[martinl]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Gondites do build them, indeed. But they are master craftsmen, inventors and ideas-men, not pragmatic merchants.

The church of Gond zealously attempts to enforce a divine monopoly on the sale of smokepowder and smokepowder weapons. This means a variety of things, but for starters, they sell small amounts of powder at x20 of the prices that more business-minded alchemists demand. And they only sell their weapons to those who support their monopoly.

This is actually canon, btw.

Huh. I was sure that after the ToT this position of the Gondish church wrt spreading tech, especially smokepowder, was reversed via divine revelation. To be precise, the ToT put Gond in direct contact with the masses, and the god decided to stop being such a jerk. (Presumably, as a god, he had an idea of the eventual equalizing effect firearms and other tech have wrt peasants/aristocracy.)

On reflection, this would break the DnD paradigm fairly quickly if allowed to continue, so I'm not surprised it was reversed. (Assuming I didn't get it wrong in the first place.)

If the current version didn't have the Gondites spreading the powder around, who is doing it?

Many adventurers have magical items which provide DR and DR 6+ is not uncommon, though. But militia armed with heavy spears or polearms can do 1d+2 imp pretty reliably and even the occasional 1d+4 cut. And having sixty attacks per minute instead of one shot makes a difference.

Mooks get in one to three (if lucky) attacks before getting mowed down in any case. Reload time is not as big a deal in that scenario.

If your crossbows do damage comparable to your muskets however, and are significantly cheaper and already accepted, the muskets are not likely to be adopted at all.

There are spells such as Firetrap, Explosive Runes and others which can be triggered by a given set of conditions. If you want to be nasty, you can specify your own conditions by casting a metamagic spell and then tying any other spell to it, up to and including the most powerful attack spells.

These are not simple spells, and damage from attack spells is limited. A ribcage full of REF 0.8 powder and a suit of heavy mail over top would be nasty. Not sure of the relative costs of magic vs. powder in your game though, or the limits on and availability of boom spells. (Relatively cheap and available boom spells are effectively military artillery in most cases, and lead to more modern looking armies than the shield walls I've seen you discuss here in the past.)