D&D (2024) Poll) Will the DMG2024 have Infinite Quivers?

[Crimson Longinus]

In BG1 and 2 I would buy hundreds of arrows at a time. It was so very pointless. Same with actual D&D. Buy 100 arrows. Fill quiver. Put some in backpack. Put the rest in saddlebags on horse. Refill quiver as needed. It was pointless to track.

Exactly this. It makes sense to track stuff like spell slots, as they actually can realistically run out, and you need to make decision about when to use them. It is trivial to assure that you have enough arrows for any practical scenario, so tracking them is bloody pointless.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In BG1 and 2 I would buy hundreds of arrows at a time. It was so very pointless. Same with actual D&D. Buy 100 arrows. Fill quiver. Put some in backpack. Put the rest in saddlebags on horse. Refill quiver as needed. It was pointless to track.

It definitely feels like a legacy of the earlier dungeon survival vibe.

In more intentionally designed dungeon survival games, inventory management and encumbrance are a key part of hitting the vibe. A lot these days use a limited "slot" system where maybe a dagger or about 10 arrows fit into a "slot" and you only have about 10 slots or so total (and weapons and armor and coins and rations and torches all fill up slots). Choosing to take 10 arrows with you is a decision with significant impact, since you're almost certainly leaving something else behind that could meaningfully impact your survival. 100 arrows would just fill up your inventory, or nearly so (so no bow, no armor, nothing else - hope you like throwing and eating arrows!).

D&D hasn't been designing for that kind of game for a while, which is fine, but it still has some of these throwbacks that sort of cosplay as dungeon survival.

Which is why there's even a possibility of something like an infinite quiver, I think: because it erases a part of the game that the rest of the game also would be fine erasing, but that for some reason some of the devs hold onto.

 

[CleverNickName]

But yeah, me keeping 4 stacks of 20 arrows on everyone was a lot of book keeping. Come back to town, sell my loot. Buy back up my arrows, repeat.

If I were running an in-person gaming group, I'd agree completely. Fortunately, we are playing on a virtual tabletop via Roll20, and things like XP and ammunition are tracked automatically. You make an attack with your bow, your arrow inventory diminishes by 1. You buy 20 arrows, your arrow inventory increases by 20. You don't have to remember to toggle anything on or off, you don't have to do any math at all.

And if you toggle on the rules for Encumbrance, not only does Roll20 automatically add/subtract your arrows, but it also automatically adds/subtracts the weight of those arrows. (shrug) It all happens in the background.

 

[Willie the Duck]

The fact that I've had to houserules endless quivers as simple magic items in, I think, every edition I've ran is WILD to me. So, what do we think? Hank's Energy Bow is in, but is there a basic quiver of endless arrows?

I remember in the first childhood basic D&D game I ran, I made 'Bags' of infinite arrows a mainstay magic item (don't remember if I didn't know what a quiver was/was called, or was going for a reference to bags of holding). There's a reason to want such a thing. It 'solves' the issue of ammo tracking. That has parity with things like bags of holding, which solve the encumbrance tracking issue. Same with Light cantrip and Goodberry spell for illumination and sustenance tracking.

While it would be good to fill out the roster (although I think Hank's bow is sufficient for this task), I'd also argue that it would instead be good to remove the other three instead. Replace them all with a sidebar optional rule about just not tracking encumbrance, food/water, ammo, or light if you do not want to. This is as trivially easy as radio buttons on D&D Beyond, or session 0 table agreement for pen and paper players.

The Bag of Holding made sense in oD&D (and has been legacy ever since). There, you might have wanted to start out tracking every pound of encumbrance and every copper spent on arrows and torches (those careful resource management decisions supposedly so important to the game); but then when you are getting bored of it for a campaign switch to handwavium as you leave the dungeons for hexcrawling*. There you can, oh look, just happen to have accumulated enough bags of holding not to really have to worry about it anymore. If instead you want to just not track such things in your game at all, special magic items (and spells) aren't really needed, just don't do so. *I use this as my break point because BX and later had a fixed allotment of encumbrance for food and basic survival gear, and did not change that for the Expert rules, suggesting perhaps by the time you might want to pack extra rations we maybe weren't looking too closely at the encumbrance rules.

You can automatically hit something from long range behind 3/4 cover as long as you can see a bit of it.
It's good at taking out escaping creatures, tiny low hp hard to hit creatures, really good at forcing enemy creatures to come to you if you have a way to scry ahead, and good at forcing concentration checks on something very important.
Probably best on a low dex fighter who has trouble with long range.
Best use might come up only once or twice in a campaign but when it does it's very good to have it and could save the day.

The situation where it was what saved the day is going to be rare enough that you won't know to keep the auto-hit weakbow* around and not the set of stonemason's tools, or the vial of gelatinous cube goo you collected in adventure #2, or whatever. I think half of groups (particularly if you don't track encumbrance) have/had 'that one guy' who does run around with all those things, waiting for a use for them. At least until there are some consequences or they get made fun of for it or something like that. *I'm assuming you can't sneak attack with it. Otherwise I know lots of rogues who would love to have the thing, 1d4 base damage hardly matters when assuring you get your SA damage in.

I think a D&D game where the dungeons are about survival, preparation, and tactics does not preclude story at all. You can have a lot of story or very little story. The two don't correlate necessarily. Now does the former tend to have less of the latter? I don't know. It doesn't in my campaigns but I will admit I have no knowledge beyond just my experience about the greater gaming world in general in this area.

I don't think people really mean preclude. Instead it tends to be a situation of conservation of focus. A game can include multitudes, but generally end up focusing on a subset of the possible. You can have survival*/tactics games with story just like you can have games focusing on treasure-hunts where you also save the world or the like, but generally one play loop or the other is going to get short shrift.
*although if the overall survival rate of an individual character is too low, then it limits the stories somewhat to group-goal type things rather than those based on individual goals or relationships

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's a more general genre statement. Yeah, you can have story in any game. But, a game where the main challenge is surviving a hostile environment where you need to carefully track resources is a different vibe than a game where the main challenge is to grow and change as a character and thwart personal antagonists in a satisfying story arc. Though a game can dip a bit into both camps, it'll ultimately design better for one or the other. Counting arrows ultimately has very little to say about character and narrative. If your game counts arrows, it's prioritizing the dungeon survival aspect in that regard. And if its other mechanics don't also support that vibe (for instance, if your healing is generous and ample and your PC's are typically expected to be maxxed out on hit points at the start of combat), you'll have a game that's pulling in a few different directions.

Quite true. It's why I've always objecting to a game that has always been called Dungeons & Dragons regularly morphing into a different game when a new design team or corporation gets a hold of it. TSR D&D and each different version of WotC D&D are very different games with different rules which support different goals. That much change should not be represented as the same game with the same name.

 

[Emerikol]

It's a more general genre statement. Yeah, you can have story in any game. But, a game where the main challenge is surviving a hostile environment where you need to carefully track resources is a different vibe than a game where the main challenge is to grow and change as a character and thwart personal antagonists in a satisfying story arc. Though a game can dip a bit into both camps, it'll ultimately design better for one or the other. Counting arrows ultimately has very little to say about character and narrative. If your game counts arrows, it's prioritizing the dungeon survival aspect in that regard. And if its other mechanics don't also support that vibe (for instance, if your healing is generous and ample and your PC's are typically expected to be maxxed out on hit points at the start of combat), you'll have a game that's pulling in a few different directions.

I just think story is something that applies across a lot of genres. Maybe internal change is something not every group does with their PCs but hated villains is very central to such games I'd argue. So if people were watching the game and it was getting translated into a movie, the movie would not be a drama. It would be an action movie but having said this, it would still have drama and character development. I see the in dungeon aspect of the PC's lives as sort of like their "job". They want to do well and reap the rewards and not die. They do a lot outside the dungeon though that is more social and more dramatic.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If I were running an in-person gaming group, I'd agree completely. Fortunately, we are playing on a virtual tabletop via Roll20, and things like XP and ammunition are tracked automatically. You make an attack with your bow, your arrow inventory diminishes by 1. You buy 20 arrows, your arrow inventory increases by 20. You don't have to remember to toggle anything on or off, you don't have to do any math at all.

And if you toggle on the rules for Encumbrance, not only does Roll20 automatically add/subtract your arrows, but it also automatically adds/subtracts the weight of those arrows. (shrug) It all happens in the background.

Now it only needs to automatically replenish your arrows and deduce the cost every time you visit a settlement!

BTW, a question to everyone: has anyone ever ran out of arrows in game you participated in, and if yes, what sort of circumstances lead to it occurring?

 

[Xeviat]

Now it only needs to automatically replenish your arrows and deduce the cost every time you visit a settlement!

BTW, a question to everyone: has anyone ever ran out of arrows in game you participated in, and if yes, what sort of circumstances lead to it occurring?

Once, but I can't remember if they ran out or if they were stolen from them.

 

[Emerikol]

<snip>

D&D hasn't been designing for that kind of game for a while, which is fine, but it still has some of these throwbacks that sort of cosplay as dungeon survival.

Which is why there's even a possibility of something like an infinite quiver, I think: because it erases a part of the game that the rest of the game also would be fine erasing, but that for some reason some of the devs hold onto.

Well they at least give lip service to old school play. I agree they rarely deliver but I suppose they can point here in the book for proof they gave some care for it.

I'm wondering if all the alternate rules for running healing differently will still be in the new book.

 

[CleverNickName]

Now it only needs to automatically replenish your arrows and deduce the cost every time you visit a settlement!

My players would riot if the game automatically spent their money. They need to argue with the innkeeper for at least an hour before spending a single silverpiece on a flagon of ale, for crying out loud.