I've been thinking about ammunition mechanics in ttrpg lately. They're generally sidelined in games that includes fight mechanics, but they're still kinda there, kind of around. They have to be adressed in some ways because it feels normal that when shooting with a ranged weapon, ammo's there. It's also, with range, the one thing that make ranged weapons immediately mechanically different from melee weapons. And I wanna talk about the ways games make that fun - or forget to make that fun!
Let's start with the basic, and to show my hand a bit, I'll also start by saying this is both the most boring one and the worst one. Hand-counted ammunition. The idea is that you have a set amount of ammunitions, probably separated by type (arrows, bolts, bullets...), and everytime you shoot you note down that you're one ammunition down. This is the classic Dungeons & Dragons ammunition system. It's a lot of book keeping for something that has good chances to never be relevant, but it does provide with a linear tension. The longer the fight, the closer you get to having no ammo left and having to change tactics. Which will only happen if you do the same thing every turn, an already boring way to play. In that sense, it could be used as a way to push players out of a comfortable but repetitive and boring gameplay pattern. That method usually comes with a few questions from players : can I recover and/or repair ammo that was shot? Are ammunitions expensive and/or hard to come by? Are they cumbersome to carry around and do we have a workable encumbrance system to deal with that? And why should I care about all of that? Unless the game is about scarcity of ressources, I find this method to be book keeping without benefits.
There is one way to make that method immediately more appealing, and it's to make the hand-count's limit be just one bullet. You can shoot several times in the span of a session, but weapons are so long to reload you're probably going to shoot only once in a fight. That's the case in Blades in the Dark, Seventh Sea and Spire, and immediately make ranged weapons more unique. 7th Sea is outstanding here, as bullets create dramatic wounds, immediately provoking mechanical and narrative consequences when they hit.
Pros :
- Linear tension-building
- Can be made more extreme to distinguish ranged weapons efficiently
Cons :
- Book keeping
- No mechanical depth
- Requires a decent economy and/or encumbrance system to ever be relevant
The other common method is the hero's ammo. It's the easiest to deal with, too : you don't care about ammunition. You can shoot all you want, you'll never run out of arrows and your laser pistol will never overheat. I said hand-counted was the dnd way just before, but that method is the way a lot of people actually play dnd. To look at games that use that method by design instead of by default, there's FFG's Star Wars, Fabula Ultima, 3.16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, City of Mist... And a bunch of other games honestly. The goal of that method seems to get rid of book keeping, and I can't deny it, it works. I don't really see any additional benefit, but making the game simpler is already a huge deal to create space for other mechanics.
Pros :
- No book keeping
- The easiest to teach/learn
- No noise
Cons :
- No mechanical depth
An interlude : what happens when the hero hand-counts? There are a few games that do both previous methods at once, and at least one of them does this in a way that I think works well. In The One Ring, you don't count arrows, but you do count weapons that are made to be thrown (mostly javelins). The game isn't really about scarcity of ressources, riches are abstracted to a point where buying individual arrows would be absurd. But the game focuses its traveling and fighting mechanics on the weariness of your character. Taking a hit reduces your endurance, but so does wearing the armor you want to have to prevent that hit to kill you on the spot. In that situation, your choice of weapons is decided, in part, on their weight.
It could look like thrown weapons are unappealing, but they're made light enough that they're still tempting, shooting with a bow is complicated enough that someone who doesn't specialize in it will never pick up one, throwing a javelin uses the same skills as fighting with a spear (so the XP investment can be mitigated), and combat rules make it so you can almost always shoot once before getting into melee. With that perspective, the offer becomes tempting : do you want a free attack at the start of every fight, for just a little extra weight? The method used by TOR will not work with most games, but I thought it was worth mentionning to show how some methods can be bridged to gain the benefits of both, although it also diminishes some of their benefit. The linear tension of losing ammo doesn't exist if you know you'll always start a fight by depleting all your ammunitions anyway.
The quartermaster's method is how I'll call systems that hand count ammunition with the purpose of giving options. You don't have a quiver with 20 arrows, instead you have a quiver with 10 arrows, 5 armor-piercing arrows, 2 rope-cutters, and 3 blunt arrows. The two games that come to mind when thinking about this are Legend of Five Rings fourth edition, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. It has all the issues of hand-counted ammunitions, and add a layer of book keeping to that. What is expected to be gained in return is tactical depth. An archer now has more than one tool to deal with a problem, which is good! It is good, right? Well, in L5R4 I found it underwhelming. There's no scarcity of ressources, and no real choice to be made. You'll always just shoot the best arrow for the best situation, and because situations are easy to read and ammunitions simple in design (which is neccessary to keep the book keeping manageable), what arrow is best is not a tactical choice with any depth.
I want to argue that tactical depth is the perceived benefit, while the real benefit is preparation. Or to say it in other words : book keeping isn't the issue, it's the goal. In WFRP 4e, ammunitions are easy to come by. If you're an archer. Or if you're rich. The large variety of weapons and types of ammunitions, as well as the disparity in riches (both in-world and inside a single party) make it so book keeping is its own game. You can't go into every single battle with every single type of ammo, so you'll often not be able to simply "choose what arrow is best" : you have to anticipate what arrow will be best in a few hours or sessions, and buy it now, hoping your guess is educated enough.
You know the players will be short on money when the game includes sharp sticks and pebbles as ammo.
In that situation, ammunitions also work as a sort of level up. Getting richer, having access to better contacts, that will grant you access to better munitions. Elven arrows that seek their target, alchemical powder that makes pistols even more terrifying... Your skills and talents are super important in WFRP, but they'll always be growing and growing. Gear will turn the tides just as surely, but it can be lost, damaged, and spent. Add to that a crafting system (maybe alchemical powder is a bit too expensive, surely we could make it ourselves... Hey, maybe we could even sell it?), a workable encumbrance system (well, reloading's long, but I could just carry four guns, couldn't I? I'll just need to leave my sword behind...), and you have a system that works! If that's what the table is going for. With book keeping being displaced from hindrances to benefits, the quartermaster's method requires a clear buy-in from the players, from the get-go.
An addendum about variety. I've mostly seen realistic(-ish) ammunitions for that system. Grapeshots, barbed arrows, rope-cutters... It makes sense, as it's often existing in games that try to appear as down-to-earth. However, I think there's a wealth to be explored here, with more esoteric ammunitions. Blessed silver bullets, runic arrows, crossbow bolts that turn into snakes, that sort of things. There's room to move away from just differentiating how much damage is made and range/precision buff/debuff. We could take inspiration from elemental ammunitions in Mass Effect or No_Tables' genshin shorts.
Pros :
- Linear tension-building
- Adds light tactical decision-making
- Can be a lot of fun for games where book keeping is the point
Cons :
- Book keeping is getting off the charts
- Requires a lot of work from the designers
Surely abstraction can work when it comes to knowing how many arrows you can still shoot. Let's call this category speed loading, as in revolver speed-loaders. The base idea is that you're not counting ammunitions, but groups of ammunitions. Instead of a quiver with 20 arrows, you have the picture of a quiver and three little dots beside it. Games will offer different ways to track that down, but I'll use Mausritter as an example for this category as I think it does it formidably well. Your adventuring mouse, if she wants to fight at range, will have one of her inventory slots filled by an arrow quiver or a pouch of sling stones. At the end of a fight in Mausritter, you roll a d6 if you shot. On a 4+, you lose one use of your quiver, which starts with three.
This means the book keeping is extremely simple, it's a yes/no rather than numbers, and it's kept at the end of the fight. Once dust has settled and action isn't priority anymore, you can go through your arrows and see what's left. Because the usage is randomized, it also means the tension is non-linear. A lucky mouse might be able to shoot all the time, and an unlucky one might be depleted of a third of her stones just because she used her sling in the first round. In another system, we could easily imagine this being influenced by character skills. Maybe you roll as many dice as your Ranged Attack skill and you only keep the lowest, you have a special talent that make you lose ammo on 5+ instead of 4+, or something like that.
Trophy uses something similar, checking if you lose ammo on each shot but taking the roll's result to determine that, each 1, 2 and 3 rolled removing one of your ammo slot. You can even choose to risk more ammo in order to get more dice, which is a fun little risk & reward mini game for ranged fighters.
The only issue I can see with that method is that you still need to know how many quivers (or equivalent) you can transport. Mausritter's encumbrance system is the mechanical core of the game, so it has a readied answer for that. Trophy waves it by saying "you have one". And honestly, it works! It just needs to be clear.
If you play Mausritter, you know this mechanic isn't unique to ammo, in fact all items work like this. That's how flexible that system is, and how smart the mouse game is.
Pros :
- Non-linear tension-building
- Easy to teach & learn
- Can be connected to character skills, but doesn't need it
- Almost no book keeping on the player side, and kept out of high-intensity scene
- No book keeping on the GM side
Cons :
- Require at least a barebone encumbrance system
The next one is close in spirit, but I found it different enough that it claimed another spot, and we'll call that spot action movie ammo. Still, you'll see that this method and speed loading can be bridged fairly easily. Movie heroes need to reload, but only when it's dramatic. The example game I'll use for this category is Wrath & Glory, because it does it in two different ways that I think are complementary and I had trouble finding other games that do both at once.
In W&G, most weapons will require ammo but won't require you to keep track of them (a few weapons require spending an ammunition on each shot, but they're exceptions rather than the norm). However, you can chose to deplete your gun in order to unleash a barrage of fire. Maybe you're trying to pin down an ennemy, or mow down a mob of orks. What's important is that you choose it, in exchange for a direct mechanical benefit. You'll have to reload in order to keep shooting after that, which might push you to try something else rather than lose that action. It's a dramatic moment where you empty your clip, casings fly left and right, and you expect good results. It gives a type of tactical decision that I think the previous systems never offer, because it touches on both your items and your action economy.
And there's a caveat that can make that choice tempting. In W&G, when you roll, one of the dice is in another color. It's a sort of consequence die, a 6 will let you add a positive while a 1 will add a negative, whatever the overall result of the roll is. When you shoot, a 1 on that "wrath die" will deplete your clip. This means you can chose to deplete it on purpose to gain a benefit, or shoot in the normal way and take the risk to deplete it anyway, even if it's a small risk.
That second part (a negative consequence making you lose ammo) is the one I found more often among them, but I think what makes it shine is the presence of the first part.
Pros :
- Rich tactical depth
- Can be connected to character skills for even more depth
- Light book keeping
Cons :
- Can feel random at times
Art by Siman Vlaisavljević
Hand-counted, the hero's ammo, the quartermaster's method, speed loading and action movie ammo are the five ones I found the most while digging into this topic. However, a few games do things in a way that caught my attention, but weren't replicated elsewhere.
Five Torches Deep requires you to hand count your arrows, but when you're all out you can replenish them by spending supply points. The same ressource is used for oil, potions, spell components, rations and all of that sort of stuff. This is somewhere between hand count and speed loading, especially if you use the possible simplification where one supply's worth of arrows is "one fight" instead of "ten arrows". It reminds me of Fabula Ultima's Inventory Point system too, as the quantity of supplies are known, but what they are is decided when it's needed for the story to progress.
Ironsworn goes deeper into the abstraction. Your party has a supply track going from 0 to +5. As long as it's not 0, things are fine, but it will decreases as issues diminish your material means. Once it hits 0, you start running out of things, you feel unprepared for what's to come and negative consequences will pile up. This isn't an ammunition mechanic per se, but I wanted to include it as I think it worked great as a way to measure material preparedness, and could be bridged with speed loading.
Magnagothica Maleghast isn't a ttrpg, but it had a reloading system that caught my interest. When a character of the Carcass faction shoots, that attack becomes unavailable until they reload, which is a move action (so they can move and shoot, but next turn if they'll want to shoot they won't be able to move). But the faction includes several ways to facilitate reloading. A critical hit will auto reload the gun that shot it, there's a little goblin who can reload other units' weapons, and they can even use corpses as ammunition, which pushes you to think your movement with the position of the deceased in mind. I think it's a good example of a game that makes reloading tactical and fun, instead of a chore you have to go through after shooting.
Video games had to deal with ammunitions and reloading for some time too, now. Doom's glory kill and Lisa's scarcity come to mind. I recommend anyone who's trying to create an ammunition system for their game to look outside of the ttrpg sphere. I also left out mech games like Lancer or Battle Century, but I'm sure those have interesting ammo tech in them. I just haven't read and play them yet!
This cataloguing of mechanics should provide you with enough ammo to think about how ammo is used in your games. I hope I've made clear the way that seems the more obvious ends up being the least useful one. If you want fights to be important in your game, ammunitions will come up sooner or later, and adressing them will solve many issue that ignoring them would create. Solving problems isn't all that ammo can do either, as they can also create interesting gameplay patterns. Yet even then, it's easy to confuse interesting with fun, and create a system that bogs down the whole soup instead of giving it a nice flavor. Make sure you load just the right amount of mechanical bullets your game needs!
