A firearms PSA.

First off I'd like to stress that you -can't- tl;dr this thread otherwise there's a large chance you'll be accused of powergaming or breaking rules ingame. It's fairly long I know but please, bear with me here.

So Olden has firearms again as you MIGHT have noticed and unlike before this time we're hoping to do them right. So far from what I've seen nobody really seems to know much of anything about our new firearms which is understandable, seeing as how we're using guns from what is possibly the least well known era of warfare. Also, in addition to giving you all a bit of needed information this thread will give some guidelines for the use of guns in regards of what you can and can't do. I'll admit I fell victim to a bunch of issues that these guidelines hope to correct and I hope that having some limits and such around this time will keep people from fucking up the same way I did.

Matchlocks
First off I'd like to stress the matchlock is different from the flintlock rifles in that it uses a burning rope (known as a match) to ignite the charge. This in and of it's self means it's impossible to fire the gun without first lighting the tip of the match which would mean your character can't walk around with a ready to fire matchlock to whip out in somebody's face (in addition to this poor weather or water would also put the match out unless properly protected). Also note that walking around with a lit bit of match and a loaded matchlock not only incredibly impractical and uneconomic but insanely dangerous (unless you were holding the rope in your hand all the time, which'd still be impractical). Another way the burning match impacts the matchlock is that when you're reloading the rifle you can't leave the burning match in the dog (the thing that holds the rope) since having an open ember near the pan that you're about to put powder in could easily result in a misfire and quite probably injury as well.

One thing I imagine lots of people might wonder about is how fast you can roleplay loading and priming before you're powergaming. Well, historically a musketeer of that era could fire around two shots a minute unless they were exceptionally fast. As much as I hate to include an instructional video in a roleplay guide I personally feel it might be able to give you all a better idea at the process then I could with words alone.

Spoiler:

With all that said and done I personally feel that several /me's should be used to reload a gun (imo 4 would be about right) but we're not going to try and force people to do that if they'd rather just do a single me provided they give the other participants a realistic time to act before firing. Also, as you can imagine if you're under attack it makes reloading pretty much impossible since it takes a deal of attention to actually reload the weapon.

Wheellocks
Now on to what can most easily be viewed as the "op pull and shoot powergaming style that I admittedly fell in to with Thorn" gun, the wheellock. I'm not even going to go into detail about how the wheellock works since even trying to simplify it would result in long, rambling paragraphs of highly complex steps and bullshit. If, however, you're in to this sort of thing (Pat) I'll provide a link below. Sufficient to say the wheellock is superior to the matchlock in that it does away with the whole burning rope thing in favor of a highly complicated series of gears and springs. Before firing the user would actually have to use a special miniature wrench which would be slotted into the mechanism and used to turn and lock the wheel in place. After this the gun would be loaded in the traditional way and could be kept as such for an indefinite amount of time (or until someone accidentally bumped the trigger). One downside to this is the wheellock actually took longer to fire then the matchlock did, only being able to fire about one shot per minute where the matchlock could manage two or more. Another disadvantage is due to their complex nature wheellocks are incredibly expensive and cost quite a lot to maintain and repair unless you happen to be a gunsmith and know how to do it yourself. In otherwords, if, in a fight someone were to hit your gun's mechanism hard enough there's a very good chance it'll break, where a matchlock wouldn't have such a problem. This basically means in a fight there is every possibility that someone can break your gun and you'll need to rp getting it fixed (which also means shelling out the money to do so, not just waiting a day and saying it's better). This doesn't mean a gunsmith character needs to be on, however since even just oocly giving the money to an admin and then saying the gun was sent to a smith to be fixed after a few hours would be acceptable.

That being said this would mean the wheellock could be used as a pull and shoot weapon if it wasn't for the fact that if you leave a packed charge in the barrel for a long while not only will it gum up the insides but each motion and step you took would jar it lose, meaning that before each shot you need to use your ramrod to pack the charge down even if your gun is pre-loaded (this applies to matchlocks as well). This is basically our answer to the whole "pull and shoot" thing since, while having a gun pre-loaded would take far less time then firing from scratch it would also make insta-firing impossible. That being said assassination and robbery style actions are still possible, provided the character roleplays loading his/her/it's gun almost immediately beforehand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheellock

Characters
Finally we have you and your character. The following basically stresses what you should already know but bear with me all the same. In short, if your character doesn't know how to do it, he can't. Modern guns are incredibly user friendly and I personally don't doubt that any of you (excluding pat) could simply pick up any old gun and be able to use it. However, bear in mind that firearms in those days were not user friendly at all. Sure aiming and firing the gun was easy but reloading was a whole process that you needed to know. While any of you could use a modern gun without any previous experience (except Pat), how many of you could honestly say that, in picking up a matchlock rifle you'd know how to prime, load and ready it without messing up somewhere down the line either resulting in a misfire or worse still, blowing yourself up. What it comes down to is if your character has any experience at all with match or wheel lock rifles please include it in your character page, be it learning from some old veterans, hunting with his dad as a kid or full fledged army training.


So basically that's that. Looking back on how I behaved with guns in past RP it's blatantly obvious how unfair and inappropriate those sorts of actions were and I promise I -will- come down like a ton of bricks on people emulating the way I used to be. That being said I really don't want it to come to that so if you've got any questions at all -please- contact me either through steam or in a forum PM and I will be more then happy to answer any and all questions you might have.

Again, this is a repost from the old thread. I'd like everyone to read this who hasn't, since it's just about impossible to not come into contact with firearms at some point.