Uhtred
2015-05-31, 03:19 PM
So to start with this is the Nock Volley Gun:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nock_gun
TL;DR, the Nock Volley Gun is a Napoleonic-era naval musket that was intended to be used to clear an enemy ship's deck of sailors in a single cacophonous blast. It's a short-range musket that has seven simultaneously-firing barrels that took an age to load and was devastating to both literally anything on the receiving end and also the person firing (it was discontinued because it had FAR more recoil than anyone had thought and had a tendency of breaking shoulders and setting fire to the rigging and sails it was trying to protect.
And it works great with my character concept. I just need to figure out how to make it work in an RPG setting.
Obviously it's an exotic weapon, obviously an early firearm, but what I (and my DM) are still trying to puzzle out is the "7 musket blasts at once" concept that would make it more devastating than a blunderbuss. Does the Blunderbuss' cone spread best encapsulate what being on the wrong end of that would be like? What damage would that deal? What would it crit for? And, also important, how many full-round actions do you suppose it would take to reload it? Should the recoil be in the form of a minimum required strength score to use it? Non-lethal damage every time it's fired without taking a move-action to brace yourself?
Notable is that the double-barreled musket requires a pair of attack rolls at a -4 penalty with a 40-ft range if you fire both barrels at once, maybe a similar mechanic would apply here? And what would the misfire value be? Atrocious, I would imagine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nock_gun
TL;DR, the Nock Volley Gun is a Napoleonic-era naval musket that was intended to be used to clear an enemy ship's deck of sailors in a single cacophonous blast. It's a short-range musket that has seven simultaneously-firing barrels that took an age to load and was devastating to both literally anything on the receiving end and also the person firing (it was discontinued because it had FAR more recoil than anyone had thought and had a tendency of breaking shoulders and setting fire to the rigging and sails it was trying to protect.
And it works great with my character concept. I just need to figure out how to make it work in an RPG setting.
Obviously it's an exotic weapon, obviously an early firearm, but what I (and my DM) are still trying to puzzle out is the "7 musket blasts at once" concept that would make it more devastating than a blunderbuss. Does the Blunderbuss' cone spread best encapsulate what being on the wrong end of that would be like? What damage would that deal? What would it crit for? And, also important, how many full-round actions do you suppose it would take to reload it? Should the recoil be in the form of a minimum required strength score to use it? Non-lethal damage every time it's fired without taking a move-action to brace yourself?
Notable is that the double-barreled musket requires a pair of attack rolls at a -4 penalty with a 40-ft range if you fire both barrels at once, maybe a similar mechanic would apply here? And what would the misfire value be? Atrocious, I would imagine.