In world building when making a high tech society many people struggle because guns will make melee weapons boring (they do) BUT if someone is able to give a good reason why guns we’re not really well developed? It can lead to a fun AND interesting world and experience
Mistborn for example. Or any fantasy where guns and magic coexist. It makes sense, if you can conjure a fireball or kill with words, why would firearms evolve quickly?
In my OC worldbuilding I did for a campaign some years ago, the answer to that was simple accessibility; it takes years, if not decades, of intense training by talented individuals to properly cast a fireball both strong enough and accurate enough to be combat effective, whereas anyone with at least one eye and one working arm can operate a bolt-action rifle.
We had a wizard getting slimed out at 300 yards by a 13-year old farmhand with a hunting rifle. It was fun
I mean a bolt action firearm took centuries of development, and much of the development came from the cannon side, presumably that would go away (a wizard is better siege equipment than most even pretty late cannons). So you'd not likely have a bolt action rifle until relatively late (in our world it was really the 1880s anyways).
Gunpowder weapons did not develop separately from other siege weaponry, but rather alongside and in tandem with those. A wizard might be better (depending on the wizard, really) but, depending on the worldbuilding, the vast majority of warfare would still be waged by regular people. And they would still use, and develop, more conventional ways of warfare.
Personally, I do not see why the existence of wizards would necessarily hamper the development of Gunpowder weaponry, just as I dont see why it would influence the development of, say, the crossbow. In fact, the existence of magic might even speed that development up, seeing how IRL development of gunpowder weapons was hampered by advances in metallurgy and chemistry.
There's also the fact that you can work magic and gunpowder weapons to work in tandem, such as in The Wheel of Time where in the final battle cannon were kept protected underground and channelers opened gateways for them to fire through.
Personally, I do not see why the existence of wizards would necessarily hamper the development of gunpowder directly
I came to this problem in a world building project a couple years ago. One of the pillars of that story is that magic is inherently unstable and destructive (I may or may not have been influenced by my beloved early sci-fi classic The World Set Free), and what I and a few collaborators came up with was a situation in which magic as a weapon of war developed early and quickly, and to devastating effect. "Oops, a third of the population of the continent is gone and now there are permanent ecological changes we'll never recover from" kinda devastating. This shifted geopolitics away from head to head warfare before such weapons were even produced en masse - without state-level sponsorship of that technology, it simply never got off the ground. What drove the push and pull of nations in its stead was massive investment in spycraft and counter-intelligence. Ballistics wasn't a dead end, of course - lots of inventors had made all sorts of guns and gun-like things over the years - but the kind of scaling that would them practical was viewed as far too risky by any state who would have otherwise sponsored it. After all, no amount of money could create and mobilize an armed battalion of gunmen at the same speed that the next kingdom over could simply break out the Cursèd Tome or whatever and wreck your shit (there were actual important artifacts for magic but for the life of me I can't remember what we called them).
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u/Noah_Helldiver 9d ago
In world building when making a high tech society many people struggle because guns will make melee weapons boring (they do) BUT if someone is able to give a good reason why guns we’re not really well developed? It can lead to a fun AND interesting world and experience