hoo boy am I not interested in differentiating between types of guns. :shrug-outta-hecks: I've never been particularly interested in them, so when the stats are similar I don't know what to differentiate them by. Just resorting to looking several up to get a feel for how I want to equip NPCs or pregen PCs and finding this to be the most irritating part of the research I've done for the setup. What research have you had to do for games that you found particularly tedious?
If your game has them, leaning on premade templates for NPCs can really help. Like, a security guard at a lightly-defended facility likely has just a service pistol that's meant more for presence than actual stopping power (outside of tacticool hellworlds like 'Murica, anyway), and the template likely has an example of that, whereas a heavy weapons expert in a military outfit likely has a much more destructive kit. It can also help outfit player characters if you follow the examples for some idea of what they would be packing.
I was more referring to that this game (Deadlands) has a sizeable list of specific models. For example, there are 9 types of Colt Revolvers. Beyond deciding for combat flavor if I want them to run single or double-action firing mechanisms, should I really be bothered with the difference in a Colt Army and a Colt Dragoon? Maybe I should have crossposted in guns so the people who care about this can tell me exactly what an illiterate Pinkerton toady would be packing.
Yeah, maybe @Tervell could help you out there. I didn't know how much historical accuracy/plausibility you needed for that setting.
Frankly, I probably don't need too much as it's fairly divergent from an accurate historical timeline. I am really just getting into the details to flesh things out and bring it to life in my head before I bring it to my players. I've also been looking up old photographs to understand the clothing of the time, terrain of the area, existing rail networks, and that has all been much more interesting.
For example, there are 9 types of Colt Revolvers.
This feels like a holdover from early D&D weapon-variation madness where there are 12 different kinds of compound polearm with incredibly minor & specific variations in special rules, none of which you're ever actually going to use.
You already got single or double action accounted for so the other two main functional differences are what size bullets they use and if it uses black powder like a musket or cartridge bullets like a modern gun does. I'm not a rpg expert but mechanically I'd use caliber as different damage die/bonus and reload mechanism as making it take multiple turns/impossible for black powder guns to reload mid fight. For an example of a cartridge loading gun the colt single action army is pretty iconic, and the colt navy is a good black powder one.
I'm not really a big Wild West guy, nor am I familiar with the Deadlands tabletop, so I don't know how useful this will be. Anyways - if it's an alt-history thing, I feel like it's more important to get across the vibe of how guns would have been used rather than the specifics of which model would have been used where. So you could just have fictional guns (I don't know to what extent that's possible in Deadlands) which represent certain archetypes of gun and aspects of their usage.
For example:
- revolvers are going to be loaded one round at a time, which is a very slow process. However, some models (like the Remington 1858) allow easy swapping of cylinders, which would allow you to load in a full 5 or 6 rounds at a time, at the cost of having to lug around a bunch of extra cylinders (note that it seems like this wasn't actually ever done historically, but it's alt-history, you can do whatever)
- actually, before the proliferation of cartridges, you would have also needed to manually pour in the gunpowder in each chamber, which aside from being even slower also adds in the potential for messing up the amount and either not firing the round properly or firing it so hard you blow the cylinder up. Not sure if that's something represented in Deadlands.
- revolvers are going to be rather big and heavy chunks of metal, and thus not very suitable for concealed carry. For that, you'd need a derringer, which has the disadvantage of a using a much weaker caliber, and also not having any sort of cylinder or magazine, with rounds being loaded directly into the barrel (so often they would have multiple barrels, like 2 or 4, to offset that)
- when it comes to bigger guns, muskets would be very powerful, but inaccurate and slow to load. Rifled muskets would solve the accuracy issue at the cost of even slower loading (you'd pretty much need a mallet to ram the lead ball down the barrel). Lever-action rifles would allow a high rate of fire and large capacity, but would be constrained to using weaker calibers (similar to revolvers). Early breech-loaders like the Sharps rifle could represent a really high tier rifle, which has the both firepower and accuracy, but also much faster loading (although it still has to be reloaded after each shot)
So with stuff like this in mind, you could whittle down the guns to just a few base models, representing some of these aspects, instead of dealing with the whole mess of models. There's this old Quake 3 mod that has a nice compact selection of guns, although it lacks derringers and muskets. Sticking to a small selection of 3-4 revolvers representing the major designs seems fine to me (maybe you could add the LeMat because of the unique feature of having an extra shotgun barrel), and then maybe a few derringers, and some examples for the rifle end of things.
Thanks, this was helpful, as is @Tapirs10 's input. It is an alt-history thing and includes some supernatural forces as well, including mad scientists who can basically create the gun Abe was just shot with. I'm pretty comfortable with figuring it out from a stats perspective, but wanted to learn a bit more as to what might be in common use taking into account things like service weapons for various forces and the chances of those being as available to the commonfolk mostly for flavor purposes. This is not the complete list https://imgur.com/fiwsH8m but it does have the LeMat you mentioned. I had to look that one up to understand why the stats were listed as such, and had a good chuckle thinking about fanning the hammer on that and ending it with a blast of buckshot towards my posse.
tedious? never :comfy-cool: i'll just forget whatever i research immediately anyway
dunno if it counts as research, but for me as a Worlds/Stars Without Number GM, Kevin Crawford loves to put fairly important rules in the middle of a related paragraph without any indication that it's there
lmao what a nightmare. Thankfully this one seems to have plenty of sidebars and tables for the most critical information. I'm still taking my own notes while reading through things just to help me retain what I'm reading, but it feels like there will be something I inevitably overlook. Thankfully, I think my prospective players will be forgiving and bear with my mistakes.
One particular game had me researching the Stockholm Water Festival of 1999 in depth. It was a really weird game, and come to think of it I don't think it counts, because I didn't find it tedious.
