General Guns of War Discussion

There’s a good argument for Strength modifying ranged combat, except in the case of crossbows since they are at set pulls. It does seem to be RAW, but I haven’t played that way. I don’t like that adding Strength to non-crossbow ranged weapons really nerfs crossbows compared to bows. What I like even worse is trying to come up with a bunch of house rules to bring crossbows up to par, or adding house rules to make ranged combat more realistic. You could add some of the rules after this paragraph, but I’m afraid that you’d wind up creating “Advanced ACKS” which I wouldn’t want to adjudicate as a DM. I do like rules that allow me to play with how the game is built such as custom character class creation and custom magic rules. However, I don’t want to start complicating the resolution mechanics from where they are now. Sorry if this comes off as a rant. That’s not my intent. It is a bit of a tangent from the focus of this thread, so I aplogize for that.

Some possible house rules that could lead one down the path of the Dark Side:
• Crossbows are built to accomodate various strength modifiers from (-3 to +3). This means that if there is a mismatch between the crossbow and the shooter they can either wind up not being able to fire the crossbow at all, or they fail to take full advantage of their strength.
• Strength could mean that the range increment could be either increased or decreased by 10’ per point of strength modifier at short range, 20’ at medium range, etc.
• Crossbows could be allowed to pierce a set amount of armor. Shouldn’t be as much as a firearm, so maybe 2 points? Maybe crossbows only get this at short range while arbalest get this a medium range as well.

Ogre Cannons: I'll admit to having largely skipped reading D@W battles because I was more interested in Campaigns, but I can see there's some interesting stuff here.  There might be stuff in Campaigns too, it's been a while since I've read it, and I want me some Giants with cannons on their backs.

Dungeon Guns: yeah, it seems like taking noise into account would be super important, but I'm a little worried that if it's too punitive people basically won't bother with them. I also have no idea how to make a balanced mechanic to figure how far away they'd be heard. 

Eras: so the interesting thing is, Flintlock appears to be superior to Wheellock in almost every way, except that for some reason Flintlock has a higher failure rate than wheellock in wet conditions.  At least according to tables, I've already demonstrated I have poor reading comprehension at least once in this thread.

Dwarves: I was just thinking that since dwarves don't do arcane magic it would be interesting if they were the best at casting "gun" instead :-P  Essentially I'm imagining a scenario where guns are roughly as available in the era, but with dwarves being known for their gunsmithing and gun use, even though other demihuman races have no qualms about using them.  I guess that's about as far as I got.

 

That was pretty much where we ended up - felt other ranged weapons ought to have strength to damage, didn’t want to nerf crossbows relative to other ranged weapons, and didn’t want to overcomplicate things. So we accepted the absurdity of crossbows with str to damage as the least evil.

Re Dwarves, you could achieve something like that by changing the relative availability of mercenary types for different demihuman races, with dwarves having fewer crossbowmen / bowmen / slingers and more arquebusiers and musketeers. That would nicely reflect a cultural difference without changing commonly available tech.

Re dungeon guns, you’re already supposed to roll for a random encounter after each combat (iirc?), so you could change the odds (maybe from 1 in 6 to 1 in 3) for said roll when firearms were used.

 

It's hard for me to really see firearms from the Guns of War eras really being able to cleave. It's somewhat of a stretch with crossbows for me already. I don't they they're really the weapons of individual heroes, but  are used by common soldiers fighting in formations to counter the advantages of armored cavalry. I could see characters using gunpowder to make bombs in certain situations, and I can see integrating Guns of War with an ACKS campaign, but guns seem to be of limited use for any small party of dungeon crawlers. Carrying a 1 stone weapon to fire and drop seems like a lot of weight to carry around to just shoot 1 round   in a combat.

I might be missing something. I'm not real familiar with the history of the time period that Guns of War is based on. Were their any famous gunfighters from era? 

Was there a new Guns of War release? (I backed L&E at the Guns of War level but wasn’t expecting to see the current version for a week. Well, six days now.)

I do think this weakens Fighters.

the release was posted as an update to the Domains at War kickstarter. it's a playtest document aka still a .docx with no art and limited formatting.

Ah, that’d explain why I missed it. (My D@W backing was a complicated process!)

Mm, true, the opportunies for bombing in dungeons are pretty good. Stats for smaller bombs would be pretty useful, actually.

And that one shot is so, so good. Up to +5 to hit against heavily-armored targets means they’re useful against strong, heavy opponents (dragons, giants, enormous beasts) to get them down to half HP quickly to force a morale check, and automatically forcing a morale check if their targets are ML+0 or worse means they’re also useful against masses of weak foes.

Relative to explorers? Possibly. We had a way-overpowered explorer with str16 dex18 once; he was a pain in my ass. In the general case, though, explorers have to split their stats between both reqs while fighters can just dump it all in one; I think it helps fighters more in the wilderness levels than it does explorers (since you can go from plate-and-spear dungeon phalanx to plate-and-longbow wilderness phalanx and keep more of your damage).

[quote="Jard"]

Dungeon Guns: yeah, it seems like taking noise into account would be super important, but I'm a little worried that if it's too punitive people basically won't bother with them. I also have no idea how to make a balanced mechanic to figure how far away they'd be heard. 

[/quote]

That's a good question, actually; I can't imagine there's not studies around that could be mangled to fit an average case. Have to see what the decibels are on a musket shot first, I guess.

[quote="Jard"]

Eras: so the interesting thing is, Flintlock appears to be superior to Wheellock in almost every way, except that for some reason Flintlock has a higher failure rate than wheellock in wet conditions.  At least according to tables, I've already demonstrated I have poor reading comprehension at least once in this thread

[/quote]

Right. To simplify immensely, imagine the Flintlock as your default Bic lighter - anyone who used to smoke knows they occasionally didn't work very well, and those are machine-made, not a hand-shaped flint on a hand-made mechanism. Little metal bit spins against a flint stone to create a spark. If either the flint or the starting powder is damp, ignition may not happen.

The wheellock, however, is a spring-loaded mechanism that has a lot more motive force behind it than just 'flicking your bic' - I dunno if you remember those spark-throwing toys that you pulled the plastic strip out of to make the metal wheel spin and throw sparks? Vague memory from the 80s...?

Anyway, the wheellock has enough spin/friction/heat generated that it burns out any collected moisture, and therefore is generally immune to moisture-related failure.

 

 

Fascinating.  Today I learned :-)

So it seems like with slightly increased prices and an across-the-board failure rate of 10%, (or possibly 10-20-20), matchlock could be the "upgrade" that spendy adventurers use for themselves.

I would allow cleaving with pistols if the user had multiple loaded pistols on them. Blackbeard (along with other pirates) was known for tying flintlock pistols to his belt with ribbons, so he could fire and drop them without losing them. There were also mounted cavalry troopers that would carry four to six (or more) pistols so that they could fire multiple times before having to reload.

I'm stealing that rule. Thank you.

 

No, I mean because it improves everyone's damage across a broad range of weapons. Anything that does that effectively weakens the Fighter, as it dilutes their dominance in the realm of weapon damage.

It does lead to a question about morale checks, which I think can be best illustrated by a scenario.

 

6 goblins corner a dwarven pistolier with 4 loaded wheel-lock pistols. The dwarf wins initiative and shoots a goblin. It falls, he cleaves and shoots a second goblin. The same thing happens, and he drops a third goblin, cleaves one more time and drops a fourth goblin, but now is out of pistols and cannot attack again.

 

How many morale checks do the two survivors take? Because goblins have a -1 morale, gunfire triggers a morale check, and the multiple shots and multiple deaths allow multiple scenarios. I can see a few possibilities:

1. The goblins make morale checks after each shot, plus a check at the end of the round at -2 due to having more than half their group killed in one round.

2. The goblins make morale checks after each shot, with the two at -2 due to the shots killing a target and half the group being dead.

3. The goblins make one morale check at the end of the round at -2.

4. (this one extrapolates from the rules) The goblins make one morale check at the end of the round at -4 because there are three situations forcing a check (firearm discharge, death, and half dead).

5. (the roll, roll, roll your die method) There are tons of morale checks - one for each shot and one for each death.

6. (my favored one, with totally no rule support) The goblins make a morale check immediately upon the first shot being fired. They make a second check at -2 immediately upon the first death, and a third check at -4 once half the group has been killed. The rolls occur only when the morale penalty gets worse, so if the dwarf had fired, killed a goblin, shot again, and didn't kill that target, there would be morale check #1 for the gunshot and check #2 for the death, but no check for the second shot, because it doesn't cause a further morale drop.

Only if your party contains high-strength characters who aren’t already classes with fighter damage bonus. This isn’t something I see with my group; if they have a high stat, they either play a class that has that stat as a req, or aggressively trade that stat down to boost a req for some other class that they want to play. In an 11 man party, they have a total of 5 points of positive modifiers that aren’t prime reqs for that character (4 of those 5 points are in Con, and the last is a 13 wisdom on a henchfighter whose stats they didn’t get to optimize).

Agreed, I think the cost and weight involved is a fair balance against the additional shooting power.

I think I'd go with #4.