How to easily track combat in Feng Shui?

Question

While incredibly fun, the Feng Shui combat system can get unwieldy when you have a large number of mooks and named characters fighting the players. Its hard to keep track of what shot each character gets to act on next.

What methods and/or software do people utilize to keep track of it all?

Bonus points for also helping to keep track of details of the fight beyond shot-tracking: who's fighting who, who's dead, and so forth.

Answer 1

I draw out a 18 shot track that is 3x6 squares. That means for the standard actions (attacking or actively defending) I just have to move the token representing the character either down one row for an attack or across one column for a active defence. No maths required.

Answer 2

I never needed more than a slightly expanded version of the shot counter they print in the book (just so you could stack up plenty of tokens next to each number). basically that down the middle of an 8 1/2x11 sheet of paper so that I can get a line of 6 or so tokens lined up out to the side of each number. I used shell casings (for flair) or dice with a number of mooks showing for mooks and minis for the characters' tokens, and just counted down, and went from the "inside out" (closest to the number goes first, and when you take your action you go to the outside spot on the next shot you act on).

There is an online initiative tracker and people sell general initiative mats that serve the same purpose. Here's a print one that does more than just initiative, but it doesn't have enough space on each side of the countdowns for my taste.

Answer 3

If you agree on using a computer, spreadsheet is your best buddy. I've been DMing FengShui a lot and tried several things but a spreadsheet seems the more efficient. Here is how I organise it:

Each column is a named or mook char:

• contains its name, wounds count/number of mook, initiative score, bonus info (such as main combat skill, weapon/spell, current target...)
• Even better, you can add a macro to automatically roll dices on the main combat skill, and subtract 3 to the initiative.

Above all these info, you set a global counter to see where we are, and bind a macro on its value which highlight the columns with an initiative equal to the current value (of course, once you decrease init of the character, it should not be highlighted anymore)

I know using macro for dice-rolling may look like it will kill the fun, but it actually fasten the pace and allow to focus on describing cool moves depending on the roll for NPCs (even mooks can have cool group move when especially lucky!).

If you are lazy, I can upload my own spreadsheet and send you the link.

EDIT: Here is the link, it displays 5 named and 5 mook, unfortunately I did that while not knowing how to code so, to add mode characters, you will have to modify the macros.