The problem with decisions is that it’s entirely possible to make completely wrong decisions – and often bats$&% insane decisions – for all the right reasons. Now, keep in mind that I’m not talking about life in general, here. Just game mastering. I do not give life advice. Just GMing advice.

The thing is, it’s easy to fixate on things that SEEM important, that SEEM like they should matter, that SEEM like they should make your game your better, and to make big decisions based on those things. And to convince yourself you’re doing things right. But if you actually look long and hard at what you’re doing – or if some brutally honest, no-nonsense GMing guru on the Internet interrogates you mercilessly about it – you discover that you’ve done nothing to improve your game. At best, you’ve had no effect at all. At worst, you’ve overcomplicated things. Or imposed unfair restrictions on some of your players.

And that’s what today’s article is about. It’s about figuring out how your decisions are actually impacting your game. And it’s also about tracking ammunition in Dungeons & Dragons. Why you should. And why you probably do it wrong. Just like every other GM.

A Particularly Rapid, Unintelligible Patter on the Length of Short Rests

This is a story about how to handle ammunition tracking in Dungeons & Dragons. But it’s also about how well-intentioned GMs can make crazy-a$& and ultimately meaningless decisions for what seem like very good reasons. And it starts in my comment section. Specifically, it starts with a discussion about whether you should allow a random encounter or plot complication to interrupt a short rest. In D&D, a short rest is the period after a battle during which the heroes can bind their wounds, spend their hit dice, recover certain class abilities, and reset for the next encounter. And, for some stupid reason, they require the party to sit still for one hour.

Now, the question that starts this story is easy to answer. No. Do not interrupt a short rest with an encounter or plot complication. Not unless the party is doing something incredibly stupid. And resting after a battle is not incredibly stupid. It’s something the game rules tell the players they can do whenever they want. And the game is balanced around the idea that the party can recover after each battle. Abilities that are recovered after a short rest are abilities that the party is expected to have access to in every fight. If you start f$&%ing with the players’ ability to take short rests after every battle, you’re f$&%ing with the design of the game. And you’re also screwing the players out of something they know they are supposed to be able to do. Just imagine the situation where the party is hurting and needs a short rest and you ambush them in the middle of the short rest and someone days. Are they going to be like, “well, all’s fair in that; we did stop to rest and that’s the risk”? No. They are going to call you a murderous dick. And they’ll be right.

DO NOT DENY THE PLAYERS A SHORT REST!

But here’s the thing: the designers made it a point to establish that short rests require one hour of sitting around doing nothing. Why? Who the hell knows? I sure don’t. It’s a stupid design choice because the rest of the game’s design is very clearly in favor of the players taking a short rest whenever they want. If short rests were a limited resource, hit dice wouldn’t have to be a limited resource and they’d fully return after every long rest. But an hour is a long time to sit around doing nothing. It sure seems like it should have some impact on the game. Like it should represent some trade-off. “You can have your short rest, sure,” says the game, “but it’ll cost you one whole hour.”

But, in a TTRPG, game time is meaningless. Whether the party sits around for five minutes or fifty-five minutes, there’s no skin off the players’ nose. The GM will just say, “you sit around for umpty tump minutes and then carry on.” And unless there’s a ticking time bomb or magic ritual – and there usually isn’t – the time wasted doesn’t matter one little itsy bitty bit. It just doesn’t really matter.

Well, someone in the comment section – who shall remain nameless – looked at the whole short rest thing and saw something was wonky. I can’t figure out what it was they saw that was wonky and what wonkiness they were trying to fix. Because there’s a lot of wonkiness here that needs fixing. But the solution they proposed was to reduce short rests to 30 minutes to change the strategic decisions the party made. The comment is gone now because I had to burn down the comment section on that entire article because lots of people are dense a$&holes. Sorry to all the non-dense non-a$&holes who read my site and comment.

Anyway, that was the entirety of the comment: “I’m changing short rests to be 30 minutes to make the decision more strategic.” Something like that. No further explanation or analysis was offered.

And that is a perfect example of what I mean. Taking a short rest right now is a non-decision that does not have any impact on the game and, because of that, the hour-long timeframe is just too damned long. So, the obvious fix is to make them shorter. Except it won’t actually change a f$&%ing thing at the table. Because, as I noted, the passage of time in D&D is completely flexible anyway. An hour or ten hours or an entire day might as well be a couple of seconds for all it matters in the game.

And that’s the key. The key is not just to recognize a problem and propose a fix. The key is also to beat the hell out of that proposed fix and make sure it’s doing something. And it can be very hard to do that yourself. Every GM needs a friend – or an enemy – who will respond to “I propose this change to increase the strategic depth of the game” with “and how exactly does that actually change the strategic depth of the game? How does that affect what happens at the table at all? What will your change actually look like when you implement it?”

Ammunition Counting: I Should Give you My Advice on the Subject Willy-Nilly

Now, let me tell you the story of a different conversation I had with a fellow GM. I will also not name this particular GM because I’m afraid that, if I do, I’ll be sleeping on the couch for a week. But I do want to point something out. Because GMs can be elitist a$&holes who forget the mistakes they made when they were new to the game. If anyone is an elitist a&%hole to a person who has the power to banish me from the bedroom, I will not stop at deleting the comment. Or banning them.

Because, here’s the thing, this GM was handling ammunition counting badly. For all the right reasons. But she was also handling it pretty much the same way A LOT of GMs do. For all the right reasons. Hell, she was handling it the way I used to handle it. Badly. For all the right reasons. And before you read any further, I want you to think about how you – or your GM – handles ammunition counting at the table. Because I bet you do it badly too. For all the right reasons. It’s a really common thing to get wrong for all the right reasons.

I won’t recount the whole discussion. I’ll just get to the relevant bits. At her table, she has two characters who frequently used ranged weapons: a barbarian who carries a couple of javelins and an archer who carries a quiver of arrows. Pretty standard stuff. And she’s fallen into a pattern with ammo counting. She makes the barbarian keep track of each javelin thrown. And when the barbarian has thrown all three javelins, she can’t throw anymore. Which makes sense. At the end of the battle, the barbarian invariably looks to recover her javelins. There’s a quick exchange of dice to determine whether the javelins are immediately visible or will require an extensive search. The barbarian grabs the visible ones and then searches for the wayward javelins. Some more dice determine how much time is wasted on the search. And, eventually, the barbarian ends up with her javelins back.

This is fairly typical. I’ve seen this at lots of tables. And in my halcyon and carefree days – when I was the Halcyon and Carefree GM, that is – it’s pretty much how I handled big ammo that could only be carried in small quantities. Throwing knives, throwing axes, spears, javelins, and so on. Because it was prohibitive, especially at low levels, for players to carry enough of those weapons to carry them through an entire combat. Assuming you actually counted the cost, encumbrance, and asked the player just where the hell they were keeping those things. Though, obviously, it’s easier to carry large quantities of some weapons than others. Like a bandolier of throwing knives.

As for the archer? Well, this GM has gradually gotten away from asking the archer to track ammunition. Because it’s a pain. Which, again, is pretty typical behavior. And lots of GMs go this route. Lots of GMs don’t ask their archers and crossbowmen to track ammunition. Even me. Once upon a time.

If A GM is So Lucky as to Have a Steady Mother

Now, here’s the thing: most of the things GMs do at the table are the result of various rulings that get made over time. This GM I was talking to about ammunition, she didn’t make a conscious decision about her ammunition tracking rules. Instead, when the issue came up at the table, she just started doing what felt right. Asking the barbarian to mark off each javelin thrown? That was probably just what seemed like the proper way to do things. And then, after the first fight, the barbarian asked to collect her thrown javelins. It seemed right that there should be a chance that a javelin might get lost. So, the GM made a die roll. But then, the player asked if she could search harder for the lost javelin. And the GM, sensing the player didn’t want to give up the javelin as a lost cause, gave in. And thus, a system was born.

Meanwhile, the archer probably just wasn’t keeping track of ammo. Maybe she didn’t think it was important. Or she just got lazy. And it didn’t matter because she had enough ammo to get her through every fight. So, no one noticed she wasn’t tracking ammo. She didn’t think twice about it. And the GM never questioned it. And thus, a system was born.

Now, what’s funny is that, as my GMing friend and I were talking about this, she suddenly got a funny look on her face as she was explaining how she handled the archer and the barbarian. She suddenly said, “I think I’m doing something unfair.”

And THAT’S the thing. Most of the decisions a GM makes aren’t conscious decisions. They aren’t codified laws written by Congress or Parliament or by some psychotic Monarch. They are court rulings. Common law. Rulings from the bench. Precedents set at the table and applied consistently. THAT is why GMs can make wrong decisions for good reasons. Because the wrong decision is the sum total of a bunch of good judgments in isolation that altogether add up to inconsistent, overly complicated, unfair, or just plain wrong gamemastery.

Which is why it is super helpful to have someone to explain this stuff too out loud. The minute you start explaining your systems out loud, to another person, you recognize the inconsistencies. But it also helps if that person can then grill you mercilessly to help you spot all the inconsistencies.

The obvious bit of unfairness that my GMing friend spotted was that she was holding one player to one set of standards – track your ammo and if you run out, switch strategies – and another player to a different set of standards. And yes, that is unfair. Even though, for one player, the strategy is a supplemental strategy, and, for the other player, the strategy is a primary strategy. Both players should plan accordingly. The barbarian could carry more javelins. The archer can make sure her quiver is always full. And both can attempt to recover their spent ammo.

And if she had just stopped there – and she tried – my GMing friend would have just given up on tracking ammunition altogether. After all, she didn’t want to deny the archer her primary strategy. Obviously, the archer player wants to play an archer. And tracking ammo really is a pain in the a$&. Especially when it comes to recovering ammunition.

See, ammunition tracking amounts to two things. First, it amounts to bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is a pain. Second, it also adds a cost to attacks. The javelineer or knife thrower or archer or crossbowman constantly has to spend gold refilling their quivers and bandoleers. And that’s not fair. After all, swordsmen don’t have to constantly spend gold maintaining their swords.

Or is it fair?

See, D&D combat is an interesting beast. D&D is mostly a melee-focused game. Almost all of the rules in combat have to do with resolving melee attacks. The ranged combat rules are pretty anemic that basically amounts to “cover is a thing that sometimes happens.” The other rules, like range, are a non-issue 90% of the time. When’s the last time someone was actually OUT OF RANGE? When is the last time someone DROPPED PRONE to purposely make themselves a harder target in ranged combat?

Seriously, compare the D&D combat rules to any RPG set in a world with guns or phasers or blasters or whatever, and you’ll see what I mean. There are numerous range increments on weapons which provide accuracy bonuses and penalties, there’s aimed shot rules and snapshot rules, there’s rules that make targets harder to hit depending on how far they moved on their turn, and so on.

D&D is a melee-focused game. And most of the monsters in the Monster Manual are melee fighters as a result. And yet, melee combat sucks compared to literally any other type of combat in D&D. How? Well, let me lay it out for you.

Melee combat is actually highly restricted. You can only attack a foe if they are right next to you. Or within spitting distance if you invest in a reach weapon. And as a consequence of that, to make a melee attack, you have to be in harm’s way. Because if you’re next to your foe, they are next to you. And they can attack you.

But that’s not all. Because every melee combatant exerts a zone of control due to reach and opportunity attacks – a common and necessary feature of melee combat systems – it’s not easy to switch targets. Once you’ve decided on a particular target for your melee and moved into position, you have to risk getting stabbed in the back if you want to change targets. Unless the other target is nice enough to walk over to you.

And, as mentioned above, if you decide to attack someone who can fight at range, you need to get close to them. And until you do get close to them, they can attack you and you can’t do a damned thing about it. Fortunately, most battles happen at very short ranges, so you usually only get one arrow or firebolt to the face before you end up close enough to hit someone back. But still, it’s a weakness.

On top of all of that, there’s also the basic mechanics of ability scores working against you. Except for a small number of weapons who purposely do less damage, melee accuracy and melee damage are based on your Strength score. So what? Just make your melee character with a high Strength score. Sure, but here’s the other issue. Your defensive stats are based on Dexterity and Constitution. Constitution determines the number of hit points you’ve got. And you can’t ignore that. Because you have to be in harm’s way to make an attack. And your Dexterity score governs your armor class. Unless you wear heavy armor. And heavy armors get very expensive very quickly. Low-level melee characters still need to rely on Dexterity to some degree to keep themselves protected. And Strength governs almost nothing else. Because Strength saving throws are rare compared to other types of saves.

Compare that to ranged characters. Ranged characters can target just about anyone on the battlefield. If line of sight becomes an issue, they can usually move to get a clear shot or pick a different target. And they don’t have to be in harm’s way to make attacks. In fact, they are penalized if they do get into harm’s way. Sure, they are in danger from other ranged enemies. But ranged enemies are rare in the core game. Melee enemies are far more common.

On top of that, Dexterity governs ranged attack accuracy and damage in D&D. Which means the archer gets double duty. They get both an AC benefit and an attack and damage benefit from the same score. The same score which also governs Initiative rolls, which means ranged attackers are likely to attack before the melee characters can move into position. And Dexterity governs Dexterity saving throws as well. So, in addition to good AC to protect from incoming ranged attacks, they have a good saving throw to protect from some incoming spell attacks. And because archers don’t need to be in harm’s way to fight, Constitution is less of an issue. Though it is still valuable.

The point is ranged combat is a flat-out superior strategy. It’s better in every way.

The disadvantage, of course, is that ammunition is limited. That means you have to keep track of the ammunition, first of all, and that you run the risk of running out of ammunition during a given fight and having to fall back on an inferior strategy. Unless you don’t track ammo.

Oh, there is one other even more superior strategy. It’s called f$%&ing cantrips. Which are like ranged attacks, but with zero cost and zero downsides because someone decided wizards and clerics needed infinite ammo. Spellcasting with cantrips alone is hands down, the best general combat strategy in D&D.

But I digress.

The point is if you REALLY think it through – or you have a GM like me to beat you over the head with it – it’s actually not unfair that ranged combat should have some extra costs, restrictions, and trade-offs over melee combat. And if you’re going to let any ranged combatant off the hook for those costs and trade-offs, it should be the melee characters who only use ranged combat to occasionally supplement their abilities. Archers should be held to the higher standard.

So should wizards. But we can’t fix everything in one day.

A Die Roll that Doesn’t Really Matter

Before we come up with a better way to handle this whole ammunition thing, let’s talk about the whole “rolling to hunt down and recover your ammunition” idea. Because, believe it or not, the very concept of “recovering your ammo” can drive a GM in totally the wrong direction. To favor the barbarian with javelins over the archer. Exactly the way my friend did.

Recovering spent ammunition makes sense. It’s a logical thing for any player to do. And the more costly the ammo and the less you can carry, the more useful it is. So, the javelineer is going to hunt down their lost javelins at the end of the fight. Fine. But there should be a chance that those javelins might get lost, right? There’s got to be some risk.

So, I asked my friend – while we were talking about this – if she would really, REALLY, ever deny the barbarian her three javelins? Like, if the player kept searching for them and the die rolls kept sucking and the player refused to give up, would she – the GM – ever pronounce them lost forever? And, of course, the answer was no. My GM friend admitted she’d probably never really destroy those javelins.

The die roll was just to determine how much time the barbarian wasted searching for the lost javelins. That’s ultimately the conclusion my friend reached. Because now she was trying to explain the decision that her gut had led her too and realizing she hadn’t really thought it through. It was just another ruling.

So, I accepted that and then asked what that time cost the party? I asked if the party had a ticking timebomb they were racing. Nope. Of course not. I asked if the party would lose the opportunity to take a rest. Probably not. I asked if my GMing friend would ambush the barbarian with a random encounter while she was separated from the party searching the wilderness for her lost javelin. No. She wouldn’t do that. And that’s when it dawned on my friend that the search for the lost javelins did not affect the game at all. It just wasted time. Not game time. Not character time. Real time. Player time. Play time.

And with that, my friend realized that the way she was handling ammo was a mess. Just like it was for most GMs. And then, the healing could begin.

Your Eyes Are Fully Open to Your Ammo Situation

So, let’s lay out everything we’ve covered so far. Ammo needs to be tracked because ranged combat needs risks and costs to offset the fact that it’s so much better than the primary mode of combat the game is supposed to be about. And also because there’s nothing interesting about just being able to always implement your best strategy in every situation. So, players should have to periodically pay money to restock their ammo and players should have a risk of running out of ammunition so they have to deal with the problem by changing strategies or trying to recover ammo during the fight. Meanwhile, players should be able to recover their ammunition after the fight. Meanwhile also, we don’t want to waste game time on useless die rolls. Meanwhile also too, we don’t want to burden the game with a bunch of extra bookkeeping that doesn’t get us anywhere. So, how can we solve this dilemma?

Well, let me tell you how I do handle ammunition tracking in my games. Because, the thing is, that GMing friend? That was me. This was my journey.

Bwah! I’m just f$&%ing with you! It was The Tiny GM! I berated her for an hour in a hotel room in Seattle about the dumb way she handles ammunition in her game.

Bwah! No, I’m f$&%ing with you again! I didn’t berate her or call he dumb because I don’t want to die. And because this actually also was me. For years, I handled ammunition tracking in D&D and Pathfinder in increasingly stupid ways until I finally just gave up on it altogether. So, I was totally sympathetic. Because this is EVERY GM. It isn’t always about ammo, but every GM eventually has this weird system of contradictory and unfair rules that don’t seem contradictory or unfair until they are all explained out loud.

Anyway, here’s what I eventually settled on as the right way to track ammunition.

First, accept that ranged combatants are eventually going to want to try to recover spent ammo. The game rules do not – to my memory – address that issue and it’s a massive oversight. Because, eventually, it comes up at every table. And it’d be easier if the game built a more coherent ammo system. And please, for the love of f$&%, don’t tell me about the brilliant way Dungeon World does it. I know how Dungeon World does it. I don’t need to hear this s&$% anymore.

Second, accept no one WANTS to track ammo. It isn’t fun. But no one WANTS to track anything. That’s tough. Some tracking is necessary. It’s just a matter of minimizing it.

Third, understand that there’s ammunition and then there’s ammunition. That is to say, not all ranged attacks are created equally. You’ve got your thrown weapons – spears, daggers, throwing axes, bolas, bwaka knives, boomerangs, chakrams, etc. – which are expensive, durable, and generally are carried in small numbers. Yes, some people will carry a lot of thrown daggers. And if they want to spend the money, good on them. Second, you’ve got your ammunition – arrows, quarrels, sling stones, darts, shurikens – which are cheap, small, and carried in large quantities. And you can argue that darts and shurikens are thrown weapons. And you’d be wrong. Because I gave very nice, clear descriptors and ammunition is defined as “cheap, small, and usually carried in large quantities.” If you don’t like my definitions, get your own f$&%ing blog.

If you can accept those three things, you can handle tracking ammo the smart, Angry way.

See, the reason to divide up ranged attacks into thrown weapons and ammunition – and to consider some types of thrown weapons to be ammunition – is because of the interplay between the two costs of ranged combat. Thrown weapons are only rarely replaced, but combatants run out of them every combat. Ammunition is replaced frequently, but combatants only run out of them every few fights. At least, that’s how it should be.

Consider the javelineer and the archer, for example. The javelineer usually carries two or three javelins. Because they are bulky, heavy, and comparatively expensive. Because most fights in D&D last three to six rounds, the javelineer will run out of javelins in most fights if they use them as a primary strategy. The archer, meanwhile, usually carries about twenty arrows in a standard-issue D&D quiver. They will only run out of arrows every third or fourth fight.

Meanwhile, at the end of the fight, the javelineer is almost always able to recover their javelins. They are durable, so they rarely get broken. They don’t go very far compared to arrows, so they are not going to disappear over the horizon. And they are pretty big, so they are easy to spot. Even throwing knives are relatively easy to recover. But arrows, sling stones, quarrels, and other bits of ammunition are less durable and tend to get broken or, at least, ruined. They have a much longer range, so they do vanish over long distances. And they are small and easy to lose in the underbrush, rubble, or whatever else is littering the landscape.

And that is why I don’t call ammunition “throwing weapons” and “ammo.” I call it “recoverable” and “breakable.” Recoverable items – that’s your spears and javelins and daggers – have to be tracked. When you make an attack with a recoverable ranged weapon, you have to mark it off as spent. And when you have no more, you can’t attack with that weapon unless you run over to where it is and pick it up. And if your attack is a miss, I decide where the ammo ended up. Either it bonked off a wall or, in the wilderness, it went up to somewhere around its maximum range and hit the ground. I just wing it. And often, I don’t even bother deciding where it ended up unless a player tries to recover it mid-fight. That’s pretty rare.

Breakable ammo – arrows, bolts, shurikens, darts, and stones – those work differently. And this is where I use an abstract quantum quiver thing that will break some GMs’ brains because I want to compromise between bookkeeping and simulation and avoid any die rolls at all for this sort of useless crap. But Shroedinger’s quiver is really the best way. Just remember this rule: a quiver, bolt case, pouch of darts or bullets or shurikens or whatever always has one more piece of ammo in it unless the last piece of ammo in it gets lost or broken. And ammo only gets lost or broken on a miss or on a critical hit. Oh, and your ammo bag is always empty whenever you have any downtime.

That probably all sounds bats$&% crazy. Let me explain.

Suppose you’re an archer. You buy a quiver with 20 arrows in it and set out on your adventure. A fight breaks out during your adventure. So, you pull an arrow from your quiver, nock it, loose it, and roll an attack roll. If the attack is a normal hit, you don’t have to do anything. Just roll damage and cheer. And there’s more ammo in your quiver. But, if your attack misses, mark off the arrow as lost forever. Either it flew off over the horizon and will never be found or it hit the dungeon wall and splintered. And if your attack is a critical hit, mark off the arrow as broken. It got lodged in a bone or skull or it snapped when the enemy fell on it as they died. Whatever. It’s just busted.

At the end of the battle, the archer and the javelineer will scramble around picking up their ammo as part of the “loot the corpses, clean up, and argue about whether to waste an entire hour taking a short rest or not” thing. The archer doesn’t haven’t to do anything because they marked off only the ammo they wouldn’t be able to recover at the end of the fight. The javelineer has to erase their little tick marks. Done and done.

When the party has downtime – between adventurers or after completing major objectives or whenever I say so – the archer discovers their quiver is empty. They have to buy twenty new arrows. Because that’s the price of being an archer. Or shurikeneer. Or whatever.

Occasionally, the archer will have a bad enough run of luck – or a very lucky hot streak – or the party will squeeze in a few too many encounters before heading back to town and they will find that they just lost their last piece of ammo. And they will have to switch strategies. Or they might notice they are running low on ammo and play more conservatively. And that’s when the game gets interesting. But mostly, they just have to drop some coin on keeping their ammo bag full and it won’t be a big issue.

And that’s how I handle ammo. And how The Tiny GM is now handling ammo. And how you should handle ammo. And also why I’m THIS close to requiring spell components from quantum component pouches for cantrips. Especially because I’ve noticed that a lot of spellcasters cast nothing BUT cantrips because they are an infinite resources and spells are too valuable to waste on some piddling little dragon when there’s a chance an even larger dragon might be waiting around the corner. But the cantrip problem is a story for another time.

Oh, and one last note, it’s from Ruddigore. Not Pirates of Penzance. Everyone gets that wrong because of the Joseph Papp production.