Some people like crunch in their game, some people do not. How about a little of both? I wanted to catch up on the Dicember challenge by doing the December 1st entry on ammo.
That’s a loaded one. (get it?)
Usage dice, inventory tracking, effective ranges – this stuff is great fodder for blogs. Maybe on my way to being a real blog (one day) I should tackle this one. I did some research, not enough to fall down the rabbit hole but more than I should have.
A medieval archer could shoot somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 24 arrows per minute. For my own mathematical purposes I’m going to split the difference and call it 18. That comes out to .3 arrows fired per second.
A D&D combat round is somewhere between 6 and 10 seconds depending on the edition. We will split the difference again and call it 8.
That means in a combat round an archer is letting loose an average of 2.4 arrows. That means that an archer would use all 24 arrows in their sheaf in 10 rounds! (That’s right, forget the quiver. A real archer uses a sheaf which, from what I can tell, is a bundle of arrows tied around the middle with a string).
Now, through my limited research arrows appear to be pretty durable except when striking hard surfaces. Most arrows were designed to penetrate armor at close range (think “dungeon range”) so when I say “hard surface” I’m talking rock and stone walls.
So now that I thought about it, what am I going to do?
At the end of combat they can recover all the hits and half the misses by taking a turn to search (faster than making a check for 50% for each miss).
Really thinking through it I like how this blends realism with necessary abstraction to create a simple tracking system. It also puts some pressure on missile weapons when you think about how much ammo they actually have to carry because just like a melee attack is an abstraction of several swings, a ranged attack is also probably an abstraction of several shots.
