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Thread: DnD Head Canons
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2020-10-23, 11:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I just thought of something. The city of Sigil itself is probably a portal to somewhere. The largest and most prominent bounded space in the city is the center of the torus.
Why not study those things when divination magic is at their fingertips?
Also, gunpowder not working doesn't really matter. There are plenty of other things in D&D that could produce similar explosive reaction. In 1e you could do create an explosion by mixing two magic potions of the correct types together (DMG p.119). It would be a simple matter to store small samples of the correct liquids in small glass capsules that could be smashed by a hammer operated by the trigger and thereby allowed to intermix.
EDIT:
And furthermore, in a more general sense, not working the same way as in the real world is not the same as not workingLast edited by Bohandas; 2020-10-23 at 11:48 AM.
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2020-10-23, 11:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Does not works because gond magically makes the writers of that setting unable to realise the fact that guns are not solely the result of gunpowder but instead the result of being able to get high amount of energy under the form of short bursts.
I mean it is among the least consistent settings do not try to find logic in it.Last edited by noob; 2020-10-23 at 11:53 AM.
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2020-10-23, 03:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
It's not just technology though. As you yourself have pointed outed about artifacts, it's magic as well. Magic doesn't stay advanced, and there's evidence of a past time so advanced that even Netheril, which is generally an exception to this, couldn't replicate its achievements.
Also I brought up Murlynd specifically because he's a combination of immortal, brilliant, rich, and specifically interested in firearms technology. Because of him alone it should have advanced.
Yeah, but IIRC True Creation is 2 levels higher than raise dead. And Major Creation can't create cold iron (I think that may have been what I was thinking of in my original post
I'm not sure if something like Gond's ban is even possible in other crystal spheres. Usually (individual) gods' power in D&D doesn't seem to be quite so absolute. It may be dependent on either the weave or Ao to hold (Or failing that it may have required a very long term project to cover the whole sphere in interdiction effects, or possibly a single interdiction zone that slowly grows). (And even if the power of the gods was that absolute in general, it would still be possible for any other god of technology to cancel it)
In any case, I don't really see the chaotic and evil deities (and especially the chaotic evil deities) willingly agreeing to this*, and actually intending to honor the bargain, and reliably sticking to that intent. (Or, for that matter, not forum shopping and paying off the Lords of Woe to issue rulings in their favor that have nothing to do with the Compact;s actual terms). It would have to be forced on them somehow.
*(as in any of it. The pact, the ban, any of it)Last edited by Bohandas; 2020-10-23 at 03:27 PM.
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2020-10-23, 03:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Honestly, D&Dland probably isn't so much in Medieval Status as locked into a cycle of repeating apocalypses. You can summon demons that can destroy mid-sized kingdoms, and there are literal slaughter cults that can summon those demons and who want nothing more than to destroy anything they can find. This is not a setup that produces a stable equilibrium. So realistically, the reason that everything is medieval is the same one invoked in The Stormlight Archive during the Desolations: it's really hard to hold on to technology, let alone advance, when the world ends every couple generations.
Three, actually (at least in 3e). And a good sight rarer, as the former is a Domain spell, while the latter is known to literally every single Cleric.Last edited by NigelWalmsley; 2020-10-23 at 03:28 PM.
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2020-10-23, 03:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
we were talking about forgotten realms which is not the same thing as dnd land.
There is so many dnd settings with all their own reasons for stagnation.
Some even have no medieval stasis and have tech that does absolutely everything provided someone skilled enough designs it(ravenloft) but are awful because everything is wrong.Last edited by noob; 2020-10-23 at 03:55 PM.
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2020-10-23, 05:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
It's still static in the same way that the society in the first act of Gurren Lagaan was static. Continuing the Gurren Lagaan metaphor, the version of the Age Before Ages and early Blood War that I'm imagining is somewhat similar to the later acts of Gurren Lagaan, where there is destruction on a cosmic scale, but things continue on regardless (edit: I think at one point in the movie the entire universe is destroyed and even that doesn't end the fight).
Another possible metaphor for what I'm imagining in the Eldar empire from WH40K. The entire empire was overrun my mass murder, mass mayhem, mass destruction, and widespread degeneracy and corruption, and being a serial killer was considered a legitimate artform, but due to its magical and technological might it was in no danger of being destroyed by these things directly (it did eventually end them indirectly when the Eldar's souls eventually collapsed into a singularity of pure chaos due to hundreds of reincarnation cycles of being exposed to this society, but it was in no danher of destroying them directly is my point)Last edited by Bohandas; 2020-10-24 at 03:59 AM.
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2020-10-27, 03:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The best reason to make cryptic pronouncements is a letter of the law/spirit of the law issue. If the Divine Compact says "Thou shalt not tell your followers how to do X" and you make a big stone tablet appear in some random place with a riddle on it, well, you're not breaking the rules, are you? You just created a thing (which your followers happened to stumble across) that could, perhaps, be interpreted to imply how to do X, which is totally a different thing.
Look at commune and contact other plane, the most direct way a priest has to communicate with his patron or a wizard has to communicate with a planar lord. One gives yes/no answers, or a five-words-or-fewer phrase "in cases where a one-word answer would be misleading or contrary to the deity’s interests," while the other gives any single-word answers. Why are those spells so constrained, when one has to be a powerful caster already to be able to cast them so their usage is pretty limited? Presumably because the Divine Compact says so. Why are the two spells so open-ended in what they can communicate in edges cases? Possibly so the gods can cheat like hell around the exact wording of the Divine Compact.
(The out-of-game reasons for vague divinations are totally unrelated, of course, but vague-but-easily-decipherable pronouncements show up in mythology all the time so there's plenty of precedent.)
Originally Posted by noob
If an arcanist wanted to make a non-wand projectile weapon of some sort, and if he wanted to do so without simply enchanting a crossbow with an object-launching spell or the like, and if he wanted to base the weapon on unknown principles of an entirely new area of research, and if he didn't think that doing things with exploding powders was a job better suited to an alchemist, and if a bunch of other caveats, then yes, any magic-user likely has the Int score, the resources, and the creativity to invent guns and gunpowder. But there's nothing inevitable about guns and there's a ton of baggage both cultural and personal pushing magic-users in a bunch of other directions to make their development quite unlikely.
This is true, every advanced magical civilization has its own form of advanced magic on which its civilization is built (Batrachi dimensional shenanigans for the Imaskari, 10th+ level spells and mythallars for the Netherese, teachable psionics and udoxia for the Jhaamdathi, ubiquitous bound demons and Things Man Was Not Meant To Know for the Nar, circle magic and place magic for the Raumathari, and so on). But every one of those magical civilizations started from the same baseline of low-level magics that survived the previous civilizations' falls, and none of them branched off in radically different directions because they were focused on recovering secrets of the past and honing their own unique specialties.
Also I brought up Murlynd specifically because he's a combination of immortal, brilliant, rich, and specifically interested in firearms technology. Because of him alone it should have advanced.
Even if we stipulate that Murlynd opened Murlynd's Academy of Teaching People to Build and Shoot Guns and started trying to spread his love for and knowledge of guns, there's no guarantee it would take off. It might be banned by local rulers who find it a threat to their rule, shunned by other wizards who consider it beneath them, attacked by demons who don't want cold-iron-bullet-chucking weapons to be more common, and so on--and even if Murlynd can deal with all of those things because he's a badass, it's not great for his PR and wouldn't necessarily attract a lot of adherents if everyone's ganging up on him for it.
And note that that's something he didn't do, instead ascending to be the Hero-Deity of Magical Technology--magical technology, not plain ol' normal technology--and then giving his priests and only his priests access to firebrands (magical equivalents of firearms, not actual firearms) to use to aid the common people. The one guy best placed to do what you propose explicitly didn't do that, and instead set himself up as a bottleneck and arbiter of technological development on Oerth, just like Gond did in Toril.
Yeah, but IIRC True Creation is 2 levels higher than raise dead. And Major Creation can't create cold iron (I think that may have been what I was thinking of in my original post
In any case, I don't really see the chaotic and evil deities (and especially the chaotic evil deities) willingly agreeing to this*, and actually intending to honor the bargain, and reliably sticking to that intent. (Or, for that matter, not forum shopping and paying off the Lords of Woe to issue rulings in their favor that have nothing to do with the Compact;s actual terms). It would have to be forced on them somehow.
*(as in any of it. The pact, the ban, any of it)
It is, in fact, in the best interests of Chaotic and/or Evil powers-that-be to agree to a bargain that limits divine interference on the Material Plane across the board. If anyone can pop on down to the Prime in person at any time to do what they want, Chaotic and/or Evil gods are going to get stomped by Lawful and/or Good ones because Law and Good are good at cooperating against common enemies (Law won the War of Law and Chaos, after all, and Good is all about playing nice with others) and Chaos and Evil manifestly are not. If anyone can empower any number of followers and avatars to mess around on the Prime, Lawful and/or Good gods can afford to spend their power on that because they have allies to watch their backs on their nice and safe home planes while Chaotic and/or Evil gods can't afford to weaken themselves like that because they'll get ganked by their minions, other gods, demon princes, etc. while their backs are turned. And so on.
If, on the other hand, only indirect action is possible, then that's great for Chaotic and/or Evil gods! A Chaotic god can get tons of mileage out of empowering one high priest to go poison a bunch of water supplies in one kingdom and frame a neighboring kingdom for it to kickstart a war, and an Evil church can tempt tons of mortals into giving in to their base impulses for power and slowly corrupt them until their souls are headed for the Abyss. Good gods, meanwhile, get to empower one high priest who has to go around foiling evil plans and saving orphans from burning buildings and such, and what the heck is a Lawful god going to "tempt" people with, tax deductions?
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2020-10-27, 02:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
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2020-10-27, 02:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Not only did gond give basic firearms to their followers thus making non initiate realise it is doable and know what it is after killing an initiate(only the powder is impossible to do for non gond followers) but there is also a story of cost reduction.
You need to do a basic magic missile wand to spend a full 750 gold.
That is huge in fact and it does not provide a lot of firepower and can not hit targets that are in antimagic zones.
So if you find an alternate way to do your magic missile wand cheaper or significantly more powerful(ex: make the projectile non magical and propelled by magic as an intermediary step to guns) of course you will use it and then it will spread.
Magical items being ridiculously expensive to make are a huge motivating factor to seek cheaper or better non magical alternatives.
Even more since you can just cast fabricate to make instantly any non magical item.
So clearly gond mind controls people to make them not take his gun designs and use something else than his copyrighted powder.Last edited by noob; 2020-10-27 at 02:49 PM.
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2020-10-27, 04:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2020-10-27, 06:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I mean, alignment doesn't make any sense to begin with, but Erythnul's issues may have more to do with being the god of concepts like "Hate" and "Malice". Drow apparently manage to have an extremely complicated society despite being chaotic and evil (though, of course, that's one of the parts of alignment that doesn't make any sense).
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2020-10-27, 08:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Last edited by Bohandas; 2020-10-27 at 08:12 PM.
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2020-10-28, 03:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
It is true that they might not do guns and instead do grenade launchers and explosive shell siege weapons but if you start doing this kind of things and that you have crossbows then guns are not very far from being invented.
Last edited by noob; 2020-10-28 at 03:55 PM.
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2020-10-28, 06:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
That's because you're taking a very narrow view of alignment. It's ALWAYS been true that alignment is not an absolute barometer of action nor affiliation.
The War of the Spider Queen series is actually quite clear on Lolth's tendency towards Chaos, and how her children -the drow- do not fully appreciate and embrace it. To Lolth, Chaos is a crucible. One become stronger by fully embracing chaos. To the drow, Chaos is a means to an end. They attempt to harness Chaos, to direct and use it for their advantage. They don't fully surrender to the ebb and flow of Chaos, and Lolth believes it holds them back.
Erythnul, OTOH, is a savage, almost animalistic god of slaughter. He is Chaotic because he acts upon every savage whim and impulse.Red Mage avatar by Aedilred.
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2020-10-30, 12:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The major difference here, of course, being that the Chinese alchemists were (A) experimenting with unknown materials and procedures to (B) try to create a hypothetical substance but (C) ended up accidentally inventing a novel substance which (D) had a lot of new and interesting applications, whereas a magic-user brewing potions who caused an explosion via potion miscibility was (A) working through a standard procedure with standard ingredients to (B) create a standard potion that's been known about for thousands of years but (C) ended up accidentally generating one of a bunch of random effects that don't depend on the input materials at all [because potion miscibility results don't depend on which potions were used, just that multiple potions were used at all] which (D) had zero usefulness compared to the panoply of magical effects that he could already generate.
It's like the difference between a Bronze Age person accidentally stumbling across iron smelting (by e.g. picking up a rock containing iron ore, accidentally dropping it into a forge, noticing an interesting result, and going from there) versus a Medieval smith working on forging an iron sword and accidentally getting a chunk of bronze in the molten iron. The former could lead to a major serendipitous advancement in metalworking, the latter is a mistake that messed up what he was already working on to no real effect.
For the umpteenth time, bombs and guns are not an inevitable advancement, especially when the world already has magic weapons!
Seriously, early firearms sucked. Big, heavy, slow to load, slow to fire, short-ranged, unpredictably timed, weak, inaccurate, and pretty much pathetic in every way compared to bows and crossbows. The gun eventually overtook the crossbow (around 600 years after the gun was invented) because it had been slowly increasing in accuracy and range and decreasing in weight and reload times while the crossbow had improved at a much slower rate...but in D&D settings, there are two major advantages to an enchanted crossbow compared to a gun:
1) Ease of creation. A reasonably handy peasant can make a crossbow himself with access to common materials, and then a spellcaster can enchant it himself, or a sufficiently handy spellcaster can do the whole thing himself. A usable gun, however, requires a lot more precision in its creation than a usable crossbow, and it involves more materials for the gun itself, rare materials and special expertise for the powder, and so on, so you need more people involved to create it and it's unlikely a spellcaster would be able to do the whole job himself. An adventurer or researcher or hobbyist wouldn't care, they're willing to go to some length to make or fund one, but a king trying to outfit his army is going to care about the expense and difficulty of creation and a village trying to equip its militia is going to care about the skill floor and difficulty of sourcing materials.
2) Cost-effectiveness. Someone used to enchanted crossbows is used to weapons that, once enchanted, can shoot flaming bolts (or exploding bolts or sleep bolts or whatever) forever with needing to be re-enchanted, making the only ongoing cost that of the bolts, which can be created by peasants relatively easily and cheaply. A gun already has a higher upfront cost than a crossbow, but then you add on the fact that the bullets are more expensive and harder to make, and then you add on the fact that every shot consumes gunpowder for an additional cost. Again, an individual might not care about the cost, but it would definitely hamper widespread adoption.
In the real world, guns provided a quantitatively different kind of projectile weapon and were worth investigating because firearm technology was something entirely novel. In D&D settings, primitive guns are strictly inferior to weapons they already have and don't provide any novel benefits.
The only ways in which guns are possibly superior to enchanted crossbows are (A) when comparing enchanted guns to enchanted crossbows, but to get to that point you have to have guns already, and (B) if you want the populace to be able to make their own weapons without being reliant on spellcasters, and I say possibly superior here because there's a really good chance that all the people who might otherwise research guns would have as patrons rulers who don't want the masses to get their hands on any better weapons than they already have, and so they would discourage such research even if they thought it might provide benefits over enchanted crossbows. But again, that's possibility, not inevitability.
Why would you compare a gun to a wand of magic missile? A much more direct comparison would be to a heavy crossbow, and not even an enchanted one.
As per the DMG, a musket deals 1d12 damage (x3 crit) with a range increment of 50 feet, weighs 10 lbs, and takes a full-round action to reload, while a heavy crossbow deals 1d10 damage (19-20/x2 crit) with a range increment of 120 feet, weighs 8 lbs, and takes a standard action to reload. A musket costs 500 gp upfront and costs 1.4 gp to fire (0.3 gp per bullet, 1.1 gp per measure of gunpowder), while a heavy crossbow costs 50 gp upfront and costs 0.1 gp to loose (0.1 gp per bolt). The only dimensions along which the musket isn't equal to, equivalent to, or strictly worse than the heavy crossbow are the damage (and 1 point on average is trivial) and reload time (and full-round vs. standard only gives you better mobility, it doesn't let you fire any faster).
And if you do compare the gun to a wand of magic missile? Well, firstly, the wand has a bunch of advantages: automatically hits, can hit incorporeal creatures, ignores DR, weighs practically nothing, requires no ammunition, and has no reload time. (And, if you craft one with a higher CL, you get things like multi-targeting, better single-target damage, longer range, etc., but we're just talking the basic version.) Yes, there are edge cases like fighting in dead magic zones, but lots of settings have "that one enclave of weird and secretive tinker gnomes experimenting with clockwork and alchemy" somewhere on the map where magic is less common or less than reliable, and if dead magic or wild magic is common enough for anyone to need to take that into account when picking weapons, you're dealing with a "DM's poor attempt at a low-magic setting" situation where all the standard assumptions go out the window anyway.
And secondly, the cost isn't actually that exorbitant, comparatively: a CL 1 wand of magic missile is 750 gp for 50 charges, while a musket is 570 gp for 50 shots (500 gp musket + 50 * 1.4 gp ammo), so it's not like you'd get a half-dozen guns for the cost of one wand, you don't even get two guns for the cost of one wand--but you can get 13 heavy crossbows (50 gp crossbow + 50 * 0.1 gp ammo) for the cost of 1 wand, or 10 crossbows for the cost of 1 gun. Certainly, over time the gun gets comparatively cheaper since you don't need to buy a new musket every 50 shots like you do a wand, but (A) it's not the kind of drastic price difference that would make the initial investment choice obviously in favor of the gun over the wand and (B) if you're considering arming your rank-and-file soldiers with wands of anything at all, you have enough magic at your disposal to do much more impressive things than make guns or crossbows.
You don't need to be honorable, or adhere to any rules of behavior at all, to make a deal and then hold to it if you believe that holding to it is in your best interests; that's basic game theory. And of course we see that Chaotic and/or Evil gods do try to cheat around the Divine Compact all the time--whenever you have a "the cult of [god] is trying to summon [god/god's avatar/etc.] to the Material Plane" plot or a "the followers of [god] is [impersonating/slaying/etc.] the followers of [god's rival] on a large scale" plot or similar, like the entire basis for the Red Hand of Doom adventure path--it's just that whenever they try it they get their butts handed to them by adventurers so the other gods are incentivized not to try that again for a while.
Drow society makes perfect sense with the alignment system if you recall that (A) having a baroque social structure doesn't mean valuing a baroque social structure (drow society is imposed on them by Lolth for kicks and giggles and they do their best to cope within it, as RedMage noted) and (B) that whole thing is just a facade. To quote myself from an earlier thread on the topic:
Originally Posted by PairO'Dice LostLast edited by PairO'Dice Lost; 2020-10-30 at 05:55 AM.
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2020-10-30, 05:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The problem is that you used the dungeon master manual stats which were intended to balance firearms with regular ranged weapons and did not include any of the advantages of early firearms such as armour piercing (except against bullet proof armour that is close to being masterwork plate armour since basically the smith makes a full plate armour and tests if the torso blocks a bullet by firing at it and if it does not then the plate armour is not bullet proof) or being easier to use than a crossbow at point blank range.
Guns progressively improved over time because there was people using them and/or developing them despite the fact they were not yet superior to crossbows and bows in real life so saying "crossbows and bows are superior in dnd" is not a good argument since it did not work in real life.
Also when comparing to a magic missile wand you are using the costs instead of the cost/3 which is wrong since a high level wizard comparing making guns and making magic missile wands knows the existence of fabricate which would allow them to make a whole bunch of guns at 1/3 of the written cost in a single cast and would not take weeks. (because when making 50 magic missile wands you spend 50 days while for making 50 guns it takes a single cast of fabricate)
The existence of fabricate makes non magical things vastly easier to produce than magical things.
As for damage everyone knows that in real life we can scale up guns firepower and weight until they kill the target it is intended to kill and the fact it is possible to do is easy to realise when you see how guns works.
You could literally make guns that kills elephants on a good hit with late era blackpowder guns that were wearable by humans in 1850(so a critical strike with 104 damage in dnd terms)
The possibility of scaling up firepower is extremely interesting seeing how many big dangerous creatures there is in dnd or just adventurers with way too many hp.Last edited by noob; 2020-10-30 at 05:53 AM.
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2020-10-30, 06:19 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
You might want to delete the block quote and only quote the portion that you're responding to, makes things shorter and easier to read.
None of that is true.
1) The DMG stats are generally balanced with non-firearm weapons, but they weren't "nerfed" to fit in or anything; early firearms actually were on par with contemporary weapons, and the modern and futuristic weapon stats are indeed stronger than Renaissance firearms, as you'd expect.
2) Early pistols were basically ineffective against contemporary plate armor, and longarms were ineffective at battlefield ranges, hence why firearms and plate coexisted for about 200 years. The first firearms were quite effective against shoddy, mass-produced plate armor, which then drove the development of better forms of plate armor that could resist bullets fairly easily (at the cost of being heavier and more expensive). It wasn't until massed arquebus fire became a thing that plate really started to go obsolete.
3) Early firearms were not easier to use than crossbows. Crossbows require either a four-step process (load bolt, pull back cord, aim, fire) for lighter ones or a six-step process (attach winch, winch back cord, detach winch, load bolt, aim, fire) for heavier ones, while even the simpler muskets required a twelve- to fourteen-step process and were much harder to aim (the flash pan got in the way and could blind you momentarily when it fired) and fire (the pricker or match was fairly unreliable).
The assumption you're making, once again, is that the inventor of firearms in a given setting would jump right from "what's a firearm?" to "1700s-level firearms," skipping decades of knowledge and refinement and ignoring any corresponding defensive advancements. Sure, if a mid-level wizard cast summon flintlock rifle from 18th century Earth and got such a gun it would be very effective, but that's not how the development process works.
Guns progressively improved over time because there was people using them and/or developing them despite the fact they were not yet superior to crossbows and bows in real life so saying "crossbows and bows are superior in dnd" is not a good argument since it did not work in real life.
Also when comparing to a magic missile wand you are using the costs instead of the cost/3 which is wrong since a high level wizard comparing making a gun and making a magic missile wand knows the existence of fabricate which would allow them to make a whole bunch of guns at 1/3 of the written cost in a single cast and would not take weeks. (because when making 50 magic missile wands you spend 50 days while for making 50 guns it takes a single cast of fabricate)
Secondly, wands can be crafted starting at 5th level, so there's actually a 4-level range in which a wizard can craft a wand of magic missile but not fabricate guns or crossbows. And given the demographics rules, every Large Town can have wizards making wands but you need to be in a Small City to have a chance to have fabricating wizards or a Large City to guarantee it, which runs into the issue of logistics and infrastructure again.
As for damage everyone knows that in real life we can scale up guns firepower and weight until they kill the target it is intended to kill and the fact it is possible to do is easy to realise when you see how guns works.
You could literally make guns that kills elephants on a good hit with late era blackpowder guns that were wearable by humans in 1850(so a critical strike with 104 damage in dnd terms)
The possibility of scaling up firepower is extremely interesting seeing how many big dangerous creatures there is in dnd or just adventurers with way too many hp.
But that aside, yes, you can kill stronger people with big explosions. You may have heard of this convenient spell called fireball and wands thereof?
Early forays into grenades and bombs were, as with guns, unreliable and heavy and inaccurate and so on and so forth. Given the choice between that and a nice, reliable, safe-to-the-caster, lethal-to-his-enemies, very-long-range, no-crater-making fireball, there's once again very little reason to detour into bomb development.
EDIT: The gunpowder derail has gone on for almost a full page. If anyone wants to continue the discussion I'd be happy to make a new thread for that, but we should probably get back from head cannons to headcanons at this point.Last edited by PairO'Dice Lost; 2020-10-30 at 06:44 AM.
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2020-10-30, 06:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
You are wrong on the 50 damage: the thing is that a shot in the head that enters the brain does not just cause 50 damage nor does the death corresponds to massive damage.(else elephants that have a bullet enter the head would have only 15% chance to die)
I think that a bullet entering the head of the elephant is quite definitively a one hit kill critical rather than massive damage death since massive damage death corresponds more to the traumatic shock causing death while it could have not killed and the odds of a bullet in the brain of the elephant not killing it are not 85% which is what it would be if it was massive damage rules.
They did not say "after a fortitude save the location of the hit retroactively changes" which is the only way to make it be excessive damage death and consistent with the odds of the elephant dying from a shot in the brain.
Also early fireballs were unreliable and lethal to the caster in early dnd: fireballs progressively became less and less dangerous to the caster with the editions (like how it can not bounce back anymore nor kill you with flame returns when used in a corridor and so on) so it fits exactly the same progress pattern: people would understand "seeing how fireballs progressed in all odds bombs will probably become safe to use too after a bunch of tinkerings"
Also you did nor read well I told "early firearms are easier to use point blank" and you did think I meant "early firearms are easier to use" which is not the same thing: it was common for people to fire a firearm at point blank then switch to a melee weapon which is hard to do with a crossbow but there is no dnd rule saying that firearms does not provoke aoo when shot at point blank range while it hardly opens any aoo opportunities (not more than a sword swing).Last edited by noob; 2020-10-30 at 07:12 AM.
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2020-10-30, 07:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I shoot my gunsword at him. Then I swing my gunsword at him. Gunswords are great.
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2020-10-30, 08:12 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I mean there is also the faction that thinks gunblades and similar fantasy constructs are horrible and bad. Like in WH 40k, someone who has a chainsaw sword, when the enemy has long range ray cannons, or weaponized disease.
Sometimes suspension of disbelief kicks in, sometimes it does not. Gunblades are very viable in a weird Final Fantasy style game, but make little or no sense in other media such as sword and sorcery that just happens to mull over into the industrial revolution (ala Arcanum, if you know the game).
But then again, this game's gadgeteer class has much much less believable trinkets.
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2020-10-30, 09:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Having a weapon that is both a melee weapon and a gun isn't a "fantasy construct". That's just a bayonet, something that has existed for basically as long as guns have. Certainly you could imagine fantasy bayonets that were physically implausible, but so are the absurdly giant swords of fantasy.
That said, I don't really understand the hangup on guns specifically. There probably should be more guns in fantasy, on the basis that the Powder Mage books are cool, but in-world there's way more low-hanging fruit.
Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost;24777698Drow society makes perfect sense with the alignment system if you recall that (A) [I
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2020-10-30, 10:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I believe people are thinking more of "swords with built-in guns" Which are also historical:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_swordMarut-2 Avatar by Serpentine
New Marut Avatar by Linkele
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2020-10-30, 12:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
It doesn't have to just be Lolth. From the look of things a lot of powerful chaotic beings will impose a very rigid/lawful structure on the society they head in an attempt to control it - they don't see the laws as applying to them. (Also, lots of people in the struture will support it for similar reasons.)
Conversely people who are innately lawful may have a much more chaotic society because they don't see the need for rules...
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2020-10-30, 06:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Red Mage avatar by Aedilred.
Where do you fit in? (link fixed)
RedMage Prestige Class!
Best advice I've ever heard one DM give another:
"Remember that it is both a game and a story. If the two conflict, err on the side of cool, your players will thank you for it."
Second Eternal Foe of the Draconic Lord, battling him across the multiverse in whatever shapes and forms he may take.
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2020-10-31, 12:19 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
This actually makes me want to play like a crazy gnomish rogue who uses a big swiss army knife contraption that has a sword part and a hammer part and a built in crossbow and thieves' tools and whatever else all attached to it. Like a gnome hook hammer, but with just everything he owns stuck on.
I have no idea how that would work in an actual game, but it would be amazing and hilarious.
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2020-10-31, 03:29 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
That's actually an item in the videogame Dungeons of Dredmor
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hTzZNEP5V...1600/lai03.JPG"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2020-10-31, 03:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I think it's possibly like the difference between a Baatezu courtroom, vs the Abyssal courtroom layer Woeful Escarand. The baator court is going to be cruel but it's going to follow the rule of law, whereas the abyssal court exists as a mockery of the rule of law and is openly corrupt.
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2020-10-31, 04:03 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Headcannon: There are very few battleaxes out there that only do slashing damage. For that, you'd need a battleaxe that has an axeblade on both sides of the shaft, and that's just silly. What you want, is an axeblade on one side of the shaft, and either a pick on the other side of the shaft, or a hammer. Or you start with a pick on the side opposite of the hammer, and then when you snap off the spike in someone's head, take it to the blacksmith and have him grind it down and affix a bludgeon in the place of the spike. Hell, for that matter, who even uses an axe? Put a bludgeon on one side of the shaft and a spike on the otherside.
Oh, that isn't supported in the official weapon's list? So, if you want that, you'd need a GM that'll say "yes" and let you spend an extra 2d10 GP on your melee weapons? Sure. I mean, what else is a warrior gonna spend his coin on?
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2020-10-31, 06:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The Curse of the House of Rookwood: Supernatural horror and family drama.
Ash Island: Personal survival horror in the vein of Silent Hill.
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2020-10-31, 10:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I have a head cannon to share. Since I've played most editions up to 3.5, this is how I see it all as being the same world. Basically as time passes, the laws of magic and whatever it is that governs the powers available to the living people/creatures changes and evolved over time. That would explain how even PC classes started with minimal capabilities and we're very limited in power, then developed immunities, resistances, faster actions, etc.
The timeline as I see it:
OD&D - Early Dark Ages
AD&D 1E - Transition of Dark Ages to Early Renaissance
AD&D 2E - Early Renaissance
D&D 3.0-3.5 - Mid Renaissance
D&D 4E - NEVER HAPPENED - or possibly a past timeline off of the d20 Modern setting
D&D 5E - After Renaissance, maybe just before what would have been our Industrial Revolution
*Eberron in play is like adding the Industrial Revolution to the edition's timeline
I've been considering converting some older edition magic items but making them with no change if possible and tagging them as "Heirloom" or "Ancient" just to see how it goes.