Welcome to this week’s blog book club. This week we’re discussing “Abstracting Missiles,” by Brendan S. of Necropraxis.
For next week, we are deviating from Marcia’s list as written. I’ll be skipping “Random D&D Characters, Huzzah!” by Ramanan Sivaranjan of Total Party Kill and will instead include it as a reply to last week’s OD&D equipment list as I feel that it belongs there and may not lead to much discussion on its own.
Due to this shortcut, we will be reading “Getting Worse,” by Erik Jesen of Wampus Country. (For extra Credit read the preceding post “the Confession”).
You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
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I grew up in an era of D&D where players had it beaten into their skulls that a combat round equals 6 seconds. To me it felt like a universal RPG truth. Even other games I experimented with like Savage Worlds and World of Darkness kept in-combat time abstraction to a minimum and generally had rules aimed at capturing moment to moment action. For some folks, this practice captures the intensity and immediacy in combat. For days where I was not feeling engaged in a fight, it would highlight the disconnect between how long turns were taking people and the amount of time they represented. But what if a round was longer? What advantages might that have?
From time to time I see references in podcast interviews and blogs to the minute long combat rounds in Original D&D. Today’s post is one of them. One of the issues to this interpretation is how to handle the supply of ammunition if a D&D fight is more like a montage where many arrows are fired? While claims of archers being required to fire 12 shots a minute or be drummed out of service have been debunked, using up only two arrows per minute of combat is on the slow side for trained marksmen.
To handle this issue, the post examines the possibility of abstracted quantities of missiles. After a combat occurs a d6 is rolled and on a result of a 1 exhausts a quiver of arrows. While this doesn’t add tension to individual fights it does put pressure on a dungeon crawl overall as it becomes another component of resource management. I like mechanics like this that encourage players not only to prepare more thoroughly but also to have to risk their luck scrounge up substandard supplies in a dungeon. This adds another layer of interaction as it ties human needs to the environment.
To give players more combat options the post notes they can increase rate of fire (called a volley) for an immediate ammo check in exchange for an attack or damage bonus. I wish the specifics of the bonus were called out specifically. In a game like Shadowdark I’d probably give it an advantage OR turning a hit into a crit. In Odd-likes its pretty straightforward to raise the damage dice to a d12. I do not know what the appropriate bonus for OD&D or BX would be.
Another point I appreciated is that reloading in D&D is usually a bad feeling mechanic that players will avoid at all costs under the usual assumptions of play unless they are a wizard out of spells without another ranged option. I am in favor of getting rid of reloading, its just never felt quite right in practice.
After the post, I looked into the comments and found at least one person feeling like it takes away from the moment to moment choice of ammo rationing… but honestly I am not sure I know anyone who does this. There seemed to be not much consensus on whether ranged combat should be abstracted in this way proposed in the post.
I think my main quibble is I am not sure I enjoy the all or nothing approach to ammo and I feel like the more gradual tick down of resource dice may be a better fit for me. What do you think: Is a minute long abstraction of combat tolerable? Have you ever used abstracted ammo?