bow or gun?

[silverwolfer]

Without dipping into homebrew or 3rd party, does gun's have any advantage in d&d as the information is provided in small segment of source we have for it, or does sadly bow and arrow still rule the day?

[Kaeso]

Guns are somewhere in the DMG (p. 137 or so) and they're not that good. It takes a full round to reload them, they do 1d10 flat damage (no bonus) and have a range of a mere 100 ft. if I'm not mistaken. I know early flintlocks weren't the greatest weapons and that reloading them took a while, but it's disappointing that they're strictly inferior to even a shortbow.

EDIT: Oh, and you also need exotic weapon proficiency, so don't bother.

[Drelua]

Guns are somewhere in the DMG (p. 137 or so) and they're not that good. It takes a full round to reload them, they do 1d10 flat damage (no bonus) and have a range of a mere 100 ft. if I'm not mistaken. I know early flintlocks weren't the greatest weapons and that reloading them took a while, but it's disappointing that they're strictly inferior to even a shortbow.

EDIT: Oh, and you also need exotic weapon proficiency, so don't bother.

I'm sorry, but nearly none of what you just said is true. Renaissance pistols do d10, but with a range increment of 50 and standard action reload time. Muskets are d12, 150 and also standard. Oh, and they're on page 145. Do you have a 3.0 DMG or something?

Besides, silverwolfer didn't specify a time period. Modern weapons do a lot more damage, but apparently have significantly lower range, which... confuses me to say the least. :smallconfused: They may do more damage, but a modern hunting rifle having half the range of a musket is just absurd. I don't know much about ranged combat in D&D, (or real life for that matter) so I can't really speak to how optimal they are, but I'd just ignore them on principle. Apparently, even the future doesn't have weapons that can shoot farther than a musket. It turns out, guns really peaked in that regard a couple centuries ago. :smallannoyed:

[Lentrax]

Yeah, they really f'ed up the ranges on everything.

Muskets from the early Industrial Era, e.g. the Brown bess (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Bess) were held as wildly unreliable at any distance over fifty yards, which is more or less its effective range. The use of rifling saw that range more than doubled, but rifles were considerably slower to fire because the ball had to be forced past the grooves in the barrel.

And then is the problem of powder smoke. With a cloud of acrid smoke in front of you, your view is obscured to the point of your weapon being, at best, 10-15% likely to hit a target, mostly because the opposing line was so large.

But yeah, the range is really screwed up, but I expect it has something to do with not wanting to muck about with changing RaW on Point blank shot.

[Kaeso]

I'm sorry, but nearly none of what you just said is true. Renaissance pistols do d10, but with a range increment of 50 and
Yeah, I was mistaken about that. Nevertheless, my points still stand: they're pretty much strictly inferior to bows.

[QUOTE]Besides, silverwolfer didn't specify a time period. Modern weapons do a lot more damage, but apparently have significantly lower range, which... confuses me to say the least. :smallconfused: They may do more damage, but a modern hunting rifle having half the range of a musket is just absurd. I don't know much about ranged combat in D&D, (or real life for that matter) so I can't really speak to how optimal they are, but I'd just ignore them on principle. Apparently, even the future doesn't have weapons that can shoot farther than a musket. It turns out, guns really peaked in that regard a couple centuries ago. :smallannoyed:
Yeah, that's messed up. D20 modern has better rules concerning weapons in that regard.

[Amphetryon]

This is strictly a house-rule, but I've seen some decent success in the past allowing guns to work on the "exploding die" principle, where rolling a maximum Crit allows another die worth of damage to be added, with the potential for that to also be a maximum roll that adds another die, and so on.

[Slipperychicken]

In pathfinder, it looks like guns are a lot of costly hassle (higher weapon/ammo prices, dual wielding, misfire) without much benefit over bows, making you jump through hoops just to get your Full Attacks. I would go for the Touch attacks, but it looks like one would have spend even more money and feats to make the range worthwhile.

[Tokuhara]

In pathfinder, it looks like guns are a lot of costly hassle (higher weapon/ammo prices, dual wielding, misfire) without much benefit over bows, making you jump through hoops just to get your Full Attacks. I would go for the Touch attacks, but it looks like one would have spend even more money and feats to make the range worthwhile.

On this however, the gun is a good Single-use weapon.

A fighter, even without EWP-Firearms can make a shot with a blunderbuss/double hackbut in round one, drop the weapon, and move in with his main weapon. Just because it isn't good in the drawn-out fight, a 30' cone touch attack is a great way to open a fight, just as a 100 some odd 2d12 touch attack is. The nonproficiency is mitigated by having to hit Touch AC.

[Alabenson]

I'm sorry, but nearly none of what you just said is true. Renaissance pistols do d10, but with a range increment of 50 and standard action reload time. Muskets are d12, 150 and also standard. Oh, and they're on page 145. Do you have a 3.0 DMG or something?

Besides, silverwolfer didn't specify a time period. Modern weapons do a lot more damage, but apparently have significantly lower range, which... confuses me to say the least. :smallconfused: They may do more damage, but a modern hunting rifle having half the range of a musket is just absurd. I don't know much about ranged combat in D&D, (or real life for that matter) so I can't really speak to how optimal they are, but I'd just ignore them on principle. Apparently, even the future doesn't have weapons that can shoot farther than a musket. It turns out, guns really peaked in that regard a couple centuries ago. :smallannoyed:

Part of the problem with range increments for modern weapons is that WoTC just copied the stats from D20 Modern, where range increments are much shorter than they are in D&D.
For comparison, a compound bow or a crossbow in D20 Modern would have a range increment of only 40 ft, compared with 80 ft. to 120 ft. in D&D.