So, the answer is no, because of the unofficial house rule that no one counts ammunition anyway?
If this is the case, please state this anywhere. Would be really bad for players if a DM decides to use the official rules.
To me, this topic is a solution looking for a problem.
It hasn't come up in the year and a half that I have been here and I consider it a non-issue with no need for house rules.
If someone wants to track their ammo, fine. If someone doesn't, it's really not going to bother too many people.
I don't think it is necessary to write down in the game wiki a voted in decision for every special case that someone can think up. Just play the game and have fun and only even consider making any changes if something comes up in the game and it is important enough to decide about for the entire LEB community.
This issue is not important in the big scheme of things. If a DM decides to use the official rules, suck it up as a player and do so.
One of the disadvantages of PBP is that most players don't have a printed out piece of paper character sheet in front of them. On paper, it takes a mere two seconds to track a piece of ammo. It takes 1 to 3 minutes to navigate to an online electronic character sheet and make a change to it. It's really not worth the time and effort here to track, to discuss, or to have rules for. IMO.
There are people here who have difficulty keeping their stat blocks up to date with correct information such as powers and healing surges used. To me, that's 100 times more important than ammo tracking from a bookkeeping perspective.
It seems generally unfair that, when presented with a long campaign/adventure, a ranged weapon user can simply run out of usefulness. I think this is especially true as they should be able to recover a majority of their arrows/bolts/random rocks on the ground.
I think most DMs are reasonable on this type of thing. But I don't think that the game has to be totally equitable to all PCs at all times.
In the Rhapsody adventure at the moment, some of the PCs do not have their armor and some do not have their normal weapons/implements because of the scenario. Is it fair that some do and some do not? Yup. It's totally fair. There is nothing wrong with some PCs having a disadvantage compared to other PCs in some circumstances.
Is it fair that the PCs can be on one side of a ravine, the NPC enemies on another, and the bow user has a range of 20/40 with his attacks, but the ranged spell caster, both PCs and NPCs, are limited to range 10 and the melee PCs have no real chance of attacking? That too is fair. The bow user paid for the privilege of shooting at long range.
If the ranged weapon PC is going out into the wilderness, what prevents him from stocking up on arrows ahead of time?
I don't consider this a fairness issue, no more than I consider it "unfair" that PCs limited to cloth armor have sucky AC and even if they take a feat, they still often have lower AC than many other PCs. It's a property of using a bow that it uses ammo. Take that into consideration as a player, or don't and then suffer the consequences.
As a bow user, a PC gets extreme range and good damage. One of the "costs" of doing so is that he has to pay for and carry arrows. C'est la vie.
Why should we give an advantage to players who have PCs that use bows in this circumstance? I don't see where they are being treated unfairly.
