House Rules & Colored Markers - a sort of advice contest with free stuff!

[CraigAT]

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!

CraigAT

 

[Duncan_Clyborne]

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!

 

[Zinovia]

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.

 

[bh2]

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!

 

[Duncan_Clyborne]

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.

 

[Duncan_Clyborne]

I have posted a copy of the excel spreadsheet that was the basis of the original posters JPG in the Downloads area.

 

[CraigAT]

Great response - it is nice to hear how the pieces are used in combination with other ideas.

 

[CraigAT]

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.

craig

 

[Timeboxer]

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.

 

[CraigAT]

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.