Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Tracking Wound Effects

As I get more and more into A Time of War, I realize how much information that needs to be tracked has no place on a record sheet. Today I wanted to talk a bit about Wound Effects, because I've been running a number of simulation combats and tracking wound effects in a way I'll actually remember to apply them is becoming something of a trick.

Damage is generally recorded in the Combat Data section of the record sheet -- both on the regular sheet and the custom ones I've seen various members of the community come up with. The problem here is that although there is unfailingly a track for Fatigue and Standard Damage, and checkboxes for Stunned and Unconscious, there's nothing for other effects a character might suffer. Let's make a quick circuit of all the things that might befall a character that aren't here.

First, Bleeding. Bleeding is, as far as I can tell from my simulations, what kills characters. Rarely have I had a character die immediately from a bullet or other weapon -- almost invariably they collapse unconscious to the ground and bleed out in 2 to 6 turns. Yet there is nowhere to put that effect on the character sheet.

Second, we have all the effects listed on the Specific Wound Effects table on A Time of War page 191. Dazed and Knockdown can be given a pass here, because the both only have effects that can be recorded elsewhere on the sheet (fatigue damage and character orientation on the battlemat respectively), but Deafened, Blinded, Internal Damage and Shattered Limb all carry serious and potentially long-term effects. Surgery checks are required to clear all of these conditions, so why is there nowhere to note them? Granted, Internal Damage is only listed here because of the lack of anywhere to record Bleeding, listed above.

Finally, there are weapon- and armor-centric effects that need to be tracked. This is a bit easier, because there's a notes field, but weapons with, for instance, the "Jam on Fumble" property, need a way to indicate if they're jammed. With personal armor, the BAR in all categories is reduced every time a round make it through.

I'm trying to come up with a good means of tracking all this information in a reasonably small amount of real estate, but no luck so far. For NPC's, I'm tracking them on notepaper anyways, but I'm worried about my players maintaining their records when individual actions can take minutes to resolve -- some details need to make it to paper. Some of this can be handled with swift erasing and re-entering, or flipping the sheet over and over to keep track in the notes, but those solutions are inelegant, so my search continues.

1 comment:

  1. For this purpose, I'm planning on adopting the 'poker chip' technique. Grab a bunch of plastic poker chips; they usually come in 3 colors: red, white and blue.

    Bleeding: Grab a red chip. Write down on the chip with a wet-erase marker how many rounds that character has before he bleeds out. Hand the chip to the player.

    Injury Penalty: Grab a white chip. Write down the current penalty for the character's injury state. Hand the chip to the player.

    Fatigue Penalty: Same as Injury, just use a blue chip.

    Stun: Write 'STUN' on a blue chip and hand to the player. He hands back when he recovers from the STUN.

    Other combat effects: Grab another white chip. Write down the specific effect and pass the chip to the player.

    This gives something physical to the player that they can keep on the table or by their mini (if you are using them) so that they remember to apply it.

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