Any kind of inventory management like arrows and food is way too sweaty and has never engaged a single player ever unless the whole point of the campaign is this exact mechanic. It’s a waste of time and energy and I don’t play with anyone that insists on doing it.
There’s a moment when it can add tension. You find three silver arrows in an old fort, hole up for the night, and then hear the horrible howl of a werewolf ring out.
Or you’re lost in the desert, trying to ration your water until you can find an oasis.
I’ve played Westmarches games where you do a little pre-adventure “we need to go X hexes so we’re wanting Y supplies to get there and back”. But its more a cost of failure than a drama element.
It’s because D&D used to be a dungeon crawler but nobody does that anymore, yet tradition insists the dungeon crawler mechanics remain.
For a game with no attachment to tradition, try Draw Steel
i like to borrow from other systems and treat quiver and gold as stats to be checked against. i can ask you to roll a stat check against quiver. if you fail, you are currently out of arrows and will need to perform some action to no longer be out of arrows (including long rest, just assuming part of long rest is fletching or whatever, it doesn’t need to be focused on too hard). on critical success or failure, the player’s stat can go up or down permanently, and a player can trade a wealth point for an inventory point in town.
generally it works really well at letting players focus on role play by not requiring them to maintain a running tally.
Our rule was always that if you bought 50 of something like food or ammo, you don’t have to track how many you’ve used, we’ll just assume you’re well stocked and resupplying offscreen. The limit only comes back if the party is overtly cut off from resupply, like if they are shipwrecked on an uninhabited island.
This means you can easily have a limitless supply of normal arrows but still have to track your silver arrows, smoke bomb arrows, etc. Or you can invest the money to just have a limitless supply of whatever specialty item you think is worth the cost.
Retrieving ammunition is one of those things that is, imo, similar to taking piss breaks. Like yeah, of course your character is doing it, you don’t need to track or talk about it. The only time it will ever come up is if there’s a reason it’s noteworthy. Like if you get ambushed by a dragon immediately after the fight. Okay, you lose some of your arrows because you don’t have time to pick them back up before hauling ass out of there.
Similarly, I’ve found that tracking rations and water supplies and such is usually a waste of time. If there’s a plot reason those would be serious challenges, like you’re trapped in the middle of the desert, then of course we’re going to need to get into the little details of how you’re getting food and water every day. But if you’re traveling through reasonably well populated countryside and haven’t gone more than a couple days without meeting people, you’ve got food. Even the most curmudgeonly old destitute farmer isn’t going to send a band of travelers down Completely Unpopulated Road without enough food to reach the next hub of civilization.
I sometimes detail the food people are offered to texture out a region.
You managed to hunt this, the inn serves that, a vendor sells this other thing.
Im a forever DM. We play DND for fun not inventory management, anything tedious like that just isn’t what I want to spend time in a game on.
Yeah, it’s like encumberance in video games. Usually just makes things tedious and if there’s no work around it stops being fun.
The first thing I disable in every RPG.
Going through a dungeon and having to stop every couple of rooms to throw away stuff really loses your immersion.
Bonus point is that it also accumulates wealth more easily.
You can keep ChatGPT on in the background so that she/he can keep inventory for you guys. Like a mystical miserable fuck.
AI doesn’t have gender
You can choose the “gender” by the voice you select.
That’s not how gender works.
It’s definitely not “non-binary”. Can we agree on that?
Why would you use ChatGPT to emulate a word processor? You get all the functionality you need without ever hitting enter.
How about you keep ChatGPT in the trash where it belongs?
I can tell by the downvotes that there aren’t many fans of the AI on here and that’s fine. To each their own. I’m too old to be hating on new technology like if I was born in the 1100s.
If it was just new tech, I’d be all over it. If you aren’t aware of all the issues then you haven’t been paying attention.
Also, why in the ever loving fuck would you use an AI just to track a number? Just use a calculator app, notes app, anything simpler than having “I have fired another arrow, how many are left now?” Lmao.
Read the original post knucklehead.
Making fun of Luddites, as if they didn’t actually have a great fucking point, isn’t the cool flex you think it is.
No idea what you’re talking about but thanks for the benefit of the doubt. #collectingdownvotes
ChatGPT is a pedophile and a serial killer. It keeps abusing and murdering kids.
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I just keep it on so there’s a recording of everything said that’s relevant for marketing purposes. I want the most personalized ads.
I’ve literally typed the exact parameters of the product I want into chatgpt and it still didn’t give me what I was looking for. It can’t even do advertising right.
I just threw up a little
And if it hallucinates a few more inventory items who are we to complain?
No complaints at all. Who are we to question the spirits?
food and ammo are things i never keep track of, unless its magical foods or ammo.
Except in Call of Cthulhu, because i feel runming out of ammo in that game is more interesting than in DND.
I like to use Usage Dice for this. Instead of tracking your arrows individually, you start with, say, a d12. At the end of a fight you roll it, on a 1 or a 2 the die downgrades a step to a d10, then a d8 etc. After d4 youre empty.
I wanna say I got this from the Black Hack?
Fwiw I run an old-school style game. 5e is more about power fantasy
Yah, a few games do this, mostly in the OSR space. Macchiato Monsters and Stay Frosty are the ones that spring to mind.
Although there’s not much point in doing it unless you’re tracking travel etc.
I like it! It neatly models the variability of arrows being recoverable and unbroken.
For sure! It simulates the sort of quantum uncertainty you want without bogging you down. It’s a handy mechanic for all kinds of things.
My DM is kind and gave me “plot” arrows. It doesn’t hurt that I turn the bodies of my fallen enemies into ammo whenever I can
The times I’ve bothered keeping track I don’t think I ever got below ten arrows from a twenty arrow start, and that was with a multishot/rapid shot character in 3.5. Combat just moves so fast, and the best archers these days take one shot per round with true strike and sneak attack, and everybody else has a crossbow equivalent cantrip…
I was doing this so thoroughly with one DM once, and - on account of my enthusiasm, I think - it took him two or three sessions before he told me he just doesn’t give a shit if I count them.
I remember DMing for some players once and being surprised when one of them was actually keeping track of arrows and asked if I was using the normal rules to retrieve them (getting back half). I was both surprised and impressed that he was actually doing that even though that was the rules. I appreciated it though lol.
