Speed for ranged weapons

[lowguppy]

We're playing in a setting where guns exist, mainly as artifactish weapons, and we actually found them to be pretty underpowered. The stats we had for guns had low damage, accuracy, and well, everything. We tweaked the stats, but one thing we added that really changes the system is adding speed. In general ranged weapons don't have speed, their range is their advantage. Also, the canon ranged weapons are mostly bows, which do have pretty serious disadvantages in close combat, having to draw them and notch arrows and such. Guns on the other hand, don't have those drawbacks. What's faster than pulling a trigger, and what has more reach than a bullet fired at close to the speed of sound?


There are some very good arguments for guns having speed, but I'm not sure I like what they do to the balance of the game. Has anyone else experimented with this or have any thoughts on it?

 

[Persell]

You are approaching this from the wrong end. Bows have low speedvalues in exalted canon because this prevents melee fighters from being gunned down before they can enter the fray. melee is for the most part the combat form of choice in exalted because of the visuel goodiness. If you want to change the feeling and have more gunslinning in the game, then make the guns better.


This has nothing to do with realism. don't be fooled.

 

[memesis]

You can do several things to balance guns as you need.  Assigning them a Speed value will affect initiative, and this works fine.  A modification that I made was to the Flurry/multiple-action rules, such that guns can be fired several times in a round at reduced penalties.  "Hip shots" and pre-emptive attacks against charging melee fighters were treated as Wait actions, and this worked fine for me.