“There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.” – James Thurber
How to Track Damage
Ever feel overwhelmed tracking monster damage, especially in the big, important fights? Today you will learn a variety of organized and time-saving ways to track damage.
You’ll then apply your knowledge of these methods in your games and share your damage tracking experiences in today’s activity.
Why Track Damage Efficiently?
Tracking damage can become an administrative nightmare. Poor damage tracking reduces the fun of GMing and slows the exciting pace and flow of combat for everyone. Who wants to suffer through a combat that takes twice as long due to poor damage tracking organization and execution?
Look at damage tracking like you do hit point adjustments – it’s an important tool you use to create and adjust the pace and flow of combat. So anything you can do to better organize how you track damage will increase the speed of your combat turns as GM.
Top 7 Damage Handling Methods
These damage handling and tracking methods will reduce combat slog and increase combat speed.
When you deal with damage in a clear and organized way, you gain Turn Efficiency – and more combat opportunities in the same session.
1. Reduce Hit Points, Increase Damage
Reduce monster hit points and bump monster damage and you naturally decrease the amount and duration of damage tracking you need to do.
For example, have monsters deal full damage, but reduce their hit points by a percentage, such as 20%-50%.
2. Increase Damage Organically
As we’ve seen throughout Faster Combat, finding multiple ways to increase damage is a good thing.
Give monsters and enemy NPCs offensive magical items and make sure monsters use the Combatscape in clever ways to “attack” the party.
Coat weapons with poison, have monsters try to bull rush PCs off ledges and bridges, have cannon fodder monsters trigger traps, and so on.
3. Add, Don’t Subtract
Add damage done, counting up towards monster hit point maximums. It’s easier to add than to subtract.
I no longer track damage the “old way” – subtracting damage dealt from a hit point total – which I used to do for years, on paper or digitally.
I now have a simple formula in a spreadsheet add up all the instances of a damage done to a monster along the given monster’s row, and keep a running remaining hit point total. I highlight the total when it gets to the half-way mark, and then hide or gray out the row when the monster is defeated or otherwise removed from the battle.
4. Pool Damage
Rather than track damage dealt to each individual monster, create a single damage pool and deduct damage dealt as the combat unfolds.
For example, if ten orcs have 20 hit points each, use a pool of 200 hit points. Whenever twenty points of damage are dealt, kill off an orc. The first orc drops at 20 hit points of damage received, the second drops at 40, the third at 60, and so on.
This gives the illusion that the monsters all have slightly different hit points, which gives the combat’s monsters a more organic feel as the party slices and blasts through them.
5. Share Resistances and Vulnerabilities
Decide whether you want to share the exact values of monster resistances or vulnerabilities with players. Perhaps PCs learn this information when they first
encounter the defense through one of their attacks, or maybe not until after a couple of rounds of “watching and learning” as they fight the monster.
This becomes one less damage tracking statistic for you to calculate and worry about as GM, and in the case of vulnerabilities to certain types of damage, players are more than happy to tell you their fireball hit for 40 instead of 25!
6. Ask for a Damage Tracking Helper
If you have a player who’s considering taking a turn a GMing, this is a good opportunity for that player to sit in as the GM’s Helper for a game and see what goes on behind the scenes.
Small tasks like assisting with damage tracking or roleplaying a couple of NPCs not only help the new GM learn the ropes, but add a fresh set of eyes and voice to the night’s game for the entire playgroup.
Alternatively, consider asking one of your players – particularly one who enjoys tracking body counts or is otherwise good with tracking numbers – to help you track damage dealt. Select a particular foe or set of foes with similar combat roles and delegate them to this player for tracking.
While this does remove some of the mystery and breaks immersion, it’s an option to consider when you’re simply overwhelmed by damage tracking, which can happen in complex or large fights with a great number of combatants.
With this option, you have a couple of choices for removing dead foes:
1. Tell the tracker player how many hit points a foe has so he knows when to remove them from the battlefield (fastest option – and ask them to come up with compelling death scene descriptions to help you add flavor!)
2. Have the player report to you on new damage total and you advise when a foe has died (slower option but preserves more mystery)
7. Use Visual Aids and Tools
Here’s a summary of just some of the options available to you to keep damage tracking organized and quick, whether your combats takes place on graph paper, dungeon tiles, or poster maps.
For detailed tips on how to use these and more, see lesson 3.02: Be Ready for Anything. • Minis
• Markers • Stickers • Whiteboards
• Wet-erase battle grids • Spreadsheets and Formulas • Digital Tools
• Sharpies • Color Codes • Beads • Chits • Coins • Poker Chips
Communicate Damage Dealt
A common question in combats from PCs is, “How bad does he look?” Players want a sense of how badly hurt an enemy is, especially a tough or deadly one that’s taken a beating from the PCs.
While some game systems do a good job of describing one or two critical wound states for monsters, you can always use more descriptors – especially when your PCs keep asking you for a monster status update in a critical combat!
Using descriptive language keyed to damage taken provides the party critical
information about their opponents’ toughness. This information – often just a word or two – helps the PCs make faster combat decisions.
Use the follow example descriptors based on the remaining percentage of hit points for your monsters. Customize the table further by condensing or adding new current hit point percentage ranges and moving or adding descriptors of your own.
Use Random Starting Hit Points
Session time running low? Want to get through more combats more quickly? Or simply want a more organic status for your monsters, especially in deadly areas or in certain circumstances, such as in war time or inside a collapsing volcano?
Randomly determine each encounter’s monsters’ current hit points at the start of combat.
Roll d100 for current hit points and adjust the monsters’ hit points or hit point pools down accordingly. Use the descriptors above at the start of combat to clue the PCs in immediately.
The Damage is Done
Congratulations! You’ve learned a variety of efficient damage tracking methods you can use to quicken combat. You’ve also learned how to best communicate damage done to monsters by the PCs to help the party make better, faster combat decisions.
What’s Next?
In the next lesson you will learn how to manage complex attacks with a focus on spells. Many games feature complicated spells and other attacks, especially at high levels. These actions quickly become unwieldy and slow combat to a crawl.
You’ll learn how to avoid this trap and have your most complex and mighty attacks take center stage – without devouring chunks of session time!
Resources
You’ll find more at Roleplaying Tips: 11 Monstrous Tips, 10 Monstrous Tips, 7 More Monstrous Tips, Don’t Be Afraid to Modify Your Monsters, Poker in RPGs and 9 DM Tools and Integrating Them Into Your Game.
And at Leonine Roar: Faster Combat: Rule of Three,True Encounter Difficulty: Challenge Your Players, 12 Ways to Describe Minions: First, Stop Calling Them
Minions!, Higher Encounter Damage 101, Monster Complexity and Selection and D&D 4e Markers and Condition Cards.