Don't Lose Your Head(s)

The other day Stuart asked me for some ideas on tracking damage in fights in RuneQuest. Well, I think it might have been OpenQuest rather than RQ proper. Some fantasy variant of Chaosium's d100 system, anyway. Here's what fell out of my brain after about five minutes. Completely untested, as per.

This assumes RQ style damage output and average hit points of about 11 for humanoid enemies.

The basic idea is using coins as markers. At full health the coin will be heads up, but when they take more than 5 points of damage from a single attack, they flip over to tails. If they take another 6+ hit then the coin is removed. Or you could give it to the player that struck the killing blow, as a monetary reward.

The idea is that we're not tracking the exact damage, just if it beats the 6+ threshold.

Here we have the idea illustrated by Shotgun Cultist Guy I Found in a Box, and his shiny friends.

SCGIFB faces four uninjured opponents.

BLAM! BLAM! Two of the opponents have taken 8 and 9 damage, so are flipped over to their tails side.

BLAM! One blast for 4 damage is not enough to take out one of the enemies. BLAM! But the second is for 12 and takes out the second closest opponent, so that coin is removed.

You could use stacks of coins to represent tougher foes with more health, I suppose, but this was designed for tracking low level cannon fodder, a step up from 1HP mooks. I would probably run bigger, tougher, foes as normal. Or maybe not. As I said above, untested.

Give it a try! See what you think!