Why Fantasy Avoids Gunpowder
warfantasy.wordpress.com
warfantasy.wordpress.com
With almost supernatural power, the Gonne can possess the mind of the man who uses it. It shows him the power he has in his hands, and erases all scruples by telling him what could be achieved with this power.
The Gonne, like so many other recent technological devices in Discworld, was invented by Leonard of Quirm.
As usual, he had the best of intentions when he devised it, but it turned out to be one of the most dangerous weapons ever conceived in the history of the Disc.You're going to use a sword when someone 100 meters away can plug you in the head with a gun? Umm... good luck with that.
They tried to paper over the issue by making the stormtroopers terrible marksmen, but that wasn't very successful (at least in my case).
The modern fibre combat armor is better than gambeson and probably also many forms of plate. It's lighter and can take blades and even polearms better.
Chainmail is in use to protect against industrial equipment.
There's fantasies that incorporate various "{propellant}-powered projectile weapons" but your right that they're not common, though (and maybe not considered "classic" fantasy).
There's also alchemical way to work in guns into a fantasy setting not reliant on gun powder. Or why not have gun powder; alchemy+magic could be a superset of science even.
That's just because they're "more advanced" in Star Wars universe, it has nothing to do with gunpowder avoidance. Isolated societies like Tusken Raiders use firearms and that's clearly depicted as a crude tech, long obsolete in the rest of the galaxy.
I just meant to say that fire-arm style weapons (regardless of propellant or ammunition type) still have a place in fantasy settings
Shields, personal or larger, hamper many projectile weapons in Dune: the projectile has to 'burrow' through the shield.
"Why (High) Fantasy Avoids Gunpowder"
Sword users can learn new techniques. Wizards can learn new spells. Characters can become visibly stronger, or to learn to wield stronger arcane forces. But a guy with a gun can... what? Get a bigger gun?
You take somebody like Magneto and you can have lots of creative applications of the powers, interesting matchups and development. Or you can have Rob Liefeld hero #6, who charges in with big guns. And either the bad guy dies, or the bullets bounce off and there's little ground in between.
There's a whole comic book era of big dudes with guns and they're pretty much all pointless because there's nothing much interesting they can do.
You can imagine wizards but you can't imagine more creative guns and guns-usage? For being into fantasy, you seemingly drop the ball on the whole "made up" stuff.
What's to say there aren't different techniques to using guns where one user is better than another? Or since we're in fantasy, that some characters can learn how to avoid getting shot better than others.
But people do fight with guns, and the abilities and techniques of guns and what advantages they offer are well understood, pressure tested in real conflict, and easy to find out about. The area of unknown is small, and so mostly the plausible techniques are the real ones.
You can tweak the plausibility by fuzzing off from real world uses with things like laser guns or muzzle-loading black powder, though that's still much better understood than wizard magic. You see a similar thing with fantasy melee too. Fencing is well understood even in the modern world, but how many fantasy sword fighters are recognizably fencers?
I've seen "Wanted" and it wasn't that compelling. Sam Sykes does a decent job in "Seven Blades of Black" ... but even that only works because the gun is a VERY magical device.
In the beginning, character has zero skills, they miss shots and not able to succeed in any battles.
The character learns to control their breathing, emotions, posture, aiming and so on, to become more proficient. They learn how to "quick draw" in order to shot by instinct, learn how to do tactical reloads and so on. Different guns also have different strengths, some better in close combat and so on. Just like a wizard has different potions, the guns have different ammunition. Some ammunition could have "special" effects, like exploding on impact, EMPs or whatever.
Crucially, the character learns that patience, strategy, and emotional control is the most important, just like a wizard would.
This is just what I could come up with as I wrote the comment, so again, surely someone proficient in writing sci-fi/fantasy could come up with something much greater. But it's not hard to imagine it's not impossible to have character growth with someone who wields a pistol.
And surely someone with real combat experience would have less chance of dying in combat compared to someone (like you) who have none nor have been trained by someone who have real combat experience.
Is it really that hard to imagine that one person with a gun could be more skilled because of training, knowledge and experience, than another person with a gun?
He chatted, loaded an airsoft rifle, and we walked down the lane to the field. As he talked to me he was casting his gaze around, raising his rifle occasionally, firing off a shot.
We just walked to the tower, no attempt at concealment, no special gear. By the time we'd gotten there everybody was reloading at the reload station. He'd hit everybody, in the dark, in the grass or in the tower.
Proceeded to reorganize them into squads and play for an hour or two. Had a blast that night, lots of scenarios, everybody got to play a role.
Anyway yes, training makes all the difference. Holding the weapon, pointing it are the basics they teach the first day.
Given how many sniper movies there are, we’re not suffering from “guns are boring and ruin stories”.
Similar story playing paintball. I went for my younger brothers birthday one time. A 3 person team of soldiers showed up. They moved across the maps as an obvious unit, covered each others angles, one reloading at a time, excellent aim. Trounced everyone. Three of them could have taken on dozens of civilians at once.
Huh? Come on, now. It's far more realistic than a wizard learning to cast spells, FFS.
If it's not compelling it's only because the OP's precis went into far too much detail about actual technique for an actual story. The Princess Bride would not have been compelling if the movie actually showed Westley learning each of the fencing techniques he refers to in his duel with Inigo.
An actual character development arc would be something like this:
> In the beginning, character has zero skills, they miss shots and not able to succeed in any battles.... They learn how to "quick draw" in order to shot by instinct... [cue montage] ... [cue Yoda lecture] ... Crucially, the character learns that patience, strategy, and emotional control is the most important, just like a wizard would.
That's the problem. People can suspend disbelief when the wizard casts a spell, they can't when the guy with the mundane gun does something they "know" is impossible.
Is it really, though? Have you heard about wire-fighting kung-fu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_fu)? Did the "5 point palm exploding heart technique" prevent people from suspending disbelief during Kill Bill, ruining the finale? (No, it did not.)
And does the guy with the mundane gun have to do something impossible, after his development arc? Why not just something impressively skilled?
IMHO, suspension of disbelief isn't really a function of the kind of thing depicted, but a function of how the storyteller makes that thing "fit" into the story.
Edit: I have some company in my view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief:
> J. R. R. Tolkien challenged this concept in "On Fairy-Stories", choosing instead the paradigm of secondary belief based on inner consistency of reality: in order for the narrative to work, the reader must believe that what they read is true within the secondary reality of the fictional world. By focusing on creating an internally consistent fictional world, the author makes secondary belief possible. Tolkien argued that suspension of disbelief is only necessary when the work has failed to create secondary belief, saying that from that point on, the reader ceases to be immersed in the story and so must make a conscious effort to suspend their disbelief or else give up on it entirely.[16]
The real world doesn’t really have one. There’s very little a human or even a tank can do against a sufficiently large explosion.
Then when you have that you can have the hero evolve to work around those limits.
What I’ve mostly seen obsolete guns is generally a sort of shield.
To have something interesting against explosions you need to go sci-fi or have some magic that can dampen them. We had a lot of sport having fire and alchemical powder be extremely overpowered in e.g. D&D.
Villain lair lacks an entrance? Blow up a hole. This castle has walls? Dig and mine it. Enemy has an army? Now they don't, it exploded...
IMO it's one of those things that only works once, and only because it references other stuff to provide context.
(They are very bad at integrating this into the story. In Tales of Vesperia one specific ultra-cool sword is plot relevant, you lose it at one point in the game, and then you find one with better stats in a chest. Also FF7, the #1 gun guy game, has a snowboarding minigame right after a main character death.)
Watch a cowboy shooting competition some day, be it with pistols or rifles. As a recreational shooter myself, I sure don't have the techniques these people have.
Shoot ULR: https://youtu.be/7owwTz7Z0OE?t=11
It's still skill to get into the situation but it's way harder to work into fictional warrior tropes of superior skill at arms winning.. the virtues wind up looking cowardly.
A guy with a gun can learn skills for shooting better. He starts with Stormtrooper shooting skills, and ends like the Man with No Name.
Watch an old spaghetti Western, and there are clear themes that the protagonists are far more skilled at firearms than most people in that world. I'm reminded of a scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I think) where the character Tuco escapes or something, goes to a frontier store to buy a gun, then disassembles all the guns at the store, quickly and carefully examines all the components, and reassembles all the best parts into the one he then steals, which shows his knowledge and skill. In those movies the characters' skills are taken as given, but I see no reason why you couldn't have a skill-building arc for them any less than for a swordfighter, a martial artist, or, a wizard.
> He starts with Stormtrooper shooting skills, and ends like the Man with No Name.
On the other hand, I imagine writing such a story without it seeming contrived could be rather hard. The problem with western style duels is that they often don't leave the loser with many opportunities to learn.
But, on second thought, it's not as if it hasn't been done: Django Unchained is a good example for such a plot.
The boring answer is just that fantasy is about swords and westerns/crime dramas/action are about guns. "Why isn't historical fiction set in the future?" Well, some of them use that as a secret plot twist, but mostly it's just because anyone who writes about the future already has their own genre with better and more useful conventions.
If you put guns in your fantasy then you're breaking a convention, which is fun and profitable in moderation, but you can only break so many conventions before you end up in another genre.
don't forget pouches. presumably, as the character levels up they get more and more pouches.
Tolkien hated allegorical writing. It's doubtful goblins and orcs are supposed to represent industrialization.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #186
(Not in an allegorical way; it's literally what happens.)
Just about anyone can semi-competently wield a gun after a ten hour course.
What this means is that guns brought down the warrior casts of Europe, Japan, etc. Guns are the great democratizing force since taw raw numbers become the most important metric of battlefield success.
With a stub nose revolver in her purse, any 110 lb woman can walk at night and have a fighting chance against a 250 lb 6ft 5 monster.
Makes for boring fantasy for sure. Makes for a fair society though.
Equalization is not a very convincing argument. You can twist the rules in any way, this is fantasy. Make the firearms less advanced than a revolver, less available, less preferred, countered by magic, or simply make your work not revolving around combat.
It's not really fantasy, though it does hold to a few tropes, but it explores what happens when you speed-run the introduction of gunpowder (and other technological advancements) in a world that has severe technological restrictions placed upon it.
I really enjoyed it, but I'm someone who enjoys reading in depth about how improvements in cannons changes the shape of naval battles (for example).
(For YA series it's "The Something Something".)
There were guns, and tanks, and in one surprise battle, the protagonist devises gunpowder that does work in Amber and lands rifleman atop sword-and-sandals fighters to cause a huge upset.
If author hasn't read Zelazney, then he doesn't know fantasy.
Even if guns exist, there is an arguable thrill to reading about a character infiltrating a castle with a saber and two pistols that cannot be reloaded easily. Long ago, those were pirate or naval pulp fiction.
Imo any setting can produce great stories, it's in how they're told not in how the world works. Established genres of fantasy are just attractive to some people, since analogues of the laws and structure of the world are already partially known - and it's possible to subvert expectations while not alienating people.
Though I'd expect one of those to be more like a tank, with 4 people inside. Bigger though.
It's the same reason carriers tend to be more effective than battleships, even ones loaded with cruise missiles.
Even light takes a bunch of time to reach places at astronomical distances. It would look nothing like dogfighting, much closer to modern airborne missile exchanges.
Any non-moving object would be extremely vulnerable, if even to a thrown rock at orbital speeds.
Maybe you're familiar with Atomic Rockets, the collection of engineering and science discussions about hard scifi? If not, I may have got a rabbit hole for you that will eat an entire week, easily: [0]
(Edit: while the page starts off dismissing fighters for many reasons, there are discussions of many concepts with their merits and possible defenses of the concept)
[0] https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fighter.php
Armor vs Archers: https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-s...
Archery Distances: https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...
AKA “God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal.”
Faith, steel and gunpowder.
And let's not forget about skaven, those have sniper rifles and gatling guns.
Look at baulders gate 3 success. We may have read more, but when our kids, neighbors, nieces, classmates, etc, say they're enjoying it, we'll have a long list of suggestions. If we the nerdiest can't keep the momentum going, that's on us.
But if you want to blame anyone else, blame film industry for churning out crap instead of scouring literature for new stories worth telling.
What about the English longbow? Or Mongolian horse bows?
Mongolian complex bows though are an exception, all horse nomads were expected to wield them out of hunting and warring needs.
If all of your main force is expected to wield it, it becomes a primary weapon.
There was a period of time when all Englishmen were required to train with a longbow.
I guess also it depends on what you mean by "primary" if it means the primary weapon of an individual soldier, it's obviously false, because archers primarily used their bows, in many armies. But if it means the main weapon used by the builk of the soldiers, then in most cases it probably wasn't a bow. But that isn't because of the ineffectiveness of the weapon. It's really just part of the "egalitarian" point. Shooting a bow effectively requires considerably more skill than say using spear, or even hacking with a sword.
I was under the impression that English Archery was a very specialized discipline, given its very skill intensive. The English did use the Longbowmen, but as a specialized unit in specialized situations.
I agree that guns remove the escapist aspect, but not that it foretells an impending industrial revolution.
The world simply won’t have coal nor petroleum; and schools of magic are competing with and dwarfing chemistry and science, and that’s enough to kill any momentum on industry.
It’s a world where industry can only be at a small scale.
Makes the introduction of gunpowder into a fantasy / magic based world a central part of the plot.
I love the "magician's gunpowder"; live steam + stasis spells. They come up with it to compete with the twinks using (and teaching others to make) real gunpowder and weapons.
First, since my D&D party's skin was saved in their last adventure by a lucky critical hit from our party's arqebus, I don't agree that (high) fantasy avoids gunpowder altogether. And we're the good guys, right? But on to more serious things.
> With a bow, or even a crossbow, skill and personal investment requirements are significant; by contrast, musket drill could be learned in weeks. > ... > Likewise, short bow, long bow and crossbow are tactically extremely similar.
Nonononono.
Longbows required extensive training (quoth one King Edward, "If you want to train a good longbowman, start with his grandfather."). Crossbows, once manufactured, could be taught to your average vassal in a day or so. This is one reason that the Catholic Church tried to ban them in 1096 [1], as an untrained peasant could take down a noble armoured knight (at least in mail rather than plate armor). While there were highly trained crossbow armies, such as Genoese mercenaries, the crossbow could greatly increase the deadliness of your average conscript - in less time than it takes to train someone on the musket. Whether you had the resources to outfit a large unit of crossbowmen was another matter, but if you could, training was not the bottleneck.
The average crossbow these days shoots something in the range of 60 yards, with high-end models getting "up to 100 yards" according to one manufacturer. If we allow for past war crossbows being beefier constructs - they had windlasses to help load them, after all - then maybe we can add a bit to the maximum and say 200 yards shooting in an arc, but the Book of the Crossbow [2] suggests an effective range of medieval crossbows of around 40 yards. After all, you want your shots to kill, not just go "plink" on someone's helmet.
Longbow range is generally given as something like 500-1000 feet, so 160 to 320 yards approximately - Encyclopaedia Britannica [3] gives an effective range of around 200 yards for the longbow (but this was presumably against massed targets, in the "rain arrows from the sky" style). That's more than double what you're getting from the crossbow.
So tactically, longbow and crossbow are very much not the same thing.
[1] https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/catholic-churc... (Note that I don't agree with the article's claim that crossbows had a greater _range_ than longbows. They generally had more kinetic energy on discharge (what we would today call "muzzle" energy) but _shorter_ effective range due to higher air resistance from thicker bolts. They were more handgun than sniper rifle, siege ballistas excepted. But they were very deadly at close distances.)
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Crossbow-Military-History-Weap...
-Sigmund Freud