This is the third meta question relating to this main site question (see also here and here), but it has popped back into the reopen queue several times now (five times to be precise), so I'm coming to meta, hopefully to permanently settle this question's status.
I'll keep it short, I closed it as a duplicate, and I'll provide an explanation in an answer below. But of course, answers providing other solutions are welcome.
Question A: Can I recover a single arrow?
Question B: Is ammunition recoverable and reusable?
I voted to close this question as a duplicate of Is ammunition recoverable and reusable?. Let's check the duplicate criteria.
- It's the same question, or Question A is already covered obviously as a subset of Question B. "Obvious" here means I can tell at a glance that Question A would be covered by Question B.
Firing and attempting to recover one arrow is obviously covered as a subset of the more general question "Is ammunition recoverable and reusable?"
- Question B has an obvious answer to Question A. "Obvious" here means I get a straightforward answer without hard searching — a couple of sentences buried in the middle of a post, or an answer which only sort of implies an answer to Question A, doesn't count as obvious.
The highest scoring (and accepted) answer to Question B provides a direct answer to Question A, first by quoting and summarizing the relevant rules, then providing several examples of how those rules are applied in play, including providing the scenario of Question A as an example:
For example, if we fire 7 arrows during the fight, we can recover half of 7, which is 3.5, rounded down, which is 3 arrow recovered. If we only fire a single arrow, we can recover half of 1, which 0.5, rounded down, which is 0 arrows recovered.1
Additionally, the rest of the answers contain similar rulings based on the relevant rules and further guidance that is directly applicable to Question A.
- There isn't a strong, compelling reason to cover Question A alone, separately from Question B. (If the above bullet points are met, this rarely happens.)
There is not. It remained closed through five reopen reviews spanning two and a half years before it collected four reopen votes, which allowed me to reopen and switch the close reason over to duplicate. The question is a duplicate, and is adequately addressed by numerous good answers on the linked question.
1 A note for transparency: In September 2021 I revised the accepted answer to more thoroughly explain the relevant rules and cover a couple of examples, including the example that explicitly covers the scenario of Question A.
The particular issue (and if I recall right, I ended up to vote reopen due to it) here is that the general answer does not discuss the special problem you run into with a single arrow.
The general answer has a rule that says, you recover half your ammunition, round down, which for a single arrow is you always recover 0. Case closed.
However, that is not a satisfactory answer for the single arrow case if you look at what the rule portrays, p. 146 PHB:
At the end of the battle, you can recover half your expended ammunition by taking a minute to search the battlefield.
The intend is clearly that you get back half your ammunition. In the case of many arrows, the being off by one does not really register. But with a single arrow, you would expect that over many combats in which you shoot a single arrow, you would be able to recover it about half the time. The rounding rule obliterates this outcome, and you recover no ammunition whatsoever.
This problem surfaces especially for a single arrow, and I think deserves separate treatment. I do not think that the answer of just following the rounding rule in this special case is obvious. I can easily see making a special exception ruling in this case as the DM.
So the criteria for dupe-closing are
Is the question obviously covered by the other question? Yes, a recovering a single arrow is obviously covered by a question about recovering ammunition.
Is the question already answered in an obvious way by the dupe target? Yes, in a technical sense. I do not think it does answer the OPs underlying issue however, that the arrow would be always unrecoverable. The current form removed this, as far as I can see from the history, due to efforts of the OP to keep his question open, but it seems clearly to be his motivation.
Is there a strong reason to cover the question alone? I think there is, because this special case leads to an unsatisfactory outcome using the general answer. Saying the general answer covers this point is just suppressing a discussion and explanation about how to handle the incongruence that happens in particular with a single arrow.
