You have a quick hand and keen eye when employing firearms, granting you the following benefits:
Increase your Dexterity score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
You gain proficiency with firearms (see “Firearms” in the Dungeon Master’s Guide).
You ignore the loading property of firearms.
Being within 5 feet of a hostile creature doesn’t impose disadvantage on your ranged attack rolls.
Gunner: Have a Blast!
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
A suave duelist in tails marches across the battlefield, rapier on their hip, pistol in hand. Deep in the bowels of the nautolid ship, an artificer in steam-punk goggles wields a massive shotgun, spinning in circles and blasting holes in the swarms of illithid brain eaters lunging at her. Guns and D&D don’t always go together, but when they do, they’re serving just the right kind of fantasy you’re looking for. Gunner is a feat designed to open up those options to players at an affordable price; your mileage may vary in just what it gives you, though.
At minimum, Gunner gives you a bonus to your Dexterity; if you’re ever turning an odd score to an even one, that makes this as good as an ability score improvement. That on its own puts it in the tier of feats where you don’t need all that much else to justify it; if you just want to use a differently flavored light crossbow and want to ignore the loading property, bam. You’ve got it. Where this feat gets quite a bit better is when it expands out of late renaissance fantasy into the realm of high-magic sci-fi.
If you’re just using renaissance items, at its best, you’re getting a musket. With a 40/120 range, the two-handed property, and a 500 gold piece cost, it basically becomes a slightly upgraded damage longbow at the cost of most of the longbows range. If you already have Sharpshooter, this can be a fine upgrade to take; if you don’t, Sharpshooter is almost a prerequisite to this. Where things start to get quite a bit better is when you move into the modern age and start getting ranged weapons that deal multiple dice worth of damage. Just the hunting rifle dealing 2d10 piercing at an 80 foot range will start putting out outrageous amounts of damage on characters with extra attacks. If you ever hit futuristic you’re now looking at 3d6-6d8 points of damage per shot. This is, hands down, the highest damage option you can get from a feat assuming all these items are on the table.
If you’re DMing for somebody who wants to take Gunner, I highly recommend looking at it on a case by case basis. Fighters making four shots a turn with an anti-matter rifle in your Spelljammer game is going to quickly become a major power player that can make a lot of other people feel obsolete. Burst fire weapons hit a 15 ft. cone, and can apply multiple times per turn. This honestly is a major quality of life weapon upgrade for skirmisher builds, and while it could feel oppressive on builds meant to take the most possible advantage out of it, will feel like a new tool to bring artificers and rangers in line with other characters in the mid to upper tier. Warlocks or artificers who are getting at most two attacks a round can benefit majorly from weapon upgrades to justify the attack action over some cantrip spam; in those cases, an antimatter rifle can feel completely fair, as its gated majorly on what it can do in those classes.
If you’re a player looking to pick this up, have a discussion over your expectations and desires with your DM about it. Read the table. If you’re looking to crunch together a build firing out automatic rifle rounds five times a round with a bonus action reloading it in between shots, you’re going to need to be at a table where other characters are doing similarly powered things. If you just love the renaissance dandy archetype with a musket slung over their back, this can end up being slightly underpowered, but still offer a little bump in damage and a new tool to upgrade over time.
It's a little baffling to me that they’d attach what is already a variant mechanic to a feat stuck in a variant book without even mentioning how to implement it, but alas, this is where we land. I’d go into taking Gunner with the default expectation of renaissance weapons only early on, and maybe finding some modern equivalent tools as you progress. If you’re looking to go beyond that, it’ll be something you and your DM will need to discuss to make sure everyone at the table is having a great time and contributing to fights.
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