I’ve been thinking a lot about my upcoming campaign and the feel I wanted to give to it, that as sprung in the beautiful mass of neuron I call my brain a couple of extremely simple house rules.

Tell me what you think!

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I’m one for heavily modified settings. In fact, I very often run my DnD games in steampunk, or even modern, settings. My main problem always was firearms.

The thing with firearms is that almost every systems who uses them make them extremely complicated, with magazine size, reload time, rate of fire, autofire rule, and so on, and so on. While this, in theory, is not much of a problem, for me who has to often handwave or house-rule firearms into my game, it makes the whole situation unmotivating. I don’t like being bothered by rules, I’m more of a rulings kinda guy, old-school yo.

Thus, here’s what I’m thinking : Why not make a universal rules for firearms? For the D20 players amoungst you, here’s a table with definitions!

• Damage in rules -> equivalent in d20 system -> What it represents
• Glancing damage -> d4 -> A feebly thrown dagger
• Light damage -> d6 -> More or less a hit from a short sword or dagger
• Medium damage -> d8 -> An arrow, or a good sword swing
• Heavy damage -> d10 -> A crossbow bold
• Devastating damage -> d12 -> A sledgehammer to the face

General rules

Autofire : Weapons capable of autofire may make an area attack instead of a normal attack. It uses up the weapon’s ammo, thus the character must reload before being able to shoot again. One cannot make another attack in a round in which he has used autofire.

Reloading : When a character rolls a non-disastrous critical fumble (some systems will define it, some others won’t, most often, you choose), his weapon is empty. Reloading takes a full round (unless you wish to make an advantage that reduces that to a number of actions), and leaves the player vulnerable. It’s hard to dodge and reload at the same time

Pistols

Pistols deal light damage and are rather reliable, they should have decent range (handwaved, define what is “Decent” in your own game). The good thing about pistols, you can have two of them.

Submachine guns

Submachine guns should be treated as pistols with autofire possibility. A character using a pair of submachine guns may make his area attack with a small bonus to damage (consider it one category higher than the submachine gun, thus, medium damage).

Revolvers

The big brother of the pistol. Essentially the same thing, but bigger, bulkier, deals medium damage.

Rifles

Rifles have good to great range, sometimes, they have an autofire mode, sometimes, they have attached grenade launchers (treat as autofire, but you don’t have to reload the gun before shooting again, just have to reload the grenade before using another one). They deal Heavy damage

Shotguns

Shotguns are particular in that they very their damage depending on range. At point blank range, the damage is always Devastating, and for every 2 steps a character  lowers the weapon’s damage, the character may add an additional target to his attack. Thus, a character could shoot two (close-by) targets for Medium damage, or 3 targets for Glancing damage. A shotgun has a maximum range of Short, as should be adjucated by the GM.

That it, really! I wanted to keep it as basic as possible. For anything else, stick to your favorite system’s ranged combat rules, add the numbers and be happy!

Note: Some people might wonder why a shotgun blast would make as much damage as a hit from a great axe in DnD, when firearm damage was much greater in d20 modern for example. My thinking is simple : Get sliced by a freaking greataxe and come back to tell me it was less painful then a shotgun blast. Plus, it balances ranged and melee combat so that melee weapons are still viable.