Gunpowder & Firearms in Dungeons & Dragons
Continuing along from the last post, and tying in with this month’s RPG Bloggers topic of “Steampunk” I thought I’d offer up some rules for using gunpowder and firearms in your D&D game.
Gunpowder, also known as “Black powder”, was used in firearms as early as the 1100s in China and the 1300s in many other parts of the world including Europe. By the early 1500s self-igniting firearms like the wheellock pistol and rifle began to appear. While many D&D campaigns replace gunpowder and technology with magic, some referees may choose to include firearms in their game world – either as a regular item, or as a “magical” device from some other world.
Even the earliest hand-held firearms, or “hand canons”, had superior armor piercing capabilities. A longbow was somewhat effective against chain-mail, and a crossbow slightly more so, but a hand cannon (and later firearms) could pierce plate armour. While less accurate and slower than a longbow, a hand cannon didn’t require the extensive training and practice required of a proficient archer.
As firearm technology progressed their reliability, range, accuracy and speed of reloading all continued to improve. In the 1800s weapons that could fire multiple shots before reloading appeared, and in the late 1800s and early 1900s fully automatic firing weapons were developed.
The rules for using firearms in your D&D game depend to some extent on how much detail you want to use, as well as the era of firearm you want to include. Any of the following optional rules can be used:
Hit-Point / Stamina Loss
Pistol: d6*
Rifle: d10*
* Any time you roll maximum damage you can roll again for additional damage.Example: An attacker with a pistol rolls a d6 and gets a ‘6′. They roll the d6 again and get a ‘4′. The total for the attack is 10 points.
Armour Penetration
Armour is less effective against firearms. Reduce the AC bonus from armour by 4 points. Note: this does not effect AC bonuses from dexterity or magic.
If the optional rules for Shields are used, a shield roll is not made against attacks from firearms.
Example: A character with leather armour (AC 7) and a +1 bonus to AC from high dexterity (AC 6) is attacked by a character with a rifle. Their AC is treated as 8 for the attack (No AC bonus from armour, but +1 bonus from dexterity)
Knock Down
Firearm attacks carry a lot of kinetic energy. What constitutes a “hit” rather than using up stamina and luck varies from game to game. A suggestion is that in a system that clearly defines when a character is hit that a firearm attack also include some sort of “knock down” effect.
In D&D 4e this could be represented by a character who is hit by a firearm attack and bloodied being moved back 1 square away from the direction of the attack and knocked prone.
Reloading
Most earlier weapons could fire only a single shot before needing to be reloaded. Characters might carry a pair (or “brace”) of pistols, or have a retainer who reloads rifles for them. Generally it should take a similar amount of time to reload a firearm as it does a crossbow (eg. spend 1 round reloading between attacks).
In the same way that gunpowder and firearms changed the way battles were fought in the real world, I imagine their use in a D&D campaign could also affect both the armour and equipment characters use as well as the tactics they employ. While not suitable for every game, they can make an interesting addition to a non-standard fantasy game world.
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Actually, there isn’t much chance of knockback. The target hit almost always fall in the direction they were travelling; at most, being knocked prone where they stood, or knocked off a mount.
I think it might be a bit “over the top” for how effective firearms were, in comparison to crossbows at the time. Now, that doesn’t mean that rules aren’t potentially very fitting, merely that one should also increase the power of crossbows to be comparable. One of the reasons we don’t think about gunpowder as a big player in the middle ages is that it wasn’t as effective, both in terms of quality of powder and design principles. Issues in casting and poor understanding of physics (such as barrel length vs power)caused alot of issues.
That being said you may want some more criteria in sizes, there is a vast difference between an early german pistol and an age of sail dueling pistol and the gentlemens pistols (such as derringers)
@Timeshadow: I think it depends on the system you’re playing and how realistic vs cinematic it is. In D&D 4e there are a lot of effects than send enemies flying back multiple squares (5 feet each) so for those I’d use the option of having firearms move enemies about. I see your point about not always moving *away* though… so maybe just leave it to the players discretion which square to shift them to.
@Zzarchov: From what I’ve read firearms were less accurate and slower to reload, but packed a greater punch and were better at piercing armour than either the longbow or crossbow. Range, accuracy, speed and expense were all factors in making the crossbow a better choice for armies until improvements in firearms were made.
On my (admittedly very rarely updated these days) blog, I’ve got a series on black powder weapons in D&D with some thoughts on loading and special effects (I like your exploding dice rule btw, similiar to how Nobis tackles black powder weapon, making you afraid without kicking the balance)
http://polyhedral.wordpress.com/black-powder-weapons/
I’ve been thinking about Gun Powder and the new 4e Rules. Your article has got me thinking. Thanks for the inspiration.
[...] Robertson Games offers 4 optional rulse for using firearms in your D&D game: Hit Point/Stamina Loss (with open-ended damage), armor penetration, knock-down, and re-loading. [sorry I missed this the first time around!] [...]
[...] Gunpowder & Firearms in Dungeons & Dragons | Robertson Games [...]
[...] you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates.I had previously written an article on Gunpowder & Firearms in Dungeons & Dragons in which I’d suggested rules such as “Exploding Dice” (any time you roll maximum [...]
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