Video Games Do you think firearms would be overpowered if they get into a fantasy setting like Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls?

Warrior Spirit

Junior Member
Guns seem to get nerfed in Japanese RPGs, but Western RPGs seem to respect their power.

I'm kinda thinking that if you give even mere flintlock pistols to people in a fantasy setting, they would win so many wars or fights even against great mages.

Magic is great, but it requires an insane degree of set up. Before the mage finishes his or her incantation, some musketeer would have already decimated the poor guy's forces. lol

The only magic school or magic discipline that I think is truly overpowered is some form of time magic. Elder Scrolls has certain thu'um (a type of magic) that literally slows down time, turning the character into basically a DBZ character for a minute. Final Fantasy has time mages that can stop time while the wielder does three chores before resuming the fight. Assassin's Creed is basically a form of time traveling game.

Aside from that, I think guns trump all. Even ballistas, which don't even qualify as real firearms, were already considered super weapons in their era.

I guess this is why I love dwemer lore so much in Elder Scrolls. Those guys can build guns if they put their minds to it. I just hope they... you know... still existed. lol
 
I think this conversation tends to forget how long it takes to reload an early European fire-arm.



An early matchlock firing weapon takes about half a minute to fire. Giving an arquebusier on average a rate of fire of <2 shots per minute under ideal circumstances. As well, because of the physical properties of any fire-arm before mechanical machining they are generally inaccurate because they're all smoothbore so it's difficult to accurately land a single shot on target; it's possible, the Native Americans prove as such but very difficult and they only learned how out of material necessity (white people weren't going to sell them enough shot and powder to be well armed). As well, being black powder they obscure the sight of the shooter and carry a high-risk of just temporarily blinding the user with spent powder and ash shot out of the pan, and to avoid this the arquebusier typically just shuts his eye to prevent said debris from getting into it, so he's blind at the time of firing.

The introduction and development of fire-arms for this reason is why they became a mass-use weapon of European battlefields from their introduction in the 15th century up until the Franco-Prussian War where fire-arms development reached a degree of reliability they could be used accurately and the usefulness of mass fire was outdated by accuracy of fire-arms and the development of artillery on the field. The period between the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War featured so much in way of material and doctrinal development in European warfare with fire-arms, that it made as many leaps as the development of European warfare with firearms from the 15th century to the 18th. For most of that period fire-arms were only really every tactically useful in combined-arm formations with pikemen until the development of the bayonet in the 17th century.

In single-combat situations, the gun wasn't even that useful until the 19th century with the invention of smokeless powder, rifled barrels, and easier methods of reloading like the cylinder on pistols or the trapdoor or bolt on rifles (to just speak in general terms). Even when guns were used in single combat, it was only understood to be to fire one shot and it's over. Otherwise swords and daggers were still the expected single-combat weapon on the field of honor. Guns just were not reliable for that role for like, 400 hundred years. They were only useful if you had five hundred dudes on deck who could fire at the same time or in a pattern as a single regiment.

On that note, given the general vagaries of magic a wizard doesn't even need to see you



So the wizard can just attack someone or something from a distance and win the fight unless the other side as counter-magic, which I remember is a thing described in the lore books scattered around in Skyrim. Which is all very much a description of artillery.

Which 100% makes sense when you remember that in modern tabletop RPG gaming, the wizard class was in the beginning just copy and pasted from earlier table top wargaming from artillery class units. A wizard casting fire-ball was on paper in gaming the exact same as



The only difference between a wizard and a canon is that the use of a canon against a specific target has nebulous effectiveness. The wizard can just drop some wizard money weed gang flow and theoretically blow up the dude's bowels.

The final note on the whole conversation before I leave to work is the assumption that the development of societies like our own and theoretical fantasy cultures with magic are mutually exclusive. The reality is that like with any technical or doctrinal development and change made, human systems will accommodate and expect that. Were dragons to exist in the 12th century, strategists and engineers would just develop anti-aircraft precautions the same way strategists already had and played with the role of cavalry on the field and how to deal with them. And vs dragons everyone would figure out something like the Korean hawcha as anti-air deterrence and with magic figure out anti-magical precautions. It's not a issue of balance and compatibility with fire-arms in fantasy, but an issue of imagining and incorporating organic accommodations to include and counter
 

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