Need help with a Damage Tracking system

Each card could have a damage track, with a counter that would move on it. It would be an elegant and easy way of tracking damage. Furthermore, it would be cheaper to produce. The only disadvantage of this method is that it requires space on your cards.

Regards,

Jeb

A damage track with counters is more realistic, but you could also use sliders on the side of a card, like Betrayal at the House on a Hill. Your cat won't knock those off. You could have sleeves that the cards sink further into.

As we saw in another recent post, Battlegrounds uses laminated cards and dry erase markers to track damage.

If you could get rid of hitpoints altogether, I'd cheer you on. It's such as effective way to track damage over time, but it's also a really entrenched system that could use freshening.

Yogurt

I have the same issue with my game (and roughly the same amount of health for my game's units). And, actually, I looked at ALL of the solutions you listed. I went back to the counters. The card rotation was too limiting and the dice were just too expensive to consider seriously. I also considered marking the cards (like Battleground: Fantasy Warfare does), but I just don't like writing on playing cards.

My final solution was to have three different colors of counters. Yellow = 1 health, Blue = 5 health and Red = 10 health (for things like dragons and castles). Thus far it's played pretty smoothly, and having three different levels of counters keeps things from getting too cluttered.

I'll be keeping an eye out here to see if anyone comes up with a better system. What I'm using is workable, but wouldn't mind finding a smoother alternative.

Jeff K.

Pretty much. You can see a picture here:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/123818

The character cards in that game are thick cardboard and the tension is provided by the tight fit, rather than the opposing loops of a paperclip.

It seems like everyone (including me) is trying to find a way to avoid using those pesky counters!

How big are your unit cards, and how many of them must each player keep track of? If the answer comes out low-ish, then perhaps you could try something like this:

* Each player gets a player mat with tracks for say 10 small cards.
* Each track consists of the equivalent of 7 slotted bases glued onto the mat in a vertical column. So 10 columns of 7.
* Your cards start at slot 1, held upright, and moves down one slot each time until no slots are left, at which point the card is eliminated. Healed cards move back up the track.

This would probably be more economical as a single plastic tray with seven grooves that hold cards, wiht no specific division into columns. You could even have cards on the same track as long as they did not occupy the same space. Perhaps the lack of track space and assignment of cards to the same track could become part of the game strategy...

I agree with Yogurt that HP as a concept is effective yet stale. But what, really, are hit points measuring?

In D&D, the originator of the term, a character's hit points represented a huge unber of variables which were abstracted together. speed, reflexes, luck, toughness, and so on were amalgamted into a single number representing a character's abilty to survive incoming damage. Theives dodged about, magic users used small sub-spell-level magical effects, and fighters deflected and absorbed injury as needed. All of these things were called "hit points". the origianl DMG waxes poetic about this.

The problem with this is obvious. The thieves dodge, and yet, after the battle, they still remain affected. Strained muscles from their heroic efforts? When Hp were lost, they suddenly converted into physical damage, and this was a huge headache. Weak characters are healed up to full health by a minor magic that restores 2 HP, and yet a mighty hero, presumably in tip-top shape, in totally unaffected. It might close a small scratch, but that's it. They still have 45 more HP to heal!

Your game might benefit by considering what you mean by Hit Points, and what it means to recover them. The difference could spare you record-keeping while enhancing the game-play.

Consider this: My index finger likely weighs about a tenth of a percent of my body weight. If we assume that HP represent my ability to take damage, and this is, in turn, reflected by my physical mass, then having my index finger lopped off should be inconsequential, hardly affecting my combat performance.

And yet it's easy to imagine that the effect of losing even a single finger would be more serious than mass alone would indicate. Physical effects, like shock, would immediately set in, and unconsciousness would not be unheard of. And then there's the psychological factor. Having just lost a finger to an opponant, I'd likely stare, horrified, at my injury, or drop whatever else I'm holding and cluct the injury out of sight. Niether of these allows me to keep up a steady level of combat-effectiveness.

So I think you should consider combat effects, and then make these different effects harder to achieve against tougher units. Remember, that the more individuals a unit represents, the more powerful the effects of disruptive, non-lethal effects.

Here are some affects that could be independantly eroded in a unit:

Cohesion: physical unity, the ability to maneuver and move as a group.

Command structure: the ability to understand and carry out commands.

Shock: Individual members of the unit can be stunned by explosions, violent attack, surprise.

Instinct: A unit that loses the ability of reasoned reaction is pinned (on the ground taking cover), or fleeing.

Losses: The unit actually losing members due to injury, or, (usually more rarely) death. Injurred members can be a heightened movement impediment (assuming the unit members don't leave the battlefield littered with their injured comrades), while slain memebers would be a heightened psychological one.

Malfunction: Damage and loss of equipment can cause specialize units to lose their effectiveness even though every member is alive and well. For instance, scouts that lose their communications equipment might be completely unable to report their findings.

Breaking up the concept of damage into game-impacting ability loss is better for everyone, avoids record-keeping (since every effect can be a yes/no situation), and heightens the potential for the design of new and interesting units and scenarios.