Health Bars

[Seornep]

So I am currently running a campaign and I thought it may be a good idea to have displayable heath bars for the PCs/NPCs for combat. Does anyone know of any good free software which I could download to have custom heath bars to display the information for my players?

[Taku Ooka Nin]

It honestly isn't as important as you will think it is. Players should be keeping track of who is wounded and who isn't. If they are not a perception (5) check should reveal who is bleeding.

[Seornep]

I know it isn't a necessary thing to have, but may relieve some of the stress in running a combat. I could save the time spent on describing the physical states of PCs/NPCs and instead use it focussing more on what the PCs are doing and what my NPCs are going to do

[Lucio]

You could do this easily in Excel, put a row chart on one monitor and the entry sheet on the other, and have sections for both the max HP and cumulative damage.

Heck, if you're doing that an IF formula can pick a standard description based on % HP left and creature type and display that as text on the chart.

E.g. 50% gone on a humanoid might be "Bleeding from several cuts" whilst on an ooze might be "It's started loosing coheasion, several sections seem to have diffculty moving"

[Taku Ooka Nin]

Are you playing it online or in person and intend to use a screen to convey this information?

[Seornep]

I play in person, I have a monitor set up which I remote into and display initiative and what not. I could display heath numbers(eg 34/100), but I don't want my players to know exactly how close to death the opponents are, but still have a decent indication

That is a good idea for excel, ill have to look into it

[Nearyn]

Maptool and a bit of coding can let you have tokens with hp-tracking.

I personally believe that having the health-bars for the PCs have helped the game, as they don't have to stop every other round to sum up how well everybody is doing. I believe that has helped the healing-specced hedge witch.

-Nearyn

[Distant Scholar]

<I couldn't resist>

Seornep wrote:

So I am currently running a campaign and I thought it may be a good idea to have displayable heath bars for the PCs/NPCs for combat.

If I were a player, I'd probably eat mine, and my character would die quickly.

:-)

</I couldn't resist>

[Except for the thread title, you were remarkably consistent.]

[CapeCodRPGer]

Sorry, I thought the title of this was Heath Bars. Nevermind. :)

[Rynjin]

You could use Roll20. The token on there can have health bars. Not sure how it would mesh with your current set-up though, but you could migrate the Initiative order and stuff to there too.

[Googleshng]

I'd recommend Maptool. Slight learning curve, takes some fiddling to get it to play ball with some firewalls, but after that initial hurdle it has a very nice feature set for these things, with a very efficient interface.

Roll20 would probably be my second choice. Similar feature set, easier first-time setup, but there are some shortcomings with the interface (particularly with regards to zoom, multiple maps, and not counting out movement as you drag a mini).

[Rynjin]

You can count movement as you drag now (hold Space), zooming has been improved (centers better on your token, and now has a slidebar so you're not forced to fiddle with the drop down), and you can swap to different maps as well (this one's been a feature for a while, the other two are fairly recent, within the past 6 months or so).

[Googleshng]

Good to know. My main issue with zoom is less with the centering though, and more with shrinking the font size when zooming out. Particularly since the main reason I ever do so is to measure out some crazy long distance or other.

[Rynjin]

I don't believe it does that any more. Not that I've noticed, anyway.

[zylphryx]

Man, I thought this thread was going to be something on a nutritional break through for gamer snacks through the use of advanced molecular biology or some such.

<disappointed>

;)

[Seornep]

So did google when I looked up health bar programs :P