We play with the we don’t track arrows and encumbrance unless you start trying to steal all the doors in the dungeon. The stealing of doors did happen with a group before I joined. We keep the rule just in case
Stealing doors is easy, you just have to open it and then it becomes a jar. Jars are easier to carry away than doors.
Did reinstitution of the encoumbrance rules quell the door thieving, or just make them keep paperwork on it?
We just buy 50 rations and a barrel of booze session 1 and it some how never runs out unless there’s a crazy party. I think once we had some travel session that fast forward months of travel where he managed resources for a bit.
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.
Every group I’ve been in the archers just bought more than they could ever use and someone in the party could carry the extras. Like every time they go back to town they drop 5 gp for 100 arrows.
Mostly, I agree. However, part of why it has a cost is to be a sink for gold. Sure, it’s not much, but it does add up. However, there are better ways to handle it than to track arrows.
Just make your players occasionally pay for upkeep of their gear when they’re in town. This could be themes as repairs for weapons an armor, more arrows, spellcasting supplies, food, etc. This does two things. You can give them more value in rewards and it makes them feel like they’re actually adventurers, not just game characters.
Alternatively, scale rewards down. They don’t have to know about it, but if they’re not paying for supplies then they’re going to get more value than is expected (by the rules).
Or, the final option, just ignore it. It theoretically adds up to a lot of value over the course of the game, especially for spellcasting, but who cares? If you notice they have enough money that they stop worrying about it then you can do something.
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.
Or you could save on rolls and say you’re out of arrows on a natural 1.
the big thing is just that your inventory management can just be a number and you don’t have to think so hard about it if that’s not something you or your players find joy in while playing make believe together
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.
Converts my one electrum to 50 cp. Now I have infinite money!
And that’s how the party ends up on the run for counterfeiting.
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.
I don’t mind encumberance that much. I think it’s necessary if you’re making any attempt at balancing the economy. Without it the player returns back to town with every bit of loot from the dungeon to sell, and the economy doesn’t matter anymore.
However, any game that has an encumberance mechanic absolutely has to have a weight/value sort and display. I don’t know why this is so hard for them to implement. Bethesda games never do, and I’m playing Tainted Grail (I’ve heard lots of good things, and it’s alright so far) and it doesn’t. With any amount of playtesting they’d get overencumbered, try to figure out what to drop and instantly realize they want to drop the highest weight/value items, and there’s no way to view this! How do you not add it?
In SP RPG games it’s stupid. I’m just going to make however many trips back and forth it takes to empty the dungeon anyway. Might as well let me do it in one shot so I can get on to the next thing. I get it in survival crafting type games (within reason) but no reason games like skyrim or fallout need an encumbrance mechanic when you need a fuckload of stuff to level your crafting skills.
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.
You can keep cyanide in your digestive tract so that she/he can make inventory tracking a complete non-issue for you specifically ☝️🤓
Brilliant. Well done.
thanks, I have my moments.
I’m honored to have shared the decade occurrence with you
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?
I mean, if we’re taking zeros and ones, yeah it’s definitely binary. If we’re talking gender, it’s absolutely non-binary.
Hence the “ “ The virtue signaling period is over mate.
Why would you use ChatGPT to emulate a word processor? You get all the functionality you need without ever hitting enter.
I’m wondering if they mean have ChatGPT reading the messages in Discord and automatically tracking it? It should be able to do that, but I’m not sure about the specifics. And it’s not something LLMs are good at, so you have to be able to work around it. It would basically need to notice whenever you use an item, then tell something else to remove that from you inventory.
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.
The AI has rotted your brain man. Tracking arrows, what this entire post is about, doesn’t need a fucking LLM. It needs tally marks on a sheet of paper, at most.
Regarding inventory management in general: Why the fuck would you ever use an LLM for something you can do in Notepad? Want to be fancy? Use More Purple More Better’s editable PDF player sheet templates. You can load in sourcebook data from external sources easily and have everything from every sourcebook at your fingertips. And you can still enter custom shit like custom magical items easily.
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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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?
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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
