I thought I should expand a bit on the comment in the high tech weapons post about every century adding a bonus to the effective damage dice. I'm basically assuming that, once a given technology gets past the unique or "weird science" stage and become more common in a culture, that culture becomes better and better at making that weapon, in much the same way that a person with 20 years of experience in a profession will generally be better than someone who has just started. It's a crude approach to tech level. Guns, for example, should get lighter and sturdier as time goes on. Since I'm linking the damage dice to the size of the weapon, I assumed that the maximum size of black powder weapon that can still be used by one human being, acting alone, drops every century.
Or, to put it another way: The number of centuries since the introduction of guns, plus one, equals the damage dice of a two-handed personal firearm. (I say "two-handed" because the pictures of a medieval handgonne seem to suggest it was more like a bazooka or mortar rather than a pistol.) That's the damage rating for a weapon usable by a creature in the 1 to 4 HD size range; every extra die of damage adds 4 HD to the minimum creature size.
The exact number of years is arbitrary; I picked a century because it seemed slow enough. I could drop the reference to time entirely and just say "this is an advanced 3 dice two-hand firearm" instead of saying it's from 200 years in the future.
You can trade one die of damage to halve the weight, or 2 dice to make a two-hand weapon into a one-hand weapon. You can also trade a die of damage to double the rate of fire or improve the range. I haven't decided how much the range should improve yet; I'm not big into emulating specific historic firearms, I just want a quick way to represent a mix of weapons.
Guns do not always get sturdier and more effective as time goes on. As an example: Early M-16s were anything but sturdy compared to the M-14 and shot a smaller caliber bullet.
ReplyDelete80 caliber balls hitting you at 900 fps would do plenty of damage. The improvement is being able to deliver more rounds, greater distance, with more accuracy: being wounded is being wounded.
I'm aiming at a very broad rule, here. If you try to make specific comparisons between models, you get too many other factors: changes in production methods or management, cheap materials, trying to push technology too far beyond current capability, chsnging designing goals. I don't want to examine the history of guns, or anything else, that closely.
DeleteWhy not come up with Tech Levels, rather than centuries.
ReplyDeleteBecause I don't like any implementation of tech levels I've ever seen. They tend to lump all technology together so that it advances at the same rate, and there's too much consultation of charts to determine where a particular item should fall -- and eventually, there's something that doesn't fit.
DeleteI'd rather just say "this is a gun, but it's 500 years more advanced than other guns in this world."
I don't think arguing that guns do more damage over time, or that they do more damage if they're more advanced holds much water. As JDJarvis points out, a musket ball will do plenty of damage. The advantage of a modern round is that it's smaller, lighter, and can go in a magazine.
ReplyDeleteReally where you see improvement is in size, weight, range, accuracy, (and eventually, magazine capacity and rate of fire).
How about a system where every 100 years, weight drops 1 lb, max range increases 100 yards, and range penalties (which maybe start out at -4/-6/-8) go down by one?
I'm not saying guns do more damage over time. I'm saying that you can make a gun of certain power smaller.
DeleteRemember, I'm saying that if you have guns, you have a full range of damage, from 1d6 weapons up to huge monster weapons. But when first introduced, the 1d6 weapons are heavy two-handed affairs and the bigger weapons are, in fact, bigger, and usually some kind of cannon. Improvements in metallurgy and manufacture reduces the weight needed for a gun that does a certain amount of damage.
So, essentially, I'm saying the same thing as you, except that I make the weight drop faster than you do.