Willie the Duck
Hero
Note: All of this is D&D specific. In other games I've gone so far as to have characters take up the knapping skill along with wilderness woodcraft, such that in a pinch they can craft stone-headed arrows during long wilderness deployments.
As a player, I tend to do so automatically. As a GM, I only bother when the scenario would make running out likely -- and thus the tracking (and more importantly the weighing of the option whether to use the arrow or not) an interesting component of the gameplay.
Recently in the magic thread I mentioned that I think D&D hasn't done survival mechanics all that well in the making-them-interesting part, and I think much the same point applies here. I think for a lot of people ammo tracking has been a incrementing a number that goes up and down but never hits 0* and nothing interesting comes of it and it's no wonder it is neglected. *because after the first time it ever happens to you, you overstock well in excess of any realistic requirements, and the system makes it easy for you to do so.
Imagine that you do have your players track items and replenish them between adventures. Also that you don't believe in adventuring shops and as such the characters have to buy arrows from a fletcher, rope from a roper, lamp oil from a... chandler?*, and so on. Now, do you make your players go to each shop and buy each item, or can they just have a list and add up the cost; and do you think your decision on this changes whether your gameplay style is more G, N, or S?
*just a guess. Brief research on who in medieval times sold oil was not clear, and they already were rendering fat for candles...
I think that, provided there's a reasonably shared understanding of what that character would be bringing on the adventure*, such that the character doesn't suddenly have the item because it would make a better story**, then IMO the difference is exclusively one in conservation of focus/sweating the details, and not one about GNS theory.
*everyone would agree that they would bring antitoxins on a swamp mission.
**or because it is a game where a metanarrative resource is expended to have an item 'have been in their possession all along.'
Which is not to say you should never defer to realism, just recognize that selective realism is itself unrealistic and what we tend to ask our PCs to do is inherently unrealistic. As usual, nearly anything works as long as there is a shared understanding and buy in from the participants (session 0 is your friend, etc.).
As a player, I tend to do so automatically. As a GM, I only bother when the scenario would make running out likely -- and thus the tracking (and more importantly the weighing of the option whether to use the arrow or not) an interesting component of the gameplay.
Recently in the magic thread I mentioned that I think D&D hasn't done survival mechanics all that well in the making-them-interesting part, and I think much the same point applies here. I think for a lot of people ammo tracking has been a incrementing a number that goes up and down but never hits 0* and nothing interesting comes of it and it's no wonder it is neglected. *because after the first time it ever happens to you, you overstock well in excess of any realistic requirements, and the system makes it easy for you to do so.
This is a point I keep noticing. OSR D&D discussions often emphasize how the game bitd focused significantly on the weighing of difficult choices like how much supplies do you bring into the dungeon vs. how much treasure (and thus XP, under the gp:xp framework) you can carry out. Yet even by 1974, there was enough tension on this playstyle (be it pushback or realization that maybe it gets old after a while, or something like that) that one of only 26 miscellaneous magical treasures was dedicated to an item which practically negates the issue.
I'm not sure I'd agree that this has something to do with G vs. N vs S playstyle. I think it has more to do with granularity of activity covered (particularly an activity not expected to be interesting). 'My character knows to stock up on supplies that got used up in the last adventure, and at this level the costs involved are within our rounding error' is a reasonable (if debatable) position in G, N, or S playstyles.
Imagine that you do have your players track items and replenish them between adventures. Also that you don't believe in adventuring shops and as such the characters have to buy arrows from a fletcher, rope from a roper, lamp oil from a... chandler?*, and so on. Now, do you make your players go to each shop and buy each item, or can they just have a list and add up the cost; and do you think your decision on this changes whether your gameplay style is more G, N, or S?
*just a guess. Brief research on who in medieval times sold oil was not clear, and they already were rendering fat for candles...
I think that, provided there's a reasonably shared understanding of what that character would be bringing on the adventure*, such that the character doesn't suddenly have the item because it would make a better story**, then IMO the difference is exclusively one in conservation of focus/sweating the details, and not one about GNS theory.
*everyone would agree that they would bring antitoxins on a swamp mission.
**or because it is a game where a metanarrative resource is expended to have an item 'have been in their possession all along.'
I think there is a reasonable game to be made where you can only carry as many arrows as a person reasonably could (regardless of weight). However, I wouldn't want the realism to apply selectively to just that. It can* quickly cascade to discussions about carrying multiple long items (bows, spears, 10' poles) through forests, wearing full harness plate while marching cross country, keeping armor rust free in wet grass/swamps without attendants, wearing such while crawling into conveniently-located treasure(and monster)-filled holes in the ground, the economics of such a world, and so on. *and honestly should, if you're going to be nixing someone wanting to carry 60 arrows, but that just happens to be your specific realism pet peeve.
Which is not to say you should never defer to realism, just recognize that selective realism is itself unrealistic and what we tend to ask our PCs to do is inherently unrealistic. As usual, nearly anything works as long as there is a shared understanding and buy in from the participants (session 0 is your friend, etc.).
