Hey all,
a while back, I proposed handling the issue of table lookups and wound tracking with a card system, similar to how X-Wing does it, to a generally sour reception.
I let it slide, but tonight I had a couple hours to spare, so I thought I'd take it up again. Here's what I came up with.
I'd love to hear any comments and criticism before I work much more on this. I'm more interested in hearing the constructive kind, though, than the "this is a terrible idea and you shouldn't do it"-variety
Disclaimer: This is not intended to perfectly emulate the current wound system. The intention is to make a quick, easy and hopefully exciting mechanic to replace the current Wound tables. Don't expect 1:1 results.
- There are three decks of shuffled cards, each corresponding to a damage type (Energy, Rending, Impact).
-
When you take damage, do not roll for hit location. Instead, simply draw a card from the pile with the used damage type.
If this was a Called Shot, simply discard the drawn cards until one with the correct location comes up. Shuffle the discarded cards into the deck immediately, or when you run out of cards.
If it matters which arm/leg was hit, simply roll a 50/50 chance. Shouldn't come up too often. - Count up the Wound total as normal (5 per wound/card + whatever damage you took). Look that value up on the card and apply the effects.
- Place the card in a vertical stack, using the new card to underline the effect you suffered from the last card. Optionally use a wet-erase marker on sleeved cards to keep track of rolled values (I might need to make some room for this, probably in the top middle).
Here's a few samples. Note that the wound effects are not exactly as the tables, but have similar "power levels". The damage ranges are the same for all these cards, but that could easily be altered on a card-by-card basis.
Pros:
- Skip both the hit location roll and the wound table look-up. Pretty big time-saver.
- Keep track of number of wounds without keeping notes. Particularly useful for GMs with cluttered notes (such as myself).
- Keep track of status conditions without keeping notes. Combine with wet-erase markers and card sleeves to track stuff like number of turns left, or severity of a status condition.
- Easily remember which wound caused which status condition for healing purposes. Probably not useful very often, but it could come up.
- Easily add new wound effects. Separate arms from legs (as I've done above). Make the system more or less deadly as desired.
Cons:
- Shorter wound tables, so less flexible on effects. This could be helped by printing multiple cards for the same damage type/location, but with different effects (like, one card uses effect 12 in the 11-14 bracket while the second card uses effect 14).
- Printing and card sleeve expenses.
- Need to think of how to keep track of the effect chosen on the last card. I guess it's not that hard to remember if it's just one, recent card.
- Something I haven't thought of, probably.
