Adding firearms to dungeons and dragons 

Hello everyone, I wanted to share some homebrew rules for firearms I’ve been working on as part of my weapons rework. For background, in my setting, two contingents have gunpower. A Victorian England/Pirates of the Caribbean hybrid, the Gem Cities and the New World, Shaling. My group just finished a campaign in the Gem Cities and we were planning a new one in Shaling. I was unhappy with the firearms rules used in the last campaign. They didn’t feel different from a crossbow or even a pull bow and certainly didn’t invoke my fantasy around a pirate gunslinger.

So, I did some tinkering and come up with some new rules. I want to preface this by quickly touching on realism. As per my article on realism, I really like it when my TTRPGs are realistic or explainable. Obviously, this is a game that needs to be fun, but rather than says “it’s a game design” when merge machines with fiction, I strive to create plausible and grounded reasoning. For example, I might say that in my world firearms were designed differently than their historical counterparts and do less damage but reload quicker. That is not the direction I went for these rules, but that is purely due to the fantasy I wanted to invoke and my experience with firearms.

You can download the rules here.

Now right off the bat, you can see these are very different from the current roles in the DMG and unlike anything we’ve seen from 5e design. The fantasy I settled ultimately settled on was the idea that you would only fire a gun once per combat and then switch to a sword/dagger/etc. Hence the long reload times, I think you could easily change the loading keyword to be once per combat instead, but I wanted to keep the idea of a long-range shoot-out.

One concern I’ve seen expressed and considered myself is the multiple guns idea and how powerful that is. I haven’t seen this play out in my group, largely because of the need for magical damage. None of my players have a magical gun, and even if they did, they couldn’t take advantage of a belt full of pistols. You can also limit the number of firearms a character gets by making the bullets, gunpower, or firearms themselves scarce.

If you’re curious and want to see more of my firearm rules, check out Alternative Weapons and Firearms on the DM’s Guild.