Firearm crutches for fantasy RPGs

This post is immediately inspired by a Twitter conversation, but of course its parent inspiration is the Combat Wheelchair created by Sara (mustangsart).

Firearms in Fantasy

Pathfinder, which I play weekly, has long had rules for firearms and an entire class dedicated to them, the Gunslinger. I've always been a bit chary of them for a couple of reasons. One is simply that fantasy with firearms drifts into a different space from fantasy without, mostly due to source material. The other is my personal, non-expert discomfort with things like "targeting touch AC" (meaning firearms bypass armour and shields) and the very rapid reloading that 6-second combat rounds and fights that generally finish within 5 rounds require.

I'm not really interested in delving into the exact realistic chances of these things, especially given a fantasy world. But for the record:

In the first case, I find it immersion-harming that a small lead pellet fired by alchemy from a tube has a rules mechanic of punching simply punching through armour (or perhaps inflicting damage through sheer force?), but an arrow fired by a Strength 24 orc sniper's composite bow or from a gastrophetes doesn't. This is before we get into oddities like "this Diminutive sprite the size of your thumb has a pistol that will shoot right through the frost giant's tank-like plate mail, but the frost giant's tree-sized spear can be deflected by the sprite's thimble breastplate."

In the second case, obviously it varies a lot with guns, but by my understanding you'd be doing well to fire a flintlock weapon three times a minute.

The topic of making crutches that doubled as firearms came up in the thread, and got me thinking of magic, and actually - while I'm not enamoured of actual "magical firearms" in a general fantasy setting, incorporating minor magical elements into a mechanical & alchemical firearm actually works pretty well for me. I'm a fan of thinking about how the fairly widespread availability of trivial magic might affect society!

The concept we're looking at is sturdy, adventurer-friendly crutches with a built-in firearm. So how might this work?

Disclaimer: I do not use crutches and am not proposing this as a finished, finely-tuned product like Sara's combat wheelchair! I'm just thinking this through in terms of how we could play with existing game elements. Please do correct, comment, critique and offer improvements! Please also let me know if I've messed up on a sensitive issue. My disability is mental rather than physical and I'm not especially knowledgeable in this area.

Obviously, no ableism please.

Spell Selections

I am drawing on this website for a reminder on firing black powder weapons; again, not my area.

As JABDrone pointed out, an immediate problem with a very basic model would be that you don't want a barrel going into the floor. It'll clog up with dirt, mire, spleens and all the other muck you run across while travelling through wilderness and dungeons.

So our first alteration will be incorporating a permanent, limited prestidigitation effect. This effect will use the 'clean' function of prestidigitation to clean the small volume that represents the barrel of our firearm. We want this enchanted to happen either on a command word, or when we perform a specific action, to avoid it cleaning out the barrel when we're trying to fire it.

You know, now that I think about it, loading a charge and bullet, or a cartridge, into the muzzle is also fiddly, especially if our wielder may need one hand to balance on another crutch. Leaning the grip or collar of the crutch (the butt of our firearm) on the floor is undesirable too - we don't want to unnecessarily get it dirty, and the adventuring world is full of nasty substances you could pick up that way. Some surfaces might even damage it on contact, and there's the risk of the grip becoming slippery with grease, mud or troll blood. Let's help with that. A quick application of good old mage hand should let us suck them right up the barrel. No need for ramrods here! And we can ask for our prestidigitation to clean the grip whenever it's tilted upright.

While we're at it, if our adventurer does use a pair of crutches, we could easily build additional mage hand into both crutches to keep them balanced upright when we want, so we can load and use our firearm without worring about finding a good place to prop a second crutch. This removes any penalty that might otherwise apply for impaired balance while using one crutch as a firearm, as well as the inconvenience of having to pick up a fallen crutch if it slipped over.

(If we're feeling fancy, we could throw in a grease to make the barrel permanently easy for cartridge and bullets to slide through. Might affect accuracy of firing though?)

Our firing procedure now looks like this:

1. Brace yourself and upend the firearm-crutch. This action silent triggers prestidigitation, instantly cleaning the barrel of any residues, misfires and so on.
2. Take out a cartridge, bite off the top, and prime the weapon with a little powder.
3. Take the remaining cartridge and touch it to the muzzle. Speak the command word "load", and the cartridge is drawn inside.
4. Assume firing position.
5. Fire!

Pricing of magic items is always difficult. Luckily at least we can stick with a 1st-level caster for all this. Strictly by the guidelines in magic item creation, in Pathfinder we'd be looking at imbuing our firearm-crutches with the following:

• Barrel-cleaning prestidigitation effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 2000gp (use-activated) = 1000gp
• Loading mage hand effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 1800gp (command word) = 900gp
• Balance-assisting mage hand effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 2000gp (use-activated) = 1000gp

On the surface, we'd be looking at 3900gp for the magical components of our item. But look closer: we're only actually using two cantrips here, so without pushing things at all, and keeping the higher cost where there are two, we can reasonably say it only costs 2000gp to enchant.

Time to push things. The pricing for spells assumes you can actually use those spells, and at their full capacity. We're not doing that though; we're using a very limited subset of their abilities to do a very limited thing, which radically reduces their usefulness. You can't freely move objects around, alter the temperature or flavour of items, and so on. In contrast, a sleeves of many garments lets you instantly transform your current outfit into a clean outfit of your choice, and costs only 200gp.

Mechanically speaking, none of these abilities allow you to do anything new or additional. It doesn't change the actions required to load and fire your weapon, nor grant any bonus. What it boils down to is (at least, the vast majority of the time) providing in-game ways for someone to use a firearm as a crutch without too much inconvenience.

My view is that we can treat this modification as no more useful than sleeves of many garments and price it accordingly, so my vote would be for a price of 200gp. An alternative would be to say that this is a cantrip-level effect, but highly restricted in use and benefit, and give a 50% discount taking it down to 500gp.

Please note, my pricing above doesn't include the cost of the actual firearm! Those are very expensive, and I'm not suggesting that a firearm-crutch should cost less. Just wanted to pre-empt any complaints on that head...

In Pathfinder, there are numerous traits that grant money or items worth 500gp or more. I'd therefore rule that if a player wants the use of crutches to be part of their character and background, and wants to begin play using a firearm, it's reasonable to let them have their crutches modified accordingly without worrying about starting gold. This is especially true if there are distinct drawbacks to using crutches; for example, I'd imagine that in many cases getting disarmed of your weapon (or having to surrender it on entering a palace or even a town) also causes mobility problems.

A gunslinger begins play with a firearm anyway, which is normally vastly more expensive than anything a starting character could afford (up to 2000gp). It seems entirely reasonable for that to include personalised modifications of the kind we're discussing.

Additional Developments

So far we've only looked at specific adaptations for a firearm that's used as a crutch, but there's more potential here. In a fantasy world, I think it makes a good deal of sense to consider firearms with magical engineering, not purely mechanical. Bear in mind that these weapons already cost thousands of gold pieces, and that striking a balance of 'realism' and 'is fun to use' is one of the challenges. Well, we may be able to use magic to explain how these weapons can be loaded and fired at 6-second intervals rather than a third of that speed or worse, and how our musket-wielding adventurers escape the problems of choking smoke and deafening when they constantly fight in confined spaces.

So what we're talking about here is the general use of magic to make fantasy firearms work roughly the way the rules say they do. This sectio isn't specifically aimed at firearm-crutches but at firearms in general.

Our mage hand loading mechanism has already helped to speed things up, because we no longer need a few seconds to wield a ramrod and force our ammunition into position.

Next, let's think about powder. With a flintlock or similar, you'd use some of the powder to prime your weapon, then load from the muzzle. You need to use the flint to spark on the frizzen, sending a little flame through the touchhole to ignire the main charge. There's a number of risks here. Humidity or rain can stop the flint and frizzen from sparking or make the powder too damp to catch. Residue can foul the touchhole (though our prestidigitation can help with that).

Since we have magic, though, we can avoid most of that. We don't need a flint, frizzen or touchhole at all, in fact. Instead, we use a cantrip. In Pathfinder I'd apply spark, while D&D 5e is probably looking at druidcraft or another prestidigitation from what I can see. Our spell is entirely contained inside the barrel, and on our command word, it ignites the powder inside.

Hopefully, this step might also allow us to make the weapon sturdier because it doesn't need the added engineering complexity of the flintlock mechanism. That's ideal if we're using it for physical support and mobility. Basically I think we're now looking at a metal tube with a grip. Depending on the crutch design, it might have a collar that braces it against you (if a forearm crutch) or a pad that can also serve as a stock (underarm crutch).

Another prestidigitation could maintain the barrel at a steady temperature, preventing it from overheating or suffering freezing damage. That's hopefully going to reduce the risk of misfires, which is always good. After all, I don't know about you, but it's literally years since I had a player perform any maintenance whatsoever on their gear, and the conditions adventurers tend to fight in are definitely suboptimal for wear and tear. It also makes our mobility aid less likely to hurt us, which is obviously important.

So we'd looking at roughly the following spells:

• Barrel-cleaning prestidigitation effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 2000gp (use-activated) = 1000gp
• Igniting spark effect: spell level 0 x caster level 1 x 1800gp (command word) = 900gp
• Loading mage hand effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 1800gp (command word) = 900gp
• Temperature-regulating prestidigitation effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 2000gp (continuous) = 1000gp

It's a little more magically-complex than our original design; in Pathfinder (but not D&D) we're looking at an additional cantrip. The engineering is much simpler, though! It should be significantly easier to maintain and repair physically, and easier to fire in challenging situations, like... let's be honest, virtually any situation where an adventurer is using a weapon. Wind and rain might mess up your shot but they shouldn't blow your priming powder away or damp it and foul the weapon.

The price for this should probably be a little higher, especially if we think those advantages will actually show up in play. On the other hand, less engineering is needed. I think it would be reasonable to fold all this into the normal cost of a firearm, honestly, given the typical prices. After all, we're taking a 1500gp+ weapon and saying it works partly by magic in order to aid our suspension of disbelief.

Our firing procedure now looks like this:

1. Brace yourself and upend the firearm-crutch. This action silent triggers prestidigitation, instantly cleaning the barrel of any residues, misfires and so on.
2. Take out a cartridge, bite off the top, and prime the weapon with a little powder.
3. Take the remaining cartridge and touch it to the muzzle. Speak the command word "load", and the cartridge is drawn inside.
4. Assume firing position.
5. Speak the command word "fire", or pull a trigger if you prefer. This activates our spark or druidcraft or prestidigitation, igniring the powder and firing the shot.

Additional Refinements

This is a starting point, but I'm sure there are other refinements we could add to support specific needs.

For example: our adventurer may not be able to stand and balance unaided to wield a musket in two hands. That might be a general issue, or apply only in some circumstances, like strong winds or slippery conditions, or when exhausted. Either way, we can help. Another application of mage hand could arguably be used to help aim the weapon: that should be within the 5lb. limit of the spell, while the weight and recoil are handled with the other arm.

Here, we would be adding a new capability (firing a two-handed ranged weapon with one hand), so arguably we should be charging the adventurer for it. Again, as a cantrip, we'd be looking at 1000gp normally. Potentially we should be including the 50% increase for adding multiple abilities (I'd argue the initial adjustments don't qualify as "abilities", but enhancements like the magical firing mechanism would). On the other hand, we could include a disclaimer: something along the lines of "providing you don't use the other hand for any action", limiting the circumstances where the weapon can be fired one-handed.

We could also consider adventurers who only have one hand to begin with, but that's moving into a new concept. Briefly though, I reckon a mage hand effect like the one I suggest here would be a reasonable compromise for wielding weapons that require two hands, stabilising a shield strapped to a forearm, and so on.

Our adventurer might then be looking at the following: a crutch which can be flipped round to serve as a musket, with magical effects to clean the barrel, insert and ram the cartridge, ignite the cartridge, stabilise the barrel for one-handed aiming, reduce recoil and aid balance to keep them on their feet, protect the weapon from overheating and potentially burning them, and finally clean the grip and pad when.

• Barrel-cleaning prestidigitation effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 2000gp (use-activated) = 1000gp
• Temperature-regulating prestidigitation effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 2000gp (continuous) = 1000gp
• Igniting spark effect: spell level 0 x caster level 1 x 1800gp (command word) = 900gp
• Balance-assisting mage hand effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 2000gp (use-activated) = 1000gp
• Stabilising mage hand effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 2000gp (use-activated) = 1000gp
• Loading mage hand effect: spell level 0 (treated as 0.5) x caster level 1 x 1800gp (command word) = 900gp

So at the worst, we're looking at 5800gp to modify our firearm for all that. Personally, as I said, I'd throw in the majority of that free of charge for a 1st-level character, and include the limited stabilisation with disclaimer; I'd also be happy to accept the self-igniting firearm as a magic-powered alternative to a purely alchemical mechanism for the sake of the weapon's fluff better fitting their rapid firing in the game.

As I said, this is just thinking out loud and very much isn't a fleshed-out concept, so I very much welcome constructive feedback and suggestions, and flagging up any problematic areas of this whole post and idea.