How do you feel about the price of ammunition? It feels a bit like Paizo doesn't know what to do with it. Im interested in how you guys feel about it.
A Battery has 10 charges and costs 10 credits. If you have a charging station around, you might get free refills. You could also get 10 Projectiles for 1 credit which means it is cheaper per "bullet" but you have no chance of getting free refills.
You can buy some ammunition at the start of the game and depending on the enemies you are fighting you either run out of ammo at some point or you can loot enough ammo from enemies to keep going.
But ammunition doesn't weigh anything and you automatically get rich in SF2e. If we assume you get roughly 100 credits during Level 1 then you can buy 1000 Projectiles. This only gets crazier on higher levels. So rather quickly you are swimming in Bullets.
Grenades on the other hand have a scaling price. I know they are not technically ammunition but they are still a ranged weapon in some sense. If you don't want to throw fire crackers at the enemy you need to spend more and more money on more powerfull grenades. Grenades also have a weight so you can't carry infinite grenades with you.
To me this doesn't make sense. Either the devs want uns to never worry about ammunition or they want us to care about it. The reusable grenade shell could be a baseline feature of how grenades work.
In my perfect world we would all care about ammunition and the cost of ammunition would stay relevant throughout the game. I think bullets and batteries should have a baseline weight like arrows. A "stack" of Bullets (10/20) could count as 1 Light Bulk and a Battery should always weigh at least 1 Light Bulk. Just to prevent you from carrying infinite ammunition.
My next fix would be to have ammunition prices scale with a weapons level or tier. (Just like grenade prices). This way you could still have affordable ammunition for the early levels and the price could scale with the SF2e Credit Economy.
The only problem this would introduce is the fact that enemies now need to carry "leveled" ammunition as well because otherwise you would run dry during a mission. But i think thats a worthwile tradoff. I really like the feeling when you find ammunition for your favorite weapon in a video game. I would love to see this mentality in SF2e.
But i could also see a world were people hate the idea of "buying enough ammunition". There are plenty of games like Mass effect 1 where your guns have infinite Ammunition and you only reload to cool down the weapon. But i think that it would only be fair to make grenades cooldown based if we move in to this direction.
Edit: Can somebody please tell me what the point of the cantrip Recharge Weapon is after a few levels? I think this is a nice idea. But it becomes a pure fluff choice once you have enough money to buy large quantities of ammunition.
I like to keep track of ammunition stores in my games, whether as a GM or as a player, but I understand that while there are many tables that enjoy keeping track of such, there are also many tables that ignore such stuff altogether.
My personal take on the matter is let vanilla Starfinder require keeping track of ammunition, especially so that prices are kept, and don't have to be home ruled by GM's when players actually want to keep track of these things (I'm looking at you, vehicles and fuel), and make it an official optional rule in the GM Core to waive the cost of ammunition.
It is MUCH easier to ignore a resource one doesn't like, but have stats for anyway, than to have no stats for a resource, and have to look at the economy to try to invent an appropriate cost.
I am also of the mind that projectile ammunition should have weight, and am disappointed that it does not.
As for recharge weapon, I think it's usefulness is funny enough related to this conversation. As it's an emergency bullet when you would have none. Caught by the enemy and were disarmed and arrested, but found an empty gun? Well you've now got a working gun. Or it could be the fall back when you've gone through all your mags. But if everyone is walking around with a million bullets making a 1-foot wide lump in their back pocket, much less useful.
Grenades and missiles are consumables, so have a completely different place in the design than regular ammo.
Only speaking about basic ammo: It doesn't matter and it shouldn't either. It cannot matter. The game fundamentally only cares about your current clip and what it takes to change said clip. Ammo reserve is not a factor. Changing that requires deep cuts into the engine that cannot happen due to "100% compatibility" (and because this is not a survival game).
As for the individual solutions:
1) Increased bulk changes nothing, just like in PF2. Nullspace chambers exist.
2) Level-based ammo hurts the ranged meta by adding yet another penalty to using a ranged weapon and completely breaks the economy, so is a non-starter. Beyond the basic premise, the whole "found ammo economy" consequence only works in games where you have multiple equal weapons, which SF2 doesn't support. In practice, the GM would be forced to always give you enough ammo for your primary weapon at all times or you basically don't get to play, which defeats the whole thing you are going for.
Finally, regarding Recharge Weapon: it's of questionable worth even at level 1. It is never intended as a replacement for having ammo, it is purely there to essentially give the casters action to a martial. The only halfway decent use for it I see is to stand next to your sniper and maybe give them a second shot every other turn. In the cases moosher mentioned, using the cantrip is so extremely inefficient that fighting is suicide regardless.
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Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
In our sessions, we had little dishes with beads to represent the ammo in our guns, and it was satisfying to dump one back into the other for a reload. It was quite fun.
Asking us to plan out magazines of each type would have been a non-starter. In PF2, we assume the ranged characters stock up on arrows in the same way that we used assume casters refill non-costly material components.
The thought process for our group is:
Can we afford and carry more than enough ammo to cover our expected number of encounters?
-> Yes? Then we do so, let's not waste time going through the details.
-> No? Then ammo is too much of a headache, let's play classes that aren't ammo reliant, or cut back on ammo-reliant PCs until we can solve the issue for them at least.
Spending time and energy caring about how many magazines and batteries we have is just fundamentally not desirable for our group, and mechanisms to force us to care are just going to get ignored.
I really think handwaving ammo should be the default, with optional costs or rules for making ammo matter, along with options for more severe survival and other realism rules.
I'm fine with where ammo is in the system. I might even go further and ask that batteries be cheapened a bit. Their cost and rechargeability was important in SF1E because so many things you used required their own batteries. SF2E seems to have cleaned up and streamlined a lot of that process, so needing different batteries with different levels of charge isn't as pervasive as it used to be. (I'm glad for this; the less fiddly bookkeeping I have to do, the better.)
Another reason I'd like ammo to cost something is because it sets a baseline for ammo crafted out of special materials or using special processes, at least a little. While special material items have their own formulas for when they should show up, knowing the rough worth of something still helps figure out about where those things should be priced.
I'm also fine with ammo not weighing much, if anything at all, and being universal. Like others pointed out, you haven't often got the luxury of carrying around multiple, maximally efficient weapons, so it's either your ammunition, or it's useless. And if you make ammunition start to weigh characters down the only characters it really impacts are those who want to carry heavy weapons, who will be able to carry less ammunition than other characters thanks to the greater weight of their armor, weaponry, and presumably, their ammunition.
I'd assume a belt of dozens of bullets would weigh more than a singular clip, anyway.
I would appreciate a game that's not supposed to have survival as an element to not have survival as a stat.
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I think this is one of the unfortunate inheritances of Pathfinder. PF2e is a game that bakes fine-grained resource management and survival into its core gameplay, even though both are arguably fringe aspects of play that many tables handwave and that are quickly sidelined by the game's own spells and adventurer's economy. Because Starfinder operates on the 2e framework, every item has to have a cost and be tracked, right down to the last bullet. I'm glad the cost to ammo was reduced in the preceding errata, but I agree that it's not super-fun to track ammo expenditure and other minutiae in a game that's largely about being big damn heroes. It's also for this reason that I'm not a terribly huge fan of the expend statistic, which serves only to make certain guns spend more ammo and add to the tracking with consequences to our economy that quickly become trivial.
Ammo could cease existing without much of anything changing about the game, reload just being an action you take to refill your capacity would have the same effect regardless.
... I really dislike the variable capacity tied to certain types of ammunition. I was looking at the flamethrower the other day and scratching my head at how it's objectively worse than the stellar cannon in essentially every way (same damage but fewer shots longer reload shorter range smaller area worse traits more expensive) only to notice that fuel tanks scaled, which meant by level 12 you've gone from four shots per reload to 32. Given the state of the weapon clearly Paizo is using one of those higher level numbers as a balance point, which basically turns it into a total trap for anyone who wants to use it earlier in the game.
Getting rid of variable magazine sizes would also remove the only justification variable expend has, which as Teridax says is another bit of unnecessary tracking.
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