Tracking Ammunition consistently in a Hell made of Bullets [closed]

Question

Ranged weapons are a mainstay in many games. Most fantasy games come with arrows, bolts, and sling stones. Wild West comes with lead, powder, and percussion caps in the early times and metal cartridges in the later end of the timeframe. Modern games blow out ammunition in the dozens - even hundreds at times.

However, all those expendable items come at bookkeeping troubles: Is there still an arrow in the quiver, is the next chamber a bang or click, or can the MG put out another burst?

In computer games and playing traditional games online, this problem can be mitigated by having some kind of ammo counter on the screen for each weapon user. But table-play doesn't offer that ease of use. Players have not unlimited floating numbers next to the head or self-updating character sheets.

At a table, the problem however is you need to update manually. In a fantasy game, my elven archer ended up needing a new sheet after the second or third session because I had erased a hole into the spot where ammo was counted. Putting the arrows on a separate sticky note made that page replaceable, but it was prone to be lost. Looking for the main copy of the inventory to make a new one was a noisy thing between the different pages of the sheet - amplified by the limited space on the table - barely more than the open pages of the core book was available to put down stuff for each player to handle the large map in the center.

But fantasy games like that usually don't need to account for more than 20 or such arrows per player. So were absolutely needed, I had used an ammo-counter D20 for my quiver and used a holder-ring with some sticky in it to make sure it didn't roll and wouldn't be accidentally taken as a dice.

Tracking Ammo for the Bullet-Hell

The real problem however is when games combine many people shooting with shooting a lot and variable ammo usage. That is when shooting isn't happening consistently. This gets us to Shadowrun: Firearms can let loose between one and 10 rounds per action of the runner, runners can have between one and four actions and could shoot akimbo. Oh, and each gun has different ammunition capacities...

Contrast this to the 8 to 10 HP that people have in Shadowrun and which generally only go down in combat, making editing on the sheet for those an option. But with runners easily hauling in hundreds of rounds - 4 magazines for an assault rifle are already more than 100 rounds - keeping track of how much is loaded in the different magazines, together with the fast, non-uniform extending of ammunition, creates an especially large bookkeeping burdon. A single combat action could see any combination of two from the list {1, 3, 6} or one from the list {10}, as often as the character acts, which is up to 4 times. In other words: the amount of rounds in a gun is quite a volatile number, unlike any and all other numbers. And it has mechanical significances in when reloads are needed, and in most editions of Shadowrun there are rules for reloading those magazines - and how fast it is.

In a scene that turned into a bullet hell, I was one of 5 runners. While we fought some rather resistant thing and I took a lot of drain, the other four spent several hundred bullets shooting full-auto. I am sure that at least two players lost count of what was left in their guns at some point: One recalculated twice if he had to reload using a calculator and slowing the game down, the other had a tiny post-it note upon which he just added strikes to see if he still owned any bullets and guesstimated if he had to reload or not.

What this is not about

Bottomless Magazine is not an answer to the question of trying to keep track of when you need to reload your gun because it removes the essential tactical elements of reloading and ammunition management entirely.

Altering the ammunition system or homebrewing an alternative to the shadowrun-included one (count your bullets) is also not an answer sought. This is all about methods of how to manage tracking ammunition in a system where that is a factor in the tactical decision-making of the players.

The Question

How could players track the ammunition for their runners in a way that...

• the amount of ammo left in the gun is easy to spot at a distance (from across the table)
• fast to update
• non-destructive to the character sheet
• and not bound to a movable object (dice, marker) that might be accidentally shifted on a track?

Please back up your answers with actual experience.

Answer 1

Use disposable, written records

I haven't had this exact issue, but when I have to track fiddly things like this in games I take a disposable record (like a post-it note) and just write down the total ammunition I have at the top, then use tally marks to record what I've used. As long as the tallies themselves are arranged in regular spaces (like clearly divided columns) you can easily multiply by rows. You can also mark out special counts, like the row at which a magazine will run out of ammo, so that you have an easy marker to tell when you're getting close to needing to reload.

Making a few tallies for each action taken is pretty easy, and with one pad of post-it notes you'll have enough paper that you could use one for each weapon and/or ammunition type at every session. If this issue comes up a lot and you don't want to use that much paper (or if post-its are too small for you for this purpose), a dry erase board might be a good alternative.

But the key is that you can maintain game pace by only needing one arithmetic operation per weapon per action. You write down how many bullets, clips, or whatever that you have left during other players' turns, crossing out or erasing (with a dry erase board) old values to avoid any confusion, and then subtracting what you've used from what you had so that you're ready when your next turn comes up.

Answer 2

Don't

This requires buy in from everyone at the table and it does make the game slightly less gritty. That said, in Shadowrun and in most TTRPGS I play, only track ammunition that is special in some way. I don't track basic bullets or arrows. The bookkeeping headache simply outweighs the value of tracking such basic and quickly changing numbers.

I do of course track very expensive or very significant ammo. If some character is carrying grenades, those get tracked separately for instance, and anything more exotic and expensive than a single grenade is worth tracking, but basic ammo isn't.

This does of course shift the needle ever so slightly away from a gritty environment that Shadowrun can do so well towards "action hero" but only slightly and at every table I have played with we were fine with that small shift.

Consider spreadsheets

If you elect to track things like that, consider a spreadsheet. Most modern tablets or even cell phones, to say nothing of laptops, can handle a spreadsheet decently. If you are in a room with a TV, you may even be able to cast the screen to the TV so everyone can see it.

Since I don't track ammo at all, I have not used spreadsheets to track basic ammo. I have used them to track other things at a table and it has worked quite well for me. Easier to keep track of than sticky notes.

Answer 3

You could consider a tally counter:

You might have seen these being used by bouncers, to count people entering and leaving nightclubs so they know how many people are inside. Some can both add and subtract, and there are both mechanical and digital versions - and of course phone app versions.

Downside is if you shoot (or buy) 100 bullets, that'll be a whole lot of clicking.

Another option is something like poker chips or monopoly money:

Nobody's going to confuse chips for dice, and everyone is familiar with the idea of not losing your coins between sessions.

This might be useful if you need to be able to spend a single bullet, or five hundred bullets. Downside is you might have to spend time making change.

Another choice would be stick with paper but be more careful. I mean, if your players can't keep track of a sticky note, they aren't going to be able to keep track of anything else either.

You might need a bigger table, the players to start keeping their stuff in ring binders with dividers, or to bind the important sheets together at a copy shop, or one of the less scatterbrained players to help the others not lose stuff.

The final option is to switch to a simpler system. There are plenty of gaming systems I don't use because their complex accounting sounds like a drag.

If you've got so much paperwork that your players are struggling to keep track of it all, and it's disrupting your game and making it less fun, perhaps this system isn't right for your table.

Answer 4

Use physical, easy to grab and pour tokens.

Before we moved on from a reloading style that proved to be more tedious than worth it at our table, we used tokens that you can grab from one bowl and move into another bowl. The number of tokens should always match your capacity until reload.

In our case, we used the copper credit tokens from Terraforming Mars, but any tokens - I recommend small cubes like these - that you can grab with ease (legos, other game tokens, not coins) and pour - which are neither too small nor too big and are easy to count should do the trick.

The loop is to have your bowl with your capacity on one side, select the number of ammunition to spend (a token can represent more than one unit, e.g. 10 units), grab units of spent capacity, then pour into the empty bowl on the other side. Once the initially full bowl is empty, you have to reload. After reloading, your full bowl is now your capacity bowl.

The token approach worked smoothly but took up space at the table, especially when using multiple ammunition capacities. Eventually, we moved on from that system as we generally changed how we want to play Shadowrun - which included simplifying various subsystems. If one person needed tokens for different ammunition capacity types, we used distinct distinguishable tokens (gold, silver).

The bowls contain the tokens and will prevent spills. The cube shape makes them easily trackable, even from a distance. Distinct colours give immediate visual feedback.

Answer 5

Keeping a record of ammunition used could easily be achieved with a notebook or journal that is comprised entirely of graphing paper.

Graph paper, coordinate paper, grid paper, or squared paper is writing paper that is printed with fine lines making up a regular grid. The lines are often used as guides for plotting graphs of functions or experimental data and drawing curves. -- Wikipedia

These are fairly easy to come by in most large supermarkets, office supply stores, and through online retailers. Each page is filled with a number of small squares, and one can easily add a bolder outline around the number of squares you need to keep track of, and even add markers where reloads should occur. You can easily track HP, Mana, etc. on the same page. The specific system you're playing shouldn't matter. I've used this solution before in Battletech, Rifts, Star Wars and Star Trek, and it has worked admirably for me.

I'm including a link to a product here only as an example, there are alternatives to this specific product that may be more affordable or conveniently sized. This specific one comes with two bound notebooks. These should be harder to lose than a post-it note, or a loose sheet of paper. With a total of 384 pages, you don't have to waste a lot of time erasing, you can just start fresh on a new line or page as needed. The notebooks themselves are often smaller than a regular A4 sheet of paper as well, so should work well where table space is at a premium.

As an added bonus, they look smart and you now have a historic journal of your ammunition usage (or any other stats you decide to track) across multiple sessions.

Answer 6

Try creating a printable template specifically for this purpose

What if you stick with paper but make it more sophisticated?

If small post-it notes or the character sheets don't work for you, maybe you need a new template to print specifically for ammunition tracking.

My suggestion would be multiple rows where each row has like 10 boxes for each piece of ammunition. Then in front of each row is written how many bullets you have left after filling the whole row, so you can tell on a quick glance the decimal place of your amount of bullets left. Of course for different weapons you can have different row lengths as appropriate to have a good overview. Maybe the last row is with numbers under each box because when your mag is almost empty every bullet counts.

This is mainly useful for the players, but if you use a thick red marker to cross out the squares for each bullet, it should even be possible to guesstimate the amount of ammunition left for the GM from a distance. If the sheet has little red on it, there are many bullets in the gun, if the sheet is full of red, the gun is almost empty.

And after reloading you throw away that piece of paper and take a new one. I assume it would fit multiple of these on one DIN-A4 page so you can cut it into pieces.

You could probably make such a template in word or excel or the tool of your choice.

While I personally do not have experience with such a sheet for ammo tracking in particular, this person has done something similar in photoshop exactly for shadowrun ammo tracking and seems to have had success. https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/7auq2x/i_designed_an_ammo_tracker_for_players_in_my_game/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share