Tracking and Bookkeeping

One of the great difficulties of D&D is that you have to track a lot of data. Tracking initiative and then tracking multiple conditions, buffs, battlefield effects each with their own effects, stacking behavior, and durations. So many times I have seen people trying to figure out what armor class they hit after figuring in a stack of conditions, buffs, and debuffs.

This is obviously difficult and a hassle. So how to fix it? There are essentially two approaches. One, make everything easier. Or two, develop clever ways to track things. Fourth edition took the first approach to an extreme. The Paizo edition didn't do much in this regard, but did do a couple things to make it easier like only allowing 3 buffs to work. (No more buffing marathons where players spend 30 minutes figuring out what they are going to do to buff themselves)

I think one thing about 4th edition is that it has been over-simplified. The designers wanted everything to be easy so they built extremely standardized mechanics. In my opinion the better way to handle complexity would have been to find better ways to manage it instead of tossing it out. With the increasing presence of laptops and other computing devices at the gaming table you have the opportunity to manage things via a program. Even without that, there are ways to handle things with tracking practices, cards and tokens, and so on.

Several years ago I wrote a java applet to handle initiative. A friend then built a javascript version that had some nice features and was more usable. I now use that to track initiative. This tool has made handling initiative much easier, but I have heard of other tricks to make this easier such as using a stack of cards. Another thing that happens in my games is that when the players begin to cast buff spells one person lists all the beneficial effects on a blackboard. That way it is easier to calculate the effects of those multiple buffs.

I would have liked to see more of an effort by Wizards of the Coast to create better ways to handle complexity with various tools and techniques than to simply remove as much complexity as possible from the game. If I were working at Wizards I would propose a simple set of web-based tools that would help every game, like an initiative, condition, and encumbrance trackers. You could offer these free and advertise on the site.

Wizards is the company the made it's way in the world by developing card games where all sorts of tracking information is contained in where and how you place a card and what tokens you place on it, so I would think they could aim some of that experience at managing D&D.