My DM never gave a shit or required me to buy arrows. I tracked them sometimes anyway, but we always just shrugged and said I either fletched my own during downtime, or that arrows were included in general party upkeep/funds.
this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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Arrow! Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true King under the Mountain, go now and speed well"
DM: "Okay, fine. But after this you can't use it again."
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.
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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.
I memorize which items have a good weight to value ratio and don't pick up the junk. When I was young I would take everything in multiple trips, but I ain't got time for that now.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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.
But jars aren't worth as much as doors
That's when you close it. Then it's no longer ajar
True but how many jars can you carry compared to doors?
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I keep track of ammo until it becomes clear it becomes a non issue (ie: when the party gets rich enough that it doesn't matter.)
Then at this point I only keep track of special ammo.
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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
I like it! It neatly models the variability of arrows being recoverable and unbroken.
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There are some formats where inventory management becomes interesting again. We tried doing a Hexcrawl earlier this year and there was a lot of interesting gameplay to be had in the risk/reward management of how many supplies they wanted to carry vs how much they wanted to invest in pack animals, limiting their ability to carry loot back, carrying this vs that, guessing how much they'll use before they can resupply or where future resupplies might be, gambling on whether to press forward and risk running out or turn back, that kind of thing. It's just the more currently popular adventure structures right now (eg linear or branching narratives) where inventory tracking is superfluous.
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.
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