this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I always use the arrow rule from icrpg. You have unlimited arrows until you roll a nat 1. From that point on you have no arrows and have to improvise.
That sounds really annoying. Imagine leaving a town fully stocked, get into a fight, roll a nat 1 on first attack and immediately have no arrows for the rest of the fight. What, did the ranger just forget that the quiver was empty before leaving town?
I've always disliked the concept of critical fails in general, and this is a great example of why. If we're to believe that our characters are truly these great warriors with far more skill and experience than an average person like the texts usually say, how does it make sense for these professionals to just completely blunder 1 in 20 of their attempts at everything? From an RP standpoint, it doesn't add up, and from a gameplay standpoint, it's just annoying as hell IMO.
Right? Like our swordsman is just going to have a 5% chance to forget how to hold a sword
Imagine the Lockpicking Lawyer breaking his tools on a basic lock 5% of the time!
Which is why not counting normal ammo is best boi
Maybe it's more like you clumsily dumped all your arrows on the ground. Fighting is messy and random. Just walking is random.
The other day I slipped on some stairs I walk up every day, fell and hurt my butt. That's a natural one definitely.
This reminds me when I was trying to fish out natural ones as a new DM from my players. They were rightfully annoyed by this. I fortunately grew from this and no longer fish natural ones
Seems really stupid honestly, imagine going into a fight and two arrows in you roll a 1 and now your ranged character is useless.
Like imagine forcing your barbarian to lose their melee weapon everytime they roll a 1, or a caster just loses their prepared spells, etc.
People tend to not realize how often something is going to be happening with a one in twenty chance and that you are going to be rolling your basic attack roll a gazillion times per session. When you start rolling the dice, making attacks every turn, that is going to come up very often. In fact, statistically this rule would mean that your character would be carrying on average ~13½ arrows. By the time you've rolled 14 times it's more likely that there was at least one 1 in there than not. With multiple attacks per turn that's going to happen infuriatingly often.
It work best obviously with icrpg "balance", those 2 arrows in the game could bring a boss to half health easy.
One thing I quite dislike on standard 5e is most of the time your roll matters very little. And 5e compensate this with rolling more often
Use ammunition? Roll a die. 11 and over, it's recoverable. 1-10 it's lost/broken.