DwD Studios
Managing combat
Sun, 07/24/2016 - 4:46pm | 
Hellbrandt
After another enjoyable session of BBF last night, played using Roll20, I've got a question about managing combat.
There are 3 PC's in the party, plus one NPC who is a guide (I'm sure you know which adventure this is). They were attacked by party of 9 harpies. I know my players enjoy the multi-action mechanism, particularly if the initiative is in their favour, but I find I lose track of the multi-action penalties - how many previous actions a player or monster has taken. Any of the 3 players can take multiple actions, as can the NPC I control and any of the 9 harpies... as each round progresses I have to track which harpies have attacked or defended before, and then what if they decide to take multiple actions?
If I decide to track this on paper, in any round I'm recording multiple actions for 3 PC's, 1 NPC and 9 monsters...
Any tips or advice on this? Am I over complicating it?
| 
Tags: 
BareBones Fantasy RPG is not associated with Skaldcrow Games' Bare Bones Multiverse, despite similar names. Check out Glenn's products by clicking here.
I bought a bunch of small red six siders.
After someone takes their first action we put one next to their mini with the 1 showing.
After their second action we advance it to 2. etc.
At anytime you can look at the table, simply multiply what shows on the die by 20 to find out what the current multi action penalty is for that character/npc/monster etc.
This usually comes into play when someone has taken their turn and later needs to make a resistance roll.
Hope that helps.
That's a great suggestion for tabletop, I'll take a look and see if I can do something similar with Roll20.
If you're not using all three of the numbers you can have on each token, you could easily use one of those.
Thanks Taustinoc, I did consider that - it might work for smaller combats, but having to reset the values for each token at the end of each round might be a bit time consuming.
There was a suggestion on Google+ that I set up a track as an image on each map and use tokens for each player/npc/monster, I'm going to try that.
Yeah, I saw that, and I think it's a better idea. Roll20 doesn't seem to have much in the way of macros of scripting, which makes it harder. What you want to do would be trivial in MapTool with a macro, but MapTool has a rather steeper learning curve to get to work at all.