so say im world building for a DnD campaign and i want my weapons(bladed, firearms and other) to be somewhat plausible and have realistic tactics around them and a plausible story of how they came to be and what effects they had on the world, be it the gun uses magic gunpowder, magnetism or some other stuff.For example designing it with ergonomics for chimps how can i go about it?im interested in the process, and it doesnt have to be realistic but it shouldnt be magic on its own
Ergonomically the best weapon for a chimp is a glock with a switch
>>65192066>how can i go about it?Make some shit up. If you don't know how X thing works then "it just works" is a better way to go about it then getting technical about shit you don't know.>>65192438>Bumping a dead thread
>>65192449>Make some shit up.This. The next step is taking stuff you know and augmenting it with stuff you (or your charakters/players) don't know.
>>65192066You have bigger problems. Language skills is a big part of playing DnD, you know? You might want to work on that instead.
>>65192066Imho, weapons are most interesting as world building when their development disrupts the status quo. This makes for upheaval and conflict that is fun for the party to navigate. You can still get into weapon design, but tie it to a specific place/person and have that design slowly spread throughout the wider world. This creates the disparity between the haves and the have nots and forces the party to make interesting choices.My advice take some cues from history. Maybe the elves just developed horse archery and are now a force to be reckoned with outside the forest. Perhaps new self-sailing ships have cut travel times down to distant Princely islands that the empire seeks to bring under complete subjugation. Or what do the dwarves do in the face of new seige engines that can destroy their fortified mine entrances. Or perhaps advances in armor and handguns mean the peasant class can rise up against their magic wielding lords.
Well, to make your weapons (and their history, use, social context, etc) you rather need to know how all of that works in reality. So go looking for books about the kind of arms and armour you want in your setting (at leats those with reasonably direct real world equivalents, more exotic stuff will have to be an extrapolation from that) and start reading. Given that you seem to want decent coverage of the development and use (and development of the use...) I recommend Williams' "The Sword and the Crucible" and Hall's "Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe", though depending on how much you currently know you'll probably want some basic introduction works first to help clue you in on the general lay of the landscape. Edge&Paddock;"Arms and Armor of the Medieval Knight" might be a good starting point for the European side, if you can find it, and while they're getting a bit long in the tooth so can Oakeshott's "The Archaeology of Weapons" and "European Weapons and Armour" might do well here as well. (The latter one in particular has some ideas which IMO seem a bit odd by moderns standards, Ewart was far more of a sword than armour guy for a start, and some of the stuff there about flamberge and rapiers... Well, just be prepared to update the ideas you get form that book when more recent sources give you good reason too. The author himself would be quite cross with you if you didn't.) For a look that takes a much wider geographical scope but much narrower equipment-wise Rivkin's "A Study of the Eastern Sword" is just bloody brilliant and covers basically all the angles you were asking about.For something to get you started while trying to get your hand son the books https://myarmoury.com/home.php is now sadly kinda dead, but there's a ton of good info in the articles and in the forums (spotlight topics in particular).
>>65192725I disagree. People often bitch about "realism" in role-playing games, but that's not the real goal. If realism were the goal there would be no dragons, no wizards, no elves, and none of the other stuff that makes fantasy games like DnD what they really are. DnD and games like it are by their very nature unrealistic.Now what DOES matter, and what people really mean when they whine about realism, is that everything makes sense and is logically consistent.To add to your sources, picrel covers the invention of gunpowder and the history of firearms being used in war, as well as how they were perceived by people opposed to their use.
>>65192066guns are already Medieval weapons and their lack of presence in most fantasy when you've got shit from the Renaissance and colonial era all over the place is already annoying.Guns coexisted with armor and swords and such for hundreds of years.
>>65192775When people say the word realism they mean internal consistency, verisimilitude, and a reasoned flow of cause to effect, ability to application.There's nothing wrong with using the word that way, and the incessant need to insist otherwise is fucking exhausting.
>>65194671Its a necessary gameplay concession to keep different weapons viable. For example if you've ever played the older mount and blade games and then played fire and steel, its a curbstomp to use anything other than guns and even when youve got guns theyre thoroughly annoying to face.
>>65194676>Its a necessary gameplay concession to keep different weapons viableNo it's not, which is why other weapons were used for literally hundreds of years after firearms were developed, and that's in real life where there aren't enchantments and super human attributes that alter the balance of muscle vs chemically powered weapons.
>>65192704Im esl sorry
>>65192066Well kinda depends what you are going for you do stuff like rune grenades and dispelling tactics. (Paint rune that goes boom on rock. Throw rock. / Boom rock land near you ? Dispell rune. ) Pressure guns. Like water as propellant that gets turned into steam by a mages lightning arc plasma in a chamber. Steam volume explosion pushes projectiles. Like a potato gun.Non magic or anti magic (think kryptonite bullets) projectiles are used because they bypass shields or can't be dispelled because they are mundane objects not a summoned rock. Need for defense mages. Slow heavy specialty weapons, that use lots of power for a low yield but mage armor pricing effect. Effect can be a change in shoot and scoot tactics instead of tanking stuff with shields. Or go the capacitor route. Mages create mana, charge spells into magazines over a long time and with exhausting work. But then you can fan fireballs from your runed sixshooter.
>>65192066Hi OP, DM here.You would first have to check the setting - are you playing D&D into the Forgotten Realms, are you going the beaten path and plopping the players into the Sword Coast, are you going to use a different system like Daggerheart and only used DnD to give the people an idea what you are talking about.Do not adapt the civilization around the guns, but the other way around.Do they move their contraptions through floating magic crystals that one can stick into the weapon somewhere, like an ornate decoration somewhere on the stock perhaps? Or do they wind up stuff like clockwork or rubberbands? Steam?After you figure this one out, next you go for the race features.How many arms does the race have? Different races would use different weapons, and a pistol to a giant would be a cannon to a gnome.Do they have hard scales, and thus need more penetrating weapons to more easily kill each other? Do they work in groups to form a firing line, or are more prone to operate in small teams? Do they have cities that warrant siege weaponry? Do they live next to the lands of Thay and their weapons need to be firing blessed munitions due to the little undead problem?You are approaching the problem the wrong way. The weapons will be plausible only if they are adapted to the needs of the setting, not the setting to the weapons. So the chimp ergonomics, going full /pol/ for a moment, just look at George Floyd riot footage for reference. But, if you are hell-bent to going about the other way around and actually starting with the weapons, close your eyes, picture your hand the way you would see it in first person as that race. Now try to grab what you expect to be the weapon, and see how it looks in your hand. This however would require more imagination and would not be reliable.
>>65194675>and the incessant need to insist otherwise is fucking exhausting.You could avoid this frustration by learning to use words properly. If you mean consistency or verisimilitude then just say it. We already have words for those things.>>65194676In my opinion this is a Game-master/Dungeon-master problem, not a rules problem. Like >>65194697 wrote, firearms were used side-by-side with melee weapons for centuries by many different cultures.Early firearms were powerful, but this should be balanced by the expense, inaccuracy, constant need for maintenance and supplies, and tendency to malfunction. A gun is only overpowered when the GM doesn't properly handle the hassles of acquiring gunpowder and keeping it dry, acquiring projectiles of the correct size, accuracy, malfunction, cleaning, etc. The same problem applies to magic, honestly. For example in DnD DMs often have a habit of ignoring spell components, which may not seem like much at first but it radically shifts the balance of power with magic.
>>65195004I disagree on it not being a rules problem. Broadly speaking, for plays expense and relative rarity is a poor balancing lever beyond the super early game, triply so in a system like DnD. If it's key to their character, they'll put the legwork into getting a steady supply of rare materials, whether that be fancy magic dust or gunpowder. Then stuff like "keep the powder dry", "make sure you have appropriately sized balls" and "keep the gun clean" are either way too fiddly and tedious to keep track of or should be assumed to happen during downtime by default.
>>65195071>If it's key to their character, they'll put the legwork into getting a steady supply of rare materials,The player might tell the GM that their character is spending downtime making gunpowder or doing whatever else but that doesn't mean that the player gets their way. They might only end up with half as much as they wanted. That is where the GM has an opportunity to balance the game, and realistically so.>are either way too fiddly and tedious to keep track of You don't have to "keep track of it", the GM fudges it on the fly to keep guns interesting but not too powerful. If you feel that the character with the gun totally outperformed everybody else in the last fight and nobody had any fun because that person took all the glory? It's easy enough to craft the next encounter to have the opposite effect.
>>65195004>You could avoid this frustration by learning to use words properly.No, because the problem is people like you feel comfortable talking. Making people like you more comfortable just leads to you faggots expanding your bad behavior to the next boundary.
>>65194789>are you playing Forgotten RealmsHe didn't say he was gay, anon, there's no reason to assume he is.
>>65194789I build my worlds from scratch, last time it was a giant city surrounded by a fog that does weird stuff and it had skavens doing weird as technology with the fog
>>65192066I dunno, unless you're going to sketch every weapon for the players to see, you can probably get away with describing things in a single line, for instance "Upon inspecting the fallen chimp warrior's handgonne, it becomes immediately apparent the tool wasn't designed with human ergonomics in mind, bearing an oversized trigger and action in tandem with a stabilizing fork for the user to lean against when firing."
>>65196981You whine, but you forget that *you* are the exhausted one. The problem lies between your ears. Remember, the only "bad behavior" here is you and your ilk incorrectly using the word realism when you are actually talking about something else.
