Rechan said:
And I consider it a drag to have to keep up with that kind of thing. I care about the story.
Well, that's fine. Very high minded of you. Amongst RPGers, claims of caring about the story can be used to justify just about anything. I care about the story too. Very much so. But if I just wanted to tell a story, I'd write a novel or I'd literally tell a story to an audience. But the process of story creation is occurring within a game, and that carries with it all those other notions of simulation and competition that make it more than just another story artform. If I'm not keeping track of ammo, then that part of the game which is about me solving problems with my wits suffers.
And in my opinion, even the story suffers. It's annoying to watch a movie where the protagonist draws a revolver and then fires off 12 shots in rapid succession. It's annoying to watch stories where the writer doesn't pay attention to what is going on in the universe of his story. It breaks faith with the audience. In an RPG, it breaks faith with all the other players, even the ones just interested in story, in as much as having limitless ammo makes it more of a game even than keeping track of the ammo does.
It reminds me of a recent session. We needed to escape on horseback, FAST. We had one fewer horse than PCs because one had just joined. The one PC who had no horse was a warforged. It suddenly became an argument of what we were going to do with the warforged. People were looking up rules on how long a warforged could run before falling over, how many hours it would take him to recover, how much he weighed and how that would impact the horses.
Whereas, when I run a game, you have six seconds to come up with a plan of action or your character is assumed to do nothing but stand there feeling lost, confused, and perhaps paniced. It annoys some new players, but pretty soon they see the sense of it because not only do I not have to deal with problems like you discuss but I get a story in which the protagonists can feel lost, confused, and perhaps paniced.
On the other hand, if I only cared about the story, we might sit down and think awhile about the best way to run this scene so that it would produce the best story. But obviously, we both care about something more than that and mean something more than that when we talk about 'caring for the story'. I claim that keeping track of your own ammo as a player is part of that good caretaking of 'the story' in the same way that keeping focused on the idea that there is a monster about ready to eat you is good caretaking of the story.
WHich is sort've pointless when you build your character to use scimitars, but the random table says you have a +2 bohemian earspoon, and otherwise you have just a regular scimitar. Uh, no.
Well, if you'd read Appendix P, you'd find that you get your choice of weapon which might be magical, and you have various other choices. But, I suppose you are talking about the generation of items in a more random way than that. This gets really off target, but one of the things that has long annoyed me about the specialization rules is that they impose such a limitation on play. Time was, you could find +2 bohemian earspoons and it wasn't a disappointment. In fact, you might say, "Wow. This is going to be much more effective than my longsword against heavily armored foes." Now, apparantly characterization somehow equates with 'building your character to use scimitars', and DMs have to explicitly tailor thier treasure to fit the sort of things a character wants to find or they somehow feel cheated because thier character concept included having a +X doohickey by level 8.
