4e Fan Creations and House RulesWorking on variant powers? Statting up a PC race or your version of a monster? Creating or converting an adventure? Put it here!
House Rules & Colored Markers - a sort of advice contest with free stuff!
Folks, we here at Alea Tools have gotten a lot of comments and suggestions about the use of our stackable markers for 4e status conditions. Thanx everyone!
I am interested in how people are using them – house rules rule as we always say. I’d like to see some suggestions and some discussion and ultimately post the top 3 ideas on our web site.
To make it a bit more interesting, I’d like to offer some free stuff to those winning ideas – let’s call it $20 worth of product – I’ll post winners when the comments die down to a trickle - hopefully that won't be immediately The winners can drop me a note with stuff they pick off our website.
For those of you who are not familiar with our stuff – we have 1” and 2” circular magnetic markers in 18 basic colors: red, orange, yellow, light blue, medium blue, dark blue, light green, medium green, dark green, light brown medium brown, dark brown, medium purple, dark purple, black, white, light gray and dark gray…
I am going to try and post an example sent from one of our customers and direct him to comment on his usage – hopefully that will work out… for the rest of you all, please make suggestions and comments on these things and help me pick a few winners here!
Folks, we here at Alea Tools have gotten a lot of comments and suggestions about the use of our stackable markers for 4e status conditions. Thanx everyone!
.... I am going to try and post an example sent from one of our customers and direct him to comment on his usage – hopefully that will work out… for the rest of you all, please make suggestions and comments on these things and help me pick a few winners here!
CraigAT
I am a fan of Alea Tools and I am one of the individuals' who wrote to Craig on how I am using Alea Tools for 4e. The JPG in Craig's original post shows a chart I have made of the 4e Conditions and how I use Alea Tools to designate them. The chart is actually on a magnetic white board, serves as my in-game storage board and includes summaries of the conditions.
I stumbled on this solution while trying to figure out how I was going to track conditions. The table tent method seemed to take up too much space. I started to categorize the conditions by effect; Movement (Slowed, Restrained, & Immobilized), Actions (Weakened, Dazed, Stunned), Perceptions (Deafened & Blinded), etc. This led me to notice that condition categories frequently have three 'levels' of increasingly bad effects. I then remembered that Alea Tools suggested to use yellow, orange and red for wounded, moderately wounded (now Bloodied) and seriously wounded. Alea Tools also usually came in three shades. The next observation was that there was at least one series of conditions (Slowed, Restrained & Petrified) that were developmental. The last piece of the puzzle was that several conditions included other conditions as lesser included effects.
As the chart shows, as condition colors grow darker they have increasing affects for a category. I now have several condition categories that end in a capstone condition such as Dying or Petrified. Capstone conditions use two colors; one other color and Black. I also vertically organized it so that conditions that have lesser included conditions are above the lesser included condition. In the end, I organized as follows (from light, to medium, to dark, to the color with black):
Red - Injuries (Wounded, Bloodied, Seriously Wounded & Dying) Brown - Movement (Slow, Restrained, Immobilized, & Petrified) Blue - Perceptions (Deafened, Dominated, Blinded & Unconscious) Green - Actions (Weakened, Dazed, Stunned, & Helpless) Purple - Stances (2nd Wind, Combat Advantage, Running, & Prone) Gray - Concealment (Hiding, Concealment, Total Concealment, & Invisible)
Logical Exceptions. First, Black is both Prone and used for capstone conditions. As an example, it is ambiguous that Red & Black could be both Seriously Injured and Prone or just Dying. This works for my group since we tip the figure when it is Prone. Second, I made Weakened an Action Condition even though it is a small stretch. Third, I changed Perception Conditions to include Dominated since it seemed to fit well there and could be considered a change to your perception of 'friends' or 'reality'. Finally, purple is a bit of a hog-podge, but it works for me.
I don't think this is perfect, but it is an organized, logical way of communicating what is happening. It is not that hard to remember that green conditions affect actions or brown conditions affect movement. It does not take much more to remember that Medium Brown must be Restrained. And as I said, we have the chart with all the markers next to our gaming table with notes about condition affects, Combat Advantage and Flanking.
Please provide constructive comments on ways to improve this tracking system. I would also love to hear if there is a better way to use Alea Tools for tracking conditions!
Last edited by Duncan_Clyborne; 11th May 2009 at 06:08 AM..
I haven't been nearly as organized about marking conditions, but we use Alea tools regularly in 4E combats.
Red = bloodied
Purple = warlock curse
Blue = fighter mark
Green = swordmage mark
White = flying or elevated somehow
Grey = concealment
I use tiny hair clips placed on the figures to denote any other status condition. I do like the suggestion of grouping certain similar effect types under a color group, such as varying shades for slow or immobilized.
I hadn't seen the 2" magnets. I may have to pick up a few of those.
I've been using Alea Tools quite a bit for my 4e games. For the magnetic tokens, its a bit ad hoc but here are the basics:
* Red (and Orange if I run out of Red) is Bloodied.
* Dark Grey (I have a lot of these) is a generic condition token. Usually that's enough for people to remember what condition they have on them.
* People who can only mark one person choose two tokens of the same color and put one under them and one under their mark to see who's marked.
* People who can mark/curse/etc more than one person choose a stack of same color tokens to put under people.
* I put a plus sign one side and a minus side on the other side of every token to know which way to stack the tokens. That solved a persistent problem people had when they would try and add a new token and it'd flip around or do something that would inevidably knock all the minis over.
For monsters, I usually take counters from the Fiery Dragon Counter Collection v3, use GIMP to edit/crop/etc them, arrange them in an Open Office document, print them out on normal paper, and use the 1" or 2" hole punches from Alea Tools to cut them out and paste them onto the 1" or 2" 'miniature conversion circles'. This seems to work really well:
* They are much easier to move around the battle mat than plain paper.
* Its a lot easier to cut out tokens with the hole punch thing than trying to cut out squares w/ scissors.
* Once you have so many magnetic circles you can reuse them. I have about 150 1" circles and 25 2" circles.
* If I'm preparing to run a new adventure and have run out of cirlces, I can just paste them on top of old ones.
* To store an adventure, I just place them into a medicine tube (happens to be just the right size) until I run the adventure.
* For RPGA, its nice if I'm running a game, since it takes up much less space. Especially if I'm running multiple games.
I also use the old magnets from my pre-Neo-Markers (which I converted using the conversion kit thing) to hold down paper maps I create and place on my Magna-Map.
Well, I hope that's clear enough. I really enjoy Alea Tools stuff. It got especially better once they came out with Neo-Markers (fixed the stacks of tokens sticking to each other problem). I think with this setup above I've finally found a setup for playing/DMing 4e that works for me!
we use Alea tools regularly in 4E combats...
Purple = warlock curse
Blue = fighter mark
Green = swordmage mark
I also use Alea Tools for marking. I use the limited edition colors of Maroon, Teal, Silver and Gold for various marks and curses.
Another side effect of the system I use is that the most used conditions (besides Bloodied) seem to be Actions and Movement penalties such as Daze, Slowed, Stunned, etc. use the greens and browns. These come together in Game Master Pack 03.
Another thing I do is put roman numerals on the side of white markers to designate multiple opponents. It helps when you can say 'Orc IV' rather than 'that one, no, the other one'. I use permanent marker but it eventually rubs off so it does not really permanently affect the disc. (I am not responsible if you find it is permanent!)
It is hard to read in the JPG, but underneath each condition is a summary. For example, Dominated says "Controller gets one action, Dazed" and Dazed says "1 Action, No IA and OA, Grant CBT ADV, Cannot Flank" To be honest, Alea Tools aside, I would use the chart to help refer to the condition effects and understand their relationships. It makes you re-think the conditions when you see them all filed by effect and category.
Last edited by Duncan_Clyborne; 11th May 2009 at 06:11 AM..
We're using the markers in a pretty simple fasion as well - though I like the though put into the spreadsheet bh2 submitted.
One thing we have been doing is using giving each player who can "mark" two markers of the same color. They put on under their character, then put the other marker under the creature they are marking. That links the two togehter. ALso, if someone overrides their mark they get it handed back to them - forcing them to remember to mark something new the next time around.
I actually just bought a set of Alea Tools markers last week. Still waiting for them to arrive in the mail, but I've been brainstorming potential non-typical things I can do with them:
- Disambiguating visually similar figures using color: "Green human minion" is much easier than "Human minion #2."
- Zone indicators: Number of same-colored markers indicates size of zone as a burst (e.g. a stack of 3 red is a burst 3 zone); different colors indicate different zones; position indicates center of zone.
- Buff indicators: Number of same-colored markers indicates size of bonus; different colors indicate different bonuses (e.g. a stack of 3 orange is +3 to attack); same color under enemy indicates that the bonus only applies against that target. Helpful for when the cleric does Righteous Brand and gives a +3 bonus to the fighter against the target.
__________________ Code of the Rogue Gamemistress
1. Fun is the highest principle.
2. Choice is a form of fun.
3. Let the dice fall where they may.
Those are some new ideas AMy, thanx! Also remember - you can write on these things with dry/wet erase, so if you did not want to use 3 markers to indicate blast-3 you could write the number on the edges and/or the flat surface on the top of the marker.
I love these things - wrote a little review a while back on their new stuff. Here is a simple list we used to start with - although generally it seems actually easier to just declare what you are marking as you mark it during the battle - pretty easy and informal. We also tend to write on the markers a lot.
Bloodied - Red
Weakend - Orange
Stunned - Lt Gray
Unconscious - Med Gray
Dying - Black
Slowed - Lt Brown
Restrained - Med Brown
Immobilized - Dk Brown
Dazed - Lt Green
Prone - Med Green
Helpless - Dk Green
Blinded - Yellow
Deafened - Lt Purple
Petrified - Dk Purple
Fly 5ft - Lt Blue
Fly 10ft - Med Blue
Fly 20ft - Dk Blue
Like I said - it is a basic starting list and you can create a little spreadsheet with color coding in Excel for refrence - print it on a color printer and make a bunch of bookmarks... But again, we often just use whatever color is handy and tell folks what it means when we put it in play for that fight.
We also do the matching color technique where we put a color under the fighter - say one of the greens, then when he does his combat challenge we mark the creature with the same color linking the two. That works well if you have charaters who tend to override someone else's mark.
I use index cards for initiative order -- my monster cards have all the stats for a given monster on them, plus hit point tracking, which is very handy. I have my Alea Tools colors matched up with colored paperclips, so instead of scribbling conditions onto the cards, I can just add a paperclip to match. Left side of the index card = save ends conditions; right side of the index card = end of turn or other conditions.
Those are some new ideas AMy, thanx! Also remember - you can write on these things with dry/wet erase, so if you did not want to use 3 markers to indicate blast-3 you could write the number on the edges and/or the flat surface on the top of the marker.
Yeah, I was just trying to avoid linguistic parsing -- that way you don't have to spend any extra time going "Let me look at what that number is again..."
The idea is that the stackable aspect to it means that you can easily visually determine numeric quantities.
__________________ Code of the Rogue Gamemistress
1. Fun is the highest principle.
2. Choice is a form of fun.
3. Let the dice fall where they may.
I unfortunately don't own alea tools (I'm broke), but these ideas come to mind.
1. You can use these to track initiative pretty easily. Particularly if you have anything magnetic to put them on, just assign a color to each entity or write the names on the markers. You can easily move them around for dealing with delaying, etc, and you can re-use them for every encounter.
2. They're basically counters, so you can easily use them in lieu of minis.
3. You can hand them out as tokens for action points.
I have yet to see anyone mention #1 when talking about these
The main thing I use Alea Tools for in my game is for marks.
Each of my players has had a different color (red, green, blue, purple) associated with them pretty much since we all started playing together seven years ago, and we use them to distinguish between everything from each player's character chit, to player cards, to whose pencil is whose. Everyone has a handful of markers of their color for marks/curses/whatever, and two yellow markers for light sources. I've also got a stack of white and light blue chits that I'll probably start using for flight once people get around to flying.
I wanted to avoid keeping track of conditions on the board. I figured that swapping pieces in and out for things that were as temporary as conditions as well as having to check against a chart to help remember what each color was, would end up being too disruptive for me.
The only reason that we don't use red markers to keep track of bloodied is because one of the players had already been established as red and it would have meant buying/finding/remaking a bunch of props and accoutrements.
__________________ Life's a die and then you bitch.
Thanx all - I am going to give it a couple more days, then announce winners in this little contest - now's the time if you have any other great ideas out there!
Our GM puts small magnetic squares on the bottom of our minis to make using the markers easier.
We do:
red = bloodied
gray = slowed
dark gray = immobilized
black = restrained
green = poisoned
orange = on fire
light blue = dazed
dark blue = stunned
Spare colors are used by defenders to mark. I don't other conditions have come up often enough for us to have a consistent style.
In one combat, when the room was pitch black and we weren't sure what we were fighting, the GM just used the markers to represent where we heard the monsters, instead of using actual minis. I thought that was kinda cool, especially when in the middle of combat, a 2-inch (large) disk showed up at the edge of the battlefield and began to tromp toward us.
I plan to do something similar in a game I'll run next week. The group will be in the cavern tomb of an elder, sleeping god. His slumber is disturbed by any sort of light, causing those caught in bright light at the start of their turns to take psychic damage that ramps up by an additional 5 for each turn you stay in the light. I plan to keep white tokens handy to make it clear who has bright light sources, and yellow for dim light sources.
(Part of the trick to the combat will be keeping the dragon who lives there in light. The multiple PCs can take turns having light sources, just getting pinged for 5 damage, whereas if they can keep the dragon illuminated, he might end up taking 20 or 30 damage in a round.)
The silliest we ever got was a beholder that was dazed, marked by a paladin, weakened, taking ongoing disintegration damage, ongoing bleeding damage, and was either slowed or restrained or whatever it is that Evard's Black Tentacles does these days.
__________________ Ryan "RangerWickett" Nock
Author of the War of the Burning Sky serialized novel, free at EN World. Part Two, The Irons Have Tolled, now available.
They can also be very handy to track skill challenges with, either on the table or (even better) a whiteboard. You can either track how many successes/failures are left to finish the challenge or how many of each the party has accumulated.
The winners can drop me a note with stuff they pick off our website. 
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