So you wanna put guns in your D&D5e game

I've played in a lot of 5V games where Firearms were Incorporated in some way shape or form I definitely am someone who can appreciate the cool factor of firearms how unacceptable Firearms do not belong in a fantasy setting they betray everything that Dungeons and Dragons stands for any game that incorporates Firearms is not truly D and therefore so uh as I was saying guns can be pretty cool and yeah man guns are really cool like if I had a Glock and fantasy setting I could take on like 50 goblins all at once you mean in a fight right you mean in a fight right when I've seen guns brought up in a DND Community it's not uncommon to get people either seeking to exploit them over the cool Factor while insisting that they need to be super fatal because realism because that's how guns are in real life which totally makes sense when you're talking about a setting that has literal [ __ ] dragons or you get people who get really uppity insist that guns don't belong in fantasy and that they don't want their sacred cow of DnD tainted by firearms and then of course there are also people who literally just want the idea of a firearm and they don't care if it's just a reskinned weapon and then there's others who want to make it really complicated I am guilty of this as well and it just kind of gets a little bit bloated as a mechanic in the game and the thing is none of these opinions are necessarily wrong it just kind of depends more on what you want to do the importance of firearms should rely on their thematics first and then the mechanics should reflect those thematics I have re-recorded for this video about four times now because I can't keep what I want to save about this topic short so I'm gonna try one last time let's see if I can do it as usual with all these DND videos that you find on YouTube my opinions are objectively correct and if you disagree with me you are bad and dumb and wrong and how dare you disagree with me I am right you are not anyway I'm not gonna tell you what is the best way to make your firearms in your game the best way is going to be whatever is most suitable for you that said I will point out some things that you probably do want to avoid and again the first thing that you need to ask is why do you want guns in your game and how prevalent do you want them to be in your game I do want to mention a little bit about the history of firearms before proceeding interestingly enough Firearms like crossbows were not actually meant to be super complicated weapons to use one thing that a lot of fantasy gets wrong is that it assumes that Firearms are super complicated and require super specialized training to use this is not really that true they are not significantly more difficult to use than say a crossbow both crossbows and Firearms also have the advantage of not straining you as you're trying to use them longbows despite being the quote-unquote Primitive weapon required a lot of training to use because they were very heavy to draw back and you had to have proper posture and a whole bunch of other procedures to ensure that you are aiming correctly Firearms you could just raise and shoot the entire point of firearms was that they were an easy way to get soldiers ready for battle meaning you could have peasants using firearms and make a suitable Army without having to train them very much basically what I'm saying is Firearms should be simple weapons but this is all something to keep in mind Firearms weren't exotic because they were specialized carefully crafted Clockwork Contraptions they were exotic because they were so deadly right out of the box now suddenly Joe schmoe The Peasant farmer could suddenly be a soldier if you want guns to Simply Be A alternative to existing ranged weapons then the stuff in the DMG can work fine you can also flavor it up a little bit because 5v's weapon properties are a little sparse and also to be fair the ones in the DMG are a little bit on the stronger side conversely you also get people who want to implement complicated reloading rules or there's people who insist that the guns in the DMG aren't powerful enough because guns should be incredibly fatal so going in the reverse order that I just mentioned let's start off with the guns that are exceptionally fatal if you want your guns to feel very novel and very very dangerous this is one way you can go about it make them incredibly fatal do a lot of damage but also instead of enforcing weird reloading rules where you have to spend three actions to reload or something like that instead just make it so they can only be reloaded out of combat suddenly you have something similar to a magic item except it's mundane and it's more usable by say a fighter they can open up with a salvo of bullets before switching over to their main weapon and fighting sword and Shield this would actually pretty realistically reflect how old combat used to work when Firearms were brand new with things like muskets and flintlocks as well as the age of piracy you'd often have soldiers using rifles that had bayonets on them so they could fight in the melee Skirmish after they had fired their weapons or they would have swords on them so that way they could duel sometimes you would want to save your firearm for the best possible moment and while it was possible to reload In the Heat of combat it was still incredibly hard and ideally the fastest reloader could only probably get it down to about 15 to 20 seconds which would be three to four rounds in a 5e oh it's that you're worried about the fighter opening up with action surgeon blowing away your boss with four pistol shots all at once well too bad that the sorcerer already cast disintegration that said if you really are worried about spider Bayonetta being a thing uh you can't just limit how many guns you give your party and you can even control ammo as well if it's that important guns in this method basically become like wands essentially a wand of lightning bolt or something like that it doesn't actually become all that crazy from a damage per round standpoint if you're treating them as temporary once per combat items Heck if once per combat is a little bit too frequent then you can also just make it that they need a short rest to reload their weapons yes it's longer than it would be in real life but this would be a lot easier to control and balance around plus it also would encourage people to take more short rests which are sorely underused in 5e anyway I've already mentioned what the DMG uses the firearms that exist in 5e at base are fairly similar to existing ranged weapons albeit A Little Bit Stronger so there is a bit of power creep going on part of this is due to the heavy weapon property being a completely [ __ ] property but I digress 5e's built-in weapons typically just have the loading property to handle their reloading process anything that is more modern winds up getting a very sizable damage buff as well as getting the reload property which is pretty flexible maybe too flexible barring more modern stuff the Renaissance weapons that exist in the DMG are fine if you want something that is a side grade to existing weapons and you want to emulate something more such as like Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft or other RPG games that for some reason classify Firearms as basically equivalent to other ranged weapons just for balance purposes this requires a lot of suspension of disbelief these are in all honesty pretty damn close to just reskinned crossbows they just have slight changes to the range and slight increases to their damage die I don't even think they necessarily even need the damage die increase I think it's a little bit excessive after all the only other weapon that has a D12 for its damage eye is the great ax yet thanks to the Renaissance Firearms now there is a D12 weapon that is ranged that still gets to add your modifier to its damage and also has the bonus of not having the heavy property which is [ __ ] these options are simple but we are not here to do simple we are here to Homebrew and also that is going to be a very painful process so because 5e's weapon properties are pretty scant what do we do we naturally start there this is the approach you want to take if you want your guns to actually feel unique you can emulate that they're an exotic technology without completely upsetting the balance of the game and more importantly this treats them like weapons rather than magic items so they are expected to be used regularly now the first thing everybody tries to suggest is increasing the amount of actions it takes to reload a weapon for instance it would be a great idea to have like a 68 weapons that way it does realistic damage and then it takes like you three rounds to reload the weapon before you can shoot it does this sound engaging for you to play you spend your first turn reloading your weapon you spend your second turn reloading your weapon you spend your third turn reloading your weapon you spend your fourth turn you shoot the weapon once you miss action economy when it comes to attacks is not consistent across the classes either if we want to design a home brew we want players to actually feel like they're active in the scene for now let's actually put a pin in the concept of reloading because we can address it later so I do think it is a little bit worthwhile to look at how other systems have handled Firearms especially older systems because how they did was kind of interesting back in 3.5 in Pathfinder Firearms actually within their first range increment would Target touch AC meaning they got to ignore armor this isn't something we can really do in 5e but it basically made Firearms incredibly accurate which offset their lower damage die yes firearms in Pathfinder tend to have lower damage die they also don't get to add your modifier to their damage rolls unless you're a gunslinger Firearms also had different methods to reload some weapons only took a move action to reload which there were different action types in Pathfinder and 3.5 whereas bigger Firearms might take a full action to reload making multiple attacks on your turn was a different process as well as you took a penalty for each successive attack you made on your turn but everybody could multiple attack this made giving up your action to reload a lot less punishing because there was already penalties to attacking multiple times conversely Pathfinder 2 2 also features a lot of firearms from the guns and Gary's book Pathfinder 2 is notable for its three Action System there aren't specialized action types but every player and every monster gets three actions each turn so it's really easy to implement a system where you can spend multiple actions to reload a weapon because you have multiple actions to work with you can have a weapon that requires two actions to reload and then you can shoot at every single turn and then reload at that same turn albeit at the cost of your movement other things also worth noting Pathfinder 1 despite the fact that the guns had low damage dies had huge critical multipliers so when they did get a critical hit they were super deadly Pathfinder 2 however doesn't have these huge multipliers though they do instead have these properties such as deadly or fatal which are very common to Firearms if a weapon with a fatal property lands a critical hit which is a lot easier to do in Pathfinder 2 because you just need to roll 10 above the target's AC or get an at 20. it instead changes the weapons damage die to the new listed value and adds a an additional one on top of it something that has fatal D12 instead of doing d8 for its damage we'll now do d12s on a critical hit Pathfinder 2 actually handles Firearms incredibly well for a mechanical standpoint because they managed to get the whole thing of well if you hit at least 10 above your Target's AC you get a critical hit so if you're really accurate with a firearm you can get a lot of really devastating hits whereas if you're really inaccurate with it it feels more like you're just grazing them it's really cool unfortunately for 5e we're limited more by how simple the system is it doesn't have multiple actions on your turn other than your bonus action and it doesn't have flexible actions either it also doesn't have multiple AC types so we can't emulate say hitting touch AC and penetrating armor and things like that most of 5e seems to be kind of constrained by its advantage and disadvantage system which as cool as a system as it is I think it's a little bit overused but I digress I think there's still ways that we can Implement some weapon properties that will emulate the ideas of firearms without having to make them too complicated I'm going to just list off a few things and just summarize how they work for instance if you want Critical Hits to feel super deadly add a property that adds an additional die when you get a critical hit very simple likewise to compensate for this power boost you can also have a misfire property where on a natural one the gun becomes jammed and requires either an action or an attack to clear as an attack would actually be really consistent I've seen a lot of people also try to implement blunderbusses and shotguns into DND but for some reason they always suggest that they fire in a cone I'm not exactly a fan of this because shotguns don't spread out that much in real life even a blunderbuss with a huge amount of spread would probably only spread to about three feet after about 40 feet out so instead what I would suggest for a spread property would instead just be creatures adjacent to your target take one point of Splash damage on a hit this is just automatic damage and it works like green flame blade but it is the same type as the weapon itself automatic damage may be a bit iffy but again green flame blade already exists there could also be another property that also was really good on shotguns where the weapon is able to ignore half cover and treats three quarters as half cover instead however you treat creatures themselves as full cover and cannot shoot through them this kind of has its own built-in trade-off as a result because after all you wouldn't use a shotgun to try and rescue a hostage I hope sticking with the theme of shotguns though this next property would work for pretty much any weapon still considering how damage falloff works with fire weapons Point Blank would basically give you a higher damage die within a listed range this would kind of be a workaround to targeting touch AC just instead of hitting more often you're going to hit harder and then also just to tease you with a few other ideas that I've had one might be a property that prevents the weapon from adding your ability modifier to its damage rolls however it instead adds an additional damage die this would be fairly interesting I feel because Firearms can kind of be a little bit Wily something like this would make Critical Hits feel exceptionally deadly without making the gun too much more powerful normally remember each die can be calculated as having a average value such as a D6 on average will roll a 3.5 you can use this to determine how powerful the gun is compared to other weapons for different classes this also plays into what I mentioned earlier about Firearms being a way to equip the masses for war if you were to take a bunch of peasants and give them Firearms yes they would probably miss more often than the players however when they do hit it would be just as deadly as the players because the damage is completely wild and unpredictable because bullets at least when they are circular ball bearings kind of go wild when they are shot overall I think this would be something that would be worth exploring and you'd probably want to run numbers on it but I think it's a cool way to implement Firearms without making them completely stronger than other weapons of their class in the complete opposite direction you could also just have some weird Crystal Punk weapons that are just laser guns that are made of magic or something I mean what's stopping you though that probably won't fit with the theme that you're normally thinking of of like piracy and Firearms being a new age weapon and things like that but anyway oh also on note of noise I've seen some people suggest that guns should require you to make some kind of constitution saving throw or become deafened the thing is old Firearms were bassier and deeper they made more booms rather than cracks and weren't as likely to cause hearing damage as a result you don't need to hard code in rules for noise for guns considering that they already exist in the game itself things like thunderstep already make a loud noise that is audible to people and specify how far it's Audible for you don't necessarily need this to be a weapon property going back a bit and talking about reloading for weapons that have multiple barrels or Chambers or magazines there are a few ways that you can handle reloading the most common of which being loading the loading property isn't so much a Reload property because usually players will just take something to ignore it it just basically limits how many times you can fire a weapon in one turn reloading however is specifically using an action to reload the weapon and it does not reload passively at the start of your turn like it does with a loading property both of these methods have their merits and you can use different ones for different weapons that you Homebrew the dmg's reloading property allows you to reload as an action or a bonus action which is a lot of flexibility but let's be honest most people are going to use their bonus action to reload because most classes don't need to use it normally other ways that you could Implement reloading and the advantages to that or disadvantages one as we've mentioned is reloading over multiple actions which is a very bad idea generally this leads to very passive and swingy gameplay that is not very engaging you can also reload as an action just as a normal action which is pretty costly you have to make this very worthwhile to use remember that the guns in this method can only be used once every other turn for classes without extra attack this would be a 50 damage drop but for classes with extra attack it's even higher reloading as an attack is also a possibility and is actually really easy to balance around if something has say four rounds in its chamber and then you have to spend an attack action to reload it meaning you can do it as part of an extra attack suddenly for every five attacks you could make one of them has to be a Reload which winds up being a 20 damage reduction you can balance around this and map it out then of course we have reloading as a bonus action which was mentioned already and for some classes this might be more clunky but for most it's going to be very very almost like it's not there in the first place one other interesting idea is the option to spend movement to reload how you divide movement for this will be the determining factor in how effective it is basically it allows the players to ignore reloading at the cost of being very static you can even allow some guns to use multiple different methods for reloading such as imagine if you have a gun that you can spend movement to reload it or you can spend an action now if you don't need to move you can just attack all at once and you can just use your movement to reload the weapon however if you're on the run you can replace one of your attacks and run and Gun these are all just factors that you need to consider if you're going to be home brewing and making some custom firearms for your players to use I definitely would not recommend using all of these at once and I would recommend trying to come up with your own properties as well ideally you don't want to encourage passive gameplay you want your players to be active in the moment and you also shouldn't make things super conditional or super hard to understand playing with the range as well as simple understandings that utilize said range are a good way to go about things in general however you should avoid small incremental bonuses because that is not something that 5e typically will Implement and also avoid including things that requires you to recalculate the AC on the Fly such as things that allow you to ignore the armor class and just go based on the dexterity modifier that'd be very clunky to use overall this video was way too long in the making but I hope it has been very informative and has given you ideas of how you can Implement guns in your games maybe I'll do a video in the future spicing up the weapon properties for 5e maybe release a Homebrew packet for that but that will be for another time truth be told 5e is not really my favorite system I just play it because it's what everybody else plays that's the way it goes and also it's what's popular on YouTube so give me that sweet engagement and tell me what your thoughts are on firearms in 5e this video was originally like three times long so I'm gonna just end it now [Music]

Channel: Zedrin

Views: 536,674

Keywords: zedrin, animation, dnd5e, dungeons and dragons, fifth edition, guns in dnd, firearms in dnd, homebrew, pathfinder, gunslinger, homebrew rules, making homebrew, custom weapons 5e, d&d5e, d&d

Id: gZcNuAYPy34

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022