I just watched a pretty interesting video about having firearms in DND and basically they are not the ultimate death dealing game breaking weapons that countless terminally online wannabe alt history writers make them out to be because in actual history adapted with bulkier armor, change in tactics and use melee was a desperation tactic even into modern times.
The comments ignored this on many occasions and kept talking like magic wasn't a reality warping act of fuck you physics while modern firearms was able to pull off bullet bending and time stopping, as if a common handgun can turn the user into a character from both the Matrix and Wanted.
The funny thing is when somebody does point out settings or a series, like an example a military brings transported to a high fantasy martial artist world, and their weapons couldn't do much damage on the inhabitants, posters will ignore the setting rules and go “uh, uh, well there is antimagic! So guns win!”
Another example would a common fanfic cliche in the Sailor Moon community was some street thug would pull out a gun and injury one of the senshi or the Monster of the day. Ignoring the characters often take on projectiles on par of a rocket launcher, And the anime showed Neptune and Uranus getting riddled by a LOT bullets and still kept standing, and only died when their heart crystals got yanked out.
I don't know why this happens, it annoys the hell out of me but I thought I bring it up.

Face it none of the folks talking on these things know anything about firearms, how they are really used and what they can really do. It's usually a bunch of gamer fanboys who think Tiger tanks rule the world and that World of Tanks accurately represents mounted warfare. People who have never smelled diesel exhaust on a cold morning then mounted up broke things and killed people or ever will.

It's all fantasy. You can have it work or not work however you want to do it. Like I had a protection from normal missiles spell be ineffective against anything traveling traveling over a certain speed. Missiles might not go that fast but bullets do.

The most realistic portrayal is the anime Gate where it's just the proper application of available firepower. That's how modern warfare works. About freaking time something showed how stuff really works.

But magical girls are a whole different thing. It's the whole kawaii thing. Bullets can't handle cute. Come on, any magical girl is helpless and naked during her transformation sequence. So grab her then and have at it. (Note to self do hentai magical girl comic with tentacles)

Yeah, I had a feeling it was a bunch of gamers that played Metal Of Honor (okay, maybe only War fighter) too much.
I added muskets to my DND campaign, and while strong attack wise I had a rule they must take a turn to be reloaded plus they weighed about 20 pounds a piece, it worked out well.

Of course I had planned on busting out the maybe setting/game breaking Vickers machine gun later on… If the players hadn't gotten attached to a throw away enemy bandit before killing him for knocking up a dragon that their character worshiped..

bravo1102 wrote:
But magical girls are a whole different thing. It's the whole kawaii thing. Bullets can't handle cute. Come on, any magical girl is helpless and naked during her transformation sequence. So grab her then and have at it. (Note to self do hentai magical girl comic with tentacles)

What's funny is modern era magical girl stuff points out a lot of the stuff like transformation sequences are just for viewers, the actual change is a blink in an eye so hands would be broken in mid cupping motion.

In semi-seriousness but on topic of magical girls though there is a surprising amount of guns used in the media, some say the bullets need to be specially made to do any real damage plus a high power rifle, some say handguns are effective if you got the power to stop time.

As for Gate, I love that manga, never got around to the anime though.

Furwerk studio wrote:
Yeah, I had a feeling it was a bunch of gamers that played Metal Of Honor (okay, maybe only War fighter) too much.
I added muskets to my DND campaign, and while strong attack wise I had a rule they must take a turn to be reloaded plus they weighed about 20 pounds a piece, it worked out well.

I ran both a late Medieval campaign with period firearms and then a 17th century campaign with period weapons. One of the characters was an arquebusier and had a realistic rate of fire of once a round but he had no dexterity for his armor class nor could he do anything else but load and shoot. Other characters did away with that by having multiple wheel lock pistols and doing the equivalent of a caracole. Shoot off the guns and then into it with the blade.
Monsters using guns was downright scary as fields of musket armed orcs or far worse large creatures handling a cannon like a human sized character would a musket.

Then there was the time a detailed illusion had them attacked by Stuka dive bombers.

My comics do handle firearm damage fairly realistically especially Attack of the Robofemoids with the slow escalation of firepower versus the dermal armor the aliens create.

It's a complicated topic, yeah, because people think weapons like guns would be equal to “magical” devices to people in the past and misunderstand how weapons and the perception of them work.

Like they imagine that the peoples of South America facing the conquistadors were like unarmed primitives facing a vastly superior foe and were like children being slaughtered, which is why the Spanish managed to dominate most of South and central America.
And that thinking dominates ALL common thought about colonial expansion, form India to North America, to Japan, to Africa…
Even the Gate anime gets this wrong in a way.

But it's untrue. Technology and weapons were not the main factor in the success at all.- The native people in those areas were able to get their own hands on the weapons.

The reason they could conquer was that their presence introduced a massive destablising force into the local strategic power balance. This was ALWAYS why they dominated. Weapons and the knowledge of how to properly employ them just made them slightly more effective as individual fighting units. But even with the very best weapons available at the time colonial conquerors would have still been wiped out completely if the locals could have banded together and put aside their local politics to unite against a common foe- - whenever they did that or allied with another European power they won).
Sam thing if the colonialists lost their supply lines and communication to the home country.

I know this is zooming out and looking at the from a more distance perspective, but it's important. Guns are only a small part of it. When a new weapons is introduced people try and acquire their own and they develop tactics against it.
They can't win however if their neighboring enemies use that opportunity to attack them from another direction at the same time or the conquerors ally with all the other groups and play them off against each other.

It's like the idea from the movie The Final Countdown, where one of the officers mentions they could win the whole of WW2 with their Nimitz class “supercarrier” that's been transported back in time to just before the Japanese attack on Peal harbour.

The carrier wouldn't have been that effective on its own.
It could have stopped the attack on Pearl harbour and with its classified nuclear bombs that it carried for the fighter bombers it could have done massive damage all over the place, but without a LOT of resupply from the present or allying with the WW2 US navy and developing a resupply system i would run out of puff completely in a couple of weeks and just be floating hanger.

—

You have to look at:
- How much do the troops armed with these weapons destabalise the status quo?
- How fast can the other side adapt to them?
- Is the use of them sustainable?
- How fast can the other side get a hold of their own?
- Are the aggressors with the weapons available to take full advantage of the strategic imbalance and play groups off against each other?

The whole colonial experience is fascinating. Just finished a recent work on the Conquistadors and the indigenous folks captured and used firearms early on in both Mexico and Peru. In addition mist of the fighting was done by indigenous auxiliary forces as the Spanish played groups off each other. In Peru the Spanish even fought each other.
It's now accepted that the Northeastern Iroquois effectively stopped colonial advance for almost a century by playing the Europeans off each other and forming a confederation. They quickly got firearms and adapted them to their style of warfare and in fact were expert shots with the notoriously inaccurate smoothbore flintlock. What you learned in school is not really accurate. New sources are really changing views of what was once thought to be guns just running rampant over native peoples.
Indigenous Americans very quickly developed their own gun repair techniques as well as casting special ammunition and even some powder manufacturing. They didn't make their own guns because
they couldn't do the iron and steel metallurgy. They could repair and modify but not quite make from scratch.

bravo1102 wrote:
The whole colonial experience is fascinating. Just finished a recent work on the Conquistadors and the indigenous folks captured and used firearms early on in both Mexico and Peru. In addition mist of the fighting was done by indigenous auxiliary forces as the Spanish played groups off each other. In Peru the Spanish even fought each other.
It's now accepted that the Northeastern Iroquois effectively stopped colonial advance for almost a century by playing the Europeans off each other and forming a confederation. They quickly got firearms and adapted them to their style of warfare and in fact were expert shots with the notoriously inaccurate smoothbore flintlock. What you learned in school is not really accurate. New sources are really changing views of what was once thought to be guns just running rampant over native peoples.
Indigenous Americans very quickly developed their own gun repair techniques as well as casting special ammunition and even some powder manufacturing. They didn't make their own guns because
they couldn't do the iron and steel metallurgy. They could repair and modify but not quite make from scratch.

Precisely.

It's a way more complicated equation than the old “Europeans had better tech and were more advanced”. People don't realise how ignorant and racist that idea is, based on the notion that native people were naive, primitive and infantile.

Ozoneocean wrote:
Precisely.

It's a way more complicated equation than the old “Europeans had better tech and were more advanced”. People don't realise how ignorant and racist that idea is, based on the notion that native people were naive, primitive and infantile.

People often ignore or don't know about the MASSIVE plague that spread across the Americas, and it wasn't small pox.

A sad thing is the Michael Piller effect is in full effect when viewing battles of history.

(Cutting this short as I got a few minute break.)

EDIT: I kind of breaking the flow here but I found a pretty good video the myth of multiple on one is an instant win. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pg3Vimm8tY
To kind of sum up, get morons to stumble into each other's path, be primarily defensive, and run like hell.

This is going to be bit of a ramble, but yeah this something a lot of people ignore. Keep moving so no one gets a drop on you.
I was jumped once in Baltimore, three to four guys want to honestly kill me.
They sucker punch me, got me to the ground but I manage to pull away and run out of there, trying to get my bloodied phone open to take pics of them and trying to keep a head of them.
They stole my groceries and try to throw in my direction but we're very crap at throwing. I did not stop until I got to the Aldi's I shopped at.
People like my step father was like, only way more racist, “if I had my gun, I kill them.”
I tried real hard to explain, they don't care about each other, they just see a gun, and stopping to attack is a good way to get killed and gotten a firearm. In fact it is common in Baltimore to have people that have Canon films dreams, treat a weapon as some kind of off switch remote and tend to get others killed at best.
Never listened.

Michael Piller effect? What does that even mean? I doubt people who study military history are effected by a screenwriter from Star Trek TNG. Anyone who is needs to do better research. There are all kinds of great works being done in military history and most folks just repeat the same garbage mythology that scholarship overturned decades ago. There's been a whole overturning of the previous model of armored warfare in WW2 with careful examination of actual battle reports. Much of previous historiography for WW2 was based on German memoirs. Guess what? They covered up a lot and exaggerated their own abilities.

As for the cornucopia of disease that ravaged native populations after the European arrival? It's everything that came with the domestication of farm animals that didn't exist in the America's. Really bad that De Soto pretty much let Pigs and horses loose into the whole Southeastern part of North America. He more than halved the native population and brought about the collapse of entire cultures. Remember that native Americans are more susceptible to influenza and can get much sicker from it than Europeans or Asians.