Combat can be an overwhelming experience when I’m running a game. It’s hard to remember all the bad guys and what they can do from fight to fight, and remembering the player characters as well can make my combats slow and halting instead of flowing at a reasonable pace.
A trick that works for me in turn based combat systems (4th Edition D&D) is using index cards to keep important enemy and player character information on and putting them in order of initiative. Since usually run modules, I don’t bother to write the bad guys out. Just print an extra copy of the enemy page, cut out the description and tape it to the card. Mark the damage right on the index card, and dramatically toss out the card when the evil doers inevitably die. This saves a lot of time flipping through pages to figure out dice pools and special abilities, and has the added bonus of not writing down a changing initiative order.
Large Polyhedron Collider 