A Brief Observation on Putting Guns in your Fantasy Game
Why are guns a problem for systems designed to accommodate melee combat? Whenever we take a game that facilitates heroic action fantasy, with strong PCs tearing the enemy monsters to shreds with their swords and bows and halberds, introducing a gun just makes it… fall apart. In the confines of fantasy game-fiction, you can justify a goblin getting hit by a sword-swipe and being fine, if not a bit battered. But can you justify that same goblin getting hit by a bullet? From an actual gun?
It’s more likely than you think.
There’s a lot of discourse revolving around the concept of special treatment for guns in classic fantasy RPGs. “This enemy can withstand a d6 sword”, says the game-master, “but can it withstand a gun? The thing that makes your flesh explode into a bloody pulp in all those movies I saw? No it can’t. Therefore, the gun must deal, uhhhh, 4d6 damage or something like that. But I can’t put a 4d6 weapon in the hands of my players, that’s busted, so it’s gonna have a -5 to hit (i guess it’s realistic?), and a time to reload, and aaaaugh, it’s a mess already.”
There’s a severe double standard in this reasoning. The understanding of swords employed by most mainstream DnD-like game design is borrowed from DnD’s own source fiction - pulp fantasy. And pulp fantasy heroes, and the monsters they face, can be wounded and battered and sliced through and still fight on. Conversely, the source fiction for guns operates on different rules - the media subconscious for guns is rooted in westerns, where duels at high noon are decided by a single bullet, and a shot to the shoulder leaves you incapacitated enough to end a fight. And this is indeed extremely realistic.
Mh, yes, d6 damage.
But DnD’s understanding of swords isn’t realistic at all! A sword is a reasonably heavy and very fast-moving piece of metal with a razor sharp edge; the pressure applied by a well-placed arming sword attack can indeed go toe-to-toe (or even surpass) with what a .380 CAL bullet can realistically achieve. By all accounts, a realistic sword attack should leave you as incapacitated as a bullet, more or less. And it does! That’s why most versions of IRL fencing end when the first attack lands - much like a gunfight. But that’s not how pulp fantasy heroes fight, so it’s not how DnD works.
To me, all this means is that, in order to let guns and swords coexist, the gap between the fantasy of swords and the fantasy of guns needs to be bridged. Either you make swords as realistically lethal as medieval weapons, or you make guns unrealistically harmless (which would fit the fantasy of playing Rambo, which works, since pulp fantasy heroes are basically medieval Rambos in terms of damage absorption). So if you’re putting guns in your fantasy game, just pick a side and be happy.