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alpha... November... once I liked November and cannot wait because it is my Birthday... so gifts... then November was wave one of essays... and I did not like the stress of waiting for grades... ad birthday meant one year more on my back... then... switch sides! It was my time to grade wave 1! Once done it was Birthday ! Made me thinking of celebration again. This year... grading Fria Ligan and Birthday...

Boggit,

I'm firmly in agreement with you on this - I see no difficulty (or much effort) in tracking actual use of food, fuel, ammo, etc, and to me, think it is very much part of the game: resource management in a make-do-and-mend world.
Moreover, using some form of 'resource die' to track usage whereby your supply level drops as the result of a roll of '1' or whatever seems to present all sorts of issues. It's a mechanism that can work in some games - ammo supply for a whole unit in a wargame, for example, where turn length might represent 30 minutes of real time.

However, in an RPG, I can think of all sorts of issues where I can see players going 'but that's just silly', to the point that you end up needed to track everything with it's own resource die, at which point, why not just do it properly and track actual use?
(Example - if your party contains 6 characters, and they all have a main weapon plus a back-up or specialist weapon, you've probably got 4+ different calibres of ammo, and in theory it could be as high as 12 - are you tracking ammo supply separately for each? Or does your Barret 50 become low on ammo because of the other guys in the group blazing away with the 7.62cal GPMG and the whole party now has low ammo state? Or because the guy carrying it was blazing away with his M16 and now as an individual low ammo state?).

Obviously, we don't know what is proposed or how it will work yet, and I'll aim to keep an open mind, but (clearly) I am sceptical.

However
(i) I recognise that not everyone agrees
(ii) I suspect it is a lot easier to junk a 'resource die' mechanism and introduce a house rule covering specific food/fuel/ammo/etc use (i.e. make the game more detailed) than it is to go the other way and simplify things

Thanks a lot for taking your time explaining stuff for me!

Makes me even more perplexed as to why such a system would be preferable to simply crossing over rations, ammo etc on your character sheet, though. Especially in a resource management game such mechanics would feel off.

I've written quite a bit on this topic in the other forums, but I guess I can repeat myself. Essentially, what you're calling "simulationism" is inherently unrealistic once you add humans to the mix. Go get in a firefight sometime and tell me that you're able to keep good count of the exact number of rounds you've fired and how many you have remaining. Tell me you're not ever going to empty the mag when you don't expect to. What you're describing as "simulation" is actually only simulation to the elite of the elite, and probably not even then. Humans are not Terminators and they make mistakes. They do not think in gamer terms and in reality they tend not to have the capacity for min-maxing.

So, abstracting some of this stuff, enough that players cannot exercise absolute control, is actually more realistic. And in my eye, at least, extremely desirable. It creates uncertainty, player choice, and lots of other very favorable gameplay results.

From a game design perspective, it also gets the gears turning on all sorts of cool modifiers that could be incorporated into the system which let players make cool choices and build cool characters. Want to be that guy who always knows magically by feel how many rounds are left in the mag? Take the corresponding talent that minimizes random spread. That's a cool bit of character customization. As is the reverse: the Leeroy Jenkins type that tends to put his targets down... but usually at the cost of mag dumping every time he sees a bad guy. That's a fun character dynamic to have with your party that's trying to conserve ammo!

Meanwhile a third character, not a trained soldier, has no idea about any of that but is left free instead to focus on traits that lead to their own brand of meaningful gameplay experiences. Catering to different desires around the table is usually a pretty major concern. Mechanics can help.

Last point: drama. RPGs are fun when there is drama involved. They are less fun when they are rote, by the numbers exercises with assured outcomes. When the systems encourage and create drama, everyone tends to have more exciting stories to tell. Mechanics which generate uncertainty lead directly to that.

I've written quite a bit on this topic in the other forums, but I guess I can repeat myself. Essentially, what you're calling "simulationism" is inherently unrealistic once you add humans to the mix. Go get in a firefight sometime and tell me that you're able to keep good count of the exact number of rounds you've fired and how many you have remaining. Tell me you're not ever going to empty the mag when you don't expect to. What you're describing as "simulation" is actually only simulation to the elite of the elite, and probably not even then. Humans are not Terminators and they make mistakes. They do not think in gamer terms and in reality they tend not to have the capacity for min-maxing.

So, abstracting some of this stuff, enough that players cannot exercise absolute control, is actually more realistic. And in my eye, at least, extremely desirable. It creates uncertainty, player choice, and lots of other very favorable gameplay results.

From a game design perspective, it also gets the gears turning on all sorts of cool modifiers that could be incorporated into the system which let players make cool choices and build cool characters. Want to be that guy who always knows magically by feel how many rounds are left in the mag? Take the corresponding talent that minimizes random spread. That's a cool bit of character customization. As is the reverse: the Leeroy Jenkins type that tends to put his targets down... but usually at the cost of mag dumping every time he sees a bad guy. That's a fun character dynamic to have with your party that's trying to conserve ammo!

Meanwhile a third character, not a trained soldier, has no idea about any of that but is left free instead to focus on traits that lead to their own brand of meaningful gameplay experiences. Catering to different desires around the table is usually a pretty major concern. Mechanics can help.

Last point: drama. RPGs are fun when there is drama involved. They are less fun when they are rote, by the numbers exercises with assured outcomes. When the systems encourage and create drama, everyone tends to have more exciting stories to tell. Mechanics which generate uncertainty lead directly to that.

QFT

"Death by accounts in space" should be outlawed under cruel and unusual forms of punishment.

The excess details of prior editions are precisely what I hope the team avoids. For anything other than a 1-shot, tracking rounds isn't adding anything but bookkeeping hassles.

The abstraction to random ammo rolls works well for "we were in a firefight, see if we're out" with the occasional "you panicked - make an ammo check"...

The excess details of prior editions are precisely what I hope the team avoids. For anything other than a 1-shot, tracking rounds isn't adding anything but bookkeeping hassles.

The abstraction to random ammo rolls works well for "we were in a firefight, see if we're out" with the occasional "you panicked - make an ammo check"...

It's plagued a lot of GDW games and I really hope that FL abstracts it and that the game will flow because of that.

How many rounds you blast away from the mag in your automatic weapon is one issue — the point of the semi-random human element holds some validity here.

But a random system to track how many arrows you've fired with your bow, or crossbow? "Oops ... I only meant to shoot one arrow, but it seems I actually shot five" ... eh? I did that implausible Kevin Costner multi-arrow stunt without noticing, or what?
That's a completely different matter.

Firearms with corresponding mechanics: think single-shot bolt action rifles, break action firearms (esp. single barrel) ... not to mention, weapons like the M203, or the Carl Gustaf.

If your weapon keeps dispensing bullets as long as you keep your trigger pulled and your dexterity and/or self control is a bit lacking, then sure; you quickly lose track of what you've left in your magazine. But for weapons where loading every single individual shot is a bit of a hassle before you can fire it ... such a random mechanic becomes very tricky to justify, in my mind.

Another effect to bear in mind: if we assume that you "accidentally" fired off ten-ish rounds when you only meant to fire three, okay ... but then those extra rounds are also likely to make a difference downrange.

Will the system in that case account for the effect of the inadvertently increased volume of fire — increased hit probability, damage, suppression effect... — or will the abstraction level be such that characters only suffer the negative consequences of randomly over-spent resources, but never gain the possible benefits?

There’s also a big differense between having to roll dice to see how many rounds you fire while fireing an automated weapon during a fire fight but then have a good understanding of how much ammo you actually have left afterwards. When you’re got the time to do an ammo count. Before planning to ambush the next patrol. Compared to having an abstract resource dice going into the fight, only to realize you run out of ammo the first round. If one KNOW there’s only 8 rounds left, one could argue the approach to that encounter would be quite different than If you know you have a D8 resource dice...

How many rounds you blast away from the mag in your automatic weapon is one issue — the point of the semi-random human element holds some validity here.

But a random system to track how many arrows you've fired with your bow, or crossbow? "Oops ... I only meant to shoot one arrow, but it seems I actually shot five" ... eh? I did that implausible Kevin Costner multi-arrow stunt without noticing, or what?
That's a completely different matter.

Firearms with corresponding mechanics: think single-shot bolt action rifles, break action firearms (esp. single barrel) ... not to mention, weapons like the M203, or the Carl Gustaf.

If your weapon keeps dispensing bullets as long as you keep your trigger pulled and your dexterity and/or self control is a bit lacking, then sure; you quickly lose track of what you've left in your magazine. But for weapons where loading every single individual shot is a bit of a hassle before you can fire it ... such a random mechanic becomes very tricky to justify, in my mind.

Well, that depends entirely on what the time scale of a turn is. Pretty much never is the goal of any human in a fight "fire two bullets at that guy over there" or "swing my ax at that guy three times." No, it's "suppress that position" or "kill the guy running at me." How you achieve that is a combination of intent, dice rolls, and story that links the two together in a way that makes sense. The maximum limits of what you can do are defined for pretty much all activities, ROF is no different.

So in that context there are very easy and super sensible explanations for all of the cases you outlined above. If the turn is long, then it all makes the same kind of sense: You shot five arrows because you needed to, because the first four had no effect. You fired several M203 rounds because one was a dud and the second went long. You emptied your pistol and still didn't manage to hit the guy. IE, outcomes aren't necessarily linked to the effort expended to get there. I also prefer approximate turn lengths for all of these reasons. As a storyteller or a participant in a story, I need to know when things happen, not what is happening every three seconds exactly. And it's the job of the players and the GM to tell that story, not just to roll combat results off infinite tables.

Of course a sensible system will scale ammo resources accordingly. I would assume that ROF and asset counting will take the scale of what you actually have into account. It also would make pretty good sense with true single-shot weapons to track them directly, since in that case it is easy to do for both the player and character.

Getting this across and making it clear to players how it actually is far more sensible, of course, is the GM's job. If the game system somehow tells you that you fired 2 M72s at that BMP, but you only had one... well, fix it, tell a story that makes sense, and keep moving.