Guns have been part of 5th Edition from the start, but they were notably placed in the Dungeon Master's Guide, rather than the Player's Handbook. This means that it's entirely up to the DM whether guns can play a part in the campaign.
Now, for me, one of my foundational fantasy texts was the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, which I voraciously consumed starting in my senior year of high school (though I had to wait until my freshman year of college for the last two books to come out.) King's epic follows Roland Deschain, who wanders on a quest in a post-post-apocalyptic-apocalyptic world (he's the last survivor of a civilization that fell which had, itself, grown out of the ruins of another civilization) where the very laws of reality are breaking down, on a quest to save The Dark Tower, which stands at the center of all existence and serves as the lynchpin of the universe. Roland is a Gunslinger, which was basically an elite class of knights in his homeland who are all basically expected to be deadeye masters of the gun, and who are held to a strict code of honor and conduct like a samurai (well, or at least how the samurai were later romanticized.) It basically swirls together Arthurian chivalry with Leone-style westerns, with a big mix of post-apocalyptic science fiction to boot.
It really inspired my love of fantasy genre mash-ups. I've recently been watching Netflix's adaptation of Shadow & Bone, which I want to like more than I do (I think a big part of it is that I'm a nearly (my birthday's in less than a week!) 35-year-old man, and this story is very clearly aimed at a young adult audience) but I freaking love its aesthetic and production design, with a sort of late 19th/early 20th century look with steam trains and rifles but also what would be classified as sorcerers in D&D making up a powerful (and resented) elite. It's very clearly fantasy, with "grisha" gaining various talents that give them fantastical abilities, and a giant scar across the land of perpetual shadow inhabited by ravenous monsters that has divided the most powerful imperial nation in two, but it's far from medieval.
Anyway, it's for that reason that, in my homebrew setting at least (though I'll likely also do so in any Ravenloft campaign) I tend to allow the use of firearms.
But there is a fundamental issue at play with firearms: how to balance them.
Guns in 5th Edition all have higher damage dice than other ranged weapons. A pistol, the lowest-damage firearm, deals 1d10 damage, despite being a one-handed weapon, which is equivalent to a heavy crossbow, the highest-damage ranged weapon in the player's handbook, which is also heavy, meaning that it's impractical for any small races to use one (personally I kind of hate the heavy rule, as it seems needlessly punishing for small races. Oh well.)
Now, there are a couple things built in that limit their power:
The first is a sort of open question: firearms are described as martial weapons in the DMG, so you could argue that any class with proficiency in those would be able to use them, but you can also designate them as their own class. In this case, only Artificers would have automatic proficiency in them, and a character would either have to train for them or take the Gunner feat, which was introduced in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. A feat to get these special weapons seems to me like a fair tradeoff.
The other thing to note is that firearms have a much shorter range than other ranged weapons, particularly the renaissance era ones. Pistols have a 30/90 range and Muskets have a 40/120, which means you'll really need to get very close to a target to fire without disadvantage (once again, Sharpshooter is great.) Modern weapons start to get better, but even the futuristic weapons like the laser rifle never have anywhere near the range of a longbow.
Granted, given the size of most battle maps, having a range of 150 feet versus 120 basically means that you can shoot at anything you can see. But in certain edge cases, it might make a difference. And any weapon with a normal range of 30 feet means you're likely going to find yourself having to get close enough to an enemy that they can run up and hit you on the next turn.
Firearms also come from three different eras. Renaissance weapons are pistols and muskets - the former likely implied to be something more like a flintlock. Modern weapons then give us hunting rifles, automatic pistols, shotguns, and automatic rifles. And then futuristic weapons are laser pistols, laser rifles, and antimatter rifles.
Weapons from more advanced eras do more damage. The renaissance era ones only have a single damage die - 1d10 for the pistol and 1d12 for the musket. Modern ones have two, with automatic pistols using 2d6, most of the others doing 2d8, and hunting rifles doing 2d10. Finally, the laser weapons have three damage dice, with laser pistols doing 3d6 and laser rifles doing 3d8 - they're also both radiant damage instead of piercing. And then antimatter rifles deal 6d8, which is just absurd.
Notably, only renaissance weapons and ammunition have gold costs. They're not cheap - both types of gun are hundreds of gold - but the price is set for you to easily make them available in adventuring supply stores if your setting has them.
And, of course, with a single damage die, these weapons are not so much more powerful than PHB ranged options as to break the game. A musket's average damage roll is 6.5, while a heavy crossbow's is 5.5. You get one more average damage per hit in exchange for the high cost, the potential need for special training or a feat, and the lower range.
Thus, I'm inclined to suggest that DMs can simply throw these weapons, along with their appropriate ammunition (which goes for 3g per 10 bullets) into their setting without really changing anything.
Now, there's a bit of ambiguity around futuristic weapons. According to the DMG description of them, the Energy Cells that function as ammo for a futuristic weapon contain "enough power for all the shots its firearm can make."
Futuristic firearms have the keyword "reload" with a number, so I'd think that the idea here is that you can, obviously, reload them. But in the rare instances in which these show up in published adventures (such as in Rime of the Frostmaiden,) it seems to be implied that once the gun has shot off its cell, it cannot be reloaded, and the gun is useless.
On one hand, this can be a way to balance the weapon - rather than giving the party some insanely powerful weapon that can be used indefinitely, you give them a limited-use item that they'll want to save for special circumstances.
But it also seems deeply unsatisfying - not only because I'm a hoarder, but also because it seems absurd anyone would design something that way. And given that energy cells are listed as their own item, weighing 5 oz, I must interpret that the phrasing in the DMG is meant simply to say that the energy cell contains enough energy for the gun to be fired a number of times equal to its reload count, and then must be replaced (which then makes it make sense that the antimatter rifle has a reload of 2, given how much damage each hit does.)
As a DM, you can easily limit the number of energy cells that a party comes across if you're worried the damage is too high - though an Artificer with the Repeating Shot infusion can get around that easily.
In my homebrew world's campaign, the only ranged weapon user was a Rogue. Given that most of his damage was coming from his sneak attack bonus, I wasn't terribly concerned about the extra damage of the laser pistol he used. With a sneak attack at level 8 (which I think was as high as he got,) he got a bonus of 4d6, and his weapon was dealing 3d6. And he had, I believe, +5 to Dexterity at that point. So he was doing 29.5 average damage when he got a sneak attack. With a longbow (what he was using previously - he was a Wood Elf, so he was proficient) he was doing 1d8+4d6+5, so 23.5 average damage. So basically, he got an extra six damage in every turn, which didn't feel like all that much (though I did temporarily take the gun away from him when I sent the party off on a vampire-hunting quest, which is sadly where that campaign kind of fell apart).
I think futuristic weapons should feel like something very special, and it makes sense for them to be priceless.
Modern weapons get a little trickier.
In my setting, there's a region that is inspired by the Wild West, and you can't have that without Revolvers, now can you? While automatic rifles and pistols are slightly too modern for the setting (at least for now - though they can be found used by Shadowfell-dwelling creatures called the Taheen, inspired by the aforementioned Dark Tower series,) revolvers, hunting rifles, and shotguns are all part of that Western vibe.
And they are commonplace. But are they also a little overpowered?
The thing is, ranged weapons are only used by a few character builds - battle smith artificers, ranger, rogues, some fighters... and that's about it. In my experience, I've only had really one character in an ongoing campaign built around ranged weapons (that aforementioned rogue). If someone wants to play a paladin or a barbarian, they're probably not going to abandon that entire playstyle to pick up a gun.
On top of that, game balance in D&D is not really as important as it is in some MMO like World of Warcraft. If one class or subclass or playstyle pulls ahead of another, you're not going to get benched because you, for example, chose to play a melee class.
The other, sort of soft balancing act you can play, which I've described before, is making magical firearms harder to get than other ranged weapons that are magical. Now, granted, getting magic weapons is kind of a big deal when you get into around tier 2 and start coming across foes that are either resistant or immune to nonmagical weapons, so it might seem brutally punishing to be without one. But maybe a +1 revolver isn't too hard to come across, but getting anything fancier than that is going to be a real quest.
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