Weekly updates: I think I've decided to put animated creatures back in. I've figured out a simpler way of using them. I didn't get enough playtesting in this week, but have asked friends if they are interested. I have two takers so far, and am going to playtest the first game on Wednesday. Wish me luck! I didn't get much time to work on a post because I have been editing the rules for the upcoming playtest.
This will be a short one this week.
Illeria, like many wargames, has this problem where you need to keep track of a lot of information. Each character can take a certain amount of damage before dying, and occasionally there are status effects to track (e.g. needs to reload, has 3 residual magic, is cursed for 2 turns). This is easy to do in a game like D&D, because you only have one character. But in Illeria each team has something in the ballpark of a dozen models, which can get quite complicated.
How have other games solved this problem? Warhammer and Necromunda have relatively little information about each model. For example, most of the models have only 1 health, so they are either at full health or dead (and removed from the board). This simplifies things a lot. I've thought about doing something like this for Illeria, but I think the game would loose too much if every character was one attack from death. Warmachines and MechWarrior have specialized cards for each character that you write on. I tried this for a time, and I found it to be a pain to use, because I needed to create a new set every time I played. Also, those games have an advantage that Illeria won't, which is that they have their own models, so it is easier to put a picture of the model on the card (in my case, my playtesters often lost track of which card corresponded to each character). In Frostgrave, you keep track of everything on a sheet of paper. That works decently, but I kept being annoyed with needing to create a new sheet for every playtest. Also, the opposing player needs to ask if they want information about your characters.
One idea I tried was using dice as counters. This had a couple problems. It was easy to track one thing (like health), but if you wanted to track multiple factors, it meant putting several dice next to a character, which got complicated. I also would regularly forget which dice was meant to be a counter, and roll it. This was actually part of the impetus for switching to only six-sided dice. Finally, it clutters up the table, something Sarah complained about a lot.
So, based on one of Sarah's suggestion, I came up with a new idea. I cut out a bunch of semicircles on white card stock, and covered them in clear tape. I then used ticky-tack to attach these on the bottom of the miniatures. Then, whenever I need to track something, I write it on the semicircle with a dry-erase marker. This works super well. The information follows the miniature everywhere it goes. It is easily reusable. Everyone can see it. I can put any information I want on it. And it doesn't clutter up the table. I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier (thank you Sarah!). My only criticism is that they can make the models a little hard to place on terrain. I'm thinking in the future I'll make them out of paper, rather than card stock.
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