tags, laminations, and battleboards

Okay, what about a supplimental battle board in addition to the regular tags. The intention behind it being that it's much easier to either flip up your shield or pull one 3x5 card and pen out of your pocket and quick tick off several spells than to flip through a ring in the middle of a running fight (such as the Tower Mod or similar type where you're going from fight to fight in a fairly quick manner and usually in the dark or shadows) and then when the fight is completely over or the waves abate, you can take a few minutes to pull out your ring and update your tags according to your battleboard in order to keep yourself current, especially for protectives since I think those are the spells/tags that get "cheated" on the most.

My biggest beef with the tag system is that it breaks some really cool game feel when you have to stop after a really good fight and go OOG in order to pull tags and hand em off to someone or chuck em when you really should be either gathering people together in order to plan the next phase or getting your butts out of there post haste and in relatively orderly fashion.

Anyway, I don't know if suppliments to the system are considered a playtest or not, since we're following the laws just adding to them. Plus, this type of system could be periodically audited with spot checks if marshalls wanted to go around and randomly ask someone to show their BB and tag ring to see if they're matching.
 
How do you suggest handling effects that you get from other players? Example, when a player casts a magic armor on me, they are supposed rip the uncast portion of the tag and give me the remaining tag, then I put that tag on my ring with my body and other effect tags. How does that work with a battleboard? What about healing? How do you "tag" that with a battleboard?
 
Full Battleboards have an active 'spell section' that you can cross out. For instance you may see something like this-

Spell Shield- O O O O O (Starting off blank)
Spell Shield- / O O O O (When you have it active, you line thru it once)
Spell Shield- X O O O O (When it gets taken out by a spell, you X it out)

The good thing about it is for long engagements... you can actually see that someone had a hell of a fight and scale things in monster camp differently next time.

They may turn in a character card that looks like

Magic Armor X X X X X X / O O O
Spell Shield X X X X X X X / O O
Poison Shield X X X X X X / O O O
Elemental Shield X X / O O O O O O O

Body can be done in a similar fashion. I even tried one system of battlecards at a play test event where there where intial locations and I asked people to initial or put a player number next to the dots. That let me track everything at the logistics point. It also let me see who was really 'getting into it'. If casting a protective or healing spell on someone in that system, a player would X of his/her spell and then initial the other card.

Time wise, asking a player to initial a card was usually faster than asking them to find a tag and hand it over. It also prevented a lot of confusion because players could see exactly what they had to cast. (Most players taped the battelboard to a shield, I actually wrapped mine around my sword handgrip and had it available at a glance)

Note, that at low level the battleboard may not give increased efficiency. But if someone hits 12th level as a scholar and has a 4 column, some people don't have the ability to accurately remember 36+ spells in the middle of combat.
 
That's one of the few things I don't like about battleboarding.
I don't have anywhere to put it.
Sure, as a fighter, I carry a shield, no problem, but I've got a rogue (who has almost no expendable skills) and a caster (with 80+ spells/effects) and nothing to stick the 'board' onto. I still like the idea because, even in my pocket, it's easier to read then my tags, but it's not an 'ideal' solution.

One argument that I think could be presented, and quite powerfully if written well, is that we don't track Armor tags already. Sure, most people keep track of their body in their head, and although it's against the rules not to move around body tags and healing tags, most people don't anyways. However, with Armor tags, you actually have to track it the way most people do body. If your armor is 'beat down', but not breached, you have to keep that in your head, there's no amount of tagging in the current system to track that. We already trust people to do that, taking it a step or two further isn't that big a jump.
 
Or, as I stated, use in conjunction with the tags so that it's a running tally to be caught up on in between fight sessions. For precasts, most times not only is the spell shield I started with gone, but two more have been cast and lost during the fight, so you go back to the caster at the end of the fight who cast it on you and request their tag then, when their auditing their ring off of their battleboard.
 
Dave;17896 said:
From the alliance chair regarding this topic -

There is also an option for proposing a limited play test to the owners which would be voted on if seconded and is subject to veto by Mike V.
Click to expand...

While playtests are not allowed (and leaving alone the idiocy of that particular discussion), providing a battleboard alongside the standard tag system is not a playtest, it is providing supplimentary tracking for those who wish to use it. Using a battleboard is not enforcable, but it is allowed, provided the tags are still used. There is no difference between getting my tags at logistics and using a battleboard of my own design, and gettings my tags and a battleboard from logistics.
 
There is another option. We can set up play tests which do not offer experience for existing characters, but use the rulebooks. We can't charge for the games, of course, which means all of the things needed for this would be out of pocket entirely.
 
Dave;17907 said:
There is another option. We can set up play tests which do not offer experience for existing characters, but use the rulebooks. We can't charge for the games, of course, which means all of the things needed for this would be out of pocket entirely.
Click to expand...

So two gamedays in a row could be used (i.e. Saturday and Sunday) where we 'renew' the battleboard on Sunday. Or, we could do logistics after the Saturday game as if we were going to play Sunday. That would save on site costs.

???
 
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