I have a question though. In 4.0, when a character makes a ranged attack and is adjacent to an enemy the enemy gets to make an attack of opportunity against the character. How does this play into the firearm mechanics? Would said enemy get an attack, or would it not matter?

That… and… well… when do you think we’ll see a Pact-Rifle? Heh heh.

How about a Colt of Corellon?

Good stuff Asmor.

There is going to be one big change; no armor and no shields. Probably will put a damper on a lot of defender builds, but I think that’s a surmountable obstacle.

Curious, but how are you handling the heavy lean towards “melee” from most of the classes (or will you be building your own)?

When we tried this the first time, we just used the base classes, but allowed “ranged” in place of melee, and the like, but it did make classes like the Warlord very good (ranged commanders strike is a very nice power)

One mitigating factor you might not be considering is that it also hurts your allies if you fire into melee. Not sure what my players are going to do, but I suspect melee combatants aren’t going to completely disappear.

I don’t really agree with you about high crit being that hot. Take, for example, a d12 weapon like the rifle. That’s an extra 6.5 damage/tier 5% of the time, or .325 damage per round per tier. Of course, average damage is only part of the story, since the damage is being added to a crit. Overall, I still don’t think high crit is that hot.

As far as reloading, once more I think that’s mitigated by the fact that not everyone’s going to be specializing in guns. In that sense combat won’t necessarily be so static because if someone is in your grill, you want to shift, reload, and fire, and you only get to do two of those three. With that in mind, I contend that the move reload doesn’t make combat more static– it forces more interesting decisions.

My intention is that guns should be good enough that everyone will want one and not mind using one when the situation calls for it, but also such that they don’t outshine melee weapons unless you put a bit of effort into specializing in them.

Actually, for that matter I fully intend for bows to be common as well. Cowboys & indians, y’know?

Oh, and I can’t really take credit for the idea for the clip property… It’s based off of an almost identical mechanic I saw somewhere else, but can’t remember. Probably either D20 Modern or Savage Worlds. I just remember it was a cinematic system that justified it as being difficult to keep track of how many shots you’ve fired in a hectic firefight.

- All in all, great job, innovative and balanced.

- It seems like you’ve tried to balance up the splash damage of Spread with low range, load as a move action and unreliability. I’m still not sure that it’s balanced, splash damage is good and it is a simple weapon.

- Reload move, while balanced makes for static combat. The characters will probably tend to stand still to be able to make an attack each round. This would probably be offset by the Rapid Reload feat, but then again, that’s a feat that *everyone* in the campaign will take very early, thus in practice reducing load time and reducing the number of available feats.

- Deadeye is good, perhaps too good, high crit is a very deadly property.

- I love the clip rules! They mesh very well with the 4E philosophy of not having to keep count of anything but hit points.

- Where are the military or superior weapons? This makes a wizard as apt with firearms as a specialized ranger or fighter. While potentially unrealistic, I think that coming up with some specialized weapons to serve as military or superior would be great (Peacemaker, Derringer, etc).

I’ve made some firearm rules myself, though for black powder weapons and not for fantasy western, have a look at: http://polyhedral.wordpress.com/black-powder-weapons/

Jens Alm’s last blog post..The Gunmage IV – Daily Powers, lvl 1