HP Tokens

[Rolflyn]

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

I thought it was great, but I'm a gambler and like the feel of chips and know the values at a glance. Others were less enamored. No one outright hated it, but some people thought having chips made the game feel less RPG and more board game.

We were also using the black chips to mark used powers. And I think we stopped because it was taking too much space. That, and if you stopped the game part way through a day, you had a bunch of writing to do. Writing that would have been done already if you used the typical pen-and-paper approach.

Oh, and I was the leader in that game, and it was very useful to look around and see how many hit points others had. Maybe we will try it again.

 

[interwyrm]

For my 2nd level character, I use 2d10 for hp, and 1d12 for tracking surges.

Once you hit paragon, you'd need to switch to 3d10 for hp... so it might not continue being the best solution.

 

[jbear]

I don't know if you have money to burn, but you could look at buying Descent, which is another great board game.

Comes with great minis and interlocking dungeon tiles, plus heaps of tokens you can use to mark conditions etc.

It also has small heart tokens to represent hps; there are unmarked hearts and hearts marked with 5 hps.

There are loads of other tokens, for example Red and Blue Skulls or Dragons, which you could use to mark 10hps.

 

[Mapache]

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.

When we first started, we tried using poker chips as well. I have a rather nice set in ten colors with denominations printed on them (1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, & 1000). It turned out to be more cumbersome that just keeping track of HP on the whiteboard we were already using for initiative. I do highly recommend dropping $10 on a small portable whiteboard where you can put down everyone in initiative order, track HP, and write down everyone's defenses, too, to make it easy to check if attacks hit.

 

[Firebeetle]

Currently, for my son's D&D game, we use wide mouthed glass goblets I bought at the Salvation Army (25 cents each) filled with red and green glass beads (red for bloodied, green for the rest) with a different color for temporary hit points. This works really well.

For my grown up game, I use post-it notes for the players that I actually print out. Yeah, I'm that cool. I'll post how to do it to my blog when I'm ready to.

For monsters I used to use poker chips, black and red for bloodied (black=10, red=1) and white and green for the rest (white=10, green=1). This worked well during combat since it was quick, but takes too long to set up between encounters so I stopped.

My next ingenious plan for tracking monster hp is to take some bits of 2x4 and drill lots of holes in them in rows of five. Then use colored golf tees to track, red for bloodied amounts and white the the rest. Kind of like a cribbage board. The main problem is that it will take a LOT of holes to make this work, so I'm thinking of some way that works more like an abacus but doesn't take a lot of time to set up.

 

[Truename]

My group uses coins to track PC hit points (with 1 cent = 1 hp). Easy, intuitive, and people seem to like the physicality of it.

 

[fjw70]

Thanks for the discussion everyone. It's always interesting to hear how other people handle these sorts of things. I have decided to try out the poker chip thing so I picked up this set

[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Poker-Set-In-Aluminum-Case/dp/B0007SV7LG/ref=sr_1_3?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1295618343&sr=1-3]Amazon.com: Poker Set In Aluminum Case: Toys & Games[/ame]

on the way to work today at Walgreens for $10. The system is as follows:

white = 1 hp
red = 5 hp
blue = 10 hp
green = 1 healing surge

I am going to play SW Saga tonight and will test out the new system, and assuming I like it I will roll it out to my 4e group next week. The one set should be enough (50 of each chip color), except the greens will be a little tight with a group of six that will probably be fighter heavy. But we will see.

 

[Mistwell]

Early on in 4e, someone posted a character sheet they made which had one large box for hit point tokens, and another large box for healing surge tokens. When you were hit, you moved the appropriate hit point tokens over to the healing surge box. This visual representation of hit points and "hit points in waiting" for the healing surge box seemed to serve a useful function in teaching beginners how to play the game.

To that end, I bought a bunch of red plastic hearts from a crafts/beads store, and some day hope to use them. The hearts look something like this:

I don't know where that character sheet is, but I bet it can still be found somewhere here at EW.

 

[Styracosaurus]

We use poker chips.

Blue is for the first half of your HP.
Red is for the second half of your HP (bloodied).
If you go negative, you just pile your blue chips into a pile and when you use them you have died from HP loss (as per rules).
Orange is for temporary HP.
Green is for healing surges.
Black is what you get when you fail a death saving throw. Three blacks and you are dead.

It is easy to see when you are bloodied.

It is also nice to see how the paladin HP and surges overwhelm the cleric, etc....

 

[Mistwell]

Ah, found the thread with the character sheet intended for use with tokens for hit points.

Here is a picture of the original sheet in use:

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Here is the thread.

Here is what it became next:

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Then this:

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And this

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