2y ago

Counting arrows?

84 comments

Giving an unlimited resource always changes the balance, the most fun i ever had as a rouge was with limited arrows because it forced me to think outside the box of “hide and shoot”
- The Shadow of the Demon lord system is different and interesting. You don't track individual arrows, you track quivers (which are quite expensive). A character might have like 3 quivers.
  You lose a quiver on a critical fail, otherwise you don't track ammo. This means on average you have 20 arrows per quiver, which works out about right without any of the paperwork.
  
  Interesting but i don’t like it from a role playing angle. I don’t know how to explain how that works, but if i could it would be cool.
- Would you like it if it werent counted then ?
  Because being forced to do what you do not want or need to do is the problem.
  No matter if its counted or not, pick whatever you prefer and is more fun to you. You can even have both at once in the same party.
  
  Depends on what the game is focused on. Combat and survival, absolutely. Story and ,role play maybe but not necessary. However you should play how the DM wants the game to play, period. They are the one putting in the real effort so you show that the proper respect.

DM: "You all get a magic quiver with unlimited arrows. Hurray!"
The one player who spent all their money on fancy arrows of various kinds crumples their character sheet up and tosses it aside
Player: "I don't wanna play anymore... 😠"
- Regular arrows should be infinite and special arrows limited. I like how they did it in BG3 actuallu
  
  I haven't played 5E on paper so I was actually wondering if that's how the rules worked or not.
- My players would just sell it back. I know, I gave them important items and they did that XD
- For me it was not being able to cast spell with sword and shield
  
  I started a Pathfinder CRPG a few days ago and one of the classes is specifically designed just to do that. I was tempted to choose it but it had like the highest class difficulty and it's my first time playing so I played it safe and just went with a regular ol' sorcerer.

I played in one campaign where I had to track arrows. It was a homebrewed world where anything outside of cities was extremely dangerous. We found eventually that the reason why was all the good gods had died, as this devouring entity had started eating them and then had gotten trapped, which let evil go unchecked.
It was a lot of fun, my character would have to go out and sneak around to find good wood for arrows and he spent his time during watches crafting more arrows.
- So you liked it and had fun right ?
  Good then. The question isnt to count arrows or not, but to find how to have fun yourself with the arrows. There isnt a right answer. It depends on you as a player.
  If you have fun, you are winning. Doesnt matter if you count or not.

I just did it counting arrows for a 5e dungeon campaign, and it makes things more interesting. 5E has turfed most of the original D&D dungeon crawl mechanics, but I can see why it was a thing - it adds a little bit of risk.
- I count special arrows, but normal ones ? Its not fun if you build your built around it. Plus, its very easy to carry hundreds of them at once, using your party as mules. Meaning the only moments you are lacking bolts or arrows is either your choice or your DM's. So, either you have fun yourself by adding a challenge, akind to me picking spells appropriate for my bard, or the DM's that wants to limit you in a bad way
  
  So far the DM isn't being difficult. I feel like I should be able to carry a few dozen without penalty. We'll see how the game progresses.

Timer systems like arrow counting, rations and encumbrance are good for game flow. Removing them tends to diminish the level of emotional investment and roleplaying in the game.
- I'd get overwhelmed very quickly trying to keep track of all that personally, but if it works for your table, that's perfectly fine.
  
  I can only keep up with this things on vtt's, specially foundry.
  
  There are systems that make it not purely accounting, like resource dice.
- Personally I've never managed to make 20 attacks as an archer in one combat in 5e before, so tracking those just tends to result in a number going from 20 to 12 or whatever and then me saying "by the way I walk around the battlefield picking up my arrows"
  it doesn't really add anything
  
  What you described is barely a timer system, reset on combat end doesn't really ever matter to a game. I'm addressing longer time frame resource drain benefiting the game by creating risk and promoting choice. There isn't really a point if arrows aren't lost and broken.
  
  "3 of them broke."
- Maybe for a certain kind of game. Survival horror, absolutely - as an aside, i really want to find a good survival horror fantasy RPG, I think that'd be really fun. But for mainstream fantasy games? It doesn't have the same weight or drama. The question isn't "Will I have enough supplies for this adventure, and if not how I can I make do?", but "Will the entirety my 100g worth of arrows in extradimensional storage last until I retire this character, can I spend less?"
  
  Did you note that I included encumbrance. Magic bags are a huge problem for trivializing the concerns of your character.

In our PF1e game where I play a ranged slayer, I track arrows. It made it way more interesting early on where I didn't have any blunt arrows so I couldn't hurt skeletons. Eventually, I put the money into durable arrows so after every encounter I don't run away from, it's assumed I have time to pick mine up.
I don't mind it at all, though we play on FoundryVTT so it tracks it a lot easier.
- What all do you like about Foundry?
  
  My favorite part is that it's super customizable, and specifically that it's self-hosted. We ran into issues with Roll20 all the time where it would get super slow or something wasn't working like you'd expect, especially inventory stuff.
  I won't say Foundry is perfect, but where the tool itself lacks, the fact that there are thousands of modules that can change functionality or add something cool is just amazing. Modules get made to add blood spatter, deal with terrain, add custom weather effects, add in items from 3rd party books, etc.
  And like I said, self-hosting is a big win because we're no longer reliant on someone else. Sure, if the host's internet drops, we can't play, but it's only happened twice in two years of using it.
  
  Foundry is a decent virtual ttrpg. Its got good and bad sides of it like anything else, but what it does is use your ammo or hp automatically.

Yeah I'm a Shadowrun player and we even count the bullets in magazines
- And the ammunition type!
  
  I love pulling out protractors and doing trigonometry during my roleplay session to calculate bullet spin and drop
  And doing all of that as a first step before rolling dice

Measuring the exact weight of every item in inventory is also a charming but typically discouraged new player practice.

I find this more fun in systems like Shadowrun where I can be like 'This mag is alternatively loaded with Exex and APDS ammo and it's for the big emergencies that sometimes happen'. Like, you might have 6 different mags with different ammo in that game and use them all, depending on what situations come up.
I really like Fabula Ultimas take on this too: Basic consumables like arrows aren't limited or tracked, but you have inventory points that inform how many potions or other situation-changing items you can produce out of your bag of tricks, before you need to hit a town to restock. And then they have some abilities/classes you can pick give you more of these points, refill these points in combat or during travel, or key off of these points to do other things related to crafting and item use. Really really good.

Eating candy?

I always use the arrow rule from icrpg. You have unlimited arrows until you roll a nat 1. From that point on you have no arrows and have to improvise.
- That sounds really annoying. Imagine leaving a town fully stocked, get into a fight, roll a nat 1 on first attack and immediately have no arrows for the rest of the fight. What, did the ranger just forget that the quiver was empty before leaving town?
  
  I've always disliked the concept of critical fails in general, and this is a great example of why. If we're to believe that our characters are truly these great warriors with far more skill and experience than an average person like the texts usually say, how does it make sense for these professionals to just completely blunder 1 in 20 of their attempts at everything? From an RP standpoint, it doesn't add up, and from a gameplay standpoint, it's just annoying as hell IMO.
  
  Which is why not counting normal ammo is best boi
  
  Maybe it's more like you clumsily dumped all your arrows on the ground. Fighting is messy and random. Just walking is random.
  The other day I slipped on some stairs I walk up every day, fell and hurt my butt. That's a natural one definitely.
- Seems really stupid honestly, imagine going into a fight and two arrows in you roll a 1 and now your ranged character is useless.
  Like imagine forcing your barbarian to lose their melee weapon everytime they roll a 1, or a caster just loses their prepared spells, etc.
  
  People tend to not realize how often something is going to be happening with a one in twenty chance and that you are going to be rolling your basic attack roll a gazillion times per session. When you start rolling the dice, making attacks every turn, that is going to come up very often. In fact, statistically this rule would mean that your character would be carrying on average ~13½ arrows. By the time you've rolled 14 times it's more likely that there was at least one 1 in there than not. With multiple attacks per turn that's going to happen infuriatingly often.
  
  It work best obviously with icrpg "balance", those 2 arrows in the game could bring a boss to half health easy.
  One thing I quite dislike on standard 5e is most of the time your roll matters very little. And 5e compensate this with rolling more often
- Use ammunition? Roll a die. 11 and over, it's recoverable. 1-10 it's lost/broken.

84 comments