Tracking Damage

[Guest taxboy4]

Hi guys, in my game I keep the players damage to each location noted on my DM Laptop and roll the damage dice from their hits and mine giving them descriptions.

 

What do others do or feel about keeping most of the rolls (including some skill rolls) for the DM , how do others keep track of damage or do they even use location rules?

[lemming]

I've always had the players keep track of their damage. I'm a lazy bastard

[Guest taxboy4]

Originally posted by lemming

I've always had the players keep track of their damage. I'm a lazy bastard

 

It not so much about being lazy or not, I just find it adds to the flaovur of the gamer and helps avoiding it reducing too much into a personalised wargame.

 

Also keeps them guessing!!

[Mr. Negative]

Well, I haven't been able to try this yet, as Real Life has intruded too much, but I've been toying with the idea of a system where neither the players or the GM know precisely how much damage they've taken (without doing a lot of work in their heads).

 

This really only works for small combats, but:

 

Each opponent in the fight has 4 little containers (think Tic-Tac dispensers--although I bought them from a crafts store). Small (very small) beads are used to represent Body (red), Stun (blue) and Endurance (yellow). The beads are removed from their respective containers and placed in the fourth one when damage is taken or END is used (this is to keep an opponent from Recovering more END, say, than was used).

 

In this way, the players can look at the opponents and tell roughly who is really tough, and who is really weak. They can see who is badly injured or tired (both on their own side and the other). However, it makes it hard for them to know precisely how much STUN, for example, they have (ban paper record keeping of the same).

 

This is, I'll admit, a bit slower than paper recordkeeping, and it doesn't work well in High Fantasy games where the PCs face multiple opponents each, but for games like mine where PCs are rarely outnumbered 2 to 1, it looks like it will work well. It also doesn't work too well with any setting where opponents can be freakishly tough for their size (Superheroes, transformed dragons, etc), but again, this isn't an issue with my Low Fantasy world.