Halfway House

The current Pathfinder adventure path is "Skull & Shackles", a pirate-themed path. It's a good one, and it's a good theme - who doesn't like pirates?

But there's a controversy hidden away in there - firearms.

See D&D (and, by extension, Pathfinder) has never really featured firearms. And, indeed, there is a significant portion of the fanbase who actively don't want firearms in their fantasy. (They're somewhat like psionics in this regard.) On the other hand, it's the pirate genre, and firearms have always fit in with that. And "Pirates of the Caribbean" is most definitely fantasy, and it includes firearms without them feeling even remotely out of place.

So, what to do? Do you include them or not?

Well, it turns out that Paizo have made what I consider one of their (admittedly few) missteps. Because they've omitted firearms from their adventures... mostly. But there are a couple of NPCs here and there, and a couple of scenes here and there which do include firearms... and that just makes those few instances stick out much more than they otherwise would.

In my opinion, they should have made a decision, one way or the other, and stuck with it. (And, indeed, since "Skull & Shackles" is intended to fit in their campaign world, which doesn't really feature firearms, I would have chosen to omit them. Had it been intended to be setting-neutral, on the other hand, I would have gone the other way.)

Shame, really.

Incidentally, the use of firearms has always amused me. For reasons unknown, virtually every company to attempt to include them has seen fit to include a specialised subsystem for firearms, with rules for mis-fires, or exploding damage, or similar. When in fact all that's wanted is to just stat them up as weapons. Especially for the pirate genre, there's no great mystique to firearms - load, point, shoot. There's an issue with reload times (in that, in the source, characters tend to fire once and then close to melee), but that's easy solved by giving firearms large damage but equally large reload times, thus discouraging a second shot.