Any kind of inventory management like arrows and food is way too sweaty and has never engaged a single player ever unless the whole point of the campaign is this exact mechanic. It’s a waste of time and energy and I don’t play with anyone that insists on doing it.
Retrieving ammunition is one of those things that is, imo, similar to taking piss breaks. Like yeah, of course your character is doing it, you don’t need to track or talk about it. The only time it will ever come up is if there’s a reason it’s noteworthy. Like if you get ambushed by a dragon immediately after the fight. Okay, you lose some of your arrows because you don’t have time to pick them back up before hauling ass out of there.
Similarly, I’ve found that tracking rations and water supplies and such is usually a waste of time. If there’s a plot reason those would be serious challenges, like you’re trapped in the middle of the desert, then of course we’re going to need to get into the little details of how you’re getting food and water every day. But if you’re traveling through reasonably well populated countryside and haven’t gone more than a couple days without meeting people, you’ve got food. Even the most curmudgeonly old destitute farmer isn’t going to send a band of travelers down Completely Unpopulated Road without enough food to reach the next hub of civilization.
I sometimes detail the food people are offered to texture out a region.
You managed to hunt this, the inn serves that, a vendor sells this other thing.
We play with the we don’t track arrows and encumbrance unless you start trying to steal all the doors in the dungeon. The stealing of doors did happen with a group before I joined. We keep the rule just in case
There are some formats where inventory management becomes interesting again. We tried doing a Hexcrawl earlier this year and there was a lot of interesting gameplay to be had in the risk/reward management of how many supplies they wanted to carry vs how much they wanted to invest in pack animals, limiting their ability to carry loot back, carrying this vs that, guessing how much they’ll use before they can resupply or where future resupplies might be, gambling on whether to press forward and risk running out or turn back, that kind of thing. It’s just the more currently popular adventure structures right now (eg linear or branching narratives) where inventory tracking is superfluous.
The times I’ve bothered keeping track I don’t think I ever got below ten arrows from a twenty arrow start, and that was with a multishot/rapid shot character in 3.5. Combat just moves so fast, and the best archers these days take one shot per round with true strike and sneak attack, and everybody else has a crossbow equivalent cantrip…
I remember DMing for some players once and being surprised when one of them was actually keeping track of arrows and asked if I was using the normal rules to retrieve them (getting back half). I was both surprised and impressed that he was actually doing that even though that was the rules. I appreciated it though lol.
