There was a time when blog posts were simpler for me. Typed hastily using the scant few hours between dragging myself home from work, and collapsing into unwilling sleep. No proofreaders were consulted, no rewrites, no editing passes, no research, no lofty expectations. Blogs were a method of conversing casually with the scene, used the way discord, mastadon, or twitter might be today. I can’t go home again—nor would I want to—but we can occasionally indulge ourselves. Better yet, we can revisit old forms to see what new life we might find there. So, prompted by Dyson, I’m initiating No-Effort Dicember on Papers & Pencils this year. One post every day. Their subjects won’t be thoroughly considered, their structure will ramble, their sentences will run-on, and typos will frequently go uncorrected.
I had set the notion for myself that I’d try and draft a rough procedure for each of the prompts, but already here on day one I can’t do it. Ammo is a solved problem for me. Brendan solved it way back in 2012 by attaching an exhaustion die to each quiver (or other unit of ammunition storage). There are a few good permutations on the idea to choose between. For example, the exhaustion die may be rolled each time a shot is fired, or it may be rolled at the end of an encounter. A 1 might indicate the ammo is depleted, or simply that the exhaustion die changes to one with fewer faces, or a 1 may mean the character only has a single shot left. That last one is my favorite. Lends itself well to creating tense situations.
The only real trouble I have with running ammunition this way is that it requires the referee to be somewhat strict about encumbrance and economy. Those are both aspects of play that I admire, but struggle to implement consistently. It’s not a problem that can be solved by a better ammunition tracking rule.
So instead of coming up with a procedure for ammunition, I’ll reminisce about a game in which ammo was meaningful for me. I was playing in Brendan’s Pahvelorn game with Ram, Gus, and a few other folk I’ve lost touch with over the years. This would be circa 2011~2012. I was at this time thoroughly enchanted with the play style of OSR games, but my own mindset was still stuck in a video-gamey, neo-trad perspective from years of playing WotC’s 3rd Edition. Our party was adventuring overland, and encountered a monster way too tough for us to deal with. A giant or some such paragon-level encounter. The sort of thing that takes planning, potions, and maybe a GMPC to overcome via an hours-long combat encounter in the games I was used to playing at the time. We were considering fleeing when Ram’s cleric* archer Satyavati fires a great big black arrow of doom at the monster, who instantly pops away into nothing.
In another game it might have been considered an anti-climax for this great big party-annihilating threat to be felled so easily. But it was a GREAT climax to the story of finding this arrow deep in the vaults of Pahvelorn, saving it, and knowing just when to deploy it. I remember feeling amazing, and I wasn’t even the one who did anything cool. This is a sort of ammunition tracking that is often easier to manage. Arrows and bullets are simple tools that move in and out of a character’s inventory so frequently that tracking them is difficult to make fun. Single-use magic ammunition, though, gives a player that experience of managing scarcity, without verging on the tedious.
(Apparently Satyavati was actually a Magic User? I don’t know why I remember him as a cleric.)
Check out www.DYSONLOGOS.com/DICEMBER to see other participants.
