So, you’ve got 14 monsters in the encounter, say 10 Goblin Cutters, 3 Goblin Warriors and a Goblin Hexer. They’re all on your battle map along with your four or five PC’s.
You’ve done the work and you know the order your monsters are going in, but, how do you remember which Goblin Cutter is which? I wonder what the best way of identifying them is. There’s plenty of suggestions on the web about marking them with conditions (like marked, slowed, etc.) but nothing I can find using lazy-google-fu about just tracking which bloody one is which.
I might try sticking a small bit of paper underneath each one with a number on it for now.
We’re due to start playing 4 Edition in a few weeks and one of the things I’ve been concerned about since I first read it was how combat works. Not from a technical stand point, but just the number of things the GM has to keep track of.
There now seem to be a lot of effects players can do which target another character and stay active for a number of rounds. My worst nightmare is a figure on the gaming mat with thirty seven flags of varying colours sticking out of him.
Hopefully this won’t reduce the flow of the combat too much as there’s nothing worse than a group of players getting bored while the GM tries to work something out.
In some ways, I think it’s actually worse than that. For example, a level 3 encounter for 5 level 1 characters could have 13 or 14 creatures (thanks to minions). You’ve now got 10 identical minions on the map, if they’re all moving and being engaged, how do you track which one is which? Ok, with minions it’s not so bad, if they get hit, they’re dead, but say 5 level 1 goblins who aren’t minions, it makes a difference which one is which, not just to see which one is marked but to track which one has lost hitpoints, etc.
Running my first game tonight (assuming we get characters done quickly enough) and the first fight has 13 monsters, so I’ll let you know. I see a lot of posts about handling effects (marked, slowed, etc.) using coloured pipe cleaners or plastic bottle cap-rings draped over the figures which seem like good ideas.
We were going to use the online character generator to make starting it easier. Plus it does a far cleaner character sheet than the hand written one and prints out all your encounter powers etc.
I’ll let you know how we find it as well.
Oh I’ve used the online generator (for some NPC’s and a party companion), it’s ok except it has a tendency to crash on my machine and not print out properly (it prints a page of garbage before the real data). Otherwise it seems okay.