Savage Worlds 3.1 problems with combat tracker & revealing hidden tokens

[zackspacks]

Hi all
I didn't want to post these in the bugs section, as they may already be known, or there may be a quick fix, apart from the obvious 'don't do that' fix

Situation : Savage Worlds v3.1 Combat Tracker
This is more of situational thing, as follows:
This week I had a large combat encounter pre-set up with all of the enemy tokens on the map as invisible. However some of them were set up as reinforcements, so they wouldn't appear straight away. I set the reinforcement guys to 'no card dealt' and 'unknown', however when we entered combat they were visible on the players screen as 'unknown' and much worse, their token was visible. One in particular was a huge enemy wild card, with it's token sat on the tracker.

To get around this problem, I deleted the wild card from the tracker, and reinstated him in round 3 when he appeared. This then caused another problem for me - how do I deal him into the combat ? As the cards had been dealt, he was without a card, I randomly drew one from the baccarat shoe and placed it on him. There was now no way to reshuffle the order, so we had to do it manually.

In hindsight, I guess I should have added him to the tracker at the conclusion of round 2, so that he would have been added to the round 3 draw. However this does still leave the situation where a unit appearing mid round is awkward ( but not unworkable) to put into the combat and have the tracker in the correct order. An extreme example would be 6 different units all appearing mid round.

So, what I am looking for advice on, is
a) whether there is a shortcut command to reorder the combat tracker in its correct order, after a mid round addition ?
b) how to keep the token hidden on a 'U' unit that has not been spotted yet ?

Cheers
Paul

[Doswelk]

Setting an entry on the Combat Tracker to Unknown, just hides his parry and toughness and his name.

You can hide icons on a map by right clicking on them and setting their visibility.

To deal a card to someone mid combat right mouse button on the card (or blank card spot) and select deal card.

I have some videos I made (older version of SW ruleset but still relevant) they can be found here.

[zackspacks]

Hi Doswelk
Thanks for the tip re dealing cards to a new addition, I didn't realise that.

Thanks for the clarification wrt hidden elements. At least I now know the interface is not capable of achieving what I would like to see. Actually with regards to the visibility, I have another slight problem with that, in that they appear virtually invisible to the GM too. I was using a grid of about 50x50 squares that had a pre-set ambush of about 10 guys on, I could barely find them myself, and ended up having to zoom in, and scroll around to find them . Is there a way of making them more visible to the GM ?

As for both Xorne's and your videos, our group have found them invaluable, ( I have probably watched them easily 10+ times each now ) many thanks for making them

cheers
Paul

[zackspacks]

Hi there
Rather than post another thread re the combat tracker, I thought I would add onto this. After watching one of Xorne's D&D vlogs, I notice that in the D&D version the Personalities attacks are in the combat tracker, and he just clicks on their weapon attack and it rolls the attack. Is this possible in the SW version ? I have been opening up every individual personality to do the attacks, which has left me with a really cluttered screen. I have just tried to do it, but with no success, although maybe I am doing something wrong ?
cheers

[phantomwhale]

Sounds like a great plan - add it to the tracker !

Only consideration is that personalities (and PCs, for that matter) can all have multiple attacks - I see 4E only seems to have one line, so not sure what cleverness it's doing (as someone who doesn't play 4E, I find the ruleset hard to understand sometimes - I can't even figure out how to set up a simple attack on it ! Having no libraries makes this even harder to fathom, I expect).

[Moon Wizard]

The attack/damage format for the 4E combat tracker entries is a minimal format that I hacked up myself:
<attack name> (<atk bonus> vs. <defense>) (<damage> <optional damage type>) [<other optional descriptors, such as range, recharge, etc.>]

There is a script which parses this line into usable rolls, but at the end of the day, it's a big hack. I've been considering making the combat tracker entries a little more like mini character sheets, with attacks broken out better, but that's a big task.

Cheers,
JPG

[zackspacks]

Thanks guys, added to the improvement wishlist, and also to the tracker here

https://savagefgii.idea.informer.com/proj/?ia=26498