I am in the middle of writing one of the trickiest parts of any RPG system, one which is often scrapped because of how gamebreaking it tends to be. Which is odd, considering that the game exists in a world of magic and swords and dragons and all sorts of creatures. Its not much use hiding it, its right there in the title.
The thing I'm writing is a section about firearms.
For Heroic, which is now the working and hopefully official title of the system I've been working on-and-off on developing (work and school have taken up a lot more time than I'd have liked), guns are standard play, and for really a very small reason. I think guns in a fantasy setting are cool.
Let me tell you a story about my favorite stunt I ever used. It was Pathfinder; I had totally misread the rules of the game and rolled a fantastic set of stats for my Half-Elf gunslinger (14 Strength, 18 Dexterity, 16 Con, 16 Wisdom, 15 Intelligence, and 18 Charisma. This was a legit roll. 20 dex with racial bonuses), and was having a generally good time in a three man party having hordes of monsters thrown at us and downing them in some of the longest 18 seconds in the history of the world.
We had just infiltrated - by which I meant blasted - our way in to the evil cultists base in the Shadowkeep. Our party, including our loud cavalier, was able to hide inside of their evil church while a sermon was going on: as they started to leave, our Cavalier failed a stealth check after saying something. Five of the cultists walked over and asked us who the hell we were.
I went in to emergency mode, and did was a Gunslinger does best. I used my hands. Specifically, my sleight of hand.
By this time my Dex was something like 30 because of a large number of items and the spell Wish. We were approaching endgame, and I had no idea the enemies we were facing were CR 5. Because of my huge dex, my sleight of hand bonus, logically, was massive, something like 30 something with all the bonuses and all the ranks I put in to it.
I pulled out ten gold coins, walked up to the enemies, and smiled. I began flicking the coins back and forth between my fingers, moving them fast enough that they're having a hard time keeping track of which coin is where. I knew it wouldn't hold their attention for long, but I only need a round or so. DM has me roll up a sleight of hand check to see how well I could distract them; the roll is a 15 + my massive bonus and they simply don't stand a chance of not looking at my coins.
Then I sprang my trap. The next six seconds looked something like this.
My character flipped the coins up in the air, and in one smooth motion pulled both of his dragon pistols - the one-handed shotgun pistols - from the two holsters by his chest. The five cultists were trapped in a cone of lead; none of the shots missed their abysmally low touch AC, and I ended up doing just shy of a hundred damage to each cultist over the course of two shots. In six seconds, I had recreated the only scene that would be recognizable from an action movie in almost the whole campaign.
And with a crossbow or a bow, or magic, or whatever kind of melee weapon you want, it just wouldn't have been as cool.
So I'm including guns, big and small, and have hit the problem that I'm sure everyone else has come across. How do you make guns not bows that do more damage?
Its a huge problem, because guns do not function like bows and they shouldn't in any setting. So far, I think I've come across the solution.
Bows and crossbows both tend to use combo points - the system I added in to make martial combat more tactical and interesting - to either add to damage or to add negative effects. They can use these with a few types of utility ammo, such as a quick forming glue or primitive napalm, in order to achieve different effects without relying on spells. Bows and bowmen can also simply add to their damage by firing multiple shots, much like a melee character can add to their damage by putting more of their stamina behind their attack.
Guns, however, have only one shot. You can't really make it more powerful by using stamina, and the small size of a ball as well as the destructive nature of gunpowder means most utility shots, which are ceramic or glass containers, are out of the question. So what do the guns use for bonus damage?
Nothing. Not really. Sure, certain areas can be targeted for more damage, which in turn costs stamina, but its not a terribly large amount of bonus damage because a gun is already the highest damaging/most penetrating weapon in the game. Instead, and I think this should be applied to most systems, guns should depend mostly on where you aim it at.
A good hit to the leg can blast away the armor in ways that an arrow can't. Hitting a weapon can disarm the opponent, something a bow can only do at a massive penalty (because arrow flightpaths are more wobbly than bullet flightpaths). Blast a target in center mass to cause bleeding. Make the bullet do other things besides just damage.
In short, if you make a gun a weapon that focuses more on controlling the enemy via debuffs and movement penalties, you make it a weapon that's interesting.
Those are just a few of my thoughts on the subject. Guns are a cool weapon, they're good for character who like to swagger and grab because they're loud and dangerous. They give the universe a swashbuckling feel to it, especially when they're muzzleloading, smoking firespitters. Sure it can get a bit piratey and there'll doubtless be precisely as many Jack Sparrow clones as the number of downloads of Heroic, but I'll be damned if sliding underneath a Ogre to fire two pistols up into its chest isn't the coolest thing a character can do.
I like the idea of them wrecking someone's armor. In real life guns would probably go through/destroy any armor they hit. You could also take the Pathfinder approach and make them generally unreliable for balance reasons. Or you could nix that armor-destroying stuff and give wizardy classes the ability to enchant bullets with spells. Hit in the chest by a bullet enchanted with fireball? That sounds sucky. Bullets enchanted with teleport spells could zip foes into interesting, unkind circumstances. Something like that would be pretty cool, especially since you're adding guns because they're cool to begin with.
I'm actually keeping magical bullets relatively separated. Its part of the philosophy that Heroic follows that says "Magic items are very special and not to be used lightly." A magic item takes a few weeks work in game; you have to collect the material and forge it, imparting bits of your characters energy in to it, usually in the form of blood or some other bodily fluid. A great deal of effort goes in to making magical weapons, because when you get one its going to last you a good long while - that an its very rare that you'll find a magical weapon, even inside of a treasure vault. Its because, unlike Magic, magic items use Arcana as their power source. The main difference is that Arcana is permanent; a magical item cannot be easily disenchanted without using the complex Shape Reality spell, and if that's done poorly it's likely going to detonate on you for some hideous effects. What this means is that wizards are not actually going around enchanting items, not really. That's the job of Master Crafters, or adventurers who happen to either come across or find someone with an Arcana Codex, which gives players the steps to follow in order to turn a non-magical item magical. So bullets would still take a few days to do, and once they're fired they're destroyed. Really the only useful enchantment for a bullet to have would be "Indestructible," but unless you are a very wealthy adventurer that's going to be beyond your means. But yes, back to writing. I'm getting way to distracted from describing how you create a hybrid race.
We used exploding dice or bigger crits for guns with smaller dice (4's or 6's). They would do a lot of damage or relatively little. They were rare and valuable, the powder cost a lot. They took a long time to reload. We made the range pretty poor as well. Bang for the buck they weren't really worth it, but everyone wanted one. For a pure gun combat system I really liked the Friday Night Fire Fight supplement in the original shadow run. It was a bit clunky but modeled real gunfights well.