Fill a bowl with as many coins as your character has arrows. The bowl is your quiver now. Whenever you shoot an arrow with your bow, remove a coin from the bowl and flip it. Heads: keep the coin but don't put it back into the bowl. Tails: you lose the coin for good. Return it to its owner, put it in the swear jar or buy the GM some snacks.
At the end of combat, count the coins you kept. These are the arrows you recover from the battlefield. Put them back into the bowl.
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| Álvaro Hernández |
Needless Complications to an Otherwise Perfectly Fine, Perfectly Simple Mechanic
The coins you kept are actually potentially salvageable arrows. When combat ends, choose the most appropriate for your system or style of play:
- Flip all the coins AGAIN. Heads: recover this arrow. Back to the bowl. Tails: the arrow is irrevocably lost.
- You recover 1 arrow for every minute you spend searching.
- Spend 10 minutes to recover 1d20 arrows (Max: coins).
- Make a Wisdom/Intelligence/Intuition/Search check. Success: find all of them. Failure: recover 1d6 only (adjust for increased grittiness and survivalism)
Completely Unnecessary Horizontal System of Arrow Recovery Advancement
When you successfully recover your 10th arrow, roll on the Perks table. Roll again once you have recovered [perks]x10 arrows.
1d6 Perks
- Careful Eye. Whenever you recover at least one arrow, you recover one more. Yes, this means you can recover more arrows than you shot. Who does this mysterious arrow belong to?
- Still Usable. If you deal minimum damage with a shot, you can roll the coin again.
- Lucky Bastard. When you score a critical hit, you automatically keep the coin. The arrow is stuck in your foe's corpse, undamaged and ready to be shot again.
- One Last Shot. Once per combat, the first time you run out of arrows, you actually didn't. Put a coin into your bowl.
- Combat Craft. While in combat, once per turn, you can point at one of your kept coins and ask the GM "Where is this arrow now?" If you get within arm's reach of the arrow, you recover it automatically. Put one of your coins back into the bowl. You can do this [perks] times per combat.
- Lucky Arrow. Mark one of your coins (paint it a different color, use a different currency, etc...). This is your lucky arrow now. When you flip this coin, keep it even it you get tails. When you search the battlefield after combat, flip it again. Heads: recover it. Tails: you haven't found it yet. You can keep searching until you find it or until you give up, in which case it is lost forever. This means that you will never run out of arrows completely if you have the resources and time to spare. If you ever lose your lucky arrow, you can forego gaining a new perk to find it. You are free to come up with a ludicrously unlikely story about how it came back to you. Chance trumps all.
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| Darek Zavrocki |
Aimless Rambling Disguised as Theoretical Commentary and a Note on Physicality
I wrote the above in about an hour on my way to work. I've been trying to write a simple, accessible and modular set of mechanics for brewing spirits and distilled drinks (I have close to absolutely no idea how this work in the real world) and I guess I felt the need to write something down that could actually and feasibly be completed without days of fruitless research and pointless theorycrafting. This is the result.
I somehow like this mechanic. It is direct, it is clear and, in its first and simpler iteration, it barely impacts game time, since the players can flip their coins in other people's turns. It is true, however, that the table can get pretty crowded pretty quickly if too many archers are present or too many arrows are fired. In my experience, though, combats tend to be quite short and brutal, which means that, at most, archers are going to get around 5 turns (1 turn per round), and they are probably not going to shoot an arrow in each of their turns. Even if they somehow get to shoot more than five or six times, they are the ones flipping the coins and keeping track of the results, so the process doesn't interfere with the other players' actions and, most importantly, I don't have to do anything for it to work.
Of all the needless complications, the one that appeals to me the most is actually the first one. Flipping the coins again might feel like a chore to some, but by having the kept coins be potentially recoverable instead of guaranteed, players cannot reliably predict the amount of arrows they will be able to salvage. This means that, if ammo ever runs low, they will have to make a meaningful choice about whether they should keep firing like mad or find some more conservative strategies to deal with the threat they are currently facing.
The perks are cool, I think; I am particularly fond of the last two. I tried to deviate from simple numerical bonuses (you can see me falling into that insidious habit in the first perks) and pursue a design that allows for more interactivity and roleplaying moments. Also, I wanted the coins to matter. I wanted them to be physically present. That's why Lucky Arrow is perhaps my favorite, as it is both highly interactive in a physical way and it has the potential to create some interesting RP moments.
Theoretically, all of the above can be achieved through bookkeeping and dice-rolling. However, there is something about the immediacy of the coins and the binary results they yield that makes it more appealing in my mind. You flip the coin, and you either keep it or you don't. No need to write down how many arrows you fired. They coins are there for you to see and count. And when the combat is over, the carnage done, you are the one to pick up the coins and drop them back into the bowl.
An Ending to an Already Overstuffed Post
Well, that's it I think. None of this has been play tested, of course, and given the circumstances and the prevalence of online gaming, I don't know if it ever will, at least in my (physical) table (players of mine: if you are reading this, I miss you). Also, on a mostly unrelated note, with this post I'm technically participating in #Dicember2021, a community driven challenge created by Brian Bird and posted at Dyson's Dodecahedron. Since coins are basically 1d2s and arrows are long, pointy pieces of ammo, I can cross the first prompt from the list. I guess I'm part of the community now?
