Tracking things like HP, Experience... etc

Make a mini board for each character or class (or whatever your players are) just like Arkham Horror does. Each board already has the levels, health, and mana printed on the board. Use markers/tokens to keep track of what level they are on and have red tokens for health and blue for mana.

Glad to help! Been stuck in that loop myself.

Looking forward to hearing more about your game. And if you ever need remote playtesters...

Game design party at my place!

Theme is Dungeon Crawl!

:D

Very nice, Mark. This very closely mirrors my own philosophy in making a board game RPG, although the nuts and bolts are completely different.

To the OP, try to reduce the purpose and feel of RPG conventions into something tangible, literally a game component, or a result of in game mechanics. Most board game players don't want to track things outside of the game system, writing down how much gold you have or how many EXP seems like a small thing but many would find it a turn off.

I don't know much about how your game is structured so I don't know how you would implement this in game but one idea for EXP is to assign a few values to each monster, or in game task, which is then payed out to a player upon whatever necessary victory condition, killing the monster delivering the key to such and such or picking a lock.

These could be tokens or tiles of some sort, you could even keep the color convention Mark mentioned above and add say gold to represent thief skills, or they could be numbered on cards if that is the direction you're headed. Players could use the points to upgrade skills or level up, either at will or once they reach a certain number of points either in a single color/denomination or in total. You could limit purchases to a like for like trade or come up with an exchange rate to buy out of type.

As for the HP tracking Mark mentioned, if you use a system like that you could add a second level, or more, to the edge of the card to give a larger and more gradual range of numbers. If you keep it limited to two levels players shouldn't have a hard time tracking which is the active number, or turn the idea on its head a bit.

Instead of four numbers along the edge of the card (which I take to be an avatar of some sort) add a small circular space on the card with a marker of some sort to specify the active point. At character creation, and perhaps during leveling up, players can purchase a disk to place on this space with a numbered face, think of a clock, which corresponds to the stat being tracked, be it HP or mana. For HP awarrior might start with a #10 disk, a mage #4, a thief #6, etc. as they take damage the player rotates the disk so that the marker points to the active value.

Hope that helps.

>Steals idea and patents mechanics< This is very impressive!

I have a knack for riffing on ideas that sound great, then turn into greasy smears once the rubber meets the road. :)

Still, this one sounds fun enough to prototype. Assuming I'm not infringing on your newly acquired patents, that is. :D

I've just spent the last year working on that same sort of question... how to track stuff without needing to write anything down. The board game/rpg hybrid I'm co-designing with a friend is geared to be playable by kids as young as 5 years old, so we had some additional considerations... but basically the goal is the same, to create an elegant, simple, and effective system to track information.

What we came up with for a solution was to create a combination of hero boards (sorry, i dont know how to imbed images here so it's just a link to our bgg image gallery):
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/1388324/story-realms

...and "Trackers"
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/1399306/story-realms

that abstract the information a little bit and make the game flow smoothly. We did the same with the adventuring gear:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/1378436/story-realms

and basically all other elements of the game, by focusing on the things that were most core and "essential" to the experience. Then we got an amazing art director to put it all together in a visual style that really works. There was SOOO much effort put into the translation from our lines and boxes early prototype to what you see here, but it has really paid off. YOu don't want to worry about the polish thoguh until you have a solid framework that is well-tested. One thing we ran into was once you get wireframes mapped out to the artists it's very hard to make even small "tweaks", so make really sure you're settled on a design and have refined it before spending the time and effort on creating a final.

The main point I'd say helped us was to make a list of everything that was absolutely core to the game, see if there were any elements that could be combined or eliminated, and then consider how you can represent that information in the simplest, most straight-forward way possible. Make sure that each of those elements is doing as much heavy lifting as you can. We ended up combining the ideas of hit points and stamina and strength all into one stat we call "Oomph", and combined all of the skills we wanted to represent into 6 core stats, and simplified the concept of focus, mana, and concerted efforts into "boosts". I'm not implying that is what will work for your game, just saying that when you look at the core of it you might find that there are some things you thin you need but you really don't :)

For our game, gemstones and custom meeples are used to track stuff (because they are fun and tangible and pretty), but our original prototypes used little tokens. It's almost like designing a User Interface from a video game (that's how we approached it anyway) and once you have mapped everything that absolutely needs to be represented visually, and cut out the rest, then you get to do the fun part of playing around with it until it "feels right". Once we got a functional layout, we playtested the heck out of it and really watched how players interacted with the boards and bits, made adjustments, and playtested some more. It's really interesting to watch how different people will approach something like a player board and trying to find a solution that fits your game needs and also seems intuitive and simple for the players was for us an exercise in trial and error.

Anyhow, maybe there's some ideas there that will help. Good luck!