Possibly useful game-table idea

[Quasqueton]

Do you ever forget who in the party is wounded? You know how after a combat, the cleric starts asking everyone "who needs healing"?

Well, I figured we could try something in my group to take out this metagame question, and let it be seen who is badly hurt. I bought some round stickers -- green, yellow, red, dark blue -- about the size of a nickel.

The group uses:

green = lightly wounded, less than 100% hit points

yellow = moderately wounded, less than 75% hit points

red = seriously wounded, less than 50% hit points

dark blue = critically wounded, less than 25% hit points

I had thought the Players could put these stickers on their character sheet or something to be seen by the others, so they could see immediately who is only winded, or lightly battered, or beaten, or near crushed. But when the first person to get hit while we had these stickers took a major wallop, she put a blue sticker on her forehead.

Now the forehead has become the standard place to put the sticker when wounded. Although it is funny, it actually is quite useful for helping the pace of the game.

Anyway, just throwing out a gimmick we use in our game that maybe someone here might also find useful.

Quasqueton

 

[babomb]

Sounds like a cool idea. I imagine forehead's a better place than the character sheet anyway: it's easier to see (depending on hairstyles and table arrangements), and you don't have to worry about messing up the sheet.

 

[Trainz]

LOL !

That's quite cool !

IMC, we used to have the Rogue put his pen hooked on the side of the DM's screen whenever he was walking point, checking for traps.

We dropped that trick.

 

[Meeki]

That dot idea is alright if you want that much metagaming. What my group does is utilize the heal skill to determine how hurt someone is. Besides the obvious amounts of blood the heal skill helps determine who is spurting blood faster. Basically make a heal check and, i think we use this way, if you get a 10 you can tell if the person is below or above 50%, 15 you can tell which quartile, 20 you can tell which 1/10.. and so on and so forth. What happens is the healer will make a heal check on the hurt individual, knowing who is hurt is usually obvious like I said before, on his/her downtime while waiting for the next turn. Then the healer will ask if the person is below 1/2, or which quartile or w/e like so.

Cleric makes a heal check and scores a 16 on the hurt fighter. Clerics turn comes around he asks fighter which quartile he is in, ei. 25% life left or down 75% w/e.

This way adds a sorta "in the heat of battle" judgement. You might roll bad on someone who is horrendously hurt and roll good against someone who is badly hurt and have to make a quick decision who to heal. You know the horrendously hurt is below 50% but not how much and you kno the badlyhurt is below 1/10th. This causes the cleric to make a choice on what the character knows not the player. THe dots still can be used just for quick reference by the player but this way factors in more RP'ing and realism.

 

[Rel]

We use cups with colored glass bead to represent hit points. If you rattle your cup and it sounds kinda empty, folks know that you are getting very hurt.

But the stickers idea sounds much funnier!

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

I've used poker chips, in the past. Same idea. Also, saves a lot of wear and tear on the character sheets.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

I've used poker chips, in the past. Same idea. Also, saves a lot of wear and tear on the character sheets.

Yeah, I use small poker chips to show which characters are invisible, held, drained, etc. Just place the chip under the appropriate miniature and remove when the effect is gone. It really helps me remember which npc (out of ten) was hit by the ray of enfeeblement spell, and so on.

 

[spunky_mutters]

My players usually just curse under their breath and run their characters behind the cleric if they're still mobile. If not mobile, it's usually self-evident.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

It used to be that it was each person's responsibility to yell "medic" if they needed help. If they were critical and didn't yell it was there fault. Since 3.5 and the new long term status spell we now just ask and get exact figures as per the spell description.

 

[DMO]

That's awesome! What a truly inspired idea. I like Meeki's heal check mechanic, too, but it doesn't make me laugh as hard. It sounds like you have quite the fun group, Quasqueton. Thanks for sharing.

(I know exactly which of my players would have been most likely to come up with the same thing. Sadly, he lives in Denver now and has nobody to game with anymore. It's such a waste of DMing talent. Sombody should really join Skefkin's game!)