(TFT) ...and keep your powder dry

[stan rydzewski <srydzews@ix.netcom.com>]

In TFT, gunpowder is made very expensive to prevent the players from 
blowing up everything they encounter.  While that's a reasonable goal,
the rules to make it happen are strange and unreasonable.

To sum up the problem: if one "charge" of gunpowder is enough to fire 
a musket, it's totally ridiculous for even a government to contemplate
using cannon.  Taking 1 musket shot = 1 charge = $100 as the starting 
point of my previous gunpowder discussion, I calculated the cost of 
firing a cannon to be around $16,000 per shot.  Strange, but who cares
since cannons aren't part of the game, right?  

Well, the strangeness is present even in the game's weapons.  It's not 
reasonable for a petard containing 20 of those "charges" to do the
listed damage for a petard (6d6 damage to each target within 3 MH).
Twenty shots from a BIG musket might require, at most, about a pound 
of powder.  Now a pound of gunpowder going off is dangerous, but it's 
not going to reliably kill EVERYONE within 15 yards of the explosion
the way a petard does.

But that's all taking One Musket Shot = One Charge as the starting 
point of the analysis.  What if we instead take the petard as the 
starting point?
                   Petard: $2500, 6 kg, 20 charges

The weight of the petard is reasonable for the damage it does, and it 
will basically be a keg of gunpowder, consistent with its description 
as a demolition device.  So if a petard contains 5 kg of powder the powder costs
$500 per kg.

Working backwards, the "charge" that a chemist produces costs $100, so 
one charge is 1/5 of a kg.  1/5 kg is enough to fire a musket about ten 
times, depending on how big it is, its windage, etc., so the cost per 
shot should be $10.  A grenade is basically half a kg of shrapnel and 
half a kg of powder, making its cost around $300.  

To sum up:

petard       5 kg of powder,  $2500 (6 kg total weight)
grenade     .6 kg of powder,  $300  (1 kg total weight)
one charge  .2 kg of powder,  $100  (what an alchemist makes)
musket shot .02 kg of powder, $10   (about .7 ounce or 5 drams)

This pricing structure makes a lot more sense, and the cost
of the petard (obviously what Jackson was concerned about 
the players abusing) is kept the same.  $10 a shot keeps the
arquebus too expensive to equip an army with, but small 
specialist units might have them.

---------------------------------------------------------
Stan

PS: The gunpowder conspiracy can still be alive and well under 
this pricing regime...each shot from a bombard still costs 
between $2000 and $4000.
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