In polishing my campaign framework for D&D 4th Edition in MapTool (see my earlier post about tracking conditions if you missed it), I ended up creating a lot of icons to represent various states in MapTool. I love the states that came with the torrent of images over at rptutorials.net, but I needed to create some of my own, too.

Most of the icons I created are for numeric states. For instance, I already had -10 through +10 in both red and blue squares to represent attack penalties/bonuses and defense penalties/bonuses. I realized at some point that I really ought to have separate states for damage penalties/bonuses, so I created orange squares with those numbers (once again -10 to +10).

I also thought it would be nice to have a visual way to represent vulnerability and resistance. Now, I didn’t take it to the level of vulnerability/resistance to various TYPES of damage, but it’s rare to have to worry too much about that in practice. I decided that a black square with a white number in it would represent vulnerability while a white square with a black number in it would represent resistance.

Finally, I’ve long had a state for ongoing damage, but I thought it would also be useful to have a NUMBER associated with it (ongoing 5, ongoing 10, etc.). So, I created some green triangles with black numbers to represent ongoing damage.

Given all of these new states, I had to create macros to handle them; not too hard since I could base them on work I’d already done for the attack and defense modifier macros. I also thought it would be a nice touch to have a reminder pop up in the “Take damage” macro if a character had resistance or vulnerability:

[h: VulnerableReminder=if(VulnerableState==0, "", add(" (note Vulnerable ", VulnerableState,")"))]
[h: ResistReminder=if(ResistState==0, "", add(" (note Resist ", ResistState, ")"))]
[h: DamageString=add("Amount of damage taken", VulnerableReminder, ResistReminder)]
[h: x=input("Dmg|0|"+DamageString)]
[h: abort(x)]

If the character is both Vulnerable 5 and Resist 5, the message will look like this:

Anyway, all of these states are included in my campaign framework. If you’d like a ZIP file with the images for all of the states that I use, plus some additional states that come with the big torrent, you can download that ZIP file here.

What’s missing? What additional states should I include that aren’t already here?

-Michael the OnlineDM (OnlineDM1 on Twitter)