Tracking Ammunition, Torches, and Other Items

Roger over at Roles, Rules and Rolls recently wrote about tracking arrow usage and determining whether they are consumed (i.e. damaged and therefore unusable) when fired.

The solutions that he and others suggest seem to be a bit too crunchy to me. They involve either rolling a percentage die (e.g. 50% of the time the missile is not reusable) or basing the factor of re-usability on how much damage the arrow did on impact (i.e. on a natural roll of 6 on 1d6 for damage, the arrow is destroyed). After determining which of the arrows are re-used, then we have to either subtract those that may not be re-used from the total in the quiver or add them back to the total remaining in the quiver. Some consideration is even made for loosening arrow heads to make them more or less recoverable. 

Usually in my games, we just subtract any arrows (or other missiles) fired from the total in the quiver (sack, bag, etc.). That allows us to avoid the need to check to see if they are still usable... and anyway arrows, crossbow bolts, or sling bullets are really pretty cheap. We do track resource management and on extended forays into large dungeons resource management becomes pretty serious. 

But Roger has gotten me thinking about missile management. One could do something similar to the system I use to manage the use of light sources: oil, torches, etc. Regarding light sources, I have a little table (below) which I have put into my DIY DM screen. The column which applies most to the current discussion is the far right column: Exhausted. That is the roll on which the item is exhausted (oil is used up, torch is burned out, etc.). I have players roll approximately every hour of game time. For example, a result of 1 on 1d10 means that the oil fueling the lantern has run out. The reasoning behind this system is pretty simple, to me at least. In the case of the oil lantern, 1 flask of oil should last approximately 10 hours. So, on any given hour there is a 1 in 10 chance that that is the hour in which the flask will be emptied. When a 1 is rolled, the light source, in this case, lantern, sputters and burns out in 1d4-1 rounds.

LIGHT SOURCES
Source	Radius	Brightness	Exhausted
Candle	2	Dim	1 on 1d4
Torch	5	Bright	1 on 1d4
Lantern (Common)	10	Bright	1 on 1d10
Lantern (Faerie)	12	Dim	1 on 1d20
Campfire	10	Bright	1 on 1d12
Sunrod	20	Daylight	1 on 1d12
Phosphorescent Plant/Fungi	5	Dim	N/A
Fire Creature (Tiny)	2	Bright	N/A
Fire Creature (Small)	5	Bright	N/A
Fire Creature (Medium)	10	Bright	N/A
Fire Creature (Large)	20	Bright	N/A
Fire Creature (Huge/Gargantuan)	40	Bright	N/A

The system above is pretty simple to manage and avoids having to keep a running tally of exactly how long a lantern or torch has been burning before it is exhausted. Tracking usage by the hour could be especially crunchy when one lights a torch for an hour, then puts it out for a few days before relighting it again. This system also keeps the "work" of consulting the chart and keeping track of time in the DM's hands, allowing players to play.

This system can easily be morphed to  tracking arrows while simultaneously determining whether the arrows are still usable. One could simple say that every time an arrow is fired the PC rolls... a d20 maybe... and on a 1 the PC's quiver is exhausted. In fact, I have already used variants on this system to track other consumable items: spell components for example.