History Analysis / FantasyGunControl

So, the knightly charge died without needing guns to kill it. But musketeers turned out to complement Swiss-style pike formations, making knights and all cavalry even less important. At the battle of Pavia (1525), Francis I lost to Charles V and the new Spanish formations of tercios, previously introduced by the reforms of The Great Captain, UsefulNotes/GonzaloFernandezDeCordoba: one third pikemen to defeat cavalry and non-pikemen, one third swordsmen to defeat pikemen, one third musketeers to force the enemy to attack. The French cavalry was crushed, Francis I was captured, and infantry have been more important than cavalry from that day to this. Cavalry in the modern sense -- not necessarily noble, not having a right of independent retreat, and taking orders from a general rather than acting on their own -- were organized in response to Pavia; carrying pistols and short-barreled muskets, they quickly recovered some military relevance. Heavy cuirassiers, carrying swords, sometimes lances, and pistol-proof armor, would go on to have some of the flair of knights.

So, the knightly charge died without needing guns to kill it. But musketeers turned out to complement Swiss-style pike formations, making knights and all cavalry even less important. At the battle of Pavia (1525), Francis I lost to Charles V and the new Spanish formations of tercios: one third pikemen to defeat cavalry and non-pikemen, one third swordsmen to defeat pikemen, one third musketeers to force the enemy to attack. The French cavalry was crushed, Francis I was captured, and infantry have been more important than cavalry from that day to this. Cavalry in the modern sense -- not necessarily noble, not having a right of independent retreat, and taking orders from a general rather than acting on their own -- were organized in response to Pavia; carrying pistols and short-barreled muskets, they quickly recovered some military relevance. Heavy cuirassiers, carrying swords, sometimes lances, and pistol-proof armor, would go on to have some of the flair of knights.

Knightly charges had been showing vulnerabilities for some time before this happened, though. They were a widespread tactic in the Medieval age, as it was a long-established tradition dating back to when Frankish and Anglo-Saxon chiefs/kings would smash poorly-equipped infantry whilst on horseback surrounded by trusted warriors. Although some nations still maintained effective disciplined infantry (Anglo-Saxon England, for one, and the core of it was kept intact by the Normans), it generally required a large body of professional soldiery that didn't exist. Although cavalry had long proved their worth and was easily provided by the feudal/manorial social system of the time, cracks appeared by the 'High' Middle Ages. They were only dubiously useful in the Crusades (11th through 14th Centuries), and useless against the Mongols, as both the Mongols and the Turks used light cavalry and didn't field solid ranks of troops. Longbows had difficulty penetrating plate armor (the difficulty dependent on the bow and armor), contrary to popular belief, but Crécy and Agincourt did reveal further problems -- at Crécy (1346), the French lost because their horses had no barding armor, and so had no protection against arrows, but at Agincourt (1415), they lost because they ''did'' have barding armor, and so got stuck in the mud. Then there were the first "armored war wagons" (Panzerkampfwagen, the term used for these vehicles, would go on to become the German for "tank"): in the Hussite Rebellion (1415-1436), the Bohemians (modern Czech Republic and Slovakia) circled the wagons on defense against Hapsburg knights, then attacked with massed wagons carrying light cannons and ten or twelve peasants with flails. They won, by the way; moderate Hussites had religious freedom in Bohemia until the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar (when they got caught up in the Catholic-Protestant wars that had begun with the Smalkaldic War of 1525 and were annihilated).

# Magic is disproportionately effective against guns. Perhaps it's easier to break and jam guns because they have a lot more small moving parts than a sword does, or perhaps mages can ignite gunpowder at long range and blow up ammunition stores.

Knightly charges had been showing vulnerabilities for some time before this happened, though. They were a widespread tactic in the Medieval age, as it was a long-established tradition dating back to when Frankish and Anglo-Saxon chiefs/kings would smash poorly-equipped infantry whilst on horseback surrounded by trusted warriors. Although some nations still maintained effective disciplined infantry (Anglo-Saxon England, for one, and the core of it was kept intact by the Normans), it generally required a large body of professional soldiery that didn't exist. Although cavalry had long proved their worth and was easily provided by the feudal/manorial social system of the time, cracks appeared by the 'High' Middle Ages. They were only dubiously useful in the Crusades (11th through 14th Centuries), and useless against the Mongols, as both the Mongols and the Turks used light cavalry and didn't field solid ranks of troops. Longbows had difficulty penetrating plate armor (the difficulty dependent on the bow and armor), contrary to popular belief, but Crécy and Agincourt did reveal further problems -- at Crécy (1346), the French lost because their horses had no barding armor, and so had no protection against arrows, but at Agincourt (1415), they lost because they ''did'' have barding armor, and so got stuck in the mud. Then there were the first "armored war wagons" (*Panzerkampfwagens*, the term the Germans would use again for tanks): in the Hussite Rebellion (1415-1436), the Bohemians (modern Czech Republic and Slovakia) circled the wagons on defense against Hapsburg knights, then attacked with massed wagons carrying light cannons and ten or twelve peasants with flails. They won, by the way; moderate Hussites had religious freedom in Bohemia until the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar (when they got caught up in the Catholic-Protestant wars that had begun with the Smalkaldic War of 1525 and were annihilated).

Knightly charges had been showing vulnerabilities for some time before this happened, though. They were a widespread tactic in the Medieval age, as it was a long-established tradition dating back to when Frankish and Anglo-Saxon chiefs/kings would smash poorly-equipped infantry whilst on horseback surrounded by trusted warriors. Although some nations still maintained effective disciplined infantry (Anglo-Saxon England, for one, and the core of it was kept intact by the Normans), it generally required a large body of professional soldiery that didn't exist. Although cavalry had long proved their worth and was easily provided by the feudal/manorial social system of the time, cracks appeared by the 'High' Middle Ages. They were only dubiously useful in the Crusades (11th through 14th Centuries), and useless against the Mongols, as both the Mongols and the Turks used light cavalry and didn't field solid ranks of troops. Longbows had difficulty penetrating plate armor (the difficulty dependent on the bow and armor), contrary to popular belief, but Crécy and Agincourt did reveal further problems -- at Crécy (1346), the French lost because their horses had no barding armor, and so had no protection against arrows, but at Agincourt (1415), they lost because they ''did'' have barding armor, and so got stuck in the mud. Worse still was the introduction of very literal tanks five centuries early in the Hussite Rebellion (1415-1436) -- the Bohemians (modern Czech Republic and Slovakia) invented the wagon circle to defend against Hapsburg knights, and attacked with massed wagons carrying light cannons and ten or twelve peasants with flails. They won, by the way; moderate Hussites had religious freedom in Bohemia until the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar (when they got caught up in the Catholic-Protestant wars that had begun with the Smalkaldic War of 1525 and were annihilated).

So, in short, knightly charges were dead without needing firearms to kill them; they did, however, speed up the process of their demise as was seen in the battle of Pavia (1525) which a decisive victory for Charles V of Habsburg over the aforementioned Francis I due to the introduction of the Tercios, a unit that combined the firepower of the arquebus (and later the musket) with the reach of the pikes and the versatily of the swordsmen; the result was a massacre of the French cavalry and the capture of the king of France, cementing the return of the prominence of infantry in the battlefield. Personal firearms (including cavalry pistols) were if anything more useful in ''countering'' the new styles of heavy infantry; before long, though, the musket meant the conversion of knights into cavalry (not necessarily noble, and taking orders from the general rather than acting largely on their own), and the relegation of pikes to uselessness except in defending against cavalry attack. (The Janissaries managed to fight with musketeers without using any pikemen at all.)

[[AC:Mix and match troopers.]]

[[AC: Never bring a gun to a sword fight.]]

[[AC: Ready, aim... fireball!]]

[[AC: Justifying the Trope]]

1. Literal gun control -- The main reason that it took three centuries for gunpowder to cross from the Song Empire to Europe was that the alchemical 'recipe' was the equivalent of a state secret in each new realm it spread to. In a fantasy culture, even in the absence of that kind of state control of military technology, the people who do all the alchemy tend to be the same people that work with magic, who are easily motivated to keep it a "trade secret" to avoid competition in the realm of fireball-tossing.

2. Missing ingredients -- Saltpeter, especially, can be rendered essentially unavailable by basic changes to biology or terrain. For instance, if bats are magical enough to make wandering through caves collecting guano an extreme hazard to life and limb (not a stretch in D&D-based stories), making the stuff isn't worth the pain even if you know how, and it's certainly not common enough to waste on projectile weapons when you've got perfectly serviceable crossbows. This one can be quite effective if combined with the fourth point below. While bat-infested caves aren't in short supply in many fantasy settings, it is easy to write their use as not being very economical. The other historical source for saltpeter was niter, and with its water solubility mineral sources tend to be less common outside of arid regions. (The other preindustrial method of making saltpeter--extracting nitrates from human and animal waste and then filtering through potash--is labor-intensive and takes a year to get results.) Even if gunpowder exists, one could write a setting where rocketry is more economical, as gunpowder formulae designed for that role can make use of a lower proportion of saltpeter.

3. High explosives happened first -- If someone worked out how to multiply nitrate glycerine or toluene before working out a low explosive like gunpowder, society may have skipped over to bombs and given alchemical explosives a reputation for being something you don't want anywhere near your face.

4. They exist, but they're not cost-effective -- All it takes is iron being scarce and/or wood plentiful (making bows cheaper as well as better), a military that just doesn't do much naval warfare or sieges[[note]]i.e. the things you ''really'' need artillery for; contrast the Southern/Late Song, Yuan, and Ming Empires (which featured constant and exhausting warfare between conventional combatants) and the Qing Empire (which spent its first century crushing Ming holdouts, before fighting nothing but skirmishes and open battles against Mongols for the next 300 years of its existence until the Europeans showed up)[[/note]], or a military and society that just doesn't do much warfare full stop[[note]]Take the disintegration of the Moghul Empire, for instance; relatively few muskets and artillery pieces were made when it was dominating the Indian subcontinent and fighting Persia and steppe tribes. But the moment it started to disintegrate (in the 18th century) amidst non-stop civil war, the production of both skyrocketed -- literally. It wasn't until the Empire was well and truly on its way out that somebody invented explosive rockets (great against elephants, apparently -- causes them to panic like nothing else).[[/note]] and you have very few people using guns. This is exactly how things actually happened, as so spectacularly illustrated by the First Opium War of 1840-42, wherein the forces of two European societies who'd had fought through more than 3 centuries of virtually non-stop gunpowder warfare [[note]]and had at least a million guns and 10k artillery pieces to show for it (including the ship-mounted artillery)[[/note]] faced off against the forces of an empire which (starting from a similar if not greater standard of gunpowder-usage) hadn't fought a siege or naval battle for three centuries. [[note]]And would have been lucky to have more than 100k guns and 1k artillery pieces (and probably far fewer!) to show for it, despite having more than ten times the population of Britain and France put together.[[/note]] The result was... [[CurbStompBattle predictable]].

5. They are out of scope. Medieval guns were more like battlefield equipment instead of personal weapons. They required a piece of burning rope which would first ignite a bunch of gunpowder in an open pan, which in turn would ignite the gunpowder inside the gun. This means you needed a lot of preparation before firing it, and you couldn't really use it while on the move. Also, starting a fire was a lengthy process. The issue with medieval guns wasn't the reload speed alone; muskets in Napoleon's time were just as slow to reload, but you could fire a loaded flintlock musket without any significant preparation. Not so with medieval guns. By the time wheellock and flintlock were discovered, the time we call the medieval era was over. This means all the guns you had in medieval times were a battlefield equipment, used by armies against other armies. However, most fantasy novels and role-playing games are focused on a very small group of adventurers on specific quests, and not on huge armies on an open battlefield.

Dungeons and Dragons, notably, takes a combination of justification 4 and analogy to real-world medieval firearms: you can purchase them, and they're even simple weapons (you don't need to be a soldier to use them), but they're short-ranged, slow-loading, extremely expensive, prone to failure, and not really any more powerful than their wood-and-iron counterparts, though lucky (critical) shots occur more often.

6. Some creatures may be [[ImmuneToBullets outright immune to conventional weapons]], and can only be harmed by magic. D&D is especially noteworthy for having many monsters that will NoSell physical attacks from ordinary weapons. This applies even to guns, as even modern assault weapons are useless if the bullets can't hurt the target. In these cases, only [[WeakToMagic magic]], or [[DepletedPhlebotinumShells weapons that have been charged with magic]], will do you any good. This may overlap with guns not being cost-effective, as in item #4 above. A magic sword can be used over and over again, as can magical missile weapons like arrows. However, any individual bullet can only be shot once, which means that you're better off focusing your magical resources on weapons you can keep reusing as needed.

7. Magic is disproportionately effective against guns. Perhaps it's easier to break and jam guns because they have a lot more small moving parts than a sword does, or perhaps mages can ignite gunpowder at long range and blow up ammunition stores.

Although plate armour was worn up till the middle of the 17th century, improvements that led to increased muzzle velocity and higher bullet calibre rendered it pointless to have without making it thicker and heavier, which was just not practical. That's why you see pictures of 17th-century troops in metal breastplates and helmets, whilst by the 18th they'd largely abandoned them, though some heavy cavalry units retained breastplates and helmets that were more intended to deflect swords, bayonets, and low-powered or ricocheted bullets as opposed to a solid hit from a foot soldier's musket. Breastplates and helmets for infantry wouldn't return until UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, when the sheer quantity of shrapnel put out by modern artillery (plus the technique of indirect fire that allows one to deliver said shrapnel even if you can't see where the shell will land) brought both back (often based on medieval designs; compare the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_hat kettle hat]] to the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodie_helmet Brodie]] and the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallet sallet]] to the iconic ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stahlhelm Stahlhelm]]'' or the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_helmet Adrian helmets]]).

Although plate armour was worn up till the middle of the 17th century, improvements that led to increased muzzle velocity and higher bullet calibre rendered it pointless to have without making it thicker and heavier, which was just not practical. That's why you see pictures of 17th-century troops in metal breastplates and helmets, whilst by the 18th they'd largely abandoned them, though some heavy cavalry units retained breastplates and helmets that were more intended to deflect swords, bayonets, and low-powered or ricocheted bullets as opposed to a solid hit from a foot soldier's musket. Breastplates and helmets for infantry wouldn't return until UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, when the sheer quantity of shrapnel put out by modern artillery (plus the technique of indirect fire that allows one to deliver said shrapnel even if you can't see where the shell will land) brought both back (often based on medieval designs; compare the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_hat kettle hat]] to the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodie_helmet Brodie]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallet sallet]] to the iconic ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stahlhelm Stahlhelm]]'' or the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_helmet Adrian helmets]]).

Although plate armour was worn up till the middle of the 17th century, improvements that led to increased muzzle velocity and higher bullet calibre rendered it pointless to have without making it thicker and heavier, which was just not practical. That's why you see pictures of 17th-century troops in metal breastplates and helmets, whilst by the 18th they'd largely abandoned them, though some heavy cavalry units retained breastplates and helmets that were more intended to deflect swords, bayonets, and low-powered or ricocheted bullets as opposed to a solid hit from a foot soldier's musket. Breastplates and helmets for infantry wouldn't return until UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, when the sheer quantity of shrapnel put out by modern artillery (plus the technique of indirect fire that allows one to deliver said shrapnel even if you can't see where the shell will land) brought both back (often based on medieval designs; compare the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_hat kettle hat]] to the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodie_helmet Brodie]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_helmet Adrian helmets]] or the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallet sallet]] to the iconic ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stahlhelm Stahlhelm]]'').

Guns, gunpowder, and firearms have been around for quite some time. Gunpowder first showed its face in China around the 9th century, then spread to the Middle East and Eastern Europe until finally reaching Western Europe sometime after the Crusades. Firearms have existed in some form as well ever since the Chinese Empire of the (Southern) Song mass-produced hand cannon -- handheld (heavy) gunpowder-filled tubes -- as an improvement upon the hand-grenades already in use by militiamen in urban garrisons c. 1232, though this wasn't enough to change the course of their century-long losing war against the Mongols. And in 1364, we have the first recorded use (by troops of the Mongol-led Chinese Empire of the Yuan) of shooter-lit wicks by hand that ignited gunpowder that was loaded into a gun barrel -- the matchlock arquebus. So guns actually had a place in the medieval world and are not a purely modern phenomenon. So why do {{Fantasy}} fiction and {{RPG}} developers treat it like a RedHeadedStepchild? In their worlds, guns don't exist. Cannons maybe, crude gunpowder bombs possibly, rockets if they're having a good day... but no handheld guns (unless the work in question involves [[OurWerewolvesAreDifferent werewolves]], in which case {{Silver Bullet}}s may appear).

It's frequently attributed to the assumption that guns ended the era of knights; while it might be that creators of works of fantasy think this, the assumption itself isn't true. Guns and armored horsemen existed side-by-side for over 300 years. After the advent of guns, armorers would deliberately shoot at their armour -- and customers would look for the dent because it indicated that the armour would stop bullets. That's the origin of the term 'bullet proof' -- the armour was proofed (tested) against bullets. Early guns were not necessarily superior to [[AnnoyingArrows traditional projectile weapons]] in every respect. They were more like crossbows, point-and-trigger weapons with a low rate of fire (and initially used a trigger mechanism borrowed from them). In fact, an English officer seriously suggested in the late 18th century (i.e. around the time of UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution) that the Redcoats go back to the longbow, for the superior rate of fire. He was ignored, of course, as the superior lethality, accuracy, and [[WeaponForIntimidation moral shock]] of the musket made it far more useful on the battlefield than the longbow--to say nothing of the shallower learning curve (it takes months if not years of training to learn to use a longbow; basic musketry can be learned in a matter of weeks) and less-demanding physical requirements (it takes a lot of effort to draw a longbow; hardly any to squeeze a trigger).

6. Some creatures may be [[ImmuneToBullets outright immune to conventional weapons]], and can only be harmed by magic. D&D is especially noteworthy for having many monsters that will NoSell physical attacks from ordinary weapons. This applies even to guns, as even modern assault weapons are useless if the bullets can't hurt the target. In these cases, only magic, or [[DepletedPhlebotinumShells weapons that have been charged with magic]], will do you any good. This may overlap with guns not being cost-effective, as in item #4 above. A magic sword can be used over and over again, as can magical missile weapons like arrows. However, any individual bullet can only be shot once, which means that you're better off focusing your magical resources on weapons you can keep reusing as needed.

Conversely, assuming that gunpowder ''must'' automatically exist once reaching a certain [[TechnologyLevels level of advancement]] is to fall into a [[YouFailLogicForever logical fallacy]]; development can happen at different rates in different fields, especially in a world that already has FunctionalMagic to make long-range destructive attacks. This is particularly the case if the functional magic and/or setting results in tactics differing greatly from the setting in which early guns found their first use in real history: firing in volleys using soldiers marching in ranks on battlefields. Guns present their own set of logistical issues in the form of supplies of gunpowder, as well as the cost of munitions (which severely curtailed the number of rounds of ammunition that gunpowder armies could use in training until the second half of the 19th century).

2. Missing ingredients -- Saltpeter, especially, can be rendered essentially unavailable by basic changes to biology or terrain. For instance, if bats are magical enough to make wandering through caves collecting guano an extreme hazard to life and limb (not a stretch in D&D-based stories), making the stuff isn't worth the pain even if you know how, and it's certainly not common enough to waste on projectile weapons when you've got perfectly serviceable crossbows. This one can be quite effective if combined with the fourth point below. While bat-infested caves aren't in short supply in many fantasy settings, it is easy to write their use as not being very economical. The other historical source for saltpeter was niter, and with its water solubility mineral sources tend to be less common outside of arid regions. Even if gunpowder exists, one could write a setting where rocketry is more economical, as gunpowder formulae designed for that role can make use of a lower proportion of saltpeter.