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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4060187" data-attributes="member: 4937">Let's be completely blunt here.  No more beating around the bush.What is the difference between 'not keeping track of arrows' and not keeping track of other minutiae, like gold, hit points, the distance between a PC and his foe, and so forth?  It's not about 'caring about the story'.  It's not about making the game better. It is entirely that most players natural, expected, and perhaps even necessary desire to win encourages them to accept 'you have unlimited ammunition except when I say so', far more readily than 'you don't have any gold unless I say so' or 'monsters have the hit points remaining that I say that they have'.  In other words, most players by thier natural inclination are more likely to accept fudging on thier behalf than they are fudging that they feel might actually work against them.  Anytime the fudging might actually work against them, you'll find that they are exacting sticklers for every little minutiea.  They'll want an exact accounting of the treasure down to the last brass ring.  They'll pause the game to recalculate thier attack bonus just in case that they forgot something.  It isn't that they ignore ammunition or encumberance or food because they think it will make for a better story.  It's that these things they naturally 'forget' to do anyway not merely because they are time consuming or hard (because generally they aren't), but because they feel it only penalizes them.  And, when you tell them that they can forget about it anyway they are relieved because now they don't feel guilty for having been 'forgetting' about it.The needs of the story are hardly entering into the calculation.  For me, as a player, I feel like when I fudge my hitpoints, or my ammunition, or 'forget' to keep track of my encumberance, as so many players I know do - I feel like I'm cheating myself.  Some players feel like that, and some of them don't.  For me as a DM, I feel like the archer who tells me how boring it is to keep track of ammunition is unconscioiusly cheating his friend with the greatsword by stealing the spotlight in his desire to always be successful.</blockquote>

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