Eliminating bookkeeping in Combat

Chris Rice · 03-15-2018, 02:03 PM

As a GM it's not unusual for me to have fairly large battles involving multiple players and allies and even larger numbers of monsters/adversaries. One of the slightly annoying things about this is the bookkeeping involved.

I've experimented with the idea of doing away with attritional wound points and replacing them with several altered states of performance: stunned, knocked down, wounded, incapacitated and dead. These more or less already exist in Melee/TFT but I'd thought of treating them differently.

I took a standard ST12 character and made the following assumptions;

One third of total ST taken as a hit (4) is a Stun (-2DEX for one round)
One Half of total ST taken as a hit (6) is a knockdown
Two thirds of total ST taken as a hit (8) is a wound (-3 DEX)

More than two thirds of total ST taken as a hit is incapacitated.
More than Total ST taken as a hit is dead.

I use coloured cubes to mark the various states during the game.

I've only tried this once but enjoyed the faster, less pencil intensive play. I can see various problems, one of which is having to reign in high ST monsters or they become unbeatable. For instance, you can no longer wear the giant down with arrows in the previous attritional way.

I'm probably the only one daft enough to try this, or even think about it, but if anyone else has gone down this route I'd be interested in your ideas.

03-15-2018, 02:03 PM	#1
Chris Rice Join Date: Dec 2017 Location: London Uk, but originally from Scotland	Eliminating bookkeeping in Combat As a GM it's not unusual for me to have fairly large battles involving multiple players and allies and even larger numbers of monsters/adversaries. One of the slightly annoying things about this is the bookkeeping involved. I've experimented with the idea of doing away with attritional wound points and replacing them with several altered states of performance: stunned, knocked down, wounded, incapacitated and dead. These more or less already exist in Melee/TFT but I'd thought of treating them differently. I took a standard ST12 character and made the following assumptions; One third of total ST taken as a hit (4) is a Stun (-2DEX for one round) One Half of total ST taken as a hit (6) is a knockdown Two thirds of total ST taken as a hit (8) is a wound (-3 DEX) More than two thirds of total ST taken as a hit is incapacitated. More than Total ST taken as a hit is dead. I use coloured cubes to mark the various states during the game. I've only tried this once but enjoyed the faster, less pencil intensive play. I can see various problems, one of which is having to reign in high ST monsters or they become unbeatable. For instance, you can no longer wear the giant down with arrows in the previous attritional way. I'm probably the only one daft enough to try this, or even think about it, but if anyone else has gone down this route I'd be interested in your ideas.