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

[Warrior Spirit]

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

 

[AaronMk]

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

 

[AaronMk]

It should also be noted that melee based combat carried on for a very long time even in combination with fire arms. The early period of fire arms was a strong contender as a golden age for combined arms warfare (the Spanish Tercio at least being a stand-out; I'm too busy to check the Swiss Pike formation). As I said in my previous post; the pike wasn't fully phased out until the invention of the bayonet which allowed infantry units to perform both fire and stabby roles. But in the history of stabbing things, the last bayonet charge was carried out in 2011 against Taliban forces in Afghanistan so while in the popular and mainstream military consciousness all other weapons have been fully replaced by the gun; there still persists some bizarre niche moments where antiquated combat arises.

Sort of like how the *sling* in the David and Goliath sense comes up now and then into 17th century. There was an entire peasant rebellion in France initiated and named for the fact the rebels opened the revolt by using slings to attack the houses of ministers: Le Fronde

 

[AaronMk]

It should also be noted that melee based combat carried on for a very long time even in combination with fire arms. The early period of fire arms was a strong contender as a golden age for combined arms warfare (the Spanish Tercio at least being a stand-out; I'm too busy to check the Swiss Pike formation).

To also expand on the combined arms theories of the early gunpowder era

 

[Jannah]

Are we talking modern firearms, early modern flintlock rifles, or what? Simply saying "guns" is pretty vague. Modern firearms obviously wouldn't really fit into most fantasy settings, but flintlock rifles might. Those didn't quite pack as much punch as modern firearms do either. They were cumbersome and took awhile to reload. Those I think could be balanced enough to fit into certain fantasy settings.

 

[Daisie]

I'm not familiar with either setting, but the biggest flaw I see in this premise is assuming that it would result in guns vs magic, when in reality it would rapidly evolve into magic guns vs magic guns lol.

 

[AaronMk]

I'm not familiar with either setting, but the biggest flaw I see in this premise is assuming that it would result in guns vs magic, when in reality it would rapidly evolve into magic guns vs magic guns lol.

To say again what I was saying in my first posts: no. The introduction of firearms to warfare did not lead to a rapid dominance of guns on the battlefield. It was a process that took over 200 years for firearms to become the dominant weapon in western armies, and another over 200 year process for specialized roles of old-form weapons to be finally displaced by the over time development of firearms from there.

 

[Daisie]

To say again what I was saying in my first posts: no. The introduction of firearms to warfare did not lead to a rapid dominance of guns on the battlefield. It was a process that took over 200 years for firearms to become the dominant weapon in western armies, and another over 200 year process for specialized roles of old-form weapons to be finally displaced by the over time development of firearms from there.

Okay... cool. I never disagreed with that. I wasn't talking about regular guns, I was talking about guns imbued with magic.

 

[AaronMk]

Okay... cool. I never disagreed with that. I wasn't talking about regular guns, I was talking about guns imbued with magic.

Well there being magic swords in the Elder Scrolls games doesn't necessarily mean everyone has a magic sword because of the costs in-universe of producing magic swords. So while it would also be theoretically be possible to have fights between magic guns it would not be as rapid or as inevitable as the case would seem.

Since, well: you will have to collect as many filled up souls gems as you have weapons and have the court wizard actually enchant the weapons; and representation of that process in game play can't be fully trusted because of the expedient of Elder Scrolls gameplay (nothing can be instanious, because even at a low skill level of smithing the player character can still produce incredibly intricate pieces of armor in one instant)

 

[Warrior Spirit]

To say again what I was saying in my first posts: no. The introduction of firearms to warfare did not lead to a rapid dominance of guns on the battlefield. It was a process that took over 200 years for firearms to become the dominant weapon in western armies, and another over 200 year process for specialized roles of old-form weapons to be finally displaced by the over time development of firearms from there.

Yeah. True.

Firearms development was a slow process. To give an example, it took several decades of technological innovations in metallurgy to make cannons light enough to be mobile on the battlefield. When Napoleon came into the scene, those things were like agile cats. But for so many years, military leaders found cannons too cumbersome to be effective.

 

[AaronMk]

Yeah. True.

Firearms development was a slow process. To give an example, it took several decades of technological innovations in metallurgy to make cannons light enough to be mobile on the battlefield. When Napoleon came into the scene, those things were like agile cats. But for so many years, military leaders found cannons too cumbersome to be effective.

The canon had hit Europe by the middle of the 14th century. The first recorded European battle with cannon was in the opening phases of the Hundred Years War, when a French naval raid against the British coast had a boat with a cannon.

The Gibreuval system, which lightened French canons wasn't adopted by the French army until 1765

Napoleon rose to prominence in 1790 and by that time the Army of the Republic restored combined arms

That is not *a few decades*

 

[Daisie]

Well there being magic swords in the Elder Scrolls games doesn't necessarily mean everyone has a magic sword because of the costs in-universe of producing magic swords. So while it would also be theoretically be possible to have fights between magic guns it would not be as rapid or as inevitable as the case would seem.

Since, well: you will have to collect as many filled up souls gems as you have weapons and have the court wizard actually enchant the weapons; and representation of that process in game play can't be fully trusted because of the expedient of Elder Scrolls gameplay (nothing can be instanious, because even at a low skill level of smithing the player character can still produce incredibly intricate pieces of armor in one instant)

Ahh yeah. That just comes from the fact that I have no idea what the magic system is XD
I was just thinking that if there were, say, some type of explosion spell in these games, that could remove the need for developing gunpowder and thus significantly progress these types of weapons. At least for the magic-based attackers, who would then become much more powerful based on the fact that they could fire multiple times in a row with a far shorter reload time than anyone else. I'm sure there are more examples of little quick fixes like this, but obviously not if the magic system is nonstandard.

 

[AaronMk]

Ahh yeah. That just comes from the fact that I have no idea what the magic system is XD
I was just thinking that if there were, say, some type of explosion spell in these games, that could remove the need for developing gunpowder and thus significantly progress these types of weapons. At least for the magic-based attackers, who would then become much more powerful based on the fact that they could fire multiple times in a row with a far shorter reload time than anyone else. I'm sure there are more examples of little quick fixes like this, but obviously not if the magic system is nonstandard.

The most basic things you need for a weapon that resembles what we would call a gun is a propellent, a projectile, and a container. So even if say: there were crystals enchanted to explode and you put it into a barrel shaped object that could contain the blast while shooting a small stone out the one end: you got a gun.

In the case of how fast you can fling projectiles, in the case of Elder Scrolls you can throw a fire bolt super fast. All other considerations are dependent on the world being written because magic is a very amorphous thing. You can unrestrain it from rules, but the outcome would be who would ever do anything else but use magic all the time.