I remember when I went on a two-week exchange to France my junior year of high school. we spent the first week in a town in the Loire valley. It was February of 2003, and there was a kind of crazy cultural tension between America and France. After 9/11, the Bush administration had swiftly launched our invasion of Afghanistan, but in a broadening of the "War on Terror," the administration also made it clear that they wanted to go into Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. Today, the Iraq war is almost universally recognized as a misadventure, but it certainly felt in America at the time that if you were skeptical about its merits (as I and my family were) you were in a minority. However, outside the US, some of our allies were willing to express doubts.
Chief amongst them were the French, and this led to some baffling political theater, which included renaming "French Fries" in the Congress cafeteria "Freedom Fries," as those who were behind the war saw this skepticism as a betrayal - or at least wanted to paint it that way.
Now, the war had not started yet, but it seemed (and proved to be) inevitable when I did my short visit to France. I had been there before, as I have some family in Paris (my great-uncle on the Jewish, Hungarian side of the family was either in medical school or had become a doctor there during World War II, and his French wife's family hid him from the Nazis during the occupation, and he remained there with his family after the war until he died in the late 1990s). Anyway, I was studying French in high school, and took part in this trip because it seemed like a cool opportunity.
We were paired with French kids of our age, and lived at their homes and went to their schools. When I went to my counterpart's I believe history class, the teacher asked us about life in America. He asked me how many guns I owned. I told him zero. He laughed and clarified that he meant how many guns did my family own, and again, I had to emphasize that, yes, I was an American, but no, we didn't keep guns in the house. Indeed, as far as I knew, none of my friends had guns in their houses either.
This long preamble is to give some context. I'm not a gun person. I don't really intend to ever own a gun. My dad did marksmanship as his high school sport, but I don't think he ever actually owned a firearm. I've never touched one.
But our country has a gun problem, and that problem is so pervasive that a high school teacher in France could not seem to believe that we weren't all, to the very last citizen, loaded for bear. And so I can feel a great deal of empathy for those who, in their escape into fantasy, want to escape from the very idea of firearms.
That being said, I also like to mix up my genres.
One D&D (yeah, believe it or not, this is about D&D) has taken the statistics for "Renaissance-era" firearms and added them to the core weapon options for the new version of 5th Edition. The statistics, other than adding the Weapon Mastery feature like all other weapon types, are unchanged from how they are found in the Dungeon Master's guide. However, the clear intent here is that players who wish to use firearms should, by default, be able to pick these two options - the Pistol and the Musket - when they're building their characters, and that we should be able to assume that these weapons exist in most D&D worlds.
So, if we are taking that as given, let's actually see: How do these weapons stand up compared to other ranged weapon options?
Modern and Futuristic weapons are not included here, so on the surface, all of these weapons are using a single damage die, meaning that they won't do a ton more damage than other weapons (of the default weapon options, only the Greatsword and Maul use multiple damage dice, and they deal the highest average damage of any weapon type).
The Pistol is a martial ranged weapon. It has the Ammunition and Loading properties, and has a range of 30/90. It deals 1d10 piercing damage and has the Vex property. It weighs 3 lbs and costs 250 gold.
You'll notice that this price point is very high - among the 2014 weapon options, the most expensive weapon is the Hand Crossbow, which costs 75 gold, so we're talking a little over three times as much. But if we assume that our player is simply picking this as a "martial weapon" at character creation and then holding off for a +1 option later on, which they're just going to get as a treasure drop, we might not care so much about that.
The pistol does as much damage as a Heavy Crossbow, meaning it would be one of the highest-damage ranged options if not for the existence of the Musket, which we'll talk about afterward.
The Pistol is also notable as one of only a few one-handed ranged weapons. While the Ammunition property will usually mean you still need a free hand to reload it, even if you have a way to ignore the Loading property, this could still be a good option for a hybrid spellcaster, giving you a free hand for somatic spell components when you aren't reloading - though with two-handed weapons, you generally only need to actually hold it in two hands if you're in the act of firing it. Really, this might just be niche like if you're an artificer with repeating weapon, you can put that infusion on this and then use a shield in the off hand.
Two really big downsides present themselves with the Pistol.
The first is simply the Loading property. Now, as it stands, we don't know if the Gunner feat from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything will be present in the 2024PHB. Loading as a property is designed to make these weapons less usable with the Extra Attack feature, but there are also feats that overcome that to allow you to make these weapons your primary armament. Crossbow Expert removes the loading property for all crossbow weapons. Gunner does this for firearms (though not, technically, Reload, which shows up on more advanced firearms in the DMG).
Now, Gunner from Tasha's should still be available for you given One D&D's backwards compatibility, but if you're in a group that treats the new Core Rulebooks as a fully new edition, and you have a DM who wants to stick only to the newest version of the game, you might find that this becomes a dealbreaker. That is, though, only assuming that they don't add Gunner or a similar feat to the 2024PHB. Given that I think this decision to add renaissance firearms to the PHB was a relatively recent one, I think it's highly possible they will.
So, just as if you were going to be a Crossbow Expert, you might choose to invest a Feat in Gunner or its equivalent to make these weapons viable.
However, the next issue is that the Pistol has a very short range. To fire within the normal range of the weapon, you'll need to do so while within the standard movement speed of 30 feet, meaning that you'll need to get closer to your foes than you might want to be as a ranged character.
This is less of a deal-breaker, I think, but certainly places limits on you, and may put you in a position where you need to begin a fight with some dash actions to get in range - while someone with a Longbow is needling foes with arrows from a block away.
This, too, can be remedied by picking up the new Sharpshooter feat, and if you pick up both this and Gunner, these will add up to a +1 bonus to your Dexterity modifier, meaning you aren't falling behind too far.
However, unlike other ranged weapons, the long range for firearms is only 3 times the short range, as opposed to 4 times, so even at long range, your limit is only 90 feet. That's going to cover you in most cases, but it's conceivable that you can have some fights on large maps where you're hitting that range limit.
The Musket is also a martial weapon, and has the Ammunition, Loading, and Two-Handed properties, and a range of 40/120. It deals 1d12 piercing damage, and has the Slow mastery. It weighs 10 lbs and costs 500 gold.
Now, here's something interesting: the Musket is not Heavy. That means that Small character can still use it unimpeded. What I don't understand is how the Musket, which weighs 10 lbs, is not Heavy, while the Longbow, which weighs 2lbs, is Heavy. Surely what we mean here is not heavy, but bulky? Even the pistol weighs more than the Longbow.
Longbows are actually enormous in real life - some are about six feet long - and you could imagine why a Halfling might struggle to shoot one. But I digress.
The Musket has higher damage and a slightly better range than the pistol. The higher price is, I think, usually going to be irrelevant as it is for the Pistol (assuming, of course, that players will be able to select them as free starting equipment - and to be fair, if you now look at the Fighter's starting equipment, you don't get to just choose any old martial weapons - it specifies a Light Crossbow and either a Greatsword or Longsword and Shield).
In fact, I might argue that the price of these weapons should be brought closer in price to the other options - I don't think that price in gold should be a balancing factor, as DMs will not always be consistent in how much gold you're getting, and on top of that, ideally the weapons themselves should be balanced.
Thanks to the different masteries, these two guns can play different rolls - though given Fighters are the most likely to be able to make use of them, and Fighters can learn to swap these masteries out, there's a bit more flexibility.
However, the Musket will be a little better for characters who want to keep foes at bay - between the 40-foot standard range and the ability to slow your foes, you can more easily kite a target. The Pistol, by contrast, seems built more for damage-dealing, taking advantage (literally) of Vex to keep striking more consistently.
I can actually imagine a kind of melee-gunslinger who can easily fight in melee with their pistol. In this case, you don't even truly need Sharpshooter, and you're more of a melee fighter with a 30-foot reach. Honestly, that doesn't seem too bad compared with someone fighting with a Glaive or other polearm - though again, this requires at least one feat.
Fighters who use the Musket can swap Push onto it with Weapon Adept, which can be very powerful, though you're more likely to push it out of your own normal weapon range than you would with a Heavy Crossbow.
I think my conclusion here is that these weapons are only really superior in their damage dice - but I also don't think that those dice make a huge difference. All things being equal, I think I'd rather have a d10 weapon with a 100 foot range than a d12 weapon with a 40-foot range, especially if I can get the former for a tenth the price.
I think I'd be open to changing the statistics of these weapons to put them in greater balance with the other ranged options, but I also think that they've created enough nuance here that they are both appealing but also not so appealing that they'll be mandatory.
A Longbow is still the best no-fuss ranged weapon in the game (not counting the Modern and Futuristic firearms) and will be the go-to choice for a lot of Rangers and Dexterity Fighters.
But as a DM, if I have players who use ranged weapons, I'm definitely going to be tossing magic Muskets and Pistols into the mix, and I'll have NPCs use them.
If anything, I think they're a little underpowered and overpriced. But none of them are so underpowered that they become a pure RP choice, like the Blowgun or Sling.
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