Our group has a blend die-hard and casual players (i.e contenders and pretenders ) Lately we've had a rash of computational errors that occur in the heat of battle, such as firing weapons more often than allowed, and not paying for speed changes, etc. They're just honest mistakes on the part of the less-seasoned players, but the old pros don't always catch them in time. Don't get me wrong-- I'm a veteran player but I make my share of mistakes because I'm, well...stupid
I'm looking for suggestions that will help everyone tactfully hold each other accountable. We've talked about going back to using energy tokens, creating "weapon used" tokens-- stuff like that. Anyone have any ideas?
In my opinion, the best thing you can do is use poker chips for energy with one person as the banker. As soon as the power is used it goes to the bank and you always know how much everyone has left. I hadn't tried it until I played with Jim's group and it is the best way to do it. Use coins or different size poker chips for the fractional accounting and everything will move along smoothly.
Be diligent with the weapons used tracks on the SSD as well, that is what it's there for.
If your going to go as far as appoint a banker, then set up a program in
Excel or something like that (excel will do the math for you).
Could do some interesting things to show weapons fired, HETs etc.
Sure there are Excel Experts in the SFU community.
I get by fairly well with it, but there is plenty about it I don't know.
I can't imagine the mess we'd have if we used tokens, it might work for a 1 or 2 ships each, but by the time you have 7 or so I expect it woud break down badly. The cards get picked up to much to just keep the tokens on the card (and some ships are multi ships per card)
I always just ask the other players to drop their energy everytime they do something. Plus I'm often trying to keep track of energy for tactical reasons as well, so am more likely to spot missed stuff.
For myself, I find cloak the worst. I think it is a bad mechanic to have a prepayment period and a per impulse period. Because you are not actually actively doing anything in the per impulse period it is easier to miss it.
My tragic flaw is when I mark off my last unit of power but I forget I don't have a full point to spend because of fractional points My group cuts me slack because I usually lose anyway
I understand the frustration about forgetful players. I sponsored a club at the high school where I teach and learned quickly that I would not be able to play. I was the rules arbiter and impulse/sub-pulse caller and had to remind players several times during every turn to move their paperclips down the sides of their ship cards. We used dry erase markers to put dots on weapons fired (and, yes, I had to remind them to do that, too). Dry erase marks will rub off if the cards are not handled carefully.
Mike
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Sandpaper gets the job done, but makes for a lot of friction.
The poker chips are placed near the ship cards along with baseline speed cards.
We don't appoint a banker, we just draw the poker chips from a common pool, or from a pool for each player. We use the high quality weighted plastic chips, not the cheap light plastic ones.
We also use a set of poker chips to track turn, impulse and sub pulse. Blue for turn, red for impulse and white for subpulse. The player running the sequence of play uses these.
We rarely play with more than four ships each.
Finally we have small white boards as scratchpads for adding up fire and damage when resolving combat.
We have found all of this helps with the speed and accuracy of our play increasing the fun factor for us.
I would note I was originally resistant to this approach until its benefits became apparent with more play.
) Lately we've had a rash of computational errors that occur in the heat of battle, such as firing weapons more often than allowed, and not paying for speed changes, etc. They're just honest mistakes on the part of the less-seasoned players, but the old pros don't always catch them in time. Don't get me wrong-- I'm a veteran player but I make my share of mistakes because I'm, well...stupid 
