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Monday, June 27, 2011

Damage Tracker

To go along with yesterday's time tracker: a damage tracker. This is arranged as two trackers printed two-up on a single sheet, so that the GM can print a couple, cut, and have individual trackers for each character.

It's long been my opinion that tracking damage and comparing the total to the character's hit points is easier than subtracting damage from current hit points after each successful attack. Using a sheet of scratch paper to track total damage simplifies things a lot, but like the torch and lantern cards for DCC, you eventually either have to erase the marks or throw away the sheet and get a new one. Occasionally, someone suggests using beads in a bowl to track expendable resources like damage, or setting dice manually to a total and changing the dice every time that total changes.

But even more so than torches and potion effects, damage done to individual characters can carry across several sessions. The bead and dice solutions are very transitory; attacking paper clips to a sheet of paper is easier to keep track of over several sessions.

A side note on yesterday's tracker: there's supposed to be a potion bottle icon on the left side, near the 4 and 5. It's in my PDF, but when I look at the supposedly identical PDF on Google Docs, it's not there. Can anyone else see a potion bottle? If not, has anyone else had experiences with Google Docs altering your PDFs?

2 comments:

  1. I don't see the potion bottle in the GD pdf either. No idea what's going on there; the usual arcane sparkings and shortings I'd guess.

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  2. It's weird. The implication is that Google Docs converts uploaded PDFs to another format, then back into PDF.

    I should download it again and see if it's just a problem with their PDF viewer.

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