Saturday, October 07, 2006

experiment: corkboard combat tracker

At one of the local superstores I saw a package of four 6" corkboard squares for sale. I immediately thought of a game application for these babies. First, I designed and printed this graphic:

Osric is a 5th level barbarian using the new variant rage version from Player's Handbook II. Under this system you can't rage voluntarily, instead you go apeshit each and every time your hit points drop to five times your level or less. Thus the area on the hitpoint display labeled "The Freak Out Zone". I really enjoy this new version of rage, by the way. I don't have to track uses per day and I feel like an ultimate badass because I keep hoping the bad guys hit my dude hard enough to make him go berserk on their asses.

Anyway, here's the printout attached to the corkboard and ready for use:

Hopefully, you can all see how incredibly useful this sort of thing could be for spellcasters of folks with per day abilities. Iron Heroes characters could easily track token pools with something like this doo-hickey and the new "per encounter" based classes in the Book of Nine Swords could benefit as well. I plan on trying this puppy out this Wednesday and I'm hoping to talk some of the other players in giving it a go as well. I'd especially like to see if this system would be useful for Pat's warmage/hexblade or Jason's ranger/druid.

Incidentally, I bought those cubical, spherical, and pyramidal pushpins over a decade ago. This is the first I've really done anything with them. At the time I bought them I just knew I'd come up with some sort of use for them some day. (The pink pin at zero hit points is for tracking non-lethal damage, BTW.)

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