(06-08-2015, 08:35 PM)Hammersmith Wrote: (The english did so well with theirs because every male, supposedly, was at some point required to train with it every day after church, punishable by...something...if you missed)
Guns arn't "worse" than an archer really, since in RP you're not going to be mustering entire platoons of them onto the field.
Interesting to note unrelatedly, but the law that required every English citizen to own and train with a bow is still on the books to this day. (Obviously not enforced.)
Anyway, I don't see guns as that big a gamechanger. As noted, most the difference from other projectile weapons are only notable on a large scale. As awesome as a mass battle RP would be, simply duels in my experience can be a headache enough to manage, so I don't see anything of the sort happening ever.
What one may want to be more concerned about is the accessibility of personal handheld explosives (i.e. grenades). It would be an absolute gamechanger.
Would be, if not for one thing: Magic exists. Anything firearms and gunpowder can do, magic has been doing already. Arcanists can warp a knight's body with aether no matter how much armor he wears, and grenades don't hold a torch to the destructive firepower of a thaumaturge. In small scale fights, I feel magic would trump technology.
But I imagine mages are even costlier and riskier to field than armored fighters in largescale battle, but any average joe can be trained to light a fuse and use a gun, so that makes gunpowder win out again. Moreover, it gives the common man the ability to effectively fight large-scale threats such as dragons, previously the realm of specially trained hunters and adventurers. (i.e. us)
I don't see the presence of guns and explosives being a gamechanger for the RP environment unless your character is a naval or military officer. In which case, you may want to look into powder-based siege weapons such as cannons if you've not already and see about training your ranged infantry in firearms. On a military and even economical level, the presence of these weapons will change the world greatly. However, on the personal scale, firearms and explosives don't really add too much that isn't alredy there.
