I can already tell ammo is going to be a minor "o.O?" point in Genesys. I'm okay with the {Despair Symbol} triggering out of ammo. Here's where my question comes in:

Is that triggering the gun ran dry / the hero is out of ammo on his person?
Can a teammate "toss him a magazine"? How long would that magazine last?
If you pick up a dropped gun, how long does that ammo supply last for? The Scene? 1D10 actions?
If you're mid-mission / adventure and roll {Despair}, how do you get more ammo?

If this is covered in the book and I missed, I apologize profusely. Just point me to the page and I'll go back and read what I missed.

I'm not 100% sure if it's in Genesys (away from book at the moment), but in Star Wars you had an expendable item called Extra Reload which allowed you to reload your gun as a maneuver.

I would say it would depend a lot on the characters and circumstances.

Are the PCs soldier types making short excursions from their ship or base camp? Out of ammo means you need to load a fresh clip.

Is a shortage of supplies in general a relevant plot point? Out of ammo means that gun is done until they get to a store or supply depot.

Picked up a strange alien gun? Out of ammo means it’s a paperweight until a scientist in a lab can figure out how to recharge it.

And so on.

39 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:

I would say it would depend a lot on the characters and circumstances.

Are the PCs soldier types making short excursions from their ship or base camp? Out of ammo means you need to load a fresh clip.

Is a shortage of supplies in general a relevant plot point? Out of ammo means that gun is done until they get to a store or supply depot.

Picked up a strange alien gun? Out of ammo means it’s a paperweight until a scientist in a lab can figure out how to recharge it.

And so on.

Right.. I keep forgetting the "Narrative" part of this. I'm so used to "If X happens, apply Y. Forever." Good point. Thanks all!

4 hours ago, ElderKoala said:

Right.. I keep forgetting the "Narrative" part of this. I'm so used to "If X happens, apply Y. Forever." Good point. Thanks all!

As forgottenlore said your setting really matters. One theme I thought through a bit but haven’t seen much on is this:

In a Survival setting such as horror or post apocalyptic you may choose that any weapon only has enough ammunition for a single encounter before being reloaded. If it’s used at all in an encounter it runs out at the end. With the rather limiting encumbrance rules of Genesys this will force creativity in resolution of encounters, and bolster the effectiveness of Melee Weapons. Have 1 encumbrance items to reload guns, again for a single encounter. Edit: management of those Reload resources becomes very important

2 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

As forgottenlore said your setting really matters. One theme I thought through a bit but haven’t seen much on is this:

In a Survival setting such as horror or post apocalyptic you may choose that any weapon only has enough ammunition for a single encounter before being reloaded. If it’s used at all in an encounter it runs out at the end. With the rather limiting encumbrance rules of Genesys this will force creativity in resolution of encounters, and bolster the effectiveness of Melee Weapons. Have 1 encumbrance items to reload guns, again for a single encounter.

I didn't quite catch that, if it runs out after an encounter then just reload between encounters?

11 minutes ago, Morridini said:

I didn't quite catch that, if it runs out after an encounter then just reload between encounters?

AFAIK Requirement to reload is that you have extra ammunition. I.e. every encounter one uses a gun costs one extra reload. And point was that in survival setting any weapon only has ammo to a single encounter. Your need to extra reloads (or what ever they are called in that setting) rises dramatically from normal despair causes out of ammo effect.

But I may have understood incorrectly.

The Out of Ammo Despair result in Star Wars was more 'aimed' at we never see them reload and space guns in general. There is the Limited Ammo feature so if a GM wants ammo to be an issue and PCs to be mindful of finite resources they're fine doing so. The Despair result could become malfunctions requiring the weapon to be cleared.

57 minutes ago, kkuja said:

AFAIK Requirement to reload is that you have extra ammunition. I.e. every encounter one uses a gun costs one extra reload. And point was that in survival setting any weapon only has ammo to a single encounter. Your need to extra reloads (or what ever they are called in that setting) rises dramatically from normal despair causes out of ammo effect.

But I may have understood incorrectly.

You where correct. My idea is that you don’t have to track every bullet of every gun, just whether you used the gun or not. If you have a small revolver with 4 reloads and you find a sub machine gun that’s only got two then what do you do? Keep the weaker weapon because you can use it more often? Or keep the more powerful weapon to make the more difficult situations easier, hoping the easier obstacles can be solved without a gun?

Depending on the setting, I would not always use the narrative approach for ammo. It's fine for most settings such as Star Wars where reloading or recharging should be a trivial thing. But, if you are playing a post-apocalyptic game where one of the key issues is scrounging for supplies, then I would toss the narrative and go back to old fashioned book keeping. Even in a Star Wars campaign where I used the Extra Reloads system (with the caveat of marking off 50 credits between encounters), I put a limit on it when, for example, the players were stranded someplace for a long period of time. It became too much of a stretch to allow reloading of all ammo when there was no longer a source.

How would you book keep ammo in this system? Gets a bit harder to do prescriptively when attacks aren't meant to be individual trigger pulls but instead vague open ended "attacks" which could involve multiple shots.

I guess you could just assign each weapon a set number of attacks it can perform before needing to be reloaded?

For my Dark Heresy hack I went for using the Extra Reload system, but with the caveat that each weapon has different costs for ammo; Boltguns cost a **** lot to keep going, so running out of ammo there is a massive pain, and helps stop players from breaking out the best guns in every encounter. Meanwhile, plain old bullets and lasgun charge packs are pretty affordable (and the latter can be reloaded if you're a real cheapskate. Oh, and the extra reloads are an expendable item, naturally. That's how I always ran it in Star Wars anyway, but the rules are kinda vague on it in how they're worded.

Ammo isn't really matters in Genesys at all, but it's possible to pick the enemy weapon/ammo, use Story Point to find things like weapons/ammo somewhere if it make sense, talk with a NPC and get equipments for a small quest, so on.

It's how this system works and i think it's pretty cool and narrative. The plays should deal with these small difficulties sometimes and it's great

The Despair effect to get out of ammo is very cool but it's important to think about that there are more things that could happen. The GM using a Despair always in this ways could turn the things boring. Anyway, a characther shoud have ate least a second weapon, specially if he's a soldier or something like.

Question on the "reload" for those using the despair for out of ammo: is reloading an actual action (as opposed to a maneuver or incidental)? If not, then triggering out of ammo isn't a particularly good use of despair. The despair result needs to hurt. On the other hand, a single despair shouldn't be ridiculously punishing either (i.e. a well-maintained weapon shouldn't explode on a single despair).

I prefer the idea that the weapon jams, but that's for a space opera setting. I'd say it takes an action to clear. In games where reloading is as trivial as swapping a mag, yeah, that's a maneuver at worst, so effectively your despair cost the target 2 strain for taking a second maneuver on their next action, assuming they had plans for their free maneuver. If they didn't then your despair really doesn't cost them anything. If you have any trained skill at all in shooting, you know to have extra ammo--unless you're in a survival setting.

All that said, I don't plan on caring about ammo unless the ammo is something very special and very limited. I like the idea of assessing periodic costs though, so having a gun with big boomy ammo is going to run you plenty of extra creds.

There is also the Limited Ammo feature. Some weapons DO have a specific amount of ammo in their description.

Here's the adventure / world / campaign:

"Space Rock" slams into earth. Warrbits (Bipedal, 5 ft. tall homicidal Rabbits armed with Bronze age weaponry) ransack a town, the players fight them off, save the Veggieights (Bipedal, gnome sized sentient vegetables) and we get first contact. Global Corporation of Badness gets Space Rock, unlocks trans dimensional gateway system similar to Stargate via space rock. First step will be Mankinds first attempt at colonization. That goes terrible, as they arrive on a 'already apocalypse-d' planet but they meet another sentient race who is trying to in-apocalypse the planet. (Probably space Zombies or space Zerg.) They learn about a few more races, introduced to inter-planetary commerce and Earth corporations quickly try to turn Earth into one giant Las Vegas. Missions here and there, depending on player choices, there's a big bad that wants to destroy all life as we know it, and another big bad, depending on which way they go, who wants to enslave the human race and use them as food and entertainment.

So there's going to be instances where they're cut off from supplies until they can get their own resupplies, or even outright scavenge until they can escape. And that's what I'm trying to plan for to be fair yet not strictly rules lawer-y. (I've already had enough fun with 3.5xDNDPF and the Rules Supreme Court).

I think one of the things that makes running out of ammo feel a little odd is they are still using a very long combat time which is out of the ordinary for most RPGs. One round isn't I shoot at the bad guy one time, he shots back one time. It is a snippet of a firefight that included ducking dodging firing back and forth multiple times. Now myself, I would probably wait a few rounds in to combat to use out of ammo and what that means exactly has already been discussed well in this thread. Just remember it isn't so much a character didn't know how much energy or ammo they had going in to a fight as it is they may not have used them wisely during combat.

one round - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoiRJnr-rtU

14 hours ago, Sturn said:

Depending on the setting, I would not always use the narrative approach for ammo. It's fine for most settings such as Star Wars where reloading or recharging should be a trivial thing. But, if you are playing a post-apocalyptic game where one of the key issues is scrounging for supplies, then I would toss the narrative and go back to old fashioned book keeping. Even in a Star Wars campaign where I used the Extra Reloads system (with the caveat of marking off 50 credits between encounters), I put a limit on it when, for example, the players were stranded someplace for a long period of time. It became too much of a stretch to allow reloading of all ammo when there was no longer a source.

This. My GM in my Dragon Age RPG made us keep track of our arrows. He did allow us to make more during bookeeping sessions where we were narratively covering a chunk of time, but if we were traveling somewhere and we had the misfortune to run into two combats in one day of gametime, then that was that. We had to keep track of our arrows.

If you're not playing a sci-fi setting like Star Wars, this works really well for keeping a more realistic game as well as adding flavor and making the players really have to know what's on their character sheet.

9 hours ago, Dragonshadow said:

Question on the "reload" for those using the despair for out of ammo: is reloading an actual action (as opposed to a maneuver or incidental)? If not, then triggering out of ammo isn't a particularly good use of despair. The despair result needs to hurt. On the other hand, a single despair shouldn't be ridiculously punishing either (i.e. a well-maintained weapon shouldn't explode on a single despair).

I prefer the idea that the weapon jams, but that's for a space opera setting. I'd say it takes an action to clear. In games where reloading is as trivial as swapping a mag, yeah, that's a maneuver at worst, so effectively your despair cost the target 2 strain for taking a second maneuver on their next action, assuming they had plans for their free maneuver. If they didn't then your despair really doesn't cost them anything. If you have any trained skill at all in shooting, you know to have extra ammo--unless you're in a survival setting.

All that said, I don't plan on caring about ammo unless the ammo is something very special and very limited. I like the idea of assessing periodic costs though, so having a gun with big boomy ammo is going to run you plenty of extra creds.

Assuming you're going with reloads being an actual item you have to keep track of, that can be a pretty significant cost even if the maneuver is pretty minor. Depends on the setting, really; if ammo is particularly expensive or hard to come by, those despairs can hurt.

1 hour ago, Tom Cruise said:

Assuming you're going with reloads being an actual item you have to keep track of, that can be a pretty significant cost even if the maneuver is pretty minor. Depends on the setting, really; if ammo is particularly expensive or hard to come by, those despairs can hurt.

Exactly, you have to pull the clip out as a manoeuvre, then reload fo a second. Quick draw helps but not everyone will get that talent.

I would put it that you reload as often as is needed for the cinematic nature of the combat. Use the John Wick nightclub scene as reference, and only require a physical item to reload (which players may not have) when the despair comes out.

So, what I'm bouncing around currently in my head, and you guys and (maybe gals? I heard a rumor that girls play RPGs, but I'm pretty sure that's like the Unicorn myth. lol) have been awesome help btw, is:

Resupplies (General Equipment). Contains everything needed for the general maintenance and of that style of gun as well as a case of ammo to refill magazines. While out of combat, a resupply can be used to remote a Despair - Out of Ammo result from a player's chosen style weapon.

Explosives Resupply. (Encumbrance 4.) 40mm grenades, ferret tear gas rounds, etc.
Machine Gun Resupply. (Encumbrance 4.) Belt-fed, canister contained rifle ammo.
Long arm Resupply (Encumbrance 3.) 7.62mm, 5.56mm, 30-06, .50 cal, etc.
Shotgun Resupply (Encumberance 3.) 12 gauge, 20 gauge.
SMG Resupply (Encumbrance 2.) High capacity magazines and pistol rounds.
Pistol Resupply (Encumbrance 2.) 9mm, 45 ACP, .357, 5.7mm, etc.

So, in the middle of a firefight, and the narration makes sense, Despair - Out of Ammo will mean that class of weapon is run dry for the player. If they're carrying a back up weapon like a Pistol, they can switch to that until that runs dry. lol. For looted guns, as long as they haven't "Run out" of that class of ammo, they'll Hollywood it up and keep it supplied. If it's something they haven't prepared for, Limited Ammo trait ahoy!

I just think you'll destroy the flow of combat if you add in the requirement to track ammo. That's what GURPS is for, really.

Firstly, a combat round where damage is inflicted in emphatically not 1 bullet fired. So you can't really be like "ok, I have an 8 round small automatic, it's round 9, I spend a manouevre to reload" because you've fired a gazbillion shots at this point. I think you just assume the reloading happens in a cinematic sense until it's dramatic for you to be out.

Watch this scene, because this is the most Genesys Modern combat scene I can think of:

When Wick shoots the condom full of walnuts early on, he puts about 5 rounds in him. That's 1 round of combat, but he can also achieve the same kill with 1 shot, so how do you track ammo?

You don't. You can tell by the way there's no optional rules for it. Adding in GURPS level tracking will not work without changing the 1 round =/= one shot fundamenal of the game.

Wick's reloading means he's carrying more ammo than you see him put on in the prep scenes before this, but that's ok because it only counts on despairs.

"But I want the players to have that dramatic moment without despairs..."

Then add tell them in 3 rounds they'll run out of ammo. Those who didn't bring spares are in trouble and will need to pick up a weapon (which at the end of the fight "has run dry"). Those who did will need to plan ahead to get into cover and reload.

That's how I run it, and honestly, even if you have people use an iGun type app to track their shots it doesn't work. There's a reason the system is silent on reloading, and ammo capacity. It's not an oversight.

Right. I was going more with "We're not tracking ammo, but if you're knee deep in 20 minions and you've been trigger happy all combat and you roll a Despair, you've finally hit your ammo wall. Time for the back up plan!" Using John Wick as the example, that man kills people with their own weapon almost as often as he uses his own. Another good example, Knight and Day's Tom Cruise character. While he starts with some crazy arsenal on his person, by the end of some fights, he's picking up other guns and firing because his starter guns ran dry. That's what I think will work best in my world / player base. I may add limited ammo for things like .50 cal sniper rifles, but outside of that...

I'm really preparing my players for the concept of more than just rock'em sock'em robot combat in modern, so the backup plan for me is making sure they're aware that brawl will be used a lot here and that once the guns go dry you're going to end up engaged and punchy. I think Skyfall's opening is a great example of that; Patrice expends 3 clips with full auto on his Glock and Bond, with his Walther's 2 spare clips, so they start smacking each other up on top of a train that really should have stopped when it was ripped asunder but I'm enjoying the film so whatever, and whyyyy is there a chain up there? Story Point? Fair call, play on.

So I think we agree on that point about the ammo and picking up spares; I just think telling them that despairs notwithstanding they'll be out of ammo in 3-4 rounds time (which can be extended by a reload, consuming that resource) gives them time to prepare for the inevitable fist fight.