Pirates had loads of pistols on their bandoliers, or they had long-muskets that they used for accuracy, and so on.
Pirates are cool, so flintlocks are cool.
And then you expand that out to a pioneer fantasy, or a colonialist fantasy, and it starts to really grow and grow.
Yes. Percy from the first season of Critical Role would have been just as fitting in our World with his guns (magical barrels aside) as he was in Exandria. And he was basically using what were actual multi-shot variations on things like flintlocks that really saw some use before the revolver was fully invented as we know it.
Arabian Jezzails are also a good starting point, especially if a character wants to take a more sniper-esque role.
Ah! Bazaar Bargain!
Guns definitely fit as much as rapiers, and full articulated plate mail.
"This is not an entertaining process"
Wrong, it is entertaining for a very niche audience.
I feel like I’m back in logic’s class in college 😂❤️
Working on homebrewing rules for another tabletop game, so I find it relatable in addition to entertaining.
5:45 my favorite thing about the first Guardians movie was how much it felt like a sci-fi DnD campaign. They're all selfish murder hobos and they're hilarious.
Let’s keep it real, guns were invented 300 years before the spyglass/telescope so historically, firearms absolutely should work.
Especially something like a flintlock pistol. The second he said "what is the Fantasy of guns" my mind instantly went "Highwayman" if just because of the whole "Stand and Deliver, your money or your life" being a badass line, that isn't overly edgy.
After seeing Matt Mercer's Gunslinger, I would love to see what you and James could come with for firearms...an article for a future Arcadia?
I’d also definitely recommend looking into the Renegade Fighter martial archetype that was published as a part of D&DBeyond’s limited time “Legends of Runeterra: Dark Tides of Bilgewater” promotion.
I’ve run gunslingers in my world using both rulesets, and the Renegade is (IMHO) the more easy-to-run/read and fun 5e gunslinger
One thing to note with Merced’s gunslinger (assuming you mean the Fighter archetype that Taliesin was using through campaign 1 for Percy) is that that is mostly a port of Pathfinder 1e’s gunslinger class and turning it into a fighter subclass.
If he’s done a new version since then then disregard. Unless it still has Grit points, those were the key feature of the PF1e class.
@@procrastinatinggamer The grit points were key to the subclass but the Paizo rules for firearms themselves are perfectly workable in D&D 5e. The subclass includes rules about reloading, a list of firearms, and misfire rules.
@@friarzero9841 yeah, but I’m saying a good chunk of the Gunslinger subclass’s design - when I last looked at it and based on how Percy was played in campaign 1 - draws a lot on Pathfinder 1e’s Gunslinger class and takes on firearms. Since Vox Machina’s campaign actually started as a Pathfinder one before they switched to 5e and began streaming it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Percy had been made in those PF days as a Gunslinger and it was only when they transitioned to 5e that Matt just ported the gunslinger over. And other mechanics - like misfire and such - were just brought over because “Taliesin’s used to how PF1e handles guns so I’ll just bring that over to ease the transition.”
@@andrewwelsh9194 Going to piggyback and also recommend checking out "Weird West" by Mage Hand Press
"Arthurian knights didn't ride around with M16s!" Man, now I want to live in the timeline where they did.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Watch "12 strong" with Chris Hemsworth.
Of course not they would carry the L1A1 (selective fire version) in reference to the SA80 *Kingon voice* "We do not talk about that "
Obviously. That's a viking thing.
The dark tower
At THE moment Matt said design process was boring, I was completely enthralled in it. Am I a designer-in-making, or is Matt a great speaker? Or both?
When given an either/or, say yes, and if it works, you're not dealing with a binary.
Definitely both. I can't get enough of this stuff.
There's a great part in Netflix's new Shadow and Bone where a character talks about firearms and magic coexisting.
He says that when he was young, he was told that 1 Grisha (Mage) was worth 50 standard soldiers. Then the repeating rifle was invented and that figure became 20. Then the revolving pistol was later imported from abroad and it became 10.
He then asks how long it will be until Grishas are just as useless as anyone else. If Mages have any political power in a region, this gives the very existence of firearms political weight. If you need Alchemists Guilds to make the powder and Crafting Guilds to make the firearm, and they are traditionally aligned with Mages, you can have a story about aristocratic Mages fighting to keep their relevance against a shifting world of line infantry belching fire and smoke with little training.
I just watched that. I think there's a great deal of cool storytelling potential in examining that period between late medieval and early modern that just hasn't been done by WotC.
The way I use (describe) firearms in my game is by making them semi railguns. It's mostly just a piece of metal which they just blast with lightning, getting the magnet coils to shoot it out at high velocity, therefore not only dealing piercing but also thunder damage. Oh, and it's loud. VERY loud.
So it’s very “magitech”? I assume they cost a small fortune for the fact that you can turn a fully armored knight into a red mist with the press of a button.
Yeah that's kind of along the lines of how I do it, because I just don't dig the connotations of gunpowder in my setting
@@Calebgoblin gunpowder does currently exist in my setting, however it’s still in the novelty stage and hasn’t really been weaponized yet.
@@alizard7617 fair fair! Flintlock fantasy is valid, it's just not my fantasy
@@alizard7617 I prefer to think of it as "Magicpunk". Kind of like how Eberon does it with mixing magic with tech.
As someone who has 'fanned the hammer', accuracy is out the window, starting at shot one. No level one should hit the broad side of a barn doing that
Hahaha. Thanks for sharing! That helps tune the realism of this design, I think. That begs the question, though: which direction do you want to take the design? Will you maximize realism (missing the broad side of a barn), or strive for the fantasy (McCree instakilling a 6-man enemy team with one rapid volley)? The choice is yours!
How about we make "fan the hammer" a Dex save instead of an attack roll? DC = 10 + Dex mod, it expends the entire cylinder/magazine or what's left, forcing the need to reload before the gun can be used again, and only hits up to as many targets as you had ammo left in the cylinder before making the attack, starting with the lowest save result going up, in a 15-30ft cone in front of the user.
When designing for a UK audience, I found the thing which most appealed as something that felt "right" for that kind of fantasy setting, was the classic 1800 Baker rifle from the Napoleonic wars. Big part of the public imagination here thanks to classic Sean Bean show Sharpe, and a lot of novels set during the period. You can balance it pretty nicely too, by lining up its reload time with combat rounds - if someone wants to get off multiple shots, it rewards them with high damage per shot, at the cost of actions spent reloading, the only thing is getting the sweet spot between that and them always opening with a shot from it then never considering the reload worth it and just ploughing into combat leaving it lying behind them.
You can neatly round it out as well by having lower damage flintlock duelling pistols that can get off single shots during combat but which you only really want to reload outside of combat fulfil that more disposable role.
It's funny you mention Sharpe, Matt recently did a stream talking about that show! The VOD has been deleted but there is another one coming soon.
That fire once and forget is actually very thematic of a historically accurate weapon. It's why pirates are depicted with bandoliers of flintlocks
So many Americans accidently discovered that show while researching civil war weapons. Christian Sharps was an American Gunsmith who invited one of the first practical breach loading rifles that where mainly used by Cavalry ua-cam.com/video/LSnpjPHtwlo/v-deo.html
There's a few ways I've approached firearms for DND, particularly 5e.
Want em to be super potent and realistic? Can only use them once per short rest or something, basically treat em on par with wands that deal a lot of damage once per day, with a similar cost. If they're too accessible, players will just buy multiple to avoid reloading.
But if you want them to be accessible to players? Try to compare them to other ranged weapons. While it feels a bit weird to make em on par damage wise with bows and the like, it makes em very interchangeable, and you can add some small tweaks. (E.g., maybe trade some range for more damage over a crossbow, or give them a trait to do more damage within a certain range increment for say scatterguns.)
Wanna do special actions, like six shooting, etc.? To be honest, I'd make it a feat or class feature or fighting style in conjunction with above. If they have specialized actions, they start feeling less like weapons and more like features. It makes them feel too 'special' to the other options otherwise.
I really like how pathfinder 2e handles guns too, in their current playtests. The 3 action system makes reloading them feel easier to balance, and the fatal property means that if you get a critical hit (which also happens if you beat the AC by 10), they feel as powerful as you'd expect a gun to be. Classes like the Gunslinger really capture the western feel even without an actual six-shooter, while an Investigator with a gun feels like a sniper or marksman out of the movie Untouchables. Or give em to your fighter, rogue, or swashbuckler to capture the feel of pirates.
Fun fact, "buy multiple guns to avoid reloading" is exactly what people did during the days of flintlock, so you would have soldiers (usually cavalrymen) walking around with four or more pistols hanging off their belts.
@sheparddog117 Except players don't care about loud enough for it to be a detriment. Loud is far more flavor than anything and you can't mistake flavor for balance, even if you're adding 'deafened' as a side effect.
Including a clause "gunfire can be heard up to a mile away" doesn't suddenly justify doing absurd damage as an easy to use weapon. It should be natural and expected for them to be loud, but there are spells that do the same thing that don't deafen you (thunderstep, knock, etc.).
Also I used to be a firearms collector. This is at the end of the day, a game, and adhering too closely to realism doesn't always make for the best choices.
Also x2, muskets and flintlocks were not as loud as modern firearms.
It’s funny you mentioned PF2e in a later paragraph, because your first idea with the short rest made me think of Focus Spells from 2e. You could just give the guns a reload time that makes it impractical to do in battle, maybe a minute or 30 seconds even. Easy to do after combat, but near impossible in battle.
Then if you decided to do gun-related feats or class features you could include reload-time reduction stuff.
@sheparddog117 Did you even watch the video / read my post?
@sheparddog117 I said it's not enough to balance it, and that there's plenty of things in 5e that already make just as much noise but without the side effects you're mentioning. It would make things feel inconsistent. Sure, they'll emit noise and blow your stealth, but mechanically that's not enough to balance them as a _weapon._
Re-watch the video because it talks about the concept of creating a specific fantasy you envision and your suggestions are completely off the mark.
And again, re-read my post, cause you clearly think I'm trying to say something completely different.
The -6 to AC for higher damage might be a good way to incentivize John Woo movies. Everyone running around blowing the hell out of the set to avoid getting shot.
It seems everyone else had the same idea I did: pirates. Actually running a pirate themed game with firearms and some homebrewed ship combat rules.
So is my brother.
Except we got our ship, equipment and everything else taken away from us in like the third session so we're back to being regular-ass adventurers in a non-piratey pirate campaign.
@@AugustBurnsSam Impossibly lame. LET PIRATES BE PIRATES.
Yes!!!! I love getting these windows into your game design. "Make ramming, a last ditch effort." I love this!!! Thanks Matt! SO INCREDIBLY excited for Kingdoms & Warfare.
PREPARE FOR RAMMING SPEED! - Worf
We need the six shooter so we can have an excuse for Matt Mercer to say "it's high noon" in critical role
Wasn’t Pepperbox a six shooter?
@@pixelated.dreams Yes.
@@pixelated.dreams A form of multi-barrel flintlock but it's the precursor of the six shooter in several ways yes. Percy's nemesis had what was closer to a proper six shooter however, which as I recall Percy later aquired.
This came at just the right time for one of my games. The rogue took a gun-arm from a construct and has been turning it into his own firearm. I’ve been winging it so far but this video gave me some concrete ideas to work with.
A gun-arm? Firearm-arm?
Firearm²
@@Oblivlawls haha glad you got the pun
Honestly, the DMG rules for guns are fine. No need to over-design.
@@Alex-fn2hl this PC is more of a tinkerer so he’s looking to customize the gun with attachments and mods, haven’t found rules in the DMG for that yet
Now that helped me way more than I thought it would. I have built some rpg mechanics and most of them can't fit any game because they were built as stand alone mechanics, ignoring genre and any kinds of fantasy. Once more: thanks, Matt!
"Do they fit the genre of 'medieval European fantasy' the D&D is based on?
No, of course not, don't be ridiculous, Arturian knights didn't ride with M60s"
And they didn't ride with anything close to full plate armor, yet we have these in D&D, plenty of them.
Even when guns predate full plate armor.
Average six shooter in my setting with tech analogous to 11th or 12th century fan
Vs
Average “yea I’ll use an early matchlock, it’s a bit of an anachronism but you’re ok with it right?” Enjoyer
You should know, i'm not left handed.
Well handgonnes cannons And even serpentine muskets were used during the later half of the medieval period and by the existence of rapiers and full plate armor in dnd we can tell that it is mostly in the late medieval period or early renaissance
All if you don't count katanas or smallswords
Wait, a new video series called Game Design? I'm down! But how did we already get to episode 101? Did I miss 100 episodes already!?
Daily reminder that early firearms predate the full plate paladins are often seen in
They did have the Cuirass and used them on horseback vs. Muskets.
@Ouro Boros yea, its primary advantage is that armor was by and large paper to it. The downside was reliability, or the lack of it.
I prefer early firearms cause then my “I wanna do a gunslinger” player isn’t some dumb spaghetti western transplant into my low-mid magic setting with tech close to the 11th or 12th century. It’s still anachronistic as hell but it’s not as egregious.
@Ouro Boros also if I’m not mistaken, gunpowder was made by Chinese monks in the 11th century trying to achieve immortality. Instead of getting a life extender, then made a life shortener.
And predate rapiers another staple of dnd
@Zach A well it depends some armour in the renaissance was purposely built to resist gunfire from a distance
Nothing was more painful than him saying guns don't fit in a medieval setting....even though guns and cannons in Europe were being used in war in the 14th century frequently, and by the end of the medieval era you're seeing matchlocks coming into early military use. Seriously, firearms are much much older than most people realize.
No part of this was uninteresting. I routinely fall down the "homebrew" rabbit hole until I am suddenly building a nearly brand new system and every part of this video spoke to my memories of those wonderful and frustrating projects.
Love it! Though you can add another knob to tweak by considering ammunition: How common is it? Are there different types? Can you craft it, and if so, how expensive/rare are the materials?
...what if the gun shot SPELLS!? *outlaw star intensifies*
I have a custom class called the Runeslinger, that's basically the Arcane Archer as a gunslinger. They carve runes into both their guns (say, accuracy, or phasing) and also into the ammo (fire damage, blindness, radiant, etc).
This would be the gun mage class from the Iron Kingdoms setting.
Firearms don't work for the Tolkien style medieval fantasy that we see a lot today, but muskets are all over the Grimm faerie tales.
If you want to do a strictly Tolkien-esq fantasy then yes, but there's no reason why you can't do that type of fantasy but with guns. There's a pretty large overlap between the first guns and the last use of amour and swords IRL, so there's a lot of neat ideas to explore in fantasy too.
Eh. Hard to still call Forgotten Realms Tolkein style these days.
There was a Blunderbuss in "Farmer Guiles of Ham." though the hero only used it once.
Related to homebrewing guns:
A party I was in a while back had a Ranger that used a longbow, and me, a Monk who used guns. My DM and I both homebrew a lot and we wanted guns to not suck to use while still not completely overshadowing our Ranger. The fantasy we thought of was "gun make big boom", so we wanted them do extra damage. We didn't go for the western duelist principle because it just doesn't seem to work in DnD, since everything is a big sack of hit points in this game. Since they dealt a lot of damage, we needed to give them some drawbacks so that they wouldn't overshadow the ranger.
The drawbacks we gave them were threefold:
1. They had the "loud" property, which meant that for the most part everyone within half a mile could hear it when I shot.
2. They had a loading penalty, which meant when you fired the number of shots the gun could have (so it would say "loading 2" for a double barrel shotgun) then you had to spend one attack to reload.
3. I had to track ammo, which we developed what I thought was a fun system for which I'll explain later.
I had a six-gun that dealt 1d10 damage (a lot for a one handed weapon), had "loading 6", and used "light" ammo. Had a sniper rifle that dealt 2d12 damage and had "loading 1." that used Heavy Ammo and had disadvantage up to 20 feet because of the scope, but a super long range and could help me see at distances. Had a double barrel that dealt 3d6 damage, had "loading 2" and used Heavy Ammo, and shot in a cone in front of me where enemies had to make dex saves.
Now, the ammo system: We decided that the longbow ranger shouldn't have to pay attention to ammo because it was easy to buy, find, craft, restock, etc. Arrows are everywhere. Bullets, in the setting we were playing, were not.
A person could hold three slots of light ammo and two slots of heavy ammo in easily accessible areas at a time. When you roll a natural one to hit with a weapon, you mark off one "slot" of the ammo of its type. When you're out of slots, you're out of ammo. If you are carrying extra ammo say in a backpack or a saddlebag, you could refill one slot with an action at a time.
The system was actually fun, because it made me consider when going into an encounter if I should carry more shotgun ammo or more sniper ammo, or a mix of both. It also added narrative tension because knowing I was low on ammo and could run out at any second made it riskier to engage in a combat, so I had to make the choice between spending a turn restocking if I could or taking the chance that I could run out if I went in. You knew it was coming, but didn't know exactly when.
Brainlets: "fIReARms dOn'T bElOnGS iN FanTaSy"
Me, wondering where in traditional European medieval fantasy does a submarine crab mecha come into play: I c
Must.....conform.....! Augh no it's too much pressure!
>me stopping the game to inform the DM that magic does not exist so the Wizard cannot cast a spell
Firearms have played such a huge part of the end of the medieval era, it's so disappointing to see people scoff at including them in fantasy. Not only were cannons and handgonnes used as early as the Hundred Years War in the west but fire lances and rockets were going strong for hundreds of years before that in China!
@@friarzero9841 firearms play a big part in my world. They just aren't wide-spread in the campaign that my players are currently in.
Medieval armies used firearms and cannons. Rarely did they exist outside Royal arsenals, troops in the field of battle and siege trains. The average wandering adventurer is roughly never going to be toting an arquebus. Thus, they exist in my campaign, I have rules for them, they inform plot and conflict, but have almost exactly zero part in the gameplay itself. This is exactly the "Three Musketeers" formula. Almost exclusively swordplay in a world where war is dominated by firearms.
As for firearms and D&D and so-called Medieval Europe: plate mail and two-handed sword appeared around renaissance, at which point simple firearms were certainly present
when talking about firearms Warhammer Fantasy pops into mind. There are a few other neat ideas in there, like corruption.
A brace of two single-shot pistols is a common thing to give empire and dwarf commanders in WFB and Mordheim, and the Ratmen use Jezzails and crude, wildly inaccurate gatling guns as staples for their ranged support.
At 17:55 you add in that enemies get advantage because you're standing still, but I think it should be *Creatures* *you* *didn't* *attack* *this turn have advantage* *on attacks against you* *until the start of* *your* *next* *turn* since you're looking directly at your target (or targets, plural with certain combo features). This wording has the bonus of accounting for Haste and cross classing into Fighter. After all, we see heroes in action movies narrowly avoid attacks made against them from the guy they're shooting at all the time, but be completely unaware of a flanking maneuver until it's too late. This way you really feel like you're only looking at the one target enemy with the intensity of a western hero.
Matt maneuvered himself into a difficult situation by over-thinking the thematics. Thematics aren't rules. A round is only six seconds. One shot should be one attack. Steady Aim is a bonus action to work within the 6 second round dynamic. If you're working within a pre-set system of rules, alter the thematics to fit the rules. Don't try to create your own rules to fit the thematics. This is a trap that will lead to ineffective game design.
I designed a full gunslinger class for 5e and one of the subclasses "The Wanderer" (based on archetypes like The Man With No Name) had the features you're talking about. The first was "Steady Aim" where at the start of your turn, you can use a bonus action to aim at a single target. You add your wisdom modifier to all of your attack rolls this turn to that target, but your speed is 0 until the start of your next turn. The other feature was "Fanning" where as an action you can make a number of attacks with your firearm equal to your proficiency bonus but each attack after the first has a cumulative -2 to the attack roll (3rd at a -4, etc)
2:14 The answer is actually yes, they obviously wouldn't be using m16's in medieval times, but they would be using rudimentary firearms like handgonnes, arquebuses and cannons.
That moment when you watch Matt Colville go over almost the exact same thought process you did when you were designing your own gun system...
Maybe I should be getting into game design
Your shirt makes me really happy, I need one! Thanks for the video as always.
One thing that I think is worth mentioning is that if you're designing special rules for your own game and the goal is to match a particular fantasy it's ok for a ruleset to be "overpowered" (at least in my mind). So long as the goal is to evoke a particular powerful fantasy.
Recently I was running a one-shot for my friends using the mutants and masterminds ruleset, the premise was that they were a SWAT like counter terror/crime unit in some distant future corporate dystopia.
One very important part of that premise for me was the idea of "breaching", where the squad has to make some effort in order to set up for a breach, they have to be relatively undetected, and succeed on a skill challenge (with any skill so long as they can explain how they use it) but if they do they're rewarded by a very powerful series of events. They get to chose what their initiative is from an array (first person to breach gets highest, last person gets lowest). They always act out a surprise round where none of their enemies get to act first. And based on the number of sucesses on the skill challenge (had to beat 14) they get this:
"1 Success = 14 to be used on an ally or foe.
2 Successes = 7 or 18, with the 7 being an effect against a foe and 18 friendly.
3 Successes = 1 or 20, with the 1 being an effect against a foe and 20 friendly.
Every breacher gets one result to use.
These numbers can be used out of turn order. Meaning multiple people can use theirs at once. For example when multiple foes must make a roll at once.
They can be used on any dice roll during a breach.
They can not be rerolled, and must be used before a dice roll is made.
**An unused result is lost**"
This is insanely powerful. In the oneshot we've had the very first combat finish in the surprise round because the players rolled well and made good decisions. But that was the whole point of the system! I designed encounters with the assmumptions they'll breach them and thus I'll be able to roll through them faster. Not to mention, the idea was supposed to be that their organisation is infamous to the point where if people say "RIPpers are here" the characters could hear genuine terror in their voice. They were supposed to be boogeymen that all criminals have nightmares about and it worked PERFECTLY.
So yeah, sorry for the long winded comment, but I think it is important to remember "why" you're designing a certain ruleset. If the idea is for it to be balanced, then try to keep it balanced. But if the idea for something like a gun is to be a terrifying weapon that should absolutely be kept out of people's hands rules can also be designed around that.
when you were asking what type of guns people have cool fantasies of, I just kept saying, "pirates". I was disappointed to hear "cowboys".
Pirates of the Caribbean. halfling with a blunderbuss being blasted backwards
Two directions I'd go are to look at what kind of mechanics are already in the game. Specifically, they have a feat that mimics the sort of high damage single shot mechanic in the sharpshooter feat (its something like -5 to hit for +10 damage) . Also then we should look into the game design of other 5e weapons. It would feel a little weird to add a new weapon to the arsenal that has all of a sudden way more mechanics. You could argue that more weapons should have some unique mechanics, but that's a critique of 5e in general and a different conversation. You would want this piece of design to fit in with the other D&D weapons though.
For fanning, I'd look at the crossbow master feat, which fits the fan the hammer fantasy in removing the disadvantage for close quarters with a ranged weapon. These two options build a weapon with choices between a harder shot for bigger damage, or more mobility and versatility in a running close quarters fight but lower damage.
I'd also not mind looking at a more piratey 16th-century firearm design which takes advantage of the period having guns that were longer reload and less reliable and so couldn't serve as one's only weapon but could be clutch in the right situation. This has me thinking of the pirate films where pistols and blunderbusses are almost temporarily consumable items. You might have several loaded pistols ready to go, or you might need to reload between fights. Then I'd look at a gun more as a consumable, something you can shoot for BIG damage (which feels more accurate for its damage vs medieval weapons) but the reload time means that in a high mobility fight you're either bringing a few of them into battle, or you're saving it for that clutch shot.
I feel im in a perpetual state of waiting for the next vid lol
D&D is heavily influenced by Early Modern (Renaissance) time period and even the late medieval period had firearms. To say that firearms don’t fit the game because of its “medieval” setting betrays a deep preference for superficial aesthetic over any coherent understanding of history. 12th century Europe the standard D&D milieu is not.
Doubly so when the social trends that the D&D adventurer mimics (and the traditional Americanisation of the setting) are often extremely divorced from a truly medieval perspective, with its wonderful strangeness often more fantastical than anything D&D writers can come up with, hewing almost exactly around the social trends of the mid to late 1300s to the late 1500s, at best (often even more modern social concepts are added thoughtlessly), a period whose shifts were in some cases integrally tied to the proliferation of firearm and cannon technology.
Considering how almost all fantasy includes the printing press (usually indirectly by having books readily available) and the galleon without a second thought, I find it strange how people consider firearms (which predated both the printing press and the galleon) to be unfit for a medieval setting.
@@jackodonail1980 America needs better history education. As a history nerd it saddens me to see "studded leather" and plate side by side. ;P
@@friarzero9841 Agreed.
I figured that "fanning the hammer" fantasy would be partially filled by having a gun fighter with multiple attacks. It would be interesting to be able to "spend" extra attacks to stand still and increase the damage of your shot. It would even be balanced to if you get an extra damage die per attack that you spend this way
IMO the existing rules already do a pretty good job with most of this. In the Old West it was common to carry a lot of pistols because reloading them was hard, so a character built on this kind of premise probably would have several.
A fast firing character would be built as a Battlemaster, whereas the devastating single shot type as a Rogue. (I'm leaving aside the magical pistoleer built on a Warlock chassis, but that's viable too.) If a revolver was a difficult weapon to make and cost a lot, that would keep it out of the hands of riffraff, but within the realm of PCs. A good analog would be Plate Mail.
Really nice display of game design, especially how it shows that wanting to get a specific fantasy to work often leads to overly complex rules that don't work.
It's almost always better to simplify your design up to a point that you cannot simplify it any further without losing the fantasy you're trying to achieve.
That was a very insightful look into the mind of a designer. I loved it! Also the flavor of a reload action rolling a d6 and reloading that many bullets is such a good idea. Top tier content here.
My players' fantasy when asking for guns: *shiny stick goes BOOM*
Me: "Here, have a brass wand."
One single firearm exists in my D&D setting, a revolver-esque pistol that propels shards of obsidian with what is essentially a stored Eldritch blast inside. The obsidian has to slowly grow back inside the cylinder, which is the "cooldown"
Stealing this
please tell me it is specifically a pepper-box style revolver
@@8-bitsarda747 sorry m8
Listening to your proces this is what I came up with:
Make it a magic item. You can make different weapons have more or less damage, or different size in magazines etc. based on their worth (rarity).
My take: Western Sixgun. This is a short range weapon found in the western lands, where lawlessness rules. It became populair due to its versatility. You can use it in two different ways "Fan and Blast" or "High noon shot".
Fan and blast gives you the ability to quickly unload your gun and instil terror in you opponents. As an action you can shoot half your magezine (3 shots) and you make 3 ranged attacks each with disadvantage. Every shot does 1d6 damage (+ dex mod) and all enemies not in at least half-cover make a Wis saving throw (DC 10 + dex mod) or are frightend (of being shot) until the start of your next turn.
High noon shot: the shot to end your enemy. As an action you can shoot one precise bullet, make 1 ranged attack with advantage and lose your movement for this turn enemies have advantage on attacks against you. For this attack you can choose your dex or str, you ignore half and three-quarter cover. The shot does 3d6 dmg (+dex or str mod). If you hit the enemy and it fails a Wis saving throw (10+str or dex) it is Shocked (Shocked is a condition in which and enemy cant take actions and movement is halfed) until the start of your next turn. These shots have to be perfect so after every third *maybe second. shot you have to clean your barrel from sooth and powder residu this takes an action.
Reload: Use your action to fill the gun. Roll 1d6 + dex mod, thise is the amount of bullets you can refill. Is the amount bigger then the amounts of bullets you need to fill the magazine, then you can use your bonus action to fire (ranged attack) 1 bullet dealing 1d6 damage.
Edit:
Range Fan and blast has a max 30ft range, high noon shot 60/90ft range.
Nobody is proficient from the start in weapons, so they have to take a feat to add their PB to the reload check and attacks.
THIS IS MY BOOMSTICK
Today's task: Homebrew sawed off shotgun.🤩
I would look at modifying criticals for the "single aimed shot". Maybe changing it to 18-20 instead of just 20 (or better yet, based on proficiency bonus to scale). The bigger problem is how single shots and fan the hammer interact with fighter's extra attacks. Perhaps the single shot must be a full round action, and fan the hammer acts like 2 extra attacks that classes can build on top of. That way, both attack styles scale with the player.
Stoked on this cos I'm considering running my K&W homebrew in the Napoleonic era.
I am running a pirate campaign in an era partly inspired by the Napoleonic era and it's great. Would recommend
If you don't have at least one player wanting to play a Rifleman, they've not watched enough Sharpe.
@@VosperCDN Fighting undead at TOree Castro instead of French Cavalry, now that's soldiering.
Have you read the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik?
@@dvklaveren No, tell me more.
This is 100% an entertaining process.
I'm one of those people that watched *all* of Mike Merles Happy Fun hour... twice.
yeah I really enjoyed that series
I love how 14 minutes after posting a video that's 24 minutes long you already have dislikes. Didn't even give you a chance.
I understand that this is a hypothetical so the design is not super serious but I while I was watching the part about AC penalties, why not make it an AC bonus? While I was imagining this mostly for an unarmored character (since armor makes it really hard to aim guns) but even with light armor I think it'd work and would incentivize players to unload their six shooter.
Yo if you could look into dumping the twitch vods on UA-cam that would be awesome!
I love the long form content, but my sleep schedule is fucked and the twitch vod player is (notoriously) garbage.
I hate Misfire mechanic. I look at Pistols as Short swords, shotgun is a long sword, Rifle is a two handed heavy sword. Revolvers can be as intrecate as Short swords or even more so. I'm trying to find a gunslinger that isn't Matt Mercers cause I don't like the misfire mechanic and the selection of guns.
The thing is D&D weapons are balanced against each other inside the system, and that system has little relationship to real world combat, so guns are just a relatively high damage weapon. IRL any weapon has a good chance to kill or serious harm somebody. Bows, crossbows, and even slings are only moderately less deadly than guns against unarmored people. So guns really should only do moderately more damage than other weapons but have a better chance against to hit against armored opponents.
The infamous THAC0 was designed to handle exactly this kind of problem, but it was just a bandaid over the design wound that is attrition-based combat.
Matt's great and I really respect him, but this is like listening to a debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin: every "solution" requires a qualifier, an amendment, a rule inside a rule inside a rule. And at the end there's no great solution, because whatever you do, you're just propping up a mechanic with another mechanic. The problem isn't guns, it's D&D.
This is why I use Powered by the Apocalypse systems: everything's deadly. If you roll well, you mess somebody up. If you roll poorly, you're on the receiving end. Maybe slightly more so for a deadlier weapon, maybe slightly less so if the opponent has armor. You can hold the rules in the palm of your hand and get on with the business of roleplaying.
EDIT: And Apocalypse World literally has a stat for "cool under fire." It's called... Cool.
Here's my take:
Number of bullets shot in a round and damage.
1 = 1D6 + 5
2 = 2D6 + 4
3 = 3D6 + 3
4 = 4D6 + 2
5 = 5D6 + 1
6 = 6D6
Action - Full Reload
Bonus Action - Reload amount of bullets = Wis+1
Action - Duel - Gain Advantage, opponent gains advantage. 1 bullet = Profeciency bonus×D6 + 5 No movement.
Idea for fanning the gun: you get the penalty for each shot above however many attacks you get in your attack action. So a 20th level fighter gets 4 shots for free and can do 2 more at disadvantage or at -1/-2 or -2/-4. 5th level fighter gets 2 shots for free and can do 4 more with penalties
No one will see this, but I still need to write it. If you want a fun bolt-on for guns in D&D that change the game a bit and makes guns more than just a different weapon choice, but something every character is going to want to pick up; well, here it is. This is an evolution of the system I created for one of my games.
There are five classes of (single person) firearm: One-shots (for assassins), Six-shooters (for gunslingers), Sweepers (shotguns), Spitters (machine guns), Longshots (rifles). There are five classes of ammo: standard, silver, adamantine, cold iron, and magi.
_Bullets_
*Standard:* piercing damage.
*Silver:* piercing damage, counts as a silvered weapon.
*Adamantine:* bludgeoning damage, counts as magical.
*Cold Iron:* slashing damage, counts as magical. If hit with a cold iron bullet, spell casters have disadvantage on their concentration check. Deals +2 damage to fey, undead and fiends.
*Magi:* force damage, counts as magical. A weapon firing magi bullets can be used as a spell focus, and spells cast with the weapon can include a firing phase before the spell takes effect. If this firing phase is used, the origin of the spell will change to come from the general area where the bullet would have struck. In this way, the gunmage can fire touch spells from a distance, or rake a lightning spell through enemies fanned out before them.
_Weapons_
*One-shots:* 1d4 damage, Dex to hit, bonus action to reload, range: 10/40. Mods (up to one): suppressor (don't break stealth to fire), magi (allows the use of magi bullets).
*Six-shooters:* 1d6 damage, Dex to hit, Action to reload: DC 15 Cha check (amount over 15 is how many bullets you reload up to 6), range: 20/100. Fan, fire as normal, spend 5 feet of movement per bullet to fire additional bullets (at disadvantage) if not empty. Mods: magi (allows the use of magi bullets).
*Sweepers:* two-handed, 2d6 damage, fires in a 20 foot cone, DC (10 + Con) Dex save for no damage, action to reload. Mods (up to one): sawn (3d6 damage, -10 foot cone), long barrel (1d6 damage, +10 foot cone), pistol grip (becomes one-handed), double-barrel (can fire twice before needing a reload).
*Spitters:* Requires 16 Strength to wield, two-handed, magazine size 30, action to reload, range: 50/300. Three firing modes: Single shot, 1d4 damage, Dex to hit. Burst, 3d4 damage, Str to hit, uses 3 bullets. Suppression, uses 15 bullets, creates a 50 foot line from the shooter that deals 4d4 damage to anyone entering that line until the start of the shooter's next turn, DC (10 + Proficiency) Con save for half.
*Longshots:* two-handed, 1d8 damage, Wis to hit, action to reload, range: 200/700. Mods (up to one): scope (range becomes 500/1500), magi (allows the use of magi bullets)
_Class Proficiencies_
Proficiency in any one class of firearm can be gained by a feat. This feat also increases any ability score by 1.
*One-shots:* rogue, wizard, cleric, fighter, monk
*Six-shooters:* ranger, sorcerer, warlock, bard, paladin
*Sweepers:* fighter, barbarian
*Spitters:* fighter, barbarian, paladin
*Longshots:* ranger, monk, cleric, druid, warlock
_Final Notes_
I've intentionally left off prices, this would be highly dependent on your game and world. I've also not detailed magical weapons, but suffice to say the possibilities here are _sky high._ Every class can make use of a firearm, at least as a backup weapon for special situations. Every class can _shine_ with a firearm. Every class can have a build based entirely around a firearm. None of the extra actions are fiddley or cumbersome. The weirdest one is fanning using movement as a resource, but is easy to track because players _already_ have to track their movement used. Mods create fun choices. Magi bullets create insane spell combinations, but can be balanced by their price and availability. These play _pretty_ well with the other rules. The flaw I see most people make with firearms is making them _high damage._ The wording on the Spitter is meant to allow a character with extra attack to be able to mix and match. They could, for example, fire off a burst at a target and then lay down suppression. This ties in well with the tank abilities of the classes that get that weapons class.
The six-shooter and extra attack work fine, you'd fire normally for the first attack and normally for the second, then if you want to fan after that you can. You can also attack, fan, and then attack with another weapon. You could also _fan twice_ but I don't know why you'd want to.
These weapons all work fine at level 1 and they work fine at level 20. Extra attack scales better with some of them than others, but the Sweepers aren't really _meant_ as a primary weapon.
_Justifications_
*Why Charisma for Reloading Six-shooters?* This does two things: first, it creates a weapon for charisma classes that gives them a specific benefit. But more importantly, a six-shooter is a weapon for a cowboy with some grit. Charisma is grit, it is how cool you are. Gunslingers are _cool._
*Why Con mod for the Sweeper DC?* Similarly, this creates an inherent benefit for Constitution classes, but also reflects the toughness someone needs to fire a shotgun.
*Why Wis mod for the Longshots?* As with the others, this creates benefits for Wisdom classes, and it reflects the _perception_ needed to fire a rifle from extremely long range. It also creates a super-long-range class of weapon which allows bows to still be useful and feel different.
Renegade Fighter martial archetype that was published as a part of “Legends of Runeterra: Dark Tides of Bilgewater” made the guns more of an ability than a weapon (I think they are sort of magical, so you don't deal with ammo and reloading). Good ideas to work off of.
Personally id make faning the gun a dex save on the target spread out evenly among them, (shooting at 3 foes is 2shots each etc etc) they either fail and take all or save and take nothing. and the save dc would be reduced by how many shots you take over lets say two. So Clint fans six rounds at his 3 enemies, each taking two. the DC is 8+Dex+Prof-rounds beyond 2. His dex is 16 (+3) and his Prof bonus is +3. So 14-4 (6 rounds shot) the DC is 10 pass you take nothing and fail they take two shots (lets say 2d8 each shot so 4d8)
21:42 D&D 5e has 13 Classes now, this last one also gives proficiency with firearms innately.
No shade Matt but the first assertion is not correct. While the era of Dungeons & Dragons would not support an M-16, the era seems to perfectly support firearms from the wheel lock and even early musket era. Think about it… This is a world where knights are wearing full plate mail, rapiers, halberds and more. This would suggest that we are even past the time of handheld cannons and well within wheel lock technology. Look at the Black Riders for historical reference. They were Calvary troops who would often carry six or seven Wheelock pistols at a time due to them only having one shot. Firearms were a very popular choice among late medieval German mercenaries.
I watched a history series where they tested a crossbow against one of the first muskets and the crossbow was deadlier but the musket was easier to use for a layperson
And you can put a bayonet on a rifle. It's a polearm and firearm in one. Extremely op for the time.
I honestly think making guns this overwrought new mechanical thing is missing the point. Like, if the fantasy of having a revolver is being able to fan the hammer for six shots, or one-shot opponents in a duel, then the fantasy of having a greataxe is cleaving people in twain. lopping heads off and cutting a swathe through lesser foes.
These are things you can do, by being a 14th-level Barbarian with Great Weapon Master, but none of them are built into the greataxe. A town guard with a greataxe is not Conan, just like a random cowpoke isn't Angel Eyes.
So yeah, for my money, a revolver is a 1d10 ranged weapon with a short range of 40 feet. that needs both an action and bonus action to reload every six shots. Fanning the hammer, drawing a precise bead at the cost of movement, and reliably shooting out past 40 feet? Those are class features and feats.
How is a bullet dealing the same dmg as an arrow
@@cozycr8485 That's the same damage as a heavy crossbow. How much damage would you have a bullet do? Keeping in mind that a solid hack with a battleaxe does 1d10, and being bitten by a grizzly bear is 1d8.
I've always used the "Your heavy crossbow is now a musket" school of thought
I'm personally a big fan of guns in D&D as flintlocks, matchlocks, and wheellocks, especially in my personal Warhammer-ish setting. And while I played with the idea of adding Backfire mechanics and whatnot, I feel like they can make using a kind of weapon more punishing than they have to be, and using them as a third 'type' of ranged weapon in a world works very well, putting them as the highest damaging in terms of dice, but close to the lowest in terms of range, using the Musket and Pistol from the DMG as a baseline.
You going through the design process was actually incredibly entertaining. It allowed me to go through the process with you and build ideas in my own head! Love every video you do!
You can say that again
I disagree with your final design for a six gun, therefore i will give you my take on it.
I would start of by taking the Revolver from DMG as is, and change absolutely no mechanics. All the mechanics i would want are there. The misfires, the one powerful shot, the barrage of shots, realoading, and even called shots. I will be using some of our most powerful tools, narration and reflavouring.
For the focused shot, you will be attacking a target multiple times as normal. But we will instead narrate this as being one aimed and powerful shot. To add some extra spice, you may want to use Steady Aim, Sneak Attack, Eldritch Smite for a Warlock, or something maybe Hunter's Mark or Hex in a "*points* I am going to get you" sort of way. Banishing Smite and Branding smite (both available to the hexblade warlock, for that sweet charismatic gunslinger fantasy) are the two smite spells that can be used with ranged weapons, and therefore can also be flavoured as called shots. Banishing smite specifically could be a "If i hit, you die. If you hit, well..." Battle manouvers can also be added for more spice, more on that later. Despite narratively being only one shot, it will still interact with the reload mechanic as normal, more on that later.
For a barrage of shots, you do the exact same thing as above with exception of the narration. The narration is now that you are moving towards cover (which you would be doing as a ranged character anyways), and attacking multiple times. Nothing strange here. For early levels, you can say that a lot of the bullets miss which is actually the player not having extra attack. If you want to cast a spell, consider reflavouring too. A shatter spell could be the barrage of bullets.
To follow up on the question on how a single shot would still interact with realoding. What you do is to say that your gun misfired, and that you need to reload it. Misfiring times would change depending on how many focused shots you made compared to barrages, it would also change depending on your multiattack. If you need to reload, and didn't have a focused shot then you would be reloading as normal.
As for focused shots, it can easily be made using some class features such as the battlemaster's manouvers. A trip attack could be you shooting someone in the leg making them fall to the ground.
If this inspired you, then i trust that you will be able to find more cool ways to reflavour and narrate abilities to fit what you want from them.
Literally just yesterday I was pondering simple firearms addition to 5e, what crazy coincidence.
That happens all the time for me. One day I'm wondering how to implement a certain concept in my game, the next day, or sometimes later that day, Matt uploads a video that helps! He is a true wizard.
I'm blown away at the amount of people who haven't read the whole DMG.
@@NieroshaiTheSable I didn't care for the as written rules.
@@NieroshaiTheSable I use it only as reference for rules rather than a manuscript on how the game should be played, if I forget a condition I will check but anything else that isn’t a core game mechanic I rule in the game. And yeah I’ve maybe read 1/3 of the DMG
Classic high fantasy is hardly entirely medieval, it's basically a fusion of a bunch of different time periods, one of those time periods being renaissance, which absolutely had guns. In fact, I would bet that many of the very heavy armors people use for inspiration for D&D armor actually only historically exist in order to defend against firearms
Also, I think there are lots of people who have more of a blunderbuss type fantasy, because there are many fantasy worlds (such as the world of warcraft) which includes such things being used by dwarves. Maybe its more of a video game generation thing, but also I've literally never seen anything about the 3 musketeers except for the candy bar, which they dont even have 3 flavors anymore. Being a modern fantasy nerd I have a way stronger connection to realistic renaissance gun vs plate armor fighting than i do for the cowboys vs indians type fantasy that my dad and grandpa grew up with
I love how Matt said “Lets design Dark Tower for D&D”😭😭😭
He remembered the face of his father.
_Ka is a wheel_
I think it's unfare to say that guns don't belong in dnd bc king Arthur didn't use an AR. King arther was active in the migration period, not the late, middle or early medieval ages, not the Viking age, not even the me to Virgin age. If king Arthur was active in 1530 he would have used guns, maybe only as tools to destroy encampments, maybe he'd champion line combat. in high fantasy I think it's appropriate to use late medieval technology like plate armour and like guns so long as you integrate the guns in a way that is fun
"Do firearms fit d&d? No cuz knights didnt use M16s" Stupidest statement ive seen on the channel, to the point it makes me angry (love this channel and used Matts advice a ton of times, so not hating). Guns and full plate armor were invented at roughly the same time, and to assume guns means modern guns is just, well, a stupidly modern view.
Come on, even writers like Mallory and Ariosto who actually lived at the time when plate armour and firearms overlapped didn't mix firearms and the supernatural. Shining knights fought dragons with swords and lances, not arquebuses.
Because the arquebus would have killed the dragon far easier! Yes, guns, even early ones, take out a bit of the drama and panache of fantasy. But we assume that the people in a d&d world want to survive the dragon, and what better way of doing it than with a gun if knights and wizards aint around?
@@digitaljanus Wrong. In Le Morte d'Arthur, Mordred went and laid a siege on the Tower of London with cannons. Granted, back then, firearms were handgonnes (handcannons) instead of harquebuses (which were being introduced by the time Le Morte d'Arthur was written at the very tail end of the Middle Ages). In general, medieval authors were every bit as anachronistic as anyone else in the modern age. It is very common to find paintings and depictions of battles with equipment and fashions that would not exist until centuries later (usually fashions and elements contemporary to the author's time).
I guess the main complication in designing guns as a weapon-type is that weapons in 5e are simple, and complexity is built into feats and class features. If guns are complex, then it is additive to the already complex class structures, and things can get very messy. I would think for 5e guns should be very simple baseline, and then complexity added to them through new subclasses, potentially a new class with it's own subclasses, additional subclass options for existing subclasses, and/or new feats.
I think a warlock may have a very different relationship with their gun than a ranger.
Giving guns a long reload makes me feel i have to do the same to crossbow.
And worrying about guns on arthurian knights you should also worry about plate armor, dnd already has alot of anachronisms
Darkest dungeons and bloodborne have made gun and sword popular.there is wow too that has guns.
And with arquebuses being late medieval and early renaissance, gun and plate is not anachronistic ,missfire should be part of guns but unless you give the same loading restrictions to crossbows i dont see why the loading property should change
@@ohthreefiftyone kinda faster than a crossbow
Crossbows used for war had all kinds of mechanisms to reaload, they couldn’t be reloaded by just strength .
Crossbows and muskets shared the same strategies, teams of two when one reloads the other shoots
@@ohthreefiftyone here on crossbows, is a great channel in general
ua-cam.com/video/2IdfmaC_t-Q/v-deo.html
what if you changed the ranges for shooting more or less bullets, like, normally you could shoot, say, 50ft (100ft), but for every extra bullet you fire, you drop your short range by 5 and your long by 10, so if you fire 6 bullets, you would get disadvantage for anything farther than 25ft and be unable to shoot anything more than 50.
I think making a 6 shooter work in DnD is a lot harder than making single shot weapons work. First of all the technology for single shot weapons is renaissance technology so really not far off in terms of fitting the fantasy, second of all they have a comparable weapon with mechanics already in the game (crossbows). Loading property gives at most one shot per round so you can have increased damage without worrying about fighters abusing multi-attack. I add in misfire on nat 1's simply to cause the normal auto-miss as well as requiring an action to roll to fix the gun. Success means you only lost the one action to fix, while failure means your weapon needs more time to fix and is unusable for the remainder of the combat and until adequate time is spent on repair
Notably these do reload far faster than historical counterparts would; however, I group that in with "fun > realism" given that practically no one wants to use their weapon once and spend a minute loading powder and a bullet into their weapon before they can make another attack
I mean I have no problem with black powder so long as we keep it to like Flint Locke’s and cannons can only really be used as siege equipment. All I really have to do is make the really interesting stuff either hard to get and require an entire quest chain and then be something that everyone’s going to want to rob them of because obviously if you’re just carrying around a cannon with you a lot of people are going to want that from bandit camps to any orcs who know what that is to the city guard when they see you roll up with a cannon. But yeah Then again I’m also the type of do more complicated combat roles like for example you’re trying to hit a giant who is wearing steel plate guess what his armor is almost an inch thick you’re going to be meeting called Shots. I also make large races truly large and giant truly gigantic so like the shortest giants are 30 feet tall and by shortest giants I mean Cyclopes. You could theoretically get around noise by having a gun in chanted to be silent or just casting silence on the gun unless you want there to be some limit to the ability of the spell as for decibel level but if that’s the case thunder wave would also break that spell. Another thought reloading of black powder weapons takes a lot of time Although ironically the bigger the weapon the last time it would theoretically take for example it’s easier to load a blunderbuss then it is a pistol or a cannon than a howitzer
Muskets do not have rifling, they have smooth bores, they are less accurate, but easier and thus faster to load. A rifle is called such because it is rifled, the swirling grooves that spin the projectile, making it stable in flight and more accurate. The grooves however create and require a tighter fit, making it harder to load, and fouling becomes a much bigger issue.
Maybe instead of doing any dice of damage it does your hit minus the targets ac in damage. So you roll a net 21 and the ac is 12, well that was a great shot and gottem in the gut or something 9 damage. Then you get six shots a turn and can sacrifice shots to add your tohit modifiers to a shot at the additional cost of -1 ac and -10 movement. In a QuickDraw you'd dump all your shots into one and get 6 times the to hit which translates to damage -5 ac and no movement.