So, recently within the last few years I've noticed that we have, albeit in a very small manner, expanded upon some of the firearms items. We included Powder Horns, which.. Serve no purpose except perhaps to shave a little weight, and I have heard - but not witnessed - that we have some scripts introduced for blunderbusses, but it's widely ineffective in comparison to say, a regular black powder firearm. It takes two turns to reload a pistol, to fire and on the wide average, do 30-40 damage for every two turns if we assume the individual is carrying a single one, or, 30 damage per turn if we assume the individual is carrying an irrelevant number of black powder firearms on his or her person, that they are then cycling.
I can understand there is an effort to try to represent how slowly a pistol fires, but what most people often overlook is the fact that the kind of heavier crossbows that NWN represents are essentially Windlass Crossbows, which you carried an apparatus with you to reload and wind the bow back, then you placed a bolt and fired between 300lb and 1,000 lb draw-strength. This was the weapon that largely left firearms largely out of favor in the battlefield for unskilled soldiers until the renaissance/early modern period. It took just as long to reload as a black powder firearm, if not a little longer to a trained shooter.
Currently in NWN, we have a Light Crossbow and a Heavy Crossbow. These both would take extraordinarily longer than a Longbow/Shortbow to fire, but the way we get around that is a simple feat called Rapid Reload, which magically allows them to somehow draw their crossbows and fire them up to four, or hasted, five times within a six second period for a full BAB class.
So why are we still left with the rather pointless mechanic of loading a bullet, then the powder - then shooting the firearm, when we have settings that exist in which firearms are dominant? I would love to see more characters who use black powder beyond the novelty, because we utilize
flintlock firearms.
I'd personally like to see the damage per shot of flintlocks brought into a more controllable range, and allow them to be fired more often, as a viable combat method for a character that isn't .. Before a certain somebody shows up .. A gun-wizard who buffs his/her bullets and can only manage to use them through an extremely tedious and ultimately unduly process. I would suggest, if nothing else would change, to include an item in the game that performs the action of loading both powder and bullet simultaneously that could be created through the crafting system or purchased at a store. By the time we have flintlocks, people have figured out how to put powder and ball in a cartridge, where the process is just biting off the top of the cartridge, pouring some powder in the firing pan, pouring the rest down the barrel, shoving the ball down, then ramming it down, pulling the hammer back and firing. By comparison, what we are currently doing is.. Taking a bag of powder, pouring a loose amount of powder down the barrel (which is dangerous) and then pouring a loose amount of powder in the firing pan (which is dangerous) then, reaching for a separate bag with bullets in them, to take a separate wad of cloth, wrap the bullet, then ram it down.
Of course, if we could just remove that all together and make a firearms system that worked by actually shooting them in combat with some VFX, I'd be ever happier!
POST NOTE:
Here's an example.
