Ammo management

They make for excellent worldbuilding inspiration though.

Do what METRO does.

Make ammunition the currency.

There's nothing players track better.

????
is it because counting ammo with reall ammo would be expensive in a game like Fallout?
Let me clarify
I mean count the number of rounds you will be taking with you, which should be a small amount, and keep them on the table until fired.
actual stockpiles should be just counted on paper.

as someone who frequesnts /k/, the best middle ground is probably splitting each into a few calibers so that your players weapon choices matter more.

don't go fucknuts with it, but common nato calibers would be a good split, and make sure you remember and enforce that SMGs usually use pistol-class cartridges.

example might be splitting rifle ammo into 5.56, 7.62, and .50 bmg

by doing the above it means you can make the .50 rounds for very heavy machineguns scarce and limit the heavy firepower of your party, while keeping generic 7.62 more readily available (in most rifles you can use .308 win and 7.62 nato interchangeably, so its pretty plentiful sateside as it's a common hunting caliber) and make 5.56 for things like military rifles medium-rare (inb4 AR15 crew complains, but buying decent 5.56 just walking into a shop is getting harder so its not out of reality)

you don't need much granularity, just enough to differentiate and make it so they need to be conscious of the choice.

If my experience with the game is anything to go by, the players will ignore ammunition alltogether and just get really good with throwing knives.

You can use the default system's generic ammo types if you want, though it may cheapen it a bit of the players are always conveniently compatible with their particular gun, regardless of how rare that ammo is in real life.

I would personally just mark down common ammo types (9x19,.40S&W,.45ACP,.223,.308, etc, etc) and not treat the weapons any differently than they are stated in the rule book (An AR-15 and an AK-74 doing 2d6 despite using two different ammo types) so there's not too much crunch getting in the way and bogging things down.

Whether or not to use real calibers is more of thematic thing, if the game takes place in a fallout style setting then I'd say a mix of both, but if it's real life earth I recommend using actual calibers.

Would those shells be considered live ammunition?

Throwing Knives can't destroy the brain of a zombie. Melee weapons, sure, but getting into melee with zombie hordes just requires one good roll from the DM.

How much ammo do you expect your Pc's to have? What one user suggested, using literal ammo at the table, sounds like it would actually be a good idea. You use believable calibers and it gives the players something physical to fret over. I'd only use this for very small ammo counts though.

This, throwing knives will never be better than even a good sling shot.
relevant.
youtube.com/watch?v=tLxnNP-ycVQ

Not OP, but I don't want anyone to walk in on my gaming group laughing and talking about shooting people, with a table covered in fucking live ammunition. We had enough problems planning a shadowrun heist at school, with nothing more than dice and minis.

I'd probably use real world ammo types and maybe split it into pre apocalypse grade and shoddy wasteland reloads of spent brass. Give the home made higher jam chance or some such.

>Good
This man doesn't make GOOD slingshots.
He makes exceptional slingshots.

Though ypunraise a good point. Its all well and good forcing players to track ammo, but players are players. They will just invest time and effort into means that aren't guns to kill Zombies.

Such as elastic powered toilet brush cannons.

>How much ammo do you expect your Pc's to have?

I don't want to be stingy, but if they never ran out sometimes (or think twice about using their last few rounds) there really wouldn't be any reason to keep track of it at all.

i remember that, who would have thought?

>if they never ran out sometimes (or think twice about using their last few rounds) there really wouldn't be any reason to keep track of it at all.

The amount of ammunition remaining does matter if your system cares about things like burst-firing.

And it's a resource drain like anything else, which should matter in the post-apocalypse unless you're literally just running it as a weird western.

Although with the number of people the average PC kills each session, simply scavenging half-broken shit off enemies should make them pretty well off after a while. For that reason, you probably want to enforce encumbrance too, although I suggest using one of the OSR-style simplified encumbrance systems rather than tracking everything by the pound.

How unspecific of you.

i mean the toilet brushes, that is just bizarre to me.

Sharpen them up and give them enough thrust.

That's pretty amazing.

Use pistol, rifle, and shotgun.

Get spent casings from a range, buy unloaded shotgun shells and ask them for empty boxes. Fill the ammo with Playdo for heft and a somewhat loaded appearance. Hand them out as players find them (you can cheat larger numbers by filling boxes with paper and just counting them en bloc).

So far, so dire. But you can take it further. For starters I'd wear some of the boxes a little with vinegar, sunlight, repeated humidity, sandpaper. Do the same to snack packs, soda cans, and MREs. Also age some canned tomatoes, beans, and spam. The players won't eat those but they still can be handed back for a replenishing meal, emptying the party bags. Oh yeah, tell the players to each bring a bag.

The bullets and shells can be worn as well. Try nothing them with a chisel or clogging the primer with sticky gunk. You can also get matching magazines, but a small box will do: have each player set their magazine with those bullets. And when they fire, have them hand back the bullets one by one. Now when you get a damaged one, roll for malfunction.

Please be aware that primer in unloaded shotgun shells is still a dangerous explosive and must be handled with a little caution. Instruct your players. It will add tension to the game.

Now get some flashlights, half empty extra batteries, maybe an old Gameboy with Tetris, pocket knifes and multitools, binoculars, etc.. Connect them all to some in game goody, like +1 repair or some such. Then hand them out when players find stuff. And turn out the light when it's night so the players have to use their flashlights to roll.

Or hand out toy guns with limited ammo strips.

Gamma World is future apocalypse, so modern calibers might not have any more validity than whatever the fuck they were using two hundred years ago. Given that a plethora of other gun types exist (lasers, blasters, needlers, slicers, magnetically-impelled slug throwers, black ray pistols, etc.), having a standardized pistol bullet might not be too crazy. That's assuming, of course, that Mutant Epoch has the same basic setting as Gamma World.

Well, old timey guns are just considered pre-apocalypse relics, but I see your point

go to a local shooting range.

ask them if you can have spent brass and cartridges.

use the brass as counters.

for more complexity you could divide it out such that
>a 9x19mm or .38 special cartridge is one shots worth of pistol ammo
>a .45 ACP is five shots worth
>a .500 supermag or .50 AE or .454 caull round is ten

do the same with rifles
>a 7.63x39mm or a 5.56x45mm or a .223 is one
>a .30-06 or a .30-30 is five
>any really large hunting round is 10

shot-shells can go by color

either that or you can get a whole bunch of poker chips and divvy them up between the players maybe glue little icons on them so you know whats what in terms of rifle, pistol, or shotgun ammmo.

with cases of specialty ammo(dragons breath shot-shells for example) you count that shit off carefully.

>>a 9x19mm or .38 special cartridge is one shots worth of pistol ammo
>>a .45 ACP is five shots worth

What do you mean by this? A .45 costs 5 times as much to shoot?

no, they're clearly bigger

I'm basically suggesting the use of counters.

a player declares an attack by throwing down however many shots-worth of ammo(in counters) before they roll dice

(at my locality)it's more like 3 times as expensive to shoot than 9mm but that depends on your local market.

He's saying the ammo could be used as physical tokens for keeping track of ammo, with some of it representing multiple number of rounds, 1, 5, and 10 respectively.

My question is where spent .22 brass falls on the spectrum.

probably should have that marked as singles of the most prevalent ammo moving one scale or other up the ladder

and I was suggesting that you pick up a bucket of spent brass to use as counters because they are thematically appropriate and frequently free to take away from the ranges...

I don't like using single bullets to represent a number of them. It takes out the whole resource management haptics and is little more than crossing off ammo boxes on a sheet.

When a player has six bullets in from of them they should FEEL how their character only has six shots left.

And if it's a zombie apocalypse make that 5 plus sleeping pill.

meh, it was just an idea for covering larger numbers of available rounds.

you could just as easily go 1:1 with necked rounds being for rifles, un-necked rounds for pistols and shells for shotguns

Keep things as simple as you can.
Light pistol ammo.
Heavy pistol ammo.
Light rifle ammo.
Heavy rifle ammo.
Shotgun shells (shot).
Shotgun shells (slug).

And that's it apart from the odd barrel loaded grenade or rocket.

For pistols, anything over .357 is Heavy. .357 Magnum should also count as Heavy.

SMGs use mostly light pistol rounds.

Most rifles use Light Rifle ammo, especially assault rifles that are less than 7.62. Anything larger is Heavy Rifle ammo.

Machine guns mostly use Heavy Rifle ammo (in reality, many use slightly different loads for the same caliber, but it's not worth it unless you're worried your players are going to hoard ammo for their HMGs). Miniguns use Light or Heavy Pistol ammo.

This isn't very realistic, but it will save you a ton of bookkeeping, and will make it easier for you to distribute ammo to your players so they can meet the challenges you want to throw at them.

If you want to simplify things even further, just create a variety of generic gun types and give them stats.

Hold-out revolver.
Hold-out semi-auto.
Light revolver.
Light semi-auto.
Heavy revolver.
Heavy semi-auto.
Machine pistol.

Submachine gun.

Double barrel shotgun.
Sports shotgun.
Semi-auto shotgun.
Fully automatic shotgun.

Varmint rifle, semi or bolt.
Hunting rifle, semi or bolt.
Sniper rifle, semi or bolt.
Anti-material rifle, semi or bolt.

Assault rifle.

Light machine gun.
Heavy machine gun.
Minigun.

That should cover 99% of your actual weapon category needs. Feel free to add small modifiers to any given generic weapon to make them feel different.

"Long barreled heavy revolver adds 10% to its range", "Sawn-off double barrel shotgun has 75% less range, but deals twice the damage" or stuff like that.

With guns you either go simple and generic, or full blown /k/. There is no sensible middle ground that will please everyone.

He's making a joke.

The throwing knives in Metro are OHK on any part of the body when facing human opponents and smaller monsters.

They're also silent. If you can get decent at aiming them they're insanely OP.

My .357 is grumbling in the safe, but alright.

lots of people aren't aware of the variances of ammunition, just leave it at that.

Honestly the more specific you get, the harder it is to balance it.

Just leave it at generic rifle pistol etc.

Add in AP or whatever, but don't add specific caliber.

Better yet, let's say they have 2 rifles

1 sniper rifle large caliber
1 lower caliber assault rifle

Do this:

1 sniper rifle (x)
1 assault rifle (y)

That's how many rounds he has FOR THAT RIFLE. If the gun breaks he can't add the ammo to the assault rifle, it's specifically the snipers ammo. So he needs to find another sniper rifle.

Ammo costs the exact same, just make them write how many rounds they bought, and which gun they bought ammo for.

I'd just use 1 ammo of each type, don't even specify it. Then, if you have a player who wants a /special/ gun they also have to find special ammo for their tiny advantage.

But unless the player initiates it I wouldn't even specify the guns. Just call them police pistol, ancient revolver, hunting rifle, or pump gun.

Hmm. Maybe it's just me but I don't see much difficulty in the book keeping, of using many calibers and guns, mostly because I know 90% of automatic rifles are going to use one of three calibers and a pistol is likely going to do the same.

It probably helps that I frequent /k/ and thus can automatically connect ammo to it's proper weapon.

One of the biggest appeals for post-apocalypse, for a lot of players, is how much of the game ISN'T made up. They get to apply their real-world knowledge of guns and vehicles and engineering, in a way that is usually discouraged in other games.

So, yes, I think your players will expect you to talk about real ammo. I don't think it's a big deal if you make a decision to abstract over that but explain your decision early. Having abstract ammo doesn't stop you from making ammo management important, players will understand that they only get to go boom so many times before they run out of boom, which is the important part.

yeah, but most players aren't as cross-literate in /k/nowledge so they might not make the connection...

Unless you hit one of the jingly metal parts on their bodies. That happened to me in one of the stealth sections when a knife of mine deflected off of a flask or something. I was surprised, pleasantly because the devs thought of that, unpleasantly because it alerted the guy I was aiming at.

Yeah, I can see how it can be an issue, un/k/nowledgable people wouldn't know the difference between a glock 17 and a glock 22, while someone more /k/nowledgeable like myself would hear the name of a gun and immediately think of the possible caliber options.

I think the problem is that the more realistic you get, the more information has to be set in stone.

If you have real guns, with real ammo, they need parameters that are statted out to differentiate them somehow.

Someone who isn't completely knowledgeable about guns is going to have a hard time statting up accuracy, range, and damage profiles for 5 most common revolvers, 5 most common semiauto pistols, 5 most common sport rifles, 5 most common assault rifles, along with extra things like shotguns, smgs, sniper rifles, holdout pistols, etc.

Even if you did have someone who did that, there'd probably still be someone else who would find fault in some of those numbers, which could ruin the feel of the game.

Well, marking the performance of individual weapons is 2 or 3 steps more fiddly than tracking ammo types. People on /k/ argue about which weapon of a given type is the best but they can all agree on which weapons fire .45 ammo.

My metric for a good post-apocalypse system is that it handles different weapons or vehicles in a way that is detailed enough to be satisfying, so that PCs discussing their resources sound like they're in a movie and not playing a game, but still abstract enough to be playable.

Like this user brought up, tracking every possible facet of a weapon is a much greater endeveour than just saying AK-74, SKS, AR-15,, Glock 17, Sig P226 and so on and making similar weapons have the same damage (as they reasonably would within their expected combat ranges) when you start adding in accuracy and specific damage profiles for each weapon you stop being able to abstract and might want to move towards something with far more crunch like GURPS or, if you're REALLY doubling down on the simulation Phoenix Command.

Couldn't the post-apocalypse setting be used to justify a relatively small variety of still-functioning firearms with decent supplies of ammunition? All kinds of tragedies or unforseen issues could weed out certain weapons groups or their supply of ammunition.

You could easily use that to make gun logistics a little less terrifying. Just have two or three weapons in each category (pistol, automatic rifle, shotgun, sniper), all of them use the same ammunition as others in the category, with clear hierarchy of weapon quality. Maybe each category can have a homemade/shitty version, a reasonable quality version, and one that's considered endgame-tier.

That's highly dependent on the apocalypse in question and the time between the big end of humanity and when the game starts. A firearm kept out of humidity and not submerged or subjected to the elements would probably last at least 50 years on it's own with no care before it begins to become unreliable, even more so if it's in a climate controlled room and preserved properly before the end. As long as you prevent the weapon from rusting it's good to go forever.

>That's highly dependent on the apocalypse in question and the time between the big end of humanity and when the game starts

That's more or less what I mean. The GM could tweak these details and others to achieve the desired mix of weaponry. For instance, certain weapons might have been popular near the beginning of mankind's return to the world, but by now most of their ammunition is gone. Or there were secret preserved facilities for manufacturing certain ammunition types, but some of those might have been damaged or destroyed in wars between tribes (making them less common), while others might have persevered (making them more abundant as a result). And so on and so forth.

Well that would only work with future or fantasy guns, as in a real world setting people with the skills would be manufacturing guns and ammo like mad and making a profit off of it.

If i remember right in fallout NV the gun runners find an old weapons factory and start churning out pre-war quality weapons and stuff using the blueprints they find. That'd be likely be happening in a realistic apocalypse setting as well, except it could easily happen out of some dude's little workshop (albeit in much smaller numbers) and people would eventually start manufacturing powder and reloading brass, making their own brass... and so on until they make their own self sufficient ammo supplies.

Assuming there is some time between the apocalypse and the game start, and guns from before exist concurrently with guns made in certain workshops. What would be the most reasonable way to distinguish them, should older guns be better?

well in real life, depending on where you live you could have a very simple time finding right ammo (Warpac nations for example are all gonna be slavshit so finding the right ammo would be easy as there's little variety). America on the otherhand hand would be a nightmare. There's an absolutely stupid amount of variety in types of ammo here, and only certain types work with certain guns. Single shot or revolve type weapons are more flexible, for example a single shot 22lr can shoot 22 short, 22 Magnum, etc, while something like a .357 Magnum can fire 38 special as well. A more complex weapon would be more picky. It's an interesting wrinkle that would give a player a reason to hang onto a "worse" gun because it'd be easier to feed. In addition, these simpler revolvers and rifles would hold up better over time.

I'd say keep a few common types, like 9mm, 10mm, and 45 for pistol, and just roll every time they find ammo to see what type. Maybe make it where a 1 means its something none of their weapons take, like 9x18 mak or 7.62 tokarev, to further up the tension. I probably wouldn't count every single bullet, but I'd you want to make every shot count go for it.

Is anyone seen any good systems that represent scarcity of ammo without having to have you tracked every shot fired each round round.

Gamma world 4e (ie based off fourth edition done doesn't dragon technically the seventh edition of the game) had an interest in system where you could either fire once in combat or multiple times and be classed as out of ammo by end of it.

Are there any games that have a similar abstract? Hopefully not *as abstract* but still get the point across

Either you track ammo as a central theme
>I shot him with the bullet we found in that cellar last week.
or you don't mention it unless it becomes central
>You held them off all night, but dawn is still an hour off, and each of you only has 2 magazines left, including the one in the weapon right now.

Anything in between is just tedious.

Is tracking ammo really much more tedious than hitpoints? You can use a pair of d10s for either.

Quality of the the craftsmanship, most workshop guns should be a sorta quickly made single shot zipgun or pipe rifle with no rifling, then a handful of decent quality manual action weapons that may or may not have rifling and then finally at the end tier you have wasteland manufactured pre-apocalypse quality firearms that are nigh indistinguishable from the real thing.

So just create some low quality variants for the sake of realism and simple variety?

Most wasteland manufactured weapons should be low quality variants yeah, but make sure there are plenty of higher quality post-apocalypse weapons as well.

>Or hand out toy guns with limited ammo strips.
Brush this actually sounds like a great idea, get a bunch if capguns and let them keep track of their ammo using caps.

Though the noise and smell may get annoying

Yup. Only makes sense in games where there is maybe the occasional exchange of gunfire, but no cover fire battlescapes.

Basically one system I've seen that was interesting was the "1 scene/1 clip" rule, where you don't count bullets in fire fights except in terms of "how many shots does this gun have before I need to take a turn to reload" (so there's basically "infinite bullets" in the scene itself, like shadowrun), but each fire fight or scene where a gun is fired uses up at least one clip from the party's supply for every gun used.

In the AFMBE campaign I used this in (zombie setup was: anyone who dies becomes a zombie regardless of a bite, unless headshotted dismembered zombie parts could sometimes continue moving around of their own accord and would still strive to kill the living - "zhands" were a recurring threat) it led to one major change in player behaviour once things got down to 8-10 clips for 4 guns:

If there wasn't a MAJOR zombie hoard or they weren't dealing with heavily armored and beligerent survivors, they would do ANYTHING rather than use their guns.

It was kinda fun GMing these people in their weird elaborate traps set up, sneaking attempts and tendency to start singing the "yub-yub" ewok song every time a trap worked as intended. Even if it was essentially being done for metagaming reasons.

>essentially being done for metagaming reasons.
Conserving ammunition is not a metagaming reason user.

I personally don't like that sorta system. Considering it just groups up all the ammo into one weird chunk and sorta breaks the immersion of "ammo is scarce" if the players end up expending several magazines worth of ammo but only use 1 or 2 chunks from the stockpile and sems like it makes parts where the players only expend a few rounds of ammunition count against them pretty heavily. I seriously don't see how it's better than just counting each individual rounds and subtracting from the group stockpile only when people reload their magazines (IE during downtime).

Fuck off carlos.

If it's more than a hundred years into the future you should feel free to just make up whatever. It's not like anyone really uses a ton of 19th century stuff today.

>the moment when you realize nuclear powerplants are just fancy steam engines
>the moment when you realize the internet is a complicated telegraph network

>the moment you realize coal and oil are still the primary sources of energy in the world, just like they were at the end of the 19th century

Op here, thanks for the thorough and reasonable response, I think I'll go with this one.

It has enough variety that should fulfill the requirement of some ammo scarcity, as well as the decision of trying to keep a lower quality gun that has easier to find ammo versus a higher quality gun that has rarer ammo.

It's "at least 1" clip per gun per scene - if scenes go particularly long the GM can subtract more clips, and PCs can spend clips for special shooting maneuvers.

First type of maneuver that comes to mind is "suppressing fire" - basically if you're counting individual bullets how many bullets does laying down covering fire use up? In a less specific system that's just "one clip per use of the maneuver".

Admittedly,devolves into just a repurposed "magic point" based casting system for gunplay, but that doesn't mean it's bad per se

Well depends on the system, some system have covering fire as a specific action that fire x amount of rounds from the magazine. To simplify covering fire and automatic fire all you have to do is set a fixed amount of shots fired by that weapon autofire being five for example and covering fire being 4 to 10 shots.

>16 shooter

kek

It's not that far off from reality.

>>hyper-realistic unless done by an extremely talented GM
>>enjoyable
How would this work?

It'd be playing Phoenix Command with someone who knows the tables and rules like the back of his hand.

What about a man with a bionic hand with all the rules and tables written on its back?

Honestly in a count-every-bullet set up I'd make them roll to see how many shots they fire in a full auto spray-and-pray attack, if they want to conserve ammo use fixed burst or semi-automatic, fools.

Then that guy would have a REALLY big hand, unless it's got some sort of mindlink LED screen that shows him the rules when he thinks of them.

And yeah, that's another way of doing suppression or automatic fire, making them roll a die to see how many rounds they expend (unless they take a talent or something to counteract it)

You're welcome. I've spent decades running Shadowrun, so every time we play a game that isn't so anal retentive about guns I've pulled out that system and it has worked wonders. It's simple, flexible, and minimizes bookkeeping as much as possible without trivializing resource management.

>You have a quiver of arrows
How many is that
>As much as you need until you crit fail an attack then you run out. After combat you easily find what you need to make another quiver full of arrows again.
What if I fail right after making a quiver full of arrows?
>Then your string breaks. After combat you easily repair it
What if I crit fail again right after that
>Then the dice gods hate you and your bow snaps in two. You can repair it when we go to town if it has magical properties and you can craft a simple bow with no magical properties in the mean time right after combat easily enough

>What about special arrows and the such
Keep track of how many of those you have given their inherent nature obviously.

>What if I silvered arrows
Treat them the same as regular arrows, but a crit fail means you will have to make some more silvered arrows as you ran out of them. You can make them by melting down a silver coin for each head, so 25 silver should do it.

My advice is to keep an organized pad of paper with all player names, how much ammo they have and what kind of weapon they are using. From experience players will not keep track of their own ammo. However, I kinda like being able to go "click, you're out" after they roll an attack roll.

I think that you guys vastly overestimate how much trouble it is to track ammunition counts.

If you just use something like a bracket of tallies next to your total bullets, it's basically brainless. You just mark down tallies for each bullet you consume, then at the end of each fight you clear the tallies and reduce your ammunition number by the number of tallies you had. I have done this for just about every consumable in RPGs for years; it's quite easy and accurate.

Tokens is a fairly simple of way of doing this, or use pennies.

>I kinda like being able to go "click, you're out"

Evil, but I like it.

>phoenix command
>completely realistic combat game

tldr: You got shot? You're probably dead or dying. Sucks to be you.

Yeah that sounds about right. I don't see the problem here.

That sounds like the opposite of fun. I think they missed the most important part of 'game'.

Hitpoints might be a stupid system, but at least they can let you have a somewhat enjoyable combat.

Well, the game is more of a skirmishing system than a roleplaying system. But to give you an idea of how survivable your average grunt will be I'll look up the rules real quick...

An average grunt with some experience will have a health (ability to recover) of 10 and a will of 10 (ability to withstand fear and unconsciousness) with a Knockout Value (KV) of 20. Using the advanced damaged tables, our hapless grunt getting shot in the gut by an m16 will take 186 points of damage +10 shock, adding damage shock together gives us 196, well over three times the grunts KV so he has a 99% chance to be incapacitated.

Depending on a d10 roll he can be incapacitated from anywhere between 25 phases (about 50 seconds) to 25 minutes. To determine his Damage Total and see how likely he is to die we multiply the actual damage he took (186) by 10 then divide by health (in this case 10) leaving him at 186, since this is below 200 we use the 100 line on the table. Using the base medical rules, with no first aid he must roll in 31 hours to see if he dies, a 36 percent chance of dieing. His chances improve exponentially if he gets decent medical attention.

To contrast the same soldier getting shot in the heart takes 26,000 PD and will die in a single phase.

Of course, I think the system could be improved so that the KV of people is somewhere between 70 to 100 instead of 5 to 40 at best, that way the people are getting shot in the leg or chest and at least get a fighting chance to keep fighting on instead of having a 99% chance of falling over and being unable to do anything for the rest of the battle.

Considering even the most grievous wounds for the (less artery filled parts) of the legs cap out a 200 and the arms cap out at 120, although they still disable the arm preventing their use.

My /k/ senses are tingling. How have none of you fuckers posted this yet?
Anyway OP, i'd say borrow a bit from the Metro series in regards to ammunition. With enough time there's bound to be a few folks in the wasteland that have learned to make bullets that can be fired without having the gun turn the wielder's hand into shrapnel and meat salsa. It's likely going to be pricy, but it beats the alternative of getting "recycled" rounds (damaged or heavily used shell casings, duds that were tinkered with to the point of instability, etc.) or trying to scrounge every little scrap of ammunition from corpses. In terms of pricing, I would imagine that generic rounds would have prices based on caliber whereas shotguns may have prices based on the load they carry. Rifles and pistols might have very little range across the board when it comes to cost, but shells might range from a cheap ass shell filled with whatever was lying around, to a dragon's breath round that could cost as much as pre-apocalyptian ammo.

Speaking of pre-apocalyptic ammunition, it should still be around, however depending on the time that this is supposed to take place it should have varying degrees of scarcity. Regular pre-waste ammo is a valuable thing to have on hand as it's likely even more reliable than the home made stuff. Military grade ammunition should be even more valuable, potentially to the point that it can be used as currency.

Speaking of pre-apocalypse ammo, does properly stored ammo expire in some fashion over time?