Help me track monsters better

[Nich_Critic]

Hey all,

I'm running Ravenloft for 4 players, but this seems to apply regardless of what I'm running. I seem to have a lot of trouble tracking the health of many otherwise identical monsters. How I tend to manage is I write down the max health of each type of unit, and then as the PC's begin to engage them, I move down the list subtracting health. I run into trouble, though, if they're spreading their attacks over all the enemies. Particularly if I have 7+ of a single type of enemy, I quickly lose track of which ones lost which amount of health.

We tend to play on square grid maps with push pins as characters. We have about 6 colors, so 4 go to the PC's, and I get 2 for differentiating types of units (also to help the players do the same). We have *some* marked pins, but the owner of them is kind of anal about it. I would like to have pins marked with numbers 1 to X to represent my monsters, which would solve the issue, except for the aforementioned anal ness.

So, to all DM's: How do you keep track of which enemies have taken what damage when you have lots of identical enemies?

[dsmiles]

So, to all DM's: How do you keep track of which enemies have taken what damage when you have lots of identical enemies?

Dice.

1 to 4 identical enemies, each gets a d4.
1 to 6 identical enemies, each gets a d6.
And so on.
And so forth.
Up to 1 to 20 identical enemies.

[Nich_Critic]

Neat idea, but our maps/pin board would be too small. I usually like combat encounters to fit on a single sheet of 9"x11" paper, or many such sheets for many rooms

[Kaww]

I started using this:
Also I use scrabble letters as monster tokens, I need my dice...
Don't forget to name the monsters by corresponding letters or the system causes a headache...

[LibraryOgre]

I've done it a couple ways, depending on the tactical level of the game.

One thing I do is keep a spreadsheet with current HP totals tracked on it. When someone damages something, I just update the HP total. However, if it's a large number of largely identical monsters, I let the players know that I'm going to simplify things for myself and just run the lesser monsters as an "HP Pool" What that means is that, instead of tracking each monster individually, they have a total number of HP, and every time they do damage equal to one full HP, they kill one of their choice.

For example, in the caves of Chaos they ran into 20 skeletons and 20 zombies, backed up by some lesser priests, a 5th level priest, and a 3rd level wizard. They'd split into two groups, and tracking individual HP would've been a pain in the butt. So, I told them that for every 7 HP they did to skeletons, one of the skeletons would die. If the rogue did 3 HP and the fighter did 4, even if they were on the other side of the sea of skeletons, one skeleton would be taken off the board. It made tracking them a LOT easier, gave them some tactical control, but still made them chew through a LOT of skeletons. And then there were zombies. And clerics blasting them in the back. With a wizard.

If they hadn't put the helm of opposite alignment on the minotaur, they would've been TOAST.

[Sillycomic]

Can't you just go out and buy some pins of your own so you can mark them?

Push pins are... what like a dollar for 20 or 30 of them? Any dollar store would have more than enough to let you keep track of any variety of similar or different enemies you want to throw at your group.

Cause, your real problem is: How do I differentiate between all of these monsters being represented by very similar push pins.

The answer seems simple enough, buy a variety of push pins that you don't mind marking up. Then you can track the monsters and Push Pin Owner won't have marked up pins.