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Gun balance

   
Gun balance

Why is it apparently SO hard for firearms in roleplaying games to be balanced against melee weapons and spells? I've yet to see a single tabletop game that managed to have firearms in it without them either being massively underpowered, massively overpowered, or at least having that be the common consensus in the community. And since I'm making yet another tabletop game that has both melee weapons and firearms, I'm concerned that there's a factor at play here that isn't strictly about the actual weapons themselves. And if there is another factor, in particular if there's a factor in campaign design or player psychology, what can I do about that? CAN I even do anything about that?

Hmm, interesting question.

I can think of a couple of plausible hypothetical reasons. The main one is probably that I believe guns are (perceived to be) more deadly. D&D, Pathfinder, and in fact many games are set up such that getting hit in the face with a greatsword usually isn't fatal. This is ridiculous (in 3.5/PF you can fall from space onto pointy rocks and not die once you hit the mid-to-high levels) but it's mainly for gameplay and balance reasons, so it sort of makes sense. However, for some reason, this feels less tolerable for guns. We all know* that if you get shot, you basically just die straight away, whereas suffering a stab wound and carrying on at least for a bit does not seem so crazy, or even go all Boromir on them, running around bristling with arrows.

I suppose this is a smaller part of a larger issue, which is (perceived) realism. Actually, in D&D 3.5, firearms are just the same as other projectile weapons. This makes Renaissance firearms a bit weak, but only because they are basically just crossbows. A musket is a 1d12 heavy crossbow with a 150ft range, though, which is hardly to be sniffed at. But then how do you expect modern firearms to be balanced against slings and spears? They're just not comparable. Furthermore, people expect firearms to work differently. People stopped wearing armour when firearms became big because it wasn't so much use, and we want the rules to reflect this. That's why PF firearms are touch attacks. However, that introduces massive balance issues because the game expects most attacks to target regular AC.

Firearms also don't add damage based on Strength or anything like that. This means that a moderately strong person is still doing more damage with a greatsword than with even a modern firearm by 3.5 or PF rules. Consequently you risk ending up with either firearms which are really good at the low levels (anyone can pick up a gun and deal 2d12 damage or whatever), firearms which are really bad at the higher levels (so with my 30 Strength and special bow, I can shoot an arrow dealing 1d8+10 damage, more than a bullet), or - usually - both.

Depends on the intricacy of the rules for weapons. There are plenty of systems where melee and ranged weapons have negligible differences, or no differences at all.

But for systems that go deeper into the differences of guns and melee weapons, there are several factors. "Realism" (or a misguided sense of) is a common cause. There's a reason people don't hit each other with sharp sticks anymore. Guns are just better and more efficient at killing.

Also, as far as I recall Star Wars Saga Edition did a decent job at balancing the two. Of course, it also has lightsabers so is it really accurate to compare. In general I think scifi games have a bit more effort put into them, whereas in many fantasy games guns are a curiosity or footnote mechanically.

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Originally Posted by TheFred View Post
Hmm, interesting question.

I can think of a couple of plausible hypothetical reasons. The main one is probably that I believe guns are (perceived to be) more deadly. D&D, Pathfinder, and in fact many games are set up such that getting hit in the face with a greatsword usually isn't fatal. This is ridiculous (in 3.5/PF you can fall from space onto pointy rocks and not die once you hit the mid-to-high levels) but it's mainly for gameplay and balance reasons, so it sort of makes sense. However, for some reason, this feels less tolerable for guns. We all know* that if you get shot, you basically just die straight away, whereas suffering a stab wound and carrying on at least for a bit does not seem so crazy, or even go all Boromir on them, running around bristling with arrows.
I believe that asterisk is meant to lead to a footnote that reads something like "*And that's completely incorrect, guns don't actually work that way at all, and people are severely misinformed."

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I suppose this is a smaller part of a larger issue, which is (perceived) realism. Actually, in D&D 3.5, firearms are just the same as other projectile weapons. This makes Renaissance firearms a bit weak, but only because they are basically just crossbows. A musket is a 1d12 heavy crossbow with a 150ft range, though, which is hardly to be sniffed at.
Except they have a way better critical, IIRC. (Nope, looked it up, that was Pathfinder.) Oh, and you lose out on attack rate and bow-specific feats and class abilities. (Multishot, rapid shot, etcetera.) This of course means they're ultimately inferior weapons in 3.5 to bows.

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But then how do you expect modern firearms to be balanced against slings and spears? They're just not comparable.
Modern firearms, you wouldn't. But wide varieties of firearms were used at the same time as spears, and when modern-ish firearms came into being in the late 19th century, swords were still common weapons. That's about the tech level of my game, actually, which is why it matters.

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Furthermore, people expect firearms to work differently. People stopped wearing armour when firearms became big because it wasn't so much use, and we want the rules to reflect this. That's why PF firearms are touch attacks. However, that introduces massive balance issues because the game expects most attacks to target regular AC.
This is actually false. Handheld firearms did not render armour obsolete. Armour didn't fall out of style for regular infantry until about 400 years after firearms were invented, and even when it did it wasn't because of handheld firearms anyway, it was because of the prevalence of artillery. Even after that point, armour never completely stopped being used with some very heavy uniforms being designed to resist sabres, knives and bayonets, officers and some cavalry wore breastplates until the Napoleonic era, and some cavalry continued wearing breastplates until cavalry became obsolete.

Early firearms actually had inferior penetration to other projectile weapons of their time, and that didn't change until the Renaissance. Later firearms were better against armour, but they didn't ignore it or render it obsolete, they just changed its design to focus more protection on the torso. Lighter armour was also eliminated in favour of cut and stab resistant coats, which you can't call armour but were still a protective garment.

Even in the early 20th century, personal armour did exist and did see some use, but it wasn't common and was not intended to stop rifle fire. Instead, it was intended to protect against close-quarters firearms such as pistols, shotguns and submachine guns as those would be the primary weapons when clearing trenches. In World War II these were far less common and the uniforms used by most nations (Germany being the exception) were no longer knife-resistant, but flak jackets (which are also a form of body armour) became far more common. Mobsters also wore very thick, multi-layered silk suits (which cost enough money to buy a car) that provided significant protection against handguns and shotguns.

After WWII modern-style bulletproof vests began to be introduced to regular infantry in increasing numbers. That process was slow going, but eventually reached the point where today body armour that is completely impervious to small arms fire is now standard issue in the militaries of developed nations. Which means that for the entire history of firearms, body armour has been in use, much of it specifically to defeat firearms, and was quite capable of defeating at least some common firearms that were present on the battlefield.

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Firearms also don't add damage based on Strength or anything like that. This means that a moderately strong person is still doing more damage with a greatsword than with even a modern firearm by 3.5 or PF rules.
A greatsword doing more damage than a firearm makes sense. Guns, contrary to popular belief, don't actually inflict an especially lethal wound. The advantage of a firearm is range and ease of use, for later firearms also armour penetration and for modern firearms rate of fire. These are all things that are a factor in most game systems, so a gun doesn't need to have its damage be as high to be as good or better. It definitely helps, but that's not the weapon's main draw and it's only realistic with some firearms for them to deal a lot of damage and not with others.

Modern firearms are also not more lethal than historical firearms, the .78 calibre ball of a land pattern musket or "brown bess" is quite a bit more lethal than the wound left by an AR-15. Brown bess was known to rip arms off, they're not even remotely comparable. The thing that makes the AR-15 better is it's faster firing, more accurate and has longer range. Of course, that's also quite a bit more modern than anything in my game. Most people shot by it will survive if they're hit once, especially not right away (dying takes time, even with very large wounds), but it's still a life-threatening injury and you tend to be hit more than once when shot with an automatic weapon.

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Consequently you risk ending up with either firearms which are really good at the low levels (anyone can pick up a gun and deal 2d12 damage or whatever), firearms which are really bad at the higher levels (so with my 30 Strength and special bow, I can shoot an arrow dealing 1d8+10 damage, more than a bullet), or - usually - both.
My solution to that issue was to allow for better, more sophisticated firearms later in the game as finances became available. If your 1st level adventurer can only afford a musket that was obsolete a century ago, but a 20th level adventurer has a blowback-operated rifle that's so state of the art it's only made by gnomes and they refuse to sell it to anybody, it's possible for them to only have weapons that are balanced at any given time. I also used weapon modifications and special ammunition to further this. As for how well it'll work, we'll find out.

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Originally Posted by Actana View Post
Depends on the intricacy of the rules for weapons. There are plenty of systems where melee and ranged weapons have negligible differences, or no differences at all.

But for systems that go deeper into the differences of guns and melee weapons, there are several factors. "Realism" (or a misguided sense of) is a common cause.
Yes, and I'm concerned I might not be able to do ANYTHING about that. If people think bullet wounds result in reliable, instantaneous death, nothing I can do is going to change that expectation if that expectation persists despite the fact that they're obviously, blatantly wrong and are incontrovertibly disproven on a daily basis whenever a shooting is covered on the news.

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There's a reason people don't hit each other with sharp sticks anymore. Guns are just better and more efficient at killing.
Modern guns, sure, but not all firearms throughout history and not generally in terms of damage dealt. Most of the reason they won out over other weapons is once they were present, you had to risk a life-threatening gunshot wound to get into range with any other weapon and even so melee weapons are still standard issue in the form of combat knives and bayonets.

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Also, as far as I recall Star Wars Saga Edition did a decent job at balancing the two. Of course, it also has lightsabers so is it really accurate to compare.
I've never played that game, actually.

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In general I think scifi games have a bit more effort put into them, whereas in many fantasy games guns are a curiosity or footnote mechanically.
They have to. If melee weapons exist in a sci-fi setting as anything but a backup weapon, they need some explanation as to why. And if it's going to be anything other than a knife or a bayonet they seem to think it can't just be a backup weapon. (Nevermind that swords in particular were already a backup weapon, even in the medieval period, so clearly yes they friggin' can be.) And they also can't just be better because A: That makes no sense at all, and B: If they were, everybody would use them.

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Originally Posted by Avianmosquito View Post
Except they have a way better critical, IIRC. (Nope, looked it up, that was Pathfinder.) Oh, and you lose out on attack rate and bow-specific feats and class abilities. (Multishot, rapid shot, etcetera.) This of course means they're ultimately inferior weapons in 3.5 to bows.
Sure... just like crossbows. A 3.5 Renaissance pistol is basically a one-handed Heavy Crossbow which doesn't weigh as much and has a much reduced range (50ft vs 120ft; crit is x3 rather than 19-20/x2, more or less a wash). A musket is that but longer range and 1d12. To be honest, they're not all that unbalanced compared with crossbows - but who even uses crossbows? Bows are way better.
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Originally Posted by Avianmosquito View Post
Early firearms actually had inferior penetration to other projectile weapons of their time, and that didn't change until the Renaissance. Later firearms were better against armour, but they didn't ignore it or render it obsolete, they just changed its design to focus more protection on the torso.
Well it really depends what kind of guns you're talking about.

Obviously, armour is almost never going to be useless, because that's just physics (simplifying "armour" massively to "something which absorbs some impact") though it may be negligible. I actually dislike PF's touch AC rules for this reason (plus they're bad game design). But with firearms now being "big", I wonder if people would still wear medieval-style armour if modern armoured vests weren't a thing. Anyway, point is that it's quite hard to make rules which reflect this and also work mechanically.
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Originally Posted by Avianmosquito View Post
A greatsword doing more damage than a firearm makes sense.
Of course. However, the realism breaks down a bit here regardless. Even if a gun does less, it can still kill you in one shot - now OK, Pathfinder gives them x4 crits but I suspect that if the rules were to reflect them accurately things would be even swingier (that's only one shot in 20, and the damage might still be as low as four 1s).

Either way this introduces a balance conundrum. The way D&D/PF work, the damage needs to scale a lot for things to work, because hp does too. I mean, I guess you could have a weapon which just kills you outright on a crit or something but again, swinginess isn't really great for gameplay. The closest thing without the damage scaling loads would be firearms shots doing quite large damage but being really inaccurate for ill-trained users, with experts perhaps getting crits much more often (to represent being better able to make lethal shots). Of course you can still add damage (and things like Weapon Specialisation exist) but it's way harder than with a bow.

It's also dubious that bows ought to deal so much more damage than guns. Perhaps not so much; in order to deal big damage with a bow, you need a big Str score, at which point we're talking magic or, say, being an actual ogre. At that point arrows are going to pack a hell of a lot of punch. I'm not sure how that compares with bullets, though (obviously it will depend a lot on the type of firearm).
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Originally Posted by Avianmosquito View Post
My solution to that issue was to allow for better, more sophisticated firearms later in the game as finances became available. If your 1st level adventurer can only afford a musket that was obsolete a century ago, but a 20th level adventurer has a blowback-operated rifle that's so state of the art it's only made by gnomes and they refuse to sell it to anybody, it's possible for them to only have weapons that are balanced at any given time.
This is OK, but it depends on how freely available those advanced firearms are. If modern-esq weapons are around at all, chances are someone is making money by making them. Sure, you can have rare, super-high-tech things knocking about, maybe prototypes or whatever, but how much variance exists will be quite setting-dependent.

Of course, if this is a setting where magic also exists, the status quo is hard to imagine. There probably exist armours which can just make the bullets fly away from you, and conversely firearms which are also magical.

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Originally Posted by TheFred View Post
Obviously, armour is almost never going to be useless, because that's just physics (simplifying "armour" massively to "something which absorbs some impact") though it may be negligible. I actually dislike PF's touch AC rules for this reason (plus they're bad game design). But with firearms now being "big", I wonder if people would still wear medieval-style armour if modern armoured vests weren't a thing. Anyway, point is that it's quite hard to make rules which reflect this and also work mechanically.
Actually, under the surface, modern body armour is plate concealed inside a layer of fabric. It isn't that different, in terms of design, from some historical armours. Modern all-fabric vests also aren't that new, dense fabric body armour dates back to the bronze age, though back then it was made of linen. It's kinda funny, to an extent, how people think of modern body armour as new and different when it's only slightly tweaked and made of different materials.

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Of course. However, the realism breaks down a bit here regardless. Even if a gun does less, it can still kill you in one shot - now OK, Pathfinder gives them x4 crits but I suspect that if the rules were to reflect them accurately things would be even swingier (that's only one shot in 20, and the damage might still be as low as four 1s).
That's never realistic, actually. Any weapon *can* kill you in one shot, it's just that some weapons are more likely to than others. It's also not realistic that an attack either kills you right away or not at all. It's also also not realistic that an attack that doesn't kill you has no effect on your capabilities. At some point, you just need to accept that it's not realistic to have a playable tabletop game.

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Either way this introduces a balance conundrum. The way D&D/PF work, the damage needs to scale a lot for things to work, because hp does too. I mean, I guess you could have a weapon which just kills you outright on a crit or something but again, swinginess isn't really great for gameplay. The closest thing without the damage scaling loads would be firearms shots doing quite large damage but being really inaccurate for ill-trained users, with experts perhaps getting crits much more often (to represent being better able to make lethal shots). Of course you can still add damage (and things like Weapon Specialisation exist) but it's way harder than with a bow.
A lot of that is just that those games scale way too heavily. Having 10-15 times as many hit points at level 20 as you did at level 1 is going to mess up any semblance of realism.

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It's also dubious that bows ought to deal so much more damage than guns. Perhaps not so much; in order to deal big damage with a bow, you need a big Str score, at which point we're talking magic or, say, being an actual ogre. At that point arrows are going to pack a hell of a lot of punch. I'm not sure how that compares with bullets, though (obviously it will depend a lot on the type of firearm).
It also depends how you're defining damage. If it's just pure damage to a soft target, historical firearms were far more damaging than any other ranged weapon. But if we're taking penetration into account, for enemies in armour or really large enemies, war bows penetrated better until about the start of the 17th century and even then it wasn't until the end of the 18th that they were powerful enough to penetrate breastplates. (And even once they could, it was initially only at close range with a good angle.) Also, does the target's ability to react to the shot factor into it? You can react in time to avoid an arrow, and if you're really good you can deflect it with a melee weapon, but bullets are far harder to avoid and impossible to hit with a weapon.

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This is OK, but it depends on how freely available those advanced firearms are. If modern-esq weapons are around at all, chances are someone is making money by making them. Sure, you can have rare, super-high-tech things knocking about, maybe prototypes or whatever, but how much variance exists will be quite setting-dependent.
Besides the extremely lucrative government contract paying for cartloads of them for the Gnomtäller's military, quite a few of them are stolen and smuggled out to be sold on the black market. That's the only way you can get them at all, but because that smuggling is legally treason, those rifles cost enough to buy a small house (or a hundred muskets) and at typical prices it would take almost the entirety of a 6th level character's WBL in a game with far slower progression in all areas than D&D or Pathfinder.

If you're willing to make it your top priority, you may be able to reasonably afford one some time around 10th level and if you're also concerned about things like sidearms, good ammunition and body armour closer to 15th. Customizing your weapons and using top-tier ammunition? More like 20th. Having good barter skill also helps get it a little easier, of course, but not every party is going to have high barter for their level (as it's a contested roll, so you need to upgrade it as you level just to stay competitive).

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Of course, if this is a setting where magic also exists, the status quo is hard to imagine. There probably exist armours which can just make the bullets fly away from you, and conversely firearms which are also magical.
It is a setting with magic, and that certainly does complicate it. Especially since the characteristics of various weapons are complicated by magic, and the characteristics of various enemies are complicated by magic, and that just makes everything way more difficult both in universe and mechanically.

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Originally Posted by Avianmosquito View Post
A lot of that is just that those games scale way too heavily. Having 10-15 times as many hit points at level 20 as you did at level 1 is going to mess up any semblance of realism.
I suspect you may have answered your own question, then, at least in part; pretty much everything is hard to balance unless you just completely ignore all that and make it a refluffed regular weapon or give Dex to damage or whatever.
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Originally Posted by Avianmosquito View Post
At some point, you just need to accept that it's not realistic to have a playable tabletop game.
This is quite true, though the question remains as to how one can most accurately reflect reality with the fewest/simplest/most elegant rules, and whilst still keeping some kind of game balance. You sort of want to optimise some function of the three, and I'd probably not rate realism as the most important after a point but if I can get some of it for free, why not?

This is probably the rest of the cause of the problem. People want guns to reflect realism (for some perceived form of realism - or at least something which feels realistic in perhaps a more cinematic sense*), and it seems they care more about this than with other weapons though that may just be because those rules are sort of settled, and then they go and add in guns. Point is, though, that makes you feel the need to add some weird or special rules, which often don't work out so well.

Coming back to the original point, though, I don't think it's a general rule that gun balance is poor. Like I said, D&D 3rd Ed's guns are just crossbows, basically, and many more modern/sci-fi systems are built around the firearms so they're less tacked-on. Eclipse Phase for example is mostly guns, and the point of melee weapons is because they can be concealed or acquired more easily (and possibly used to deliver poison/neurotoxins/nanobots or electric shocks)... though balance in Eclipse Phase doesn't mean quite the same thing anyway since there's no reason you can't just program up a blueprint for a killbot then hack a fabber (3D printer) to start making millions of them, and then remotely order your new army of militant toasters to kill everyone. Anyway, I digress.

*There are examples, though I can't think of many off the top of my head, where producers have made TV/film stuff less realistic to make it more believable to audiences. There was one I think based on a true story of someone falling from six stories up and surviving so they shortened it to four, and people still said it was implausible (though that's perhaps not quite the same thing; falling from a great height and surviving is fairly rare).

A google search of "skydiver hits ground and survives" leads me to believe that lethality of an injury depends on so many factors that we don't want to try and simulate all of this realistically via dice.

If I were home brewing this, I would look at how lethal magic and swords are at levels 10 - 20, match my firearms to that and then devise a mechanism that GREATLY reduces my damage yield for guns at starting levels and let it ramp up slowly to those levels and handwave it as accuracy issues by making firearms a skill you dump points in like spellcraft ot acrobatics.

I'd play test a few combats, and then make final adjustments to my firearms mechanics for BTH or damage yield based on that.

I suppose it breaks the system by making a weapon class dependent on skill points and could be conceived as a penalty, but if it makes them playable by all and roughly equivalent to other weapon types in terms of usefulness, may be that's worth it.

I tend to think of ranged vs melee in a game balance rather than a historical sense (even though I like history and historical gaming).

I think some variant on the way Hero does it will lead to more balance. There, you build an attack which costs a certain number of character points. 'Ranged' is an advantage one puts on an attack, so for the same number of character points, you get less ranged damage than melee damage. It seems fair to me, since the ability to attack at range is more valuable than its lack.

As to the initial conundrum over rules where guns are overpowered or underpowered, it's a choice the GM makes. If he overpowers guns, he does so knowing that everyone will use guns. If he underpowers them, he knows no one will. If he wants a mix, he'll have to think hard about balancing them.

Sounds to me, like introducing firearms into the same sort of game where swords are being used, requires a) a lot of research into what to expect from these weapons and b) even more research into how to account for this, in terms of mechanics.
Balancing realism or some sort of theme (only bad guys use technology, like guns, while good guys use classic weapons) certainly plays a factor.




 

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