Magic ammunition

[Vebyast]

DND's rules for magical ammunition always seriously bugged me. Either you buy non-reusable arrows in packs of 50, in which case your high-level character fires off their entire investment in a single engagement, or you buy a single fully reusable arrow, in which case you have to spend some plusses on "returning" and even then you can only use it once per round. Meanwhile, melee characters enchant their favorite weapon and go to town with it. Theoretically this is balanced because enchanted ammo lets ranged characters stack up the effects from both their bow and their arrows. This... feels a bit klugey.

Any thoughts? Disallow enchanted ammo or ammo stacking with launcher, make returning work better for ammunition, given melee characters some kind of buff that lets them stack enchantments up too, something else entirely?

[Korwin]

Enchanting Arrows made sense in 3.0, but not in 3.5... just enchant your bow.

[Ancient History]

We had holy avenger pistols in the Crypts of Chaos, with bullets of slaying demons and bullets of slaying devils.

[Previn]

Enchanting Arrows made sense in 3.0, but not in 3.5... just enchant your bow.

There is a point to them in 3.5. It allows you to get an effectively higher plus weapon than normally possible, and in some cases to get a plus combination that is cheaper than an equivalent plus weapon. On top of that something like Brilliant energy is much better used on ammunition than on the bow proper since it is often worthless against certain foes.

[OgreBattle]

The enchantment should be on your bow/crossbow/sling

The ammunition itself should be like a scroll/potion that explodes. I think that's what Tomes does.

[fectin]

Enchanting Arrows made sense in 3.0, but not in 3.5... just enchant your bow.

There is a point to them in 3.5. It allows you to get an effectively higher plus weapon than normally possible, and in some cases to get a plus combination that is cheaper than an equivalent plus weapon. On top of that something like Brilliant energy is much better used on ammunition than on the bow proper since it is often worthless against certain foes.

Pretty sure those plusses overlap, not stack. They're each enhancement bonuses to attack/damage.

[Emerald]

Enchanting Arrows made sense in 3.0, but not in 3.5... just enchant your bow.

There is a point to them in 3.5. It allows you to get an effectively higher plus weapon than normally possible, and in some cases to get a plus combination that is cheaper than an equivalent plus weapon. On top of that something like Brilliant energy is much better used on ammunition than on the bow proper since it is often worthless against certain foes.

Pretty sure those plusses overlap, not stack. They're each enhancement bonuses to attack/damage.

I think his point is that a +1 flaming speed bow plus +5 arrows is cheaper than a +5 flaming speed bow, and that you can get up to +18 worth of special abilities on both together if you're willing to spend all that money rather than just +9 for enchanting the bow.

[Josh_Kablack]

This is the Den, can we cut with the stupid and define actual problems before we start suggesting solutions?

3.0: Enhancement Bonuses to Bow stack with enhancement bonuses to arrows (3.0 DMG page 176-177). This might have been to "balance" out the fact that mighty bows only went up to +4 Strength rating (3.0 PHB Page 113-114) in 3.0.

3.5: Enhancement Bonuses to Bow overlap with Enhancement bonuses to arrows, only the higher applies. Abilities other than Enhancement bonuses can be applied to result in pseudo-stacking in many cases. Thus it's possible to have a +1 Flaming, Frost, Shocking, Thundering bow firing +1 Holy Undead Bane, Spell Storing arrows and get the benefits of all those effects with each attack.

However the actual problems are that

• 3rd level Wizard Spells make enchanting ammo foolish.
• The system's attempt to "balance" ranged weapons by giving them a cap of roughly 2/3rd the damage of melee weapons is laughable.

The first of those is easily fixable with Tome attitude. Characters who use bows should just get access to Greater Magic Weapon, Keen Edge, Flame Arrow and the various energy-substituted and admixtured versions of Flame Arrow without having to use Leadership to do so.

You could write up whole classes that gave level-appropriate abilities, and you could carefully track combat buffs against the action economy, but it's easy enough to illustrate with something along the lines of:

Archer [Combat]
You use a bow (or other missile weapon) as a weapon in the world implied by the rules of this game
Benefit: You can cast Greater Magic Weapon as an at-will spell-like ability
+1: You can cast Keen Edge as an at-will spell-like ability
+6: You can cast Flame Arrow as an at-will spell-like ability.
+11: You can apply each of the 5 flavors of Energy Substitution feat to the Flame Arrow abiltiy above when you use it. Thus it's pretty much expected that you'll layer all 5 energy types on to your arrows - unless you are dispelled, caught off-guard or running low on prepared arrows.
+16Any projectile you fire gains Distance, Ghost Touch and becomes a Bane weapon against whatever it hits.

And boom, that feat takes the place of caring about the costs and expenditure of magic ammo and mid-level archers no no longer have wizard cohorts following them arrow to prep their arrows.

However the 2nd problem is actually unsolvable at the design stage. In D&D, Missile weapons are better than melee weapons for the following reasons:

• More than 75% of the entries in the monster Manual are incapable of harming a foe more than 6 squares away.
• A non-trivial number of melee-focused monsters in all editions of D&D are more badass in melee (the entire Giant Type, some animals) than even the most optimized melee weapon PC of appropriate level can hope to be.
• Of the 3.x monsters with ranged abilities, a substantial portion have missile capacity that is vastly inferior to a moderately optimized missile weapon PC of appropriate level; and even the most ranged-focused (3.5 Eryines, Beholders) are only on par with optimized PC archers.
• Monsters with melee-punishing damage-shield and counterattack abilities (Remorhaz, Mimic, etc) exist in D&D. Monsters with missile reflection or similar ranged-punishing abilities do not.

3.x D&D "balanced" those advantages of missile weapons against melee by allowing melee weapon specialists to do roughly 150% of the damage of a missile weapon specialist. Now that might be possible in the abstract, but the variation in actual playgroups encounter engagement ranges really throws a wrench into that idea. Some groups are going to wing it with mapless description, some groups will use only rough sketches on a notepad, some groups throw things on a 30"x30" Chessex battlemat and some groups have 12'x8' game tables with 3-dimensional foamcore terrain.

Thus at the design stage it is completely impossible to predict engagement ranges (despite the DMG rules for such) and how many rounds of missile fire before the PCs and the monsters are in melee, and attempting to balance melee against missile by damage ratios or ammo, or action economy will never actually work. To fix these issues, an entire rewrite of many fundamental parts of the game is necessary.

***************


Hence the 4.0 idea of PCs being either totally melee or totally ranged focused and making it rare for anybody to be able to target enemies more than 10 squares away. This approach was (more) disciplined and resulted in a better balance between the two -- but as has been stated ad nauseam on this forum, made for a less interesting game.

[Lokathor]

Let's keep in mind that Tome games assume auto-scaling magic weapons at this point. Bows don't have a plus that's any bigger or smaller than normal. Also, Book of Gears has a paragraph talking about how magic ammunition should be 1/10th normal price, not 1/50th, but then never break when used (though you still might lose it of course). Also the only suggested kind of magic ammo is the spell arrow.

Launchers (bow/xbow/sling/etc) should probably just have unlimited ammo within Medium Range, then you don't have to worry about ammo in 95% of cases.

And throwing weapons should probably just be 'returning' for free as well.

[Prak]

You can use a orison or first level spell to get infinite ammo. Summon Holy Symbol (Orison) can do it in the right settings, and failing that, an arrow or bolt (non-masterwork) is a material component for something like fire arrow, so Summon Component works too.

So basically you enchant a bowstring with Summon (Holy Symbol/Component), as use activated, and you just pull your bow and have arrows appear in your hand.

[codeGlaze]

Generating energy arrows a la the DnD cartoon ( I think it was that series ... basically Prak's answer ) or a quiver that generated arrows have been two of the more common solutions I've been privy to.

[Heisenberg]

We had holy avenger pistols in the Crypts of Chaos, with bullets of slaying demons and bullets of slaying devils.

I certainly hope the pistols in question were something cool and classy, like a 1911.

Either you buy non-reusable arrows in packs of 50, in which case your high-level character fires off their entire investment in a single engagement

What the heck kind of D&D are you playing where you blast through 50 damn arrows in one fight? I mean your basic point stands, but I would say that 50 arrows should do you for at least 3-5 fights.

Edit: To no one's surprise, I clicked this thread because I initially thought it was about Shadowrun.

[Prak]

AH did say high level, so we're dealing with characters that dual wield crossbows (8 bolts/round) or have Rapid Shot et al (4 arrows per round, or hell, maybe they're wearing chokers of Girallon's Power and making like Arrow Demons). So, like, two fights. Oh wait, haste. And I'd bet there's some Ranged Cleave feat somewhere, so yeah, I could see a character pissing through 50 bolts in a single combat.

Especially since they could have a choker of Girallon's Power, be a Thri Kreen, and multi-wield magic reloading crossbows.

[Ancient History]

AH did say high level,

Did not.

Anyway, the reason we have magical ammunition is basically Tolkien's "black arrow" from the Hobbit; not that both magical arrows and bows didn't show up in mythology and folklore before that, but I like to think Tolkien is the common reference point.

From a story perspective, there is a good reason to have enchanted ammo versus enchanted weapons as it provides PCs a temporary resource that they get to sweat over using - this is actually quite common in many fairy tales and quest stories where the hero gets X things to pass X challenges, and if they waste one they're fuxxored.

From a gamemaster perspective, enchanted ammo (or silver, cold iron, jade, etc.) is a good money sink for a low-level campaign - compare expensive APDS and explosive ammo for a street-level game in a modern setting - a better grade of equipment than what the average goon will carry and which provides a measurable benefit to the PCs, but is a finite resource and a constant drain on their cash, and forces them to make the decision between buying the cheaper magic ammo now or save up for the magic weapon later.

Likewise, because enchanted ammo (tends) to be cheaper than the equivalent weapon by a fair amount, you can drop a wider variety of it into a game without disrupting the local economy - it's better thematically to trade out frost arrows for fire arrows mid-combat than to switch from your frost bow to your fire bow, and while you'll probably dump sell the +3 bow your opponent has because you have a +4 bow, you might keep the handful of magic arrows because hey, you might run out later.

For D&D3.+ in particular, the utility of magic ammo tends to break down around level 5 or 6 - by the time you can craft your own sleep arrows, you're past the level where your enemies are likely to succumb to the save DC; same-same with slayer arrows. By the time you can cast magic weapon (level 1), odds are you're likely better off putting it on your weapon than on a bunch of ammo you can't fire all of before the duration runs out.

Which isn't to say that's always the case. You could have, for example, an orc gang who put their ammo magazines together so that the mage can bless it right before they go into combat; that gives the orcs a slight edge until the magic bullets run out and is nicely cinematic. But from a PC perspective, where specialization tends to be king, most will go with single-weapon buffs.

[Prak]

Oh, sorry, that was Vebayast. I blame Heisenberg's improper attribution.