Simple Firearms Rules for Pathfinder

The Pathfinder firearms rules are complex. Obviously Paizo was going for a mix of balance and realism. That said, if you don't care about realism and you want, instead, a simple way of interacting with firearms, try this:

	Damage	Critical	Range	Misfire	Capacity	Weight	Special
Revolver	1d8	x4	20	1	6	3 lb.
Rifle	1d12	x4	60	1-2	1	10 lb.
Shotgun	2d8	x2	20	1-2	2	12 lb.	Scatter

Range: Within a firearm’s first range increment, ranged attacks are made against a target’s touch armor class. Further range increments are treated normally (suffering -2 to hit for each subsequent range increment).

Misfire: Firearms misfire on a natural 1, gaining the broken condition and increasing the misfire value by 4. If a broken firearm misfires again it explodes, destroying the weapon and dealing weapon damage to everyone in a 10 foot radius. Broken firearms can be repaired with a gunsmith’s kit and a DC 10 Dexterity check over the course of 1d6 hours.

Broken: If the item is a weapon, any attacks made with the item suffer a –2 penalty on attack and damage rolls. Such weapons only score a critical hit on a natural 20 and only deal ×2 damage on a confirmed critical hit.

Scatter: This gun can shoot two different types of ammunition. It can fire normal bullets that target one creature, or it can make a scattering shot, attacking all creatures within a cone. Make a separate attack roll against each creature within the cone with a –2 penalty. Effects that grant concealment, such as fog or smoke, or the blur, invisibility, or mirror image spells, do not foil a scatter attack. If any of the attack rolls threaten a critical, confirm the critical for that attack roll alone. A firearm that makes a scatter shot misfires only if all of the attack rolls made misfire. If a scatter weapon explodes on a misfire, it deals triple its damage to all creatures within 10 feet.

Commonplace Guns: While still expensive and tricky to wield, early firearms are readily available. Instead of requiring the Exotic Weapon Proficiency feat, all firearms are martial weapons.

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This has been copied and reworked from Pathfinder Open Gaming Content. While paring it down in just this way is my idea, I really can't claim authorship with a clean conscience, so I won't. Let's call it an open content rework or an OGL homebrew revision or something, hell, I don't know, call it Susan and feed it scones if you want.

If you've got a player who wants to run a Gunslinger, probably don't use these rules. Gunslingers want all the complex stuff and are probably unbalanced if you make things too easy on them. Otherwise, this is a way of including firearms in your Pathfinder game that doesn't require memorizing a whole new subset of rules or printing out twenty pages of reference material.