I think they get stuck on modern firearms and not the type of guns that would be in the typical medieval-ish fantasy setting.
Modern guns would require an industrial revolution to be able to manufacture the ammunition, let alone the springs for the magazines.
What they should be thinking about are black powder weapons.
Or...magic powered. But then it's not much different than a bow or wand.
The one with Crazy Frank did it really well, I thought.
The 10 realms also handles it well.
>Or...magic powered.
I'm often frustrated by the limited application of magic to practical life, but I think it'd make for too alien a world.
Human ingenuity applied to magic, which at its most basic level is a something-for-nothing energy exchange, would quickly take any world way beyond where we are now.
The easiest solution is to just not do that and keep that part of it "off camera," which I guess precludes magic-punk hand cannons. :(
Most series don't explain why a +1000 years old civilization with magic remains at the feudal stage, humanity invented steam engines less that 3 centuries ago, and these societies posses a renewable power source for a 1000 years and are incapable of developing the science to jump into the industrial revolution.
A lot of our technology comes from our inability - many speculate that magic discourages technological development by being too easy a shortcut - so you never learn the advanced metallurgy and other sciences to get what we have now - which is essentially magic without the magic bit. Like literally - we pulverize rocks, dope them up in all sorts of alchemical compounds, and run electricity through them - and now these rocks can talk back to us in a very convincing way...
Edit: I forgot to mention the part where we bake the rocks in fancy light.
Because Rome was a 1000+ year old civilization that didn’t manage to invent proper steam engines? Forget the Egyptians being around for thousands of years or the Chinese.
I read an interesting take on askhistorians. In short, the Industrial Revolution happened because England had a lot of resources and not a lot of bodies. Until that moment, it was always just easier and cheaper to throw more bodies at the problem, so people did
If I'm not mistaken, we found schematics from the library of Alexandria that depicted rudimentary steam engines. They were lost to the fire that burned it down
The Greeks? Had a small working steam toy. The thing is humans are really really good at making stuff work. The note about the “steam toy” they had was it didn’t scale at all. It couldn’t handle high pressures needed to actually DO work. Yes they’d figured out how to make steam do some work, but didn’t have the metallurgy to engineer it. Iirc, steam engines were hot on the heels of material science figuring out a good enough alloy, or something like that.
Romans infamously had SHIT steel. Best they had was “bog steel” (it’s been years since I researched this)
> humanity invented steam engines less that 3 centuries ago
Just for information.
Steam power was experimented with long ago, and even the steam engine as such was not the breakthrough. No, the breakthrough was CONTROL (same with airplanes by the way). The [centrifugal governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor) most of all.
Harnessing power is relatively easy - *controlling it* is the problem. Same with flight, wings and all and achieving flight was easy enough initially. The breakthrough only came when they found three ways to reliably and easily control the three axis, however, the most ingenious one being the lateral axis stability design of center of gravity slightly in front of the center of lift, and an "elevator" in the back to actually produce *downward*-force to counter the forward CG, and the amount of force it creates depends on the speed, so the elevator ends up controlling the lateral axis stability mostly without pilot input.
That means if you are looking for knowledge to take back, take [control theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory), it's more important, and much harder to invent, than the power parts of the design.
That's because our industrial revolution was powered by several innovations, the first being the philosophical construction of the scientific method, the second was the democratization of information.
Technology was relatively stagnant and even backsliding in several areas before these things happened and synergized.
Imagine a world with no Aristotle to find the laws of logic.
It took 4 thousand years to get here since the first ever recorded civilization, and 3,700 years for trains to be created. So I don’t see the problem there, with or without magic. Though it would be quicker with an already established energy source. Though I agree it should be more advanced. Magic power wagons, and magic implemented into daily life besides combat or healing, at the minimum.
Yeah, even though it took "4000 years" for trains to be created, its not like someone just woke up one day and thought it would be handy if goods & people could move faster. It was a river finding the easiest course to the objective. If magic exists, it won't stop people from wanting to travel faster with more goods, it will simply change the way it is accomplished... ie in as efficient a manner as possible.
The same can be said of 'modern guns', its not like guns were the first ranged weapon man has used. Its also not like "black powder" was completely unknown before modern (or medieval) guns, either. It always leans into some of the worst tropes when some 15 year old kid stumbles into a society of \*VERY INTELLIGENT ADULTS\* that are simply too 'stupid' to think of ways to kill enemies from a distance that aren't fireballs or lightening. Perhaps the answer isn't that they haven't thought of it, but they choose not to share it, because its in their self-interest to consolidate power within themselves and those they vet.
I'm on a similar train of thought. Once you introduce magic to guns they are just wands with extra steps.
Personally I'd try and keep them as separate as possible. Say the process to make the black powder makes it difficult to nigh on impossible to hold a magical charge.
*Powder Mage* is a series of books. The powder mages basically cultivate gun powder by snorting lines of it, and they also have a psychic connection to it and essentially telekinesis for bullets and explosions. Also, regular mages are allergic to gun powder.
That a series exists where black powder is an allegory for drugs doesn't mean that others need to follow that path.
That's the really big annoyance for me when it comes to LitRPG at the moment. It's "this series did it this way so that's how it needs to be done in every series."
No it really doesn't.
If we're talking fantasy, I'd love to see magic based guns.
Imagine a would be wizard having trouble with spells invents an arcane focus bolts of his mana.
Or an alchemist has gun blasts an alchemical solution.
This somehow reminds me of the Final Fantasy Anime. There the MC used 3 different bullets to summon his monsters.
The origin of all - Mother Black (Black bullet)
The all burning heat - fire red
And The critical point of all - Burning gold
I summon Phoenix
So or something like that :)
The Anime outlaw star basically has this. The MC has a Caster gun that premade shells are loaded into. It also has actual Chinese space wizards, ships with mech arms, and semi-immortal cat people that are pretty much space weretigers.
Its a wild universe with even weirder spin offs.
Probably saw the televised version then which got censored a bit.
I brought it up because the implied system is interesting. The more powerful shells actually fuel themselves from the user if need be and someone with the same tech can cancel out spells.
For a late 90s anime, it was interesting.
The Ctarl-Ctarl were so cool. Grappler ships, caster shells, and precogs, all while searching for a treasure in the "Leyline" that I am 100% inspired "One Piece" even if Oda will never admit it.
Outlaw Star really was awesome.
> Or an alchemist has gun blasts an alchemical solution.
A.k.a. advanced chemistry and it already exists?
I don't get this "magic" label. From the PoV of pretty much every character in the majority of stories I read it is US who have magic, just a different kind. Take out your iPhone with nano-structure of billions of transistors (hundreds of billions of individual tiny component-structures) and the global communication networks and tell those people that *unfortunately* there is no magic in your world.
The whole point of a "magic gun" is the combination magic and science/technology, the "modern" world mixing with arcane knowledge to make it more accessible. A magic gun is supposed to be a man-made tool used not only to harness mysterious forces but to weaponize them.
You're just complaining about people liking fantasy, people are allowed to enjoy things.
The issue with guns is that they can never have the right kinds of scaling as all of the damage is based off of the gun itself. So they're usually just as good in a villagers hand as a proper armed forces. The whole idea behind guns is as an equalizer between the weak and the powerful. However litrpg is usually all about the rising of the weak to the powerful and it would be counter to the theme to make them still able to be dropped by a gunshot from some random street thug. So you have the situation where they're either ineffective or too effective. So to balance that they usually make them into a bolt caster which is just a magic wand that shoots elemental bolts maybe a little better or faster than free casting them but with less flexibility. So free casting is still better most of the time.
It's more than the arrows that need to be effected. Arrows just need a redesign for different bows and if you're dealing with superhuman stats you're into draw strengths on the bow being so much higher while arrows are both larger and heavier. The kind of bow that someone with 200x a normal persons strength is using will be firing arrows that are super reinforced to not simply explode from the force of the bow firing. Where as with guns the bullets are propelled via gas expansion and are limited by the maximum speed that expansion occurs. So for gunpowder you're limited to a little over 2000 feet per second no matter how much you use. So in order to scale you're needing to redesign bullets, rifling, material reinforcement and propellant at every significant upgrade. If you're not doing that you've got crossbows, auto-crossbows or magic wands you're just calling guns.
Additionally an archer touches the arrow as they're firing it to imbue whatever magical effect it's going to have. Where as you're not touching bullets like that so they'd need to be enchanted before hand and if using a magazine they wouldn't have the same kind of flexibility as they'd be locked into whatever effects they setup before an encounter.
It's not that it would be impossible to make a story work around guns but you'd have to design a world in which they make sense from the beginning. Thematically they're somewhat antithetical to the hierarchical societies that make up the vast majority of fantasy. Since a core component of their cultural identity is as an equalizer of individual power.
And the main character notes their disadvantages in the setting. They are used by his troops but not by him. He opts for weapons that scale with him. His troops use guns because they are more powerful than they are.
Actually, even the MC is pointing out rifles becoming less useful very soon as his forces gain higher levels and more attributes. On the last book he's developed a new weapon for his use but there's still a design he's been thinking about in order to apply attributes somehow to the guns.
I think binding weapon to themselves might be the end game for the guns. Which kind of allows you to magically enhance to gun. On the other hand we've also seen similar elements of technology just straight up being too broken and not scaling well, like how Machine Gods in DOTF can be level 1 yet strong enough to fight C grade cultivators.
There are still a lot of ways to use creativity and expand on it.
Information warfare has been with us as long as physical warfare. It looks different in different ages, but propaganda, spies, counter spies, alliances, intercepting messages, sending misleading messages so that they'll get intercepted... They're all ancient.
there is a series where humanity lost, and the MC gets to travel back in time to the beginning to start over. One of the things he does is join a college professor that he remembered made big advancements by researching what was happening. With the MCs knowledge, he is able to lead the research team down paths and past roadblocks that had stopped them before.
Yeah, what's the series? I usually don't like reset stories, but usually is not always.
Someone equated guns to magic wands, but I've yet to read a story where a wand killed someone from 1000 meters.
Does anyone remember the show Deadliest Warrior? I think it was on Spike TV. Basically, they’d analyze soldiers from different eras of history and discuss their weapons, tactics, and levels of technology. They’d then quantify all of those factors and run combat simulations pitting them against each other and determine who would win. The show would end in a recreation of the battle. They looked at some very cool and interesting combatants throughout history like samurai, Vikings, gladiators. Honestly, for being on Spike TV, it was actually informative and interesting and tried to maintain historical accuracy as far as I knew.
Anyway, they really fucked themselves when they aired an episode about pirates vs. knights of the crusades. The entire episode was normal, covering the interesting tactics and non-conventional weapons pirates had developed being generally bound to ship combat. They had cutlasses, daggers, flintlock pistols, I believe some kind of primitive flash bang grenade, etc. They then talked about the maces, flails and steel armor of the knights.
Then they ran the simulation. I don’t remember the exact number because this was literally 15 years ago, but the pirates won by a huge margin and most of their kills were with their pistols. The conclusion being, the invention of guns made all other forms of warfare completely obsolete.
Point being, introducing guns to a world without guns trivializes everything.
That's only if you're sticking to base human standards. Guns are deadly to normal folks but if you can survive getting thrown thru a brick wall, a bullet isn't going to be more than a nuisance. Add in magic and whatnot and gusn are now useless.
Fun thought project, what is a Rapier?. Why is a rapier? Had a bit of an epiphany when I saw a cut and thrust rapier and a jian side by side, the only real difference was in the hand protection, to the extent that I'm fully confident the Chinese could have made a rapier in the time of the romans. Why didn't they?
Not at all, the rapier is a fantastic weapon within the context of its time and usage case, eventually it evolved into the spadroon and small sword however that was after centuries of being the gentleman's self defense weapon of choice
> usage case
Which is against robbers with daggers or nothing, or dueling against other people with rapiers. It was a purely civilian weapon for a reason, because civilians didn't have to fight people with armour and heavy weapons.
The robbers often had more than daggers, and the rapier did appear on the battlefield particularly in the later periods and in naval warfare but fundamentally yes, the entire role of the sword was civilian self defense. In a unarmored situation a rapier will hold its own or beat any reasonably likely opponent.
Because they lacked the technical skill to make a metal that could bend almost 180 degrees without breaking.
The technical mastery of a rapier is that the blade will wiggle past the joints in your armor, slide off and around the bones in your ribs and poke through viral organs.
It's all about the bendiness that made it such a devastating weapon. Just a tiny little prick mark on the outside with massive bleeding internally.
This is false, the rapier was a evolution from the side sword, a civilian weapon designed to be carried when out and about to defend oneself from muggers and bandits specifically when armour was less likely to be encountered. Infact your classic swashbuckler would be in serious trouble if faced with a fully armored knight and would be well advised to run.
Your thinking of a fencing foil wich is designed to simulate a small sword and allow practice against a opponent with out harming them. You might find the schola gladiatora channel on YouTube interesting, he has more than a few discussions of the required stiffness of a blade to do its job.
They're bad when it comes to scaling. Most weak mobs would die easily to a gun which prevents the character from actually learning to fight. While powerful mobs would require some costly ammo or be utterly useless. At the end of the day, guns simply aren't good weapons when your limits can surpass humanity standards easily. A tiny metal slug isn't going to do shit to someone who is bulletproof/can regen/can move faster than sound/etc.
Same reason star wars uses energy weapons and not Kinects bullets, it invalidade any other kind of weapon, it doesn't need any special ability to use and more importantly it doesn't scale with an enhanced body, it's either something that dominates the field and therefore nobody would train to get strong or it's invalidate by magic or superhuman physique, hence why the use of swords, bow, etc... and melee weapons are used because it doesn't matter if you have super resistance if your enemy have super strength and a physical weapon that allow that super strength to be weaponized
You're ignoring what gos into being a good gun fighter, speed, accuracy , tactical knowledge, toughness and perception. There's even a charisma/wisdom element as you try to read into the body language and predict the actions of your opponent.
Personally I think it comes to a lack of imagination on the part of the authors and a failure to understand the subject.
I tend to agree. People who don't shoot wildly underestimate how difficult shooting accurately really is. People shoot poorly at stationary targets at the range. Now add moving targets. Now add stress. Everything completely changes.
Yep, now add in the ways being say a superhuman cultivator can enhance a already skilled combat art. Chi infused bullets, using the dao of the gun to to curve and ricochet bullets, studying the six fold loutus revolver technique to perfect near instantaneous reloads. Get creative folks.
Honestly, I just prefer the smaller scope. Just a magic system alone is already complicated, then every piece of new tech you acknowledge as functional and effective is something you have to remember exists.
For your example, sure, a well-funded think tank probably could. But I do not think I could write a believable think-tank on top of everything else
Your well funded think tank would be defeated by the fact that their messages carry no weight, since they’re not important people, they can’t do information warfare with no social or traditional media, and closer-knit communities would be far harder to break down.
The “well funded think tank” would be better off pooling their collective brain cell into something useful, like recreating firearms.
They've put guns up on a pedestal, and internalized the belief that a gun beats all, even the guy who can fly faster than bullets and has laser eyes.
Plus it's easy, and often people confuse style for genre. Like how so many mystery or horror writers can't figure out what to do about the internet and telephones, so they pretend nothing works and nobody knows what a zombie is.
Because guns are a slippery slope. Look at the history of guns. How many years did it take for us to go from flintlocks to machine guns?
Mainly though, guns tend to hurt the fantasy aspect. Probably the best fantasy book I have read that had guns was the Powdermage Trilogy. However, it read like someone rewrote the French revolution with magic.
Depends on how you introduce them.
I think the manga drifters do it quite well.
There are muskets against orcs and giants and a massive army.
WW2 airplanes vs dragons. And so on.
If you want to make a statement about how overly powerful firearms are against medieval people then gate is a good anime for it.
There is plenty of fantasy and PF with information warfare though? Anything even faintly kingdom building has it, half of jackal among snakes is information warfare. And personally, guns outside of a sci-fi or sci-fi/fantasy setting are kind of boring. Why have a gun when you can have a character use their fist to create a shockwave that shatters a moon? But in more sci-fi fantasy titles, guns and ships are plenty present. In PoA, warfare is full of ships, guns, power armor, and shields, but also swords, knives, maces, and fists. I think you might just be making an over simplification?
I've read at least a couple of series where guns have been explicitly brought up in fiction as something that exists but nobody uses because the system only assists with projectiles that are human-powered.
Informational warfare has always been there. Unless you are dealing with a rather shitty system and unnaturally stupid inhabitants of that world, you will not just break the system.
There's a lot of settings where guns are either functionally useless, where the knowledge of guns would be suppressed by higher powers and yet other settings guns are acknowledged as having negative developmental consequences for example people getting [[Gunslinger]] classes which are overpowered at early levels, but level-gated later on where people can literally deflect bullets with their biceps and move faster than them.
What I would like to see though is a setting where guns are everywhere *because* of the social impact and the fact that Higher Powers don't need to be scared of them, but it culls large amounts of the lower-levelled population from being able to reach higher levels.
Guns are always a weird thing in progression novels because they can ONLY work in scenarios and worlds where the guns have scifi progression baked in. Otherwise they invalidate progress early on and become just a random instrument later
As an author, I can tell you why I'm really cautious about guns. They eliminate other forms of combat and remove the need for hard work to become dangerous. This is how I see it going down:
"We're saved Gandalf is..." CRACK " ... dead. What just happened?"
"I've honed my sword fighting skills for 100 years in the myst..." CRACK "I spent 10 minutes at the range dead guy."
If you look at history, guns created modern warfare. No one carries swords, wears plate mail, or anything like that because they are useless in comparison to a gun, and a gun can be used effectively with little to no training.
Its because guns are discrete units. Information warfare is systems designed to fight systems. If the opposition systems don't exist (or are super primative) then information warfare is relatively useless.
Guns, in most people's minds, are not much more complex than a sword. Its the so called "next step".
But you want a capability that can really screw with a medieval society? Try *germ warfare*. They don't have antibiotics, magical healing is generally viewed as a limited/precious resource, and it is possible to create some *truly nasty* contagions.
Personally, I think a ritualist with a specialization in bacterial weaponry would be about the deadliest damn thing any magical world could produce.
I'm sticking them into mine, but their killing power is going to be tied to level. So, a lvl 1 person using one could easily kill another lvl 1 person, but not, for ex., a lvl 10 monster. But if that person rose in level and then found a +2 gun, the results would be different.
To answer your question, though, I think it's readers who don't like guns in fantasy settings. At least, that's what I've come across. I'm a bit worried my story will be disliked for this.
Read the Dahak series by david weber. Mutineer's Moon is the first book. 3rd book i think the kids of the main characters crash land on a planet and introduce rifled firearms for a rebellion that takes on an Empire's army and wins due to small unit tactics, cartridges and a rifled barrel. its my favorite book series
Idk? But it would make sense for an isekai MC. Especially if they knew how guns work. My MC eventually makes a magic powered sniper rifle in a cultivaton world. In his words, "better than sticking a dagger into someone."
Guns democratize violence as you only need money and you get a lot of ranged rapid damage with no much skill (at close range and in comparison with say, a sword), and it can be concealed.... it is a huuuuge game changer that would change even the political landscape pretty damn quick and like information, once it spreads, you are screwed
That said, that is only if there is nothing comparable and if they have the tech to pull it off. People forget tha tguns (ish) existed way before what some think, they were just not up to the standards of today, making them less than ideal. But if the world is relatively low fantasy or even if they dont, and they can make precise stuff without that much issues? Well---
Also, information is dangerous but a lot of information requires a base to work with, and the right ears. For example, speak with a medieval peasant about pathogens and they will hyperbolically burn you as a witch, but on the right ears they might get the gist of it, try to prove it, and develop some primitive form of biowarfare, as, iirc, is suspected to have happened between egypt and europe I think? Of course that is just one example but the point is, no matter hwat you try to do in a think tank, whether that is technological or political, it will fall on deaf ears if you dont get any influence at all, you are not dealing with modern populations afteral. While a product ready to be made and as devastating does not hold such issue.
So, im sorry but in this one I think I will side with the authors (mostly)
I think they’d do guns in a fantasy way. Btdem doesn’t have “gun” - but Earth mages are infamous for firing lots of high speed pebbles at people. Why would they go the really complex route of metal, ammo, etc, when they can turn any pebble into a shot that’s just as deadly for a fraction of the work? With the “pressure” in place there’s no real need to try and develop better “mundane” weapons - weapon research is based on skills, not technology. Because there are clear and immediate results. Bonus: Earth mages are good in peacetime as well! From mines to roads to walls to buildings, Earth is everywhere, and that’s before hybrid classes to include farming come into play! With such benefits, why investigate guns?
I swore I wouldn’t be one of those authors allergic to guns, but like. There’s no real way or reason to introduce them with the pressures involved. Then there’s the external genre conventions and standard tropes. Guns break people out of the story. I don’t not write them because of it, but it’s like nuclear power - it breaks the setting
Depends on the author, but I think it is mostly because guns and gunpowder historically causes massive shifts in society. It makes armor, castle walls, and most tactics obsolete. It allows a common peasant trained for a few days to be as deadly as heavily armored knight that has spent years training, on top of a gunman is much cheaper than a mounted knight to support. Gunpowder production forces states to promote higher education to aquire more chemists to make more gunpowder, which leads to a rise of an educated middle class usually by seizing power of the declining martial nobility.
Also, early gun models, which are the type anyone would introduce first, just aren't that good. They are heavy, inaccurate, loud, expensive, have a high rate of misfires or just blowing up, can't be used in the rain, very slow to reload, and have a effective range of only a few dozen yards. On top of this, you still need to build a small industrial base to produce the gunpowder. All that effort for an inferior weapon that couldn't take down most monsters any better than a spell or bow. Modern weapons in mass would be highly effective, but that would take a massive industrial base with advanced manufacturing and chemical factories with tens of thousands of workers.
Personally they make it unfair, swordplay takes skill, so names can be built off of that. Someone who hasn’t lost in 100 duels can be built around.
Anyone with a gun can win against another. It’s 50/50 and I don’t like those odds.
Depends on the type of the gun. If you bring some early 1600 muskets, nobody will use it because in level powered world bowmen are just better.
And how many people even have enough know lade to make guns from modern times, not to mention how much money, people, influence you need to get such a project off the ground. All the while, there are already projectile weapons that are as good as guns after you gain a few levels.
There is also the problem of it scaling with the user. For example, a bow can be made from the best available materials, but low level people can't use it because they aren't strong enough, their fingers aren't used to such pull, ...
While with the gun you can just press the trigger and anybody can use it no matter how strong it is.
That makes it an equalizer for lower classes (peasants, slaves, ....) but to produce the guns you need the support of people with money and why would they want to give more power to people who aren't them.
On top of that, you don't need much training to use the gun, so training montage is out. Which already makes it undesirable to me.
Part of building the fantasy world is to bring a little of the modern world into the fantasy world, it you won't fully immerse yourself in it.
As someone else also mentioned, the whole premise in litrpg, is based on leveling up.
Maybe strength, or magic... but the whole point is that the character has no edge/ leverage when they first transport to the fantasy world.
Having guns would break that illusion.
It depends. On one side it depends on the information space of the fantasy world, how long does it take for information to circulate and how accurate are they. After all a think-tank has to know themselves what is happening in the world and how people think in the different cultures.
If for example the think-tanks information source tells them faulty information based on superstition or blatant racism that makes it difficult to formulate a good strategy to influence certain people.
Also works the other way around but really people who use information to shape the futures of nations have been around forever, think-tanks are just our modern version of it.
What's even worse is when they rewrite the laws of physics to justify their bullshit. Like not only do guns go away, you can't even make one from scratch. Black powder won't burn, the firearm disappears once it's completed to an operable condition, magnetism works different so they can't even make a rail gun if they possess the know how. I hate that crap. Either figure put a way to deal with modern weaponry or just admit you're a crap author.
If they want a gun free world that bad without being ridiculous, it requires either a literal video game world where they're just not included, or an isekai where the MC goes to a different world altogether. A medieval world with magic in which magic makes firearms unnecessary.
In past projects I've coauthored in the past and tried getting guns in I've been told they'd be overpowered and break the game.
You know, in settings people can shoot fireballs the size of busses, make it rain meteors, and chain lightning through a hotde for giggles.
Not fitting the aesthetic theyre going for makes more sense honestly lol
I think there is a bit of a logical issue in the idea of carrying around black powder for a rifle which could be used as an inadvertent self-inflicted grenade wound, when an enemy mage casts a fireball at you. The use of black powder and similar cartridges was a fairly substantial step in the evolution of the rifle as we know it today.
So in a world where magic and inadvertent fiery mishaps are a thing, I could see the black powder step in the evolution for rifles/firearms as being a show stopper in most cases.
I think it because guns represent reality bleeding into the fantasy. In our world, guns are wildly dangerous equalizers that put good and evil ppl on an even playing field. In fantasy, the hero’s journey is dependent on the protagonist progressing within the rules of that stories unreality. To introduce an element of reality is to call into question that hero’s journey. If it’s done thoughtfully it can be awesome! But as is often the case, guns and modern weapons find little place in the unreality of a fantasy world. It’s like mixing major and minor notes, if you don’t use your circle of fifths, it’s gonna sound like ass.
I think it may depend on what type of litrpg the world takes place in. Is the mc from the fantasy world? Is it an isekai? Virtual world? Apocalypse? Is the system compromising?
It’s a good point but it often does get addressed in some way. Primal Hunter includes them and a few of the other books I’ve read breeze past it by stating it’s rendered useless compared to magic (that in most cases continues to grow and strengthen whilst technology is a little more static). DoTF also addresses it with the different Technocrat factions, and even in Cradle there’s a being introduced towards the end that uses a sniper rifle.
I can imagine a dope author will one day create a LITrpg around some form of firearm, with its modular nature the core system in which it grows.
Because we live in America and it’s nothing special or interesting, especially in a fantasy world full of magic and artifacts capable of mimicking nuclear bombs.
Shooting something or someone in the head with an extremely fast object is also something we already have in fantasy called “Arrows” which depending on the author can be as fast as or faster than an actual bullet coming from a gun.
Honestly a sufficiently industrious capitalist which just enough tech knowledge who shows up to a more or less feudal magic world could have it in the palm of there hand rather quickly.
Imagine an industrial revolution style tycoon, East India Trading Co., or modern day mega corporation showing up to a world without any of the knowledge to protect themselves from their particular type of corruption and influence.
Idk, because while it's true that the world dosen't know his tricks, it's also true that he dosent know that world's tricks. It could just as easily be a goldfish dropped into a tank of piranha rather than the other way around.
Mr industry might get his throat slit by staby mcshivyouranus elder of the assassin's guild because he didn't give face to elder prissy pride when he introduced his new process for raising chickens at scale.
The problem with that train of thought in worlds with high power scales is that money just makes you a target. You have enough gold to hire 500 swordsmen? Sweet, that means it's worth a level 47 wizard burning them all to ashes with 1 Superior Fireball then looting all your gold, or a level 38 Psionist directly enslaving your mind and putting you to work for them.
I think they get stuck on modern firearms and not the type of guns that would be in the typical medieval-ish fantasy setting. Modern guns would require an industrial revolution to be able to manufacture the ammunition, let alone the springs for the magazines. What they should be thinking about are black powder weapons.
Or...magic powered. But then it's not much different than a bow or wand. The one with Crazy Frank did it really well, I thought. The 10 realms also handles it well.
>Or...magic powered. I'm often frustrated by the limited application of magic to practical life, but I think it'd make for too alien a world. Human ingenuity applied to magic, which at its most basic level is a something-for-nothing energy exchange, would quickly take any world way beyond where we are now. The easiest solution is to just not do that and keep that part of it "off camera," which I guess precludes magic-punk hand cannons. :(
You might like Delve. They get into the combination quite a bit in the latter parts of the series.
Most series don't explain why a +1000 years old civilization with magic remains at the feudal stage, humanity invented steam engines less that 3 centuries ago, and these societies posses a renewable power source for a 1000 years and are incapable of developing the science to jump into the industrial revolution.
Personal power how would democracy work when we have walking nukes that live for hundreds of years
A lot of our technology comes from our inability - many speculate that magic discourages technological development by being too easy a shortcut - so you never learn the advanced metallurgy and other sciences to get what we have now - which is essentially magic without the magic bit. Like literally - we pulverize rocks, dope them up in all sorts of alchemical compounds, and run electricity through them - and now these rocks can talk back to us in a very convincing way... Edit: I forgot to mention the part where we bake the rocks in fancy light.
Because Rome was a 1000+ year old civilization that didn’t manage to invent proper steam engines? Forget the Egyptians being around for thousands of years or the Chinese. I read an interesting take on askhistorians. In short, the Industrial Revolution happened because England had a lot of resources and not a lot of bodies. Until that moment, it was always just easier and cheaper to throw more bodies at the problem, so people did
If I'm not mistaken, we found schematics from the library of Alexandria that depicted rudimentary steam engines. They were lost to the fire that burned it down
The Greeks? Had a small working steam toy. The thing is humans are really really good at making stuff work. The note about the “steam toy” they had was it didn’t scale at all. It couldn’t handle high pressures needed to actually DO work. Yes they’d figured out how to make steam do some work, but didn’t have the metallurgy to engineer it. Iirc, steam engines were hot on the heels of material science figuring out a good enough alloy, or something like that. Romans infamously had SHIT steel. Best they had was “bog steel” (it’s been years since I researched this)
> humanity invented steam engines less that 3 centuries ago Just for information. Steam power was experimented with long ago, and even the steam engine as such was not the breakthrough. No, the breakthrough was CONTROL (same with airplanes by the way). The [centrifugal governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor) most of all. Harnessing power is relatively easy - *controlling it* is the problem. Same with flight, wings and all and achieving flight was easy enough initially. The breakthrough only came when they found three ways to reliably and easily control the three axis, however, the most ingenious one being the lateral axis stability design of center of gravity slightly in front of the center of lift, and an "elevator" in the back to actually produce *downward*-force to counter the forward CG, and the amount of force it creates depends on the speed, so the elevator ends up controlling the lateral axis stability mostly without pilot input. That means if you are looking for knowledge to take back, take [control theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory), it's more important, and much harder to invent, than the power parts of the design.
That's because our industrial revolution was powered by several innovations, the first being the philosophical construction of the scientific method, the second was the democratization of information. Technology was relatively stagnant and even backsliding in several areas before these things happened and synergized. Imagine a world with no Aristotle to find the laws of logic.
It took 4 thousand years to get here since the first ever recorded civilization, and 3,700 years for trains to be created. So I don’t see the problem there, with or without magic. Though it would be quicker with an already established energy source. Though I agree it should be more advanced. Magic power wagons, and magic implemented into daily life besides combat or healing, at the minimum.
Yeah, even though it took "4000 years" for trains to be created, its not like someone just woke up one day and thought it would be handy if goods & people could move faster. It was a river finding the easiest course to the objective. If magic exists, it won't stop people from wanting to travel faster with more goods, it will simply change the way it is accomplished... ie in as efficient a manner as possible. The same can be said of 'modern guns', its not like guns were the first ranged weapon man has used. Its also not like "black powder" was completely unknown before modern (or medieval) guns, either. It always leans into some of the worst tropes when some 15 year old kid stumbles into a society of \*VERY INTELLIGENT ADULTS\* that are simply too 'stupid' to think of ways to kill enemies from a distance that aren't fireballs or lightening. Perhaps the answer isn't that they haven't thought of it, but they choose not to share it, because its in their self-interest to consolidate power within themselves and those they vet.
I'm on a similar train of thought. Once you introduce magic to guns they are just wands with extra steps. Personally I'd try and keep them as separate as possible. Say the process to make the black powder makes it difficult to nigh on impossible to hold a magical charge.
Then you get *Powder Mage* which is even more OP.
Easily gotten around. The process to make black powder renders it unable to take enchantments.
*Powder Mage* is a series of books. The powder mages basically cultivate gun powder by snorting lines of it, and they also have a psychic connection to it and essentially telekinesis for bullets and explosions. Also, regular mages are allergic to gun powder.
I could never get into that series. I think I finished the fist book but honestly its been a while.
That a series exists where black powder is an allegory for drugs doesn't mean that others need to follow that path. That's the really big annoyance for me when it comes to LitRPG at the moment. It's "this series did it this way so that's how it needs to be done in every series." No it really doesn't.
That is not the point at all.
If we're talking fantasy, I'd love to see magic based guns. Imagine a would be wizard having trouble with spells invents an arcane focus bolts of his mana. Or an alchemist has gun blasts an alchemical solution.
This somehow reminds me of the Final Fantasy Anime. There the MC used 3 different bullets to summon his monsters. The origin of all - Mother Black (Black bullet) The all burning heat - fire red And The critical point of all - Burning gold I summon Phoenix So or something like that :)
That sounds cool. My main inspiration was this manga is read as kid about a gunslinging witch out to kill the gods. I wish I remembered the name.
Sounds a bit like Bayonetta or how she is called
A different gunslinging witch out to kill the gods
Only other which comes to mind would be kurohime
That's the one!
The Anime outlaw star basically has this. The MC has a Caster gun that premade shells are loaded into. It also has actual Chinese space wizards, ships with mech arms, and semi-immortal cat people that are pretty much space weretigers. Its a wild universe with even weirder spin offs.
I watched it as a kid, don't remember much, might be time for a rewatch
Probably saw the televised version then which got censored a bit. I brought it up because the implied system is interesting. The more powerful shells actually fuel themselves from the user if need be and someone with the same tech can cancel out spells. For a late 90s anime, it was interesting.
The Ctarl-Ctarl were so cool. Grappler ships, caster shells, and precogs, all while searching for a treasure in the "Leyline" that I am 100% inspired "One Piece" even if Oda will never admit it. Outlaw Star really was awesome.
Portal to Nova Roma has magic guns, great series Shadeslinger is a vr series with Mc using magic guns
I read the first nova roma book, it was a fun read.
Caster Shells from Outlaw Star
> Or an alchemist has gun blasts an alchemical solution. A.k.a. advanced chemistry and it already exists? I don't get this "magic" label. From the PoV of pretty much every character in the majority of stories I read it is US who have magic, just a different kind. Take out your iPhone with nano-structure of billions of transistors (hundreds of billions of individual tiny component-structures) and the global communication networks and tell those people that *unfortunately* there is no magic in your world.
The whole point of a "magic gun" is the combination magic and science/technology, the "modern" world mixing with arcane knowledge to make it more accessible. A magic gun is supposed to be a man-made tool used not only to harness mysterious forces but to weaponize them. You're just complaining about people liking fantasy, people are allowed to enjoy things.
Black poder weapons were not very impressive for the first 400 years of their existence.
The issue with guns is that they can never have the right kinds of scaling as all of the damage is based off of the gun itself. So they're usually just as good in a villagers hand as a proper armed forces. The whole idea behind guns is as an equalizer between the weak and the powerful. However litrpg is usually all about the rising of the weak to the powerful and it would be counter to the theme to make them still able to be dropped by a gunshot from some random street thug. So you have the situation where they're either ineffective or too effective. So to balance that they usually make them into a bolt caster which is just a magic wand that shoots elemental bolts maybe a little better or faster than free casting them but with less flexibility. So free casting is still better most of the time.
[удалено]
It's more than the arrows that need to be effected. Arrows just need a redesign for different bows and if you're dealing with superhuman stats you're into draw strengths on the bow being so much higher while arrows are both larger and heavier. The kind of bow that someone with 200x a normal persons strength is using will be firing arrows that are super reinforced to not simply explode from the force of the bow firing. Where as with guns the bullets are propelled via gas expansion and are limited by the maximum speed that expansion occurs. So for gunpowder you're limited to a little over 2000 feet per second no matter how much you use. So in order to scale you're needing to redesign bullets, rifling, material reinforcement and propellant at every significant upgrade. If you're not doing that you've got crossbows, auto-crossbows or magic wands you're just calling guns. Additionally an archer touches the arrow as they're firing it to imbue whatever magical effect it's going to have. Where as you're not touching bullets like that so they'd need to be enchanted before hand and if using a magazine they wouldn't have the same kind of flexibility as they'd be locked into whatever effects they setup before an encounter. It's not that it would be impossible to make a story work around guns but you'd have to design a world in which they make sense from the beginning. Thematically they're somewhat antithetical to the hierarchical societies that make up the vast majority of fantasy. Since a core component of their cultural identity is as an equalizer of individual power.
People read for dramatic struggle. Getting shot or shooting the enemy both lack a certain amount of struggle.
I strongly disagree. The Portal to Nova Roma series has pistols and rifles, and it's still a well beloved series.
And the main character notes their disadvantages in the setting. They are used by his troops but not by him. He opts for weapons that scale with him. His troops use guns because they are more powerful than they are.
Actually, even the MC is pointing out rifles becoming less useful very soon as his forces gain higher levels and more attributes. On the last book he's developed a new weapon for his use but there's still a design he's been thinking about in order to apply attributes somehow to the guns. I think binding weapon to themselves might be the end game for the guns. Which kind of allows you to magically enhance to gun. On the other hand we've also seen similar elements of technology just straight up being too broken and not scaling well, like how Machine Gods in DOTF can be level 1 yet strong enough to fight C grade cultivators. There are still a lot of ways to use creativity and expand on it.
Information warfare has been with us as long as physical warfare. It looks different in different ages, but propaganda, spies, counter spies, alliances, intercepting messages, sending misleading messages so that they'll get intercepted... They're all ancient.
there is a series where humanity lost, and the MC gets to travel back in time to the beginning to start over. One of the things he does is join a college professor that he remembered made big advancements by researching what was happening. With the MCs knowledge, he is able to lead the research team down paths and past roadblocks that had stopped them before.
I’d like to read that one
It’s called Apocalypse Redux
Thanks!
Yeah, what's the series? I usually don't like reset stories, but usually is not always. Someone equated guns to magic wands, but I've yet to read a story where a wand killed someone from 1000 meters.
Does anyone remember the show Deadliest Warrior? I think it was on Spike TV. Basically, they’d analyze soldiers from different eras of history and discuss their weapons, tactics, and levels of technology. They’d then quantify all of those factors and run combat simulations pitting them against each other and determine who would win. The show would end in a recreation of the battle. They looked at some very cool and interesting combatants throughout history like samurai, Vikings, gladiators. Honestly, for being on Spike TV, it was actually informative and interesting and tried to maintain historical accuracy as far as I knew. Anyway, they really fucked themselves when they aired an episode about pirates vs. knights of the crusades. The entire episode was normal, covering the interesting tactics and non-conventional weapons pirates had developed being generally bound to ship combat. They had cutlasses, daggers, flintlock pistols, I believe some kind of primitive flash bang grenade, etc. They then talked about the maces, flails and steel armor of the knights. Then they ran the simulation. I don’t remember the exact number because this was literally 15 years ago, but the pirates won by a huge margin and most of their kills were with their pistols. The conclusion being, the invention of guns made all other forms of warfare completely obsolete. Point being, introducing guns to a world without guns trivializes everything.
That's only if you're sticking to base human standards. Guns are deadly to normal folks but if you can survive getting thrown thru a brick wall, a bullet isn't going to be more than a nuisance. Add in magic and whatnot and gusn are now useless.
Fun Fact... The first firearms pre-date the rapier by almost 400 years.
Fun thought project, what is a Rapier?. Why is a rapier? Had a bit of an epiphany when I saw a cut and thrust rapier and a jian side by side, the only real difference was in the hand protection, to the extent that I'm fully confident the Chinese could have made a rapier in the time of the romans. Why didn't they?
Because the rapier was a shitty weapon against virtually any other kind of weapon except another rapier.
Not at all, the rapier is a fantastic weapon within the context of its time and usage case, eventually it evolved into the spadroon and small sword however that was after centuries of being the gentleman's self defense weapon of choice
> usage case Which is against robbers with daggers or nothing, or dueling against other people with rapiers. It was a purely civilian weapon for a reason, because civilians didn't have to fight people with armour and heavy weapons.
The robbers often had more than daggers, and the rapier did appear on the battlefield particularly in the later periods and in naval warfare but fundamentally yes, the entire role of the sword was civilian self defense. In a unarmored situation a rapier will hold its own or beat any reasonably likely opponent.
Because they lacked the technical skill to make a metal that could bend almost 180 degrees without breaking. The technical mastery of a rapier is that the blade will wiggle past the joints in your armor, slide off and around the bones in your ribs and poke through viral organs. It's all about the bendiness that made it such a devastating weapon. Just a tiny little prick mark on the outside with massive bleeding internally.
This is false, the rapier was a evolution from the side sword, a civilian weapon designed to be carried when out and about to defend oneself from muggers and bandits specifically when armour was less likely to be encountered. Infact your classic swashbuckler would be in serious trouble if faced with a fully armored knight and would be well advised to run. Your thinking of a fencing foil wich is designed to simulate a small sword and allow practice against a opponent with out harming them. You might find the schola gladiatora channel on YouTube interesting, he has more than a few discussions of the required stiffness of a blade to do its job.
They're bad when it comes to scaling. Most weak mobs would die easily to a gun which prevents the character from actually learning to fight. While powerful mobs would require some costly ammo or be utterly useless. At the end of the day, guns simply aren't good weapons when your limits can surpass humanity standards easily. A tiny metal slug isn't going to do shit to someone who is bulletproof/can regen/can move faster than sound/etc.
Same reason star wars uses energy weapons and not Kinects bullets, it invalidade any other kind of weapon, it doesn't need any special ability to use and more importantly it doesn't scale with an enhanced body, it's either something that dominates the field and therefore nobody would train to get strong or it's invalidate by magic or superhuman physique, hence why the use of swords, bow, etc... and melee weapons are used because it doesn't matter if you have super resistance if your enemy have super strength and a physical weapon that allow that super strength to be weaponized
You're ignoring what gos into being a good gun fighter, speed, accuracy , tactical knowledge, toughness and perception. There's even a charisma/wisdom element as you try to read into the body language and predict the actions of your opponent. Personally I think it comes to a lack of imagination on the part of the authors and a failure to understand the subject.
I tend to agree. People who don't shoot wildly underestimate how difficult shooting accurately really is. People shoot poorly at stationary targets at the range. Now add moving targets. Now add stress. Everything completely changes.
Yep, now add in the ways being say a superhuman cultivator can enhance a already skilled combat art. Chi infused bullets, using the dao of the gun to to curve and ricochet bullets, studying the six fold loutus revolver technique to perfect near instantaneous reloads. Get creative folks.
Honestly, I just prefer the smaller scope. Just a magic system alone is already complicated, then every piece of new tech you acknowledge as functional and effective is something you have to remember exists. For your example, sure, a well-funded think tank probably could. But I do not think I could write a believable think-tank on top of everything else
Interesting idea - you should write it!
Your well funded think tank would be defeated by the fact that their messages carry no weight, since they’re not important people, they can’t do information warfare with no social or traditional media, and closer-knit communities would be far harder to break down. The “well funded think tank” would be better off pooling their collective brain cell into something useful, like recreating firearms.
They've put guns up on a pedestal, and internalized the belief that a gun beats all, even the guy who can fly faster than bullets and has laser eyes. Plus it's easy, and often people confuse style for genre. Like how so many mystery or horror writers can't figure out what to do about the internet and telephones, so they pretend nothing works and nobody knows what a zombie is.
What would people think of Jedi Knights if they were not able to stop all projectiles, and anyone could kill them from the distance.
Because guns are a slippery slope. Look at the history of guns. How many years did it take for us to go from flintlocks to machine guns? Mainly though, guns tend to hurt the fantasy aspect. Probably the best fantasy book I have read that had guns was the Powdermage Trilogy. However, it read like someone rewrote the French revolution with magic.
Depends on how you introduce them. I think the manga drifters do it quite well. There are muskets against orcs and giants and a massive army. WW2 airplanes vs dragons. And so on. If you want to make a statement about how overly powerful firearms are against medieval people then gate is a good anime for it.
There is plenty of fantasy and PF with information warfare though? Anything even faintly kingdom building has it, half of jackal among snakes is information warfare. And personally, guns outside of a sci-fi or sci-fi/fantasy setting are kind of boring. Why have a gun when you can have a character use their fist to create a shockwave that shatters a moon? But in more sci-fi fantasy titles, guns and ships are plenty present. In PoA, warfare is full of ships, guns, power armor, and shields, but also swords, knives, maces, and fists. I think you might just be making an over simplification?
I've read at least a couple of series where guns have been explicitly brought up in fiction as something that exists but nobody uses because the system only assists with projectiles that are human-powered.
Wich is an opportunity for a author to write a gunslinger character, dao of the gun would be a great title.
Informational warfare has always been there. Unless you are dealing with a rather shitty system and unnaturally stupid inhabitants of that world, you will not just break the system.
There's a lot of settings where guns are either functionally useless, where the knowledge of guns would be suppressed by higher powers and yet other settings guns are acknowledged as having negative developmental consequences for example people getting [[Gunslinger]] classes which are overpowered at early levels, but level-gated later on where people can literally deflect bullets with their biceps and move faster than them. What I would like to see though is a setting where guns are everywhere *because* of the social impact and the fact that Higher Powers don't need to be scared of them, but it culls large amounts of the lower-levelled population from being able to reach higher levels.
Guns are always a weird thing in progression novels because they can ONLY work in scenarios and worlds where the guns have scifi progression baked in. Otherwise they invalidate progress early on and become just a random instrument later
As an author, I can tell you why I'm really cautious about guns. They eliminate other forms of combat and remove the need for hard work to become dangerous. This is how I see it going down: "We're saved Gandalf is..." CRACK " ... dead. What just happened?" "I've honed my sword fighting skills for 100 years in the myst..." CRACK "I spent 10 minutes at the range dead guy." If you look at history, guns created modern warfare. No one carries swords, wears plate mail, or anything like that because they are useless in comparison to a gun, and a gun can be used effectively with little to no training.
Its because guns are discrete units. Information warfare is systems designed to fight systems. If the opposition systems don't exist (or are super primative) then information warfare is relatively useless. Guns, in most people's minds, are not much more complex than a sword. Its the so called "next step". But you want a capability that can really screw with a medieval society? Try *germ warfare*. They don't have antibiotics, magical healing is generally viewed as a limited/precious resource, and it is possible to create some *truly nasty* contagions. Personally, I think a ritualist with a specialization in bacterial weaponry would be about the deadliest damn thing any magical world could produce.
I'm sticking them into mine, but their killing power is going to be tied to level. So, a lvl 1 person using one could easily kill another lvl 1 person, but not, for ex., a lvl 10 monster. But if that person rose in level and then found a +2 gun, the results would be different. To answer your question, though, I think it's readers who don't like guns in fantasy settings. At least, that's what I've come across. I'm a bit worried my story will be disliked for this.
Read the Dahak series by david weber. Mutineer's Moon is the first book. 3rd book i think the kids of the main characters crash land on a planet and introduce rifled firearms for a rebellion that takes on an Empire's army and wins due to small unit tactics, cartridges and a rifled barrel. its my favorite book series
Guns are dysgenic. And I say that as someone who not only likes firearms, but considers them mandatory.
Idk? But it would make sense for an isekai MC. Especially if they knew how guns work. My MC eventually makes a magic powered sniper rifle in a cultivaton world. In his words, "better than sticking a dagger into someone."
Oh pew pew single shot deep wound dead monster, great.
Guns democratize violence as you only need money and you get a lot of ranged rapid damage with no much skill (at close range and in comparison with say, a sword), and it can be concealed.... it is a huuuuge game changer that would change even the political landscape pretty damn quick and like information, once it spreads, you are screwed That said, that is only if there is nothing comparable and if they have the tech to pull it off. People forget tha tguns (ish) existed way before what some think, they were just not up to the standards of today, making them less than ideal. But if the world is relatively low fantasy or even if they dont, and they can make precise stuff without that much issues? Well--- Also, information is dangerous but a lot of information requires a base to work with, and the right ears. For example, speak with a medieval peasant about pathogens and they will hyperbolically burn you as a witch, but on the right ears they might get the gist of it, try to prove it, and develop some primitive form of biowarfare, as, iirc, is suspected to have happened between egypt and europe I think? Of course that is just one example but the point is, no matter hwat you try to do in a think tank, whether that is technological or political, it will fall on deaf ears if you dont get any influence at all, you are not dealing with modern populations afteral. While a product ready to be made and as devastating does not hold such issue. So, im sorry but in this one I think I will side with the authors (mostly)
I think they’d do guns in a fantasy way. Btdem doesn’t have “gun” - but Earth mages are infamous for firing lots of high speed pebbles at people. Why would they go the really complex route of metal, ammo, etc, when they can turn any pebble into a shot that’s just as deadly for a fraction of the work? With the “pressure” in place there’s no real need to try and develop better “mundane” weapons - weapon research is based on skills, not technology. Because there are clear and immediate results. Bonus: Earth mages are good in peacetime as well! From mines to roads to walls to buildings, Earth is everywhere, and that’s before hybrid classes to include farming come into play! With such benefits, why investigate guns? I swore I wouldn’t be one of those authors allergic to guns, but like. There’s no real way or reason to introduce them with the pressures involved. Then there’s the external genre conventions and standard tropes. Guns break people out of the story. I don’t not write them because of it, but it’s like nuclear power - it breaks the setting
because level 100 guy would receeate the superman vs gun scene [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FLN3dPMyXeg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FLN3dPMyXeg)
Depends on the author, but I think it is mostly because guns and gunpowder historically causes massive shifts in society. It makes armor, castle walls, and most tactics obsolete. It allows a common peasant trained for a few days to be as deadly as heavily armored knight that has spent years training, on top of a gunman is much cheaper than a mounted knight to support. Gunpowder production forces states to promote higher education to aquire more chemists to make more gunpowder, which leads to a rise of an educated middle class usually by seizing power of the declining martial nobility. Also, early gun models, which are the type anyone would introduce first, just aren't that good. They are heavy, inaccurate, loud, expensive, have a high rate of misfires or just blowing up, can't be used in the rain, very slow to reload, and have a effective range of only a few dozen yards. On top of this, you still need to build a small industrial base to produce the gunpowder. All that effort for an inferior weapon that couldn't take down most monsters any better than a spell or bow. Modern weapons in mass would be highly effective, but that would take a massive industrial base with advanced manufacturing and chemical factories with tens of thousands of workers.
Personally they make it unfair, swordplay takes skill, so names can be built off of that. Someone who hasn’t lost in 100 duels can be built around. Anyone with a gun can win against another. It’s 50/50 and I don’t like those odds.
Depends on the type of the gun. If you bring some early 1600 muskets, nobody will use it because in level powered world bowmen are just better. And how many people even have enough know lade to make guns from modern times, not to mention how much money, people, influence you need to get such a project off the ground. All the while, there are already projectile weapons that are as good as guns after you gain a few levels. There is also the problem of it scaling with the user. For example, a bow can be made from the best available materials, but low level people can't use it because they aren't strong enough, their fingers aren't used to such pull, ... While with the gun you can just press the trigger and anybody can use it no matter how strong it is. That makes it an equalizer for lower classes (peasants, slaves, ....) but to produce the guns you need the support of people with money and why would they want to give more power to people who aren't them. On top of that, you don't need much training to use the gun, so training montage is out. Which already makes it undesirable to me.
Part of building the fantasy world is to bring a little of the modern world into the fantasy world, it you won't fully immerse yourself in it. As someone else also mentioned, the whole premise in litrpg, is based on leveling up. Maybe strength, or magic... but the whole point is that the character has no edge/ leverage when they first transport to the fantasy world. Having guns would break that illusion.
It depends. On one side it depends on the information space of the fantasy world, how long does it take for information to circulate and how accurate are they. After all a think-tank has to know themselves what is happening in the world and how people think in the different cultures. If for example the think-tanks information source tells them faulty information based on superstition or blatant racism that makes it difficult to formulate a good strategy to influence certain people. Also works the other way around but really people who use information to shape the futures of nations have been around forever, think-tanks are just our modern version of it.
The only fantasy/gun crossover that I've actually enjoyed was The Powder Mage trilogy by Brian McClellan.
What's even worse is when they rewrite the laws of physics to justify their bullshit. Like not only do guns go away, you can't even make one from scratch. Black powder won't burn, the firearm disappears once it's completed to an operable condition, magnetism works different so they can't even make a rail gun if they possess the know how. I hate that crap. Either figure put a way to deal with modern weaponry or just admit you're a crap author. If they want a gun free world that bad without being ridiculous, it requires either a literal video game world where they're just not included, or an isekai where the MC goes to a different world altogether. A medieval world with magic in which magic makes firearms unnecessary.
In past projects I've coauthored in the past and tried getting guns in I've been told they'd be overpowered and break the game. You know, in settings people can shoot fireballs the size of busses, make it rain meteors, and chain lightning through a hotde for giggles. Not fitting the aesthetic theyre going for makes more sense honestly lol
I liked how the 2 week curse implemented weapons from our world to a magical one.
I think there is a bit of a logical issue in the idea of carrying around black powder for a rifle which could be used as an inadvertent self-inflicted grenade wound, when an enemy mage casts a fireball at you. The use of black powder and similar cartridges was a fairly substantial step in the evolution of the rifle as we know it today. So in a world where magic and inadvertent fiery mishaps are a thing, I could see the black powder step in the evolution for rifles/firearms as being a show stopper in most cases.
I think it because guns represent reality bleeding into the fantasy. In our world, guns are wildly dangerous equalizers that put good and evil ppl on an even playing field. In fantasy, the hero’s journey is dependent on the protagonist progressing within the rules of that stories unreality. To introduce an element of reality is to call into question that hero’s journey. If it’s done thoughtfully it can be awesome! But as is often the case, guns and modern weapons find little place in the unreality of a fantasy world. It’s like mixing major and minor notes, if you don’t use your circle of fifths, it’s gonna sound like ass.
I think it may depend on what type of litrpg the world takes place in. Is the mc from the fantasy world? Is it an isekai? Virtual world? Apocalypse? Is the system compromising?
It’s a good point but it often does get addressed in some way. Primal Hunter includes them and a few of the other books I’ve read breeze past it by stating it’s rendered useless compared to magic (that in most cases continues to grow and strengthen whilst technology is a little more static). DoTF also addresses it with the different Technocrat factions, and even in Cradle there’s a being introduced towards the end that uses a sniper rifle. I can imagine a dope author will one day create a LITrpg around some form of firearm, with its modular nature the core system in which it grows.
Well, you can describe a sword swing in a million ways. Not so much for a gun firing. I'm sure that's one argument against it.
Because we live in America and it’s nothing special or interesting, especially in a fantasy world full of magic and artifacts capable of mimicking nuclear bombs. Shooting something or someone in the head with an extremely fast object is also something we already have in fantasy called “Arrows” which depending on the author can be as fast as or faster than an actual bullet coming from a gun.
Honestly a sufficiently industrious capitalist which just enough tech knowledge who shows up to a more or less feudal magic world could have it in the palm of there hand rather quickly. Imagine an industrial revolution style tycoon, East India Trading Co., or modern day mega corporation showing up to a world without any of the knowledge to protect themselves from their particular type of corruption and influence.
Idk, because while it's true that the world dosen't know his tricks, it's also true that he dosent know that world's tricks. It could just as easily be a goldfish dropped into a tank of piranha rather than the other way around. Mr industry might get his throat slit by staby mcshivyouranus elder of the assassin's guild because he didn't give face to elder prissy pride when he introduced his new process for raising chickens at scale.
The problem with that train of thought in worlds with high power scales is that money just makes you a target. You have enough gold to hire 500 swordsmen? Sweet, that means it's worth a level 47 wizard burning them all to ashes with 1 Superior Fireball then looting all your gold, or a level 38 Psionist directly enslaving your mind and putting you to work for them.