HP Tokens

F

fjw70

Adventurer

• Jan 20, 2011

• #1

Does anyone use tokens (or another physical way) to track HP for 4e? I was brainstorming ideas fo doing this (I was inspired by the Castle Ravenloft game) and here is what I have.

All HP would be rounded to the nearest 5. So 1-7 HP would be 5, 8-12 would be 10, 13-17 would be 15, etc. Then we would use red poker chips to keep track of HP (1 chip per 5 HP).

Damage would work the same way. If you do 1-7 points of damage then it would round to 5 (or 1 chip), if you do 8-12 points of damage it would round to 10 (or 2 chips), etc.

Surges would also be in chips (1 white chip per 5 surge value). So everyone up to 31 HP would have a surge value of 5 (or 1 chip), 32-51 HP would have a surge value of 10 (or 2 chips), 32-71 would have a surge value of 15 (or 3 chips).

So it would work like this. The HP and surge value on your sheet would be converted to chips and then the chips would be your actual HP and surge values during play. For example if your sheet had you listed as 49 HP then you would have 10 HP chips (red) and every time you used a surge chip (white) you would get 2 HP chips back.

Other ideas or thoughts?

EDIT: I just wanted to add that this system would just be for PCs. Monster HP would be done normally.

 

Last edited: Jan 20, 2011

log in or register to remove this ad

T

Trebor62

First Post

• Jan 20, 2011

• #2

You are going torture the hit point math at certain points. Your rounding errors are going to be multiplied one way or the other across the board by the number of surges a charcter has. Take 31 hit points six surge character they have 60 htps a day your way at 32 htps. it is 90 htpts a 50% increase for crossing the 31 to 32 break. RAW its goes from 73 htpts to 80 htpts a 10% gain.


For a twelve surge character it would go from 90 htpts to 150htpts a 67% increase for for crossing the 31 to 32 break. RAW a twelve surge character would go from 115 htpts to 128 htps an 11% increase.

 

B

BobTheNob

First Post

• Jan 20, 2011

• #3

You could do it, but are hit points really that hard? Most of the time you hear people complaining more about condition tracking than hit points.

 

F

fjw70

Adventurer

• Jan 20, 2011

• #4

BobTheNob said:

You could do it, but are hit points really that hard? Most of the time you hear people complaining more about condition tracking than hit points.

Click to expand...

No they are not hard. I am looking for ways to keep my group of teens/pre-teens (son and nephews) engaged in the game. Last week we played the Ravenloft boardgame and they seemed more engaged with that than the RPG. The boardgame is too limited IMO to play every week so I was going to experiment with ways to keep them engaged with the RPG. I was thinking that the chips would help them stay focused on the game.

That is my motivation.

 

F

fjw70

Adventurer

• Jan 20, 2011

• #5

Trebor62 said:

You are going torture the hit point math at certain points. Your rounding errors are going to be multiplied one way or the other across the board by the number of surges a charcter has. Take 31 hit points six surge character they have 60 htps a day your way at 32 htps. it is 90 htpts a 50% increase for crossing the 31 to 32 break. RAW its goes from 73 htpts to 80 htpts a 10% gain.


For a twelve surge character it would go from 90 htpts to 150htpts a 67% increase for for crossing the 31 to 32 break. RAW a twelve surge character would go from 115 htpts to 128 htps an 11% increase.

Click to expand...

Good point I hadn't considered looking at the max hp per day (I literally posted this idea a few minutes after conceiving it).

Now that I have looked at it that 31 to 32 hp jump is a big one, but it is by far the biggest one (the next biggest one is 51 to 52 hp and the % chg is about half of the31 to 32 change).

I will think about way to mitigate that jump. Any ideas?

 

R

Rolflyn

First Post

• Jan 20, 2011

• #6

We used poker chips to track hit points when we first started playing 4e. But we did the full hit point total, using white=1, red=5, green=25 convention. I'm not sure why we stopped.

 

GameDoc

Explorer

• Jan 20, 2011

• #7

I don't have the time to crunch the numbers and come up with the ideal chip/HP ratio, but in general, going with more chips worth fewer HP each would cut back on the bloat.

 

F

fjw70

Adventurer

• Jan 20, 2011

• #8

Well, to simplify things I could just use poker chip as intended with each color representing a different value (white = 1hp, red = 5hp, and blue = 10hp). That way the numbers don't change.

This should have been my first idea.

 

F

fjw70

Adventurer

• Jan 20, 2011

• #9

Rolflyn said:

We used poker chips to track hit points when we first started playing 4e. But we did the full hit point total, using white=1, red=5, green=25 convention. I'm not sure why we stopped.

Click to expand...

I just posted with the same system (didn't see your post first). Yeah, that is simpiler. Did the system work well for you?

 

Jeff Carlsen

Adventurer

• Jan 20, 2011

• #10

We used to do the same thing using glass beads. One color was worth 1 hp, another was worth 10. Worked well enough.

Eventually, though, I just started building a hit point tracker into the character sheets we used. It was just rows to ten dots, like on a scan-tron. Fill in the dot that represents your total HP count, and the lightly cross out dots when you take damage.