How do you keep track of all your players and NPC's? I was wondering what people use in this regard?

I was just going to use large sheets of paper, coins for people and a small tape measure.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

What do you mean keep track of them?

Do you mean locations on a map, or stats, or personality, or condition monitor?

Are you looking at keeping track of PC's from a GM's perspective? Like ammo, condition, or cred?


If I am a gm, since I know my players well, I let them keep track of their chars, and I monitor rounds used in a gun to be sure.

For NPC's I have notes, about a paragraph long for each, I jot down some stats if I need to, or arch type they are based on.

I have not played in 8 years ... but I would also write something to track them and keep notes on my laptop. I am a huge fan of using technology.

Battlemat, minatures, and wet erase pens of a couple colours. Only way to go.

Note: "Minatures" includes not only the specially formed little metal bits, painted or more often unpainted, but also at times beer caps, dice, the translucent plastic "bingo" markers, etc.

EDIT: More tips.


Sets of dice that a the same as each other but different from whatever other people are rolling are great for small groups of mooks. You can turn up a different number for each and presto you have a reference number for tracking damage and for the players to refer to attacks.

The mass of bingo chips work well for legions of one-hit mooks (you can use the marking pen to mark one if they were damaged but not one-hit) or for people that aren't normally attacked, but the location of which is important for AoE, LoF, etc. Such as all the people on a moderately busy train station platform.

Beer caps/beer can tabs tend to get used for critters or friendly NPCs. They are still unique and easy to identify, but we don't really have a minature that represents them all that well.

Erasers and other larger than 1" sq. items get used for larger creatures. Sometimes i'll rip off a large square of paper and write a name on it if it is an important creature, or a vehicle, etc.

Oh, and those clear plastic Chessex dice boxes work great as a platform for a "flying" creature to stand on you can get a sense of elevaton. Often you can put it right over top of a normally placed minature to show a fly over.

It's all about gaming at a university where rooms come equpped with a blackboard. Barring that, I've always used a dry-erase board and a hastily drawn scetch of the area.

A long time ago I bought four heavily discounted copies of a defunct game called "Heroquest" that contained a whole slew of little plastic figures: orks, skeletons, zombies, mummies, and others, along with four 'player character' type figures in each set). I labeled each figure's base with a Sharpie (Zombies are Z01 through Z12, orks are O01 through 024, etc.). Along with our battlemat and painted figures for PCs, they work great for combats. We use Hot Wheels cars for vehicles.

HeroQuest was awesome.

~J

Abosutely. HeroQuest was a great game. I still have it and the 2 expansions that came out for it.

I use Tact-Tiles as a battle mat for my games. Because they are dry-erase they are easy to draw on and clean up, plus you can move sections of the map off and add new sections as the players move around (Its alot easier than having to erase and re-draw if the characters move out of what you've already drawn).

For miniatures I have a ton I've painted myself (mostly Fantasy, but that's because there aren't many sci-fi minis that look good to me, except the new Rezolution DT game). I've also got the little paper minis from the Shadowrun DMZ and Denver: City of Shadows box sets. And hundreds from the D&D Miniatures game.

i think i remember that game.... one of the only "mostly board game" rpg's that i remember...

Actually WotC brought out a game that was virtually identical to it using the D&D 3.0 rules. It was either the Basic Game or the Adventure Game, can't remember. The mat in it was virtually identical as the board used in HeroQuest, it was just a cheap folding paper mat, instead of a cardboard board like HeroQuest had. The heros were very similar in every aspect, name, stats, gear. Hell, even the adventures were almost exactly the same.

edit: Interesting, never realized that HeroQuest was supposed to be set in GameWorkshops' Warhammer Fantasy world. I just looked it up online and discovered that.

One of my groups used, in addition to an assortment of miniatures from other game systems, stuff like Starbursts, peppermints, and gumdrops to represent mooks. We got to eat our kills. This custom did once almost cause me to automatically pop a lead dwarf into my mouth, though.

We put paper maps in plastic sleeves and draw directly on the sleeves with dry erase markers. We tend to use smaller tables when we game (mostly because of the venues that we typically are at) with no GM screen, because we believe in transparency of rolls.

Right now, our current game is Voice-over-IP with OpenRPG for mapping/rolling purposes. It has served us pretty well, considering our players are split up all over the country.

I am a moron, I didn't read the subtitle.


I mainly just use grid paper and draw where people are. As soon as my computer is back up, I am going to work on finishing my shadowrunner generator, so people can print out little miniature versions of their characters. The micro heros are perfect for most of these.

Mostly just descriptions and imagination. If it becomes absolutely necessary to know where that rent-a-cop is standing in relation to your orc street sam, usuall a dry-erase board or plain pen & paper.

We have a chessix map, I forget the exact scale, but it is two feet wide, and four feet in length. We placed it under a piece of plexiglass and use dry erase markers, overlays, and projectors! (A new addition)

We also make use of my hand drawn maps, a big flat screen TV (48 inches) linked with S-video cables to a Lap Top for Satellite imagery, video feed, and audio clues.

The plexiglass we use also has enough room for a dozen condition monitors, and a special tracking sheet I can use to keep track of players, NPC's, etc...by writing down names, skills, attrubtes, etc.

I occasionaly have 3278 create video footage with Adobe Photoshop for us. I think all in all we do good.

Thanks. We really try to make it fun, and this helps. Plus we're, you know, geeks.

We just got an overhead projector, so I am going to start using overlays on that for mapping, so we can cut down on the amount of time we use to study maps. Iused to have to draw them up (by hand or on the machine) and then use my printer to photocopy them. I make packets for the players, but that tends to kill our cartridges quickly.

So hopefully the overlays help!