Pathfinder is one of the most popular roleplaying games on the market today, and it managed to do the unthinkable when it de-throned Dungeons and Dragons as king of fantasy. On this auspicious Moon Pope Monday though, we ask you to look a little deeper. Gaze upon this image, taken from page 242 of Ultimate Combat.
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| And you thought an elf with a bow was bad news. |
Look closely at it. See the gunslinger. See the depiction of the spell, Reloading Hands. Now look a little more closely. Do you see the terrible implication of this image? No? Look at what the elf is holding in her left hand. That, my friends, is a semi-automatic handgun, and if I were running this game it would be a .45. At least six rounds that can be fired one after another, punching holes through armor like it weren't no thing. The implication is that somewhere in Golarion there are weapons that rival the mechanisms found in today's modern firearms. There aren't rules for them, but in this case a picture really is worth a thousand words.
Hear that sound? That's the sound of thousands of DMs shucking pens and adding a caveat to their list of "no's"
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Dude let me just clarify this since you where being kind of dumb, the only things firearms in Pathfinder do is attack against touch AC (even though the attack is not considered a touch attack for feats and such) NOTHING MORE this blog post is kind of missinformative.
ReplyDeleteDerek,
DeleteIt's "were," not "where".
Also, since it seems to have passed you by, the implication is PURELY what's in the art, and is completely removed from any discussion of mechanics whatsoever. Monday posts are meant to be short, snacky, entertaining pieces, as opposed to long discussions of rules and their impacts on the game.
Now, are firearms game breaking? No, not unless you put them into the wrong hands. HOWEVER, the point is to show that, at least in artwork, guns have all the style and flair that any other weapon or spell has in the world of Golarion. And my pointing out that there are DMs out there who pre-emptively ban these things from their games without actually seeing how they function is meant to make those DMs look close-minded, not to support their decisions to clamp down on player creativity.
If anything, I would say this art ENCOURAGES player creativity when it comes to what sorts of bizarre weapons they seek out, as opposed to the argument of, "meh, bleh, guns aren't fantasy, stop trying to ruin my Middle Ages" spiel that is commonly found at tables.