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How do you deal with it? Minis? Spreadsheets?

Since we play on Roll20, I've done it two ways. We use the battle mat, and I've had the opponents line up against the hero tokens on there, but it becomes unwieldy fast. And we've had a map, on which we did the same (while also having a battle mat on the side). That works mostly, but has other issues (the map encourages tactical thinking, which the system doesn't really support).

Tracking is of course not strictly speaking necessary; but it certainly helps, also from a narrative standpoint.

What do you do? Especially for larger engagements.

In Roll20 I have the adversary tokens set up so that the Endurance is linked to a bar and can be displayed to the heroes indicating how injured something might be.

For FTF games I just keep a note of which creature has taken what on the print out of the combat sheet (which has notes regarding plot and stat blocks for the creatures so i don't have to keep referring to the books).

None of my games have involved what might be called 'large' combats, probably 15 enemies and 4-5 heroes has been the most.

How do you track who's on who though?

In Roll20 I have the adversary tokens lined up on a copy of Voidstate's Battle mat and FTF I use numbered counters or dice to mark adversaries lined up against tokens for the company when I use tangible markers at all. For demo games I'm gradually acquiring the 6inch/15cm action figures from the Hobbit/LotR put out by Bridge Direct (?) to use for the company on either the battlemat or travel mat from Voidstate.

I print off 4×6-inch index cards for adversaries, with their stats, brief summaries of their special abilities, and a row of Endurance/Hate boxes for each individual so I can mark off losses. Next to those boxes I jot down an abbreviation of a PC's name to tell me which character each adversary is engaged with, and I tell the players that information. No markers or maps; we do it all in "Theatre of the Mind" style.

Fantasy Grounds combat tracker. Everything I need is there. All the stats, the initiative order, link to the PC/NPC sheet. Then use the stance mat to easily display stances to the players, which I then change in the combat tracker to change initiative order.

pencil notes on a piece of paper. been doing that since we started playing.

If I've prepped the adventure well, I've got sheets with checkboxes for end and circles for hate, under the stats. I'll put it into a page protector, and use overhead pens.

If not, I use pencil on a 3x5 index card or on lined notebook paper. It will look kind of like:
with major baddies, I sometimes use poker chips for Hate and End.

aramis wrote:with major baddies, I sometimes use poker chips for Hate and End.

We use poker chips for the Fellowship Pool; the players felt that their individual Endurance and Hope scores were too high to track in this way (since they'd each have 40-odd chips to manage), and as Loremaster I prefer pencil on card for tracking adversaries' Endurance and Hate, but we do like having the shared stack of Fellowship points out there in the middle of the table so everyone can see what's available. It also helps to remind them to convert unspent Fellowship points to Hope regain at the end of a session.

I haven't used it it yet but I made my own battle board and under each stance there is room for tokens. I'm currently working on printing up some chipboard tokens, to represent players and monsters, to be placed in the correct position to keep up with who is fighting who.