Ammunition and Thin Ice

My friends seem to universally hate ammunition, and I find it difficult to disagree with them. Tracking numbers on a sheet, especially with something as oft used as a bow becomes a chore that will frequently get forgotten in the heat of battle or a particularly heated discussion of exactly how much that shot missed that troll by. To this end using a similar dice rolling mechanic used elsewhere in the system (in an effort to unify the process so the only thing my players need to ask is 'how many dice am I rolling?') I have attempted to give an abstract system for tracking ammunition for arrows, charges left in a wand or even days worth of rations left.

The concept is simple, each item such as a quiver of arrows has a number of dice assosciated with it when it is found/created between 1 and 5. At the end of any encounter or roleplaying phase (in the case of rations you would only have to roll after resting and making camp, which would constitute a phase of roleplaying) the owning player must roll the dice assosciated with the object, if there are any failures (1-2 on the d6) then the player must subtract 1 die permanently from the object. If this is the last die then the object has 'run out' of uses or ammunition and is destroyed or otherwise rendered useless.

For Example.
Terence the archer has been busy fighting a Deep Crow with his party, opening fire with his bow to fend of the deep lord of Power Dome A. Once the Deep Crow has been driven back into the dark crevice within the mantle of the world that it calls its home the Games Master decides that the encounter is over. Terence has a quiver with 3D worth of arrows within, so he rolls 3d6 and gets a 5, 1 and a 2. Since the 1 and 2 are failures Terence is forced to amend his character sheet where his 3D arrows lose a dice becoming 2D arrows.

However this is not the only way the system can be used to represent something other than character skills. Consider a river of thin ice that a party must cross thats thickness is defined by a number of dice and its durability by a Hp total. Each turn the ice must roll a test to see if it can endure the weight upon it, with a difficulty equal to the number of people currently crossing, ie a party of 4 crossing means difficulty 4. If it passes the test then it holds but if it fails it takes a point of damage, if it reaches 0 Hp then the ice buckles and anybody left on the ice falls into the water, most likely taking damage from the freezing damage and possibly being inflicted with hypothermia (to be discussed in a later article about status changing effects).

With a little bit of creativity the basic mechanics of the system can be adapted to work in a variety of situations which is pleasing as a single universal mechanic is much more memorable than several necissary to control several niché situations that might only come up once a campaign.