I don't think it's too hard to implement bar system on forum.

So you could in GM menu make a bars which would appear along with player's info. Bars could be useful for a lot of things, actually.

you could make your own health bars if you need to

Actually, while I do find such bars acceptable and even nice, it will be nice to always have their bars around, so I can keep track of their stats whenever I want.

Yeah, I'm just too lazy.

I don't think this is a workable idea.  Too many different systems with different ways of recording things like health, etc.  Better to do it as spaceace suggested, which allows the GM to easily customise how he wants things to appear.  Otherwise your just asking for a feature which only benefits the users of specific systems.

Overall though, simply recording hit points (or whatever) as 7/10 or 10/12 is much more compact and easy to read at a glance, rather than trying to interpret a bar into an exact number (I notice spaceace showed the bar, and the actual numbers, which would be kind of redundant if done that way in a game).

-1.

Hey! I wanna make a comment that you create UNIVERSAL bar. For which you can choose name, color, whether it shows actual cur/max stats or just a bar. You know, I wouldn't think of something complex...

I've seen people use the bio lines to track it, either graphically or numerically.

Character Name
Player tag, number of posts
Xxxxx Xxxxx Xxooo
12/15 hp

There's a character limit for any single bio line, and it precludes using it for other things like pithy quotes, but it's there and always connected to the character.

Edited for autocowrecks
This message was last edited by the user at 14:20, Tue 15 Apr 2014.

It would be interesting to have it as an option; perhaps a way to make one of the bio lines change into a percentage bar, where you specify the color, then value/maximum.

It could have a check-box in the bio-editing page that turns the text into a bar, if you entered it right. If you put in something like, say, "15/20", otherwise it would just show the text.

I'm not sure if there would be an easier way to implement the idea, so I'm giving it +½.

That's because D&D (and most other RPGs) are in essence numbers games, and in fact many CRPGs with health bars list the numbers in addition to the bar also. ;>


I agree health bars would look cool, but we've been playing here 10-15 years without them, and the DM and players are still going to have to deal with the numbers. Personally, I think the effort would be best spent in other areas.

Also, I've found several online bar graph generators through google, you just input the data, save it as a pic, and post it along with your combat map.
This message was last edited by the user at 14:49, Tue 15 Apr 2014.

You kill all the creative mood, guys! I just wanna make some more obvious help for guys actually using stats in game. And I'm not going to move, until acceptable compromise is presented to me!

In reply to Akronom (msg # 9):
lol!
Give it up, dude. Sometimes, no matter how kewl we think our ideas are, the rest don't "get" our genius or see our vision. Been there, sung that song. :-p
This message was last edited by the user at 15:39, Tue 15 Apr 2014.

I won't give up! I will petition for bars! No one will be able to stop me.

Laziness: Dude, chill up, passive resistance is more than enough. By the way, you won't be able to do much either.

I have to agree with my laziness.

I'll give up on my own thread, which was looking for pretty much the same concept:

link to a message in this forum

As far as health bars/special areas: What I've done and seen done is to include a running total of your relevant stats in each combat post. This keeps a record of your stats over time, as opposed to "the last time it was changed," and everyone can match your combat readiness along with the actions you're performing.

A template, and cut+paste from your previous post works well, positioned either at the very top or toward the bottom of your post in a different color text.

That's really neat, I also like this one:


There's exactly 20 slashes on each line and color formatting doesn't change the size. With the dashes you have to fiddle with the size of the lines. This way you don't

A bar is nice, but you also need a "total" number for the bar.  When I'm a healer in a raid I make sure to look for that, and when I'm a tank in a raid I make sure to say something about that.  Otherwise you sometimes have people freaking out because "so and so has lost half their health!"  But half their health may still be two or three times as much health as someone more squishy has, so they're still not necessarily a priority heal target, you know?  So bars are nice, in my opinion, but I still prefer a number somewhere.

Indeed. The fighter and the wizard in my example are on pretty much equal ground.

-1 as for as BBR says too many different rules

The above work arounds are neat.

I don't really see a need for a graphic yet turns out there are some ways.

You could also put the hard number details in a private line to the GM (ie private line to yourself). Then the players only see the overall health bar suggested above.

In reply to Brygun (msg # 17):

Bars could be neat for a game where the GM is going for a bit more immersion... where players don't know each others exact hit points, instead only having a general idea of how "healthy" (a percentage-bar, with no numbers) the other characters are... they might even only have that degree of knowledge about their own health... I ran a DnD game where the players only got general descriptions of their own stats and didn't even know their own hit points.  They loved it... but it was a fruit-ton of work for me since I had to track and roll all of their damage and such.  In the slower format of play-by-post, it wouldn't be as bad.
This message was last edited by the user at 14:01, Fri 25 Apr 2014.

Build the Damage and Max HP parts of the table in a PM to yourself any time you post it :D

In reply to steelsmiter (msg # 19):

Yeah, as I said, in a PbP game, it would be much easier.  The original game was a face-to-face sit-down game.

EDIT:  Hmmm, a simple bar graph generator probably wouldn't be that hard to add.  You'd just need parameters for the percentage (which could be expressed as a decimal or a fraction) and the width of the bar, in characters.
This message was last edited by the user at 18:15, Sat 26 Apr 2014.

One non-rpol coding method would be:

- GM tracks info in a spreadsheet
- spreadsheet generates a graph pic
- GM uploads graph to photobucket etc
- in your turn summay post include link or <img> to graph