Ammunition

The 7th edition of Gamma World has some really slick rules for tracking ammunition:

Ammunition: Bullets are a limited resource that you must use sparingly. In the D&D Gamma World game, ammunition is abstract: You either have ammo or you don’t. If you do, you can use ammunition to fire any weapon you have that requires ammunition. If you don’t, you can’t.
If you use ammunition only once in an encounter: You are managing your ammo reserves carefully. At the end of the encounter, you still have ammunition.
If you use ammunition more than once in an encounter: You’re going whole hog—you might as well rock ‘n’ roll, because at the end of the encounter, you are out of ammo. You must acquire more before you can use a weapon that requires ammunition again (if you borrow some from an ally, then that ally is out of ammo.) Your Game Master determines when you find more ammo.

(Richard Baker & Bruce R. Cordell. D&D Gamma World Roleplaying Game. Wizards of the Coast, 2010.)

Only guns require ammunition, for other weapons it is assumed that you can improvise or scavenge more ammo as needed. (More accurately, the distinguishing feature between a “gun” and a “ranged weapon” is the ability to manufacture the ammo.)

Image by Okiem Kruka, CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tweaking It

I think these rules are basically perfect for Gamma World, and to show why, I’ll consider various changes that could be made.

We could allow a save to keep ammo after a combat in which you didn’t manage it carefully. I think this just introduces an opportunity to feel bad (and one more rule to track). The surety of losing ammo means that a player can be secure in their decision to go all-out.

We could remove the one “free” shot. After all, this would be the simplest version of the rule. But with this proposed change, the thought becomes “I should save my ammo for when I need it.” By contrast, with the existing rule, the thought is “I can use my ammo a little, if I make this shot really count.”

Other Rules

The simplest rule from a design perspective is just to count all the ammo as it’s used, but I wouldn’t dream of doing this in a modern game without automation. That said, Crawling Under a Broken Moon uses ammo as currency (“shells and powder” or “sp”), which does introduce fascinating, if very different, genre-appropriate considerations. (Thanks, Elias!)

You can have ammo deplete on a certain result. In a d20 system, depletion on a “1” feels bad, and depletion on a “20” feels wrong. Synthetic Dream Machine uses depletion on a “13,” which is a fun middle ground, and memorable. This is also pretty simple, but there’s nothing particularly genre-specific about it.

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