How does the UA 2019 artificer's Reloading Weapon infusion affect Matt Mercer's Gunslinger firearms?

Question

I am creating a multiclassed 2019 UA artificer/Gunslinger fighter, and a question has been raised.

If I infuse a gun with the Repeating Weapon artificer infusion, how does that affect the reloading property of the gun?

The description of the artificer's Repeating Shot infusion says:

Item: A simple or martial weapon with the ammunition property (requires attunement)

This magic weapon grants a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with it when it’s used to make a ranged attack, and it ignores the loading property if it has it.

The weapon requires no ammunition; it magically produces one piece of ammunition each time you make a ranged attack with it, unless you manually load it. The ammunition produced by the weapon vanishes the instant after the it hits or misses a target.

And firearms do have the ammunition property.

The Gunslinger's Firearm Properties section says:

Reload. The weapon can be fired a number of times equal to its Reload score before you must spend 1 attack or 1 action to reload. You must have one free hand to reload a firearm.

I am unsure of the how the rules should be interpreted, but wouldn't the repeating weapon cause the gun to never need to reload?

Answer 1

It's unclear if there’s any official answer, but likely works based on DM discretion.

UA generally isn't balanced for multiclassing, and Matt Mercer's stuff isn't canonical, so WotC wouldn't consider it when designing their own content, so there probably won't be a canonical answer for this from WotC.

That said, however, it would be reasonable for it to allow you to fire a weapon indefinitely without reloading, as a result of how it magically produces a new piece of ammunition every time you fire it, which then vanishes after firing allowing a new piece of ammunition to appear within the gun's magazine or cylinder.

Answer 2

Reading over the infusion and the description of firearms and that they have their own proficiency, it looks like the Repeating Shot is not able to be put on the firearm. The infusion has listed for its requirements, "Item: A simple or martial weapon with the ammunition property (requires attunement)". The problem here isn't with the ammunition property, but the fact it needs to be a simple or martial weapon. Firearm proficiency is gained through the subclass because a fighter does not already have it. While they are proficient in simple and martial weapons, firearms do not appear on the table within the PHB. The infusion would work with standard firearms seen on page 268 of the DMG as they are all listed under "Martial Ranged Weapons", but the firearms introduced in the Gunslinger class do not have the property listed, as such, the infusion would not work on Matt Mercer's firearms.

If, however, you had a firearm that was taken from the DMG and had the respective stats, it could bear the enchantment like normal, and be able to be fired continuously. Of course, it's up to your DM if Matt Mercer's firearms would also have the martial property to be be able for this.

Answer 3

The Reload property of the Firearms, while included in the Gunslinger's description, refers to items (weapons) and as such you could argue it's not part of the class itself.

The Artificer's infusion allows the creation of a magic item so you'd be effectively using a different item with different properties.

If you find that to be unbalanced, though, you could argue that the new magic weapon cannot perform Trick Shots because those are made with the specific firearms described in Matt's Gunslinger class.