What's the effect of the above?

Also, thoughts on how best to do poor or superior quality armour? Where do the dice get added? Defense or damage?

jh

Interesting question. I see this as more of a thought experiment than a rule question, but here goes.

If you applied the ammunition and craftsmanship rules strictly and as written to superior craftsmanship ball shot and powder, and a poor craftsmanship blunderbuss it would be +1 fortune die and +1 misfortune die to attacks. It would be a wash mechanically when averaged over the long haul, but by the 12th shot fired this combination will end up costing you 8 silver more than a pairing of average craftsmanship weapon and ammunition. Each shot after the 12th costs 9 more silver than an average blunderbuss and average ball shot and powder. So the effect is to drain the PC's treasury for little, if any, mechanical gain!

For 12 shots of each combination:

• Poor Blunderbuss 100s +1 Misfortune on attacks
• Superior Shot&Powder 120s +1 Fortune on attacks
• Average Blunderbuss 200s
• Average Shot&Powder 12s

The question I have is why would anyone actually do this with a blunderbuss. In reality it is just about as useful when filled with a handful of glass or rocks. The "standard" load for a real world blunderbuss was usually 8-15 balls of the same caliber as the breach of the weapon, and they were loaded with about 4-8 times as much powder as a firearm of similar length and caliber. Calibers tended to be in the range of .45-.75. Despite this formidable sounding load, they were not really all that effective due to the highly unpredictable spread of the shot.

Now there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why a character would put such expensive shot into his shoddy hand cannon. Maybe he wants twin tailed comets inscribed upon each ball, or silver shot for hunting werewolves, but If his reason was to mitigate the mechanical disadvantage of the weathered blunderbuss he found on corpse of a coachman I would probably shut him down. I know that this is the rules forum, not the house rules forum, but my own solution would be to assume that ball shot and powder used in a blunderbuss is considered average craftsmanship, and other things shoved down the barrel with copious explosives behind them are considered poor craftsmanship.

As for the armor quality question; Since the superior quality adds a fortune die to the dice pool of the user I think that it should add a fortune die in social situations where quality of dress is important.

It could be argued that a fortune die is analogous to a misfortune die, and that in defensive situations superior craftsmanship armor should add a misfortune die to the attacker's pool. I think that this is not intended though, or the rules would (maybe?) mention it.

OCD as ever,

-Thorvid

Thanks Thorvid for the comprehensive answer.

I intend that the PCs will be getting poor quality weapons until they are rank 2 (just intent on "stuff they will find.") I expect then that they would buy superior ammo. I'm of the thought though that I may impose stacking limits (i.e. you can't gain the benefit from BOTH the ranged weapon and the ammo, however opposing poor and superior can cancel each other out).

The roadwarden in the group will be starting with a Poor pistol and a Poor quality nag of a horse. Sucks to be "Level 1"

This gives me more room to work with in terms of material rewards as they upgrade their tools, etc. and should longevitize the campaign a bit (at least early on) so that the plateau is not reached immediately.

jh

I have rules that superiour armor does have one extra defense. Superiour weapons add a fortune die to attacks, so having superiour armor add a misfortune to the same pool really balance things our perfectly. But it's not in the rules and in my game not all superiour armors work like this. Some have other benefits. The Gromril armor is superiour quality for instance letting it ignore a critical wound... come to think of it I think the gromril armor has a base defense of 2 which is one more than normal full plate armor. So perhaps that supports the idea of extra defence for better armor.

But giving armor a single extra defense is perfectly balanced when comparing it to quality weapons.