Health bars

The bookkeeping nobody enjoys

Every role-play and skirmish game has the same friction, and it is not the rules. It is five people writing numbers on scraps of paper, rubbing them out, and then disagreeing about whether the goblin hit for six or eight two turns ago. A bar on a screen in the middle of the table fixes it by being the only copy: one place the number lives, visible to everybody, changed by a tap.

The three step sizes matter more than they look. Most games do most of their damage in two or three sizes, and once those are on the buttons the arithmetic stops happening at all. Set them to whatever the game in front of you actually rolls rather than to the round numbers this page opens with.

Why the band is in words

Beside every bar is a word: healthy, hurt, critical or down. It is there because a bar that only changes colour tells some people nothing, and because a number on its own does not answer the question anybody at a table is actually asking, which is whether that character is in trouble. Thirty five out of fifty and thirty five out of two hundred are the same number and completely different situations.

It is also what gets announced after every hit, so somebody using a screen reader hears the same thing the room sees. The bands are quarters: healthy from three quarters up, hurt to a quarter, critical below that, and down only at nothing, so a character on one hit point is still standing and the page says so.

Quest games with younger children

This works just as well for a made-up adventure at a kitchen table as for a game with a rulebook. Give everybody twenty hit points, turn the boss bar on for whatever they are up against, and let the steps be one, two and five. Children take to a visible bar immediately, and the band word does the explaining, so nobody has to be taught what a fraction of a maximum means.

If what you need is lives rather than hit points, the lives tracker counts hearts instead and is simpler for a party game. For points that go up rather than down, the scoreboard is the page, and the dice roller is what most tables put beside this one.

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