Making your own power cards

eloquentaction · Oct 13, 2008

soulkeeper said:
A favor to ask to all the card developers, esp Ander00 and Hirahito.

I love the cards, and the colors and designs are great, but I'm a black and white printer person, as I assume many folks are. Can folks include a basic, non-fancy, pretty much black and white version in the future?

I didn't see a version like this, and I'll be honest, I don't really know how to use the MSE very well, so if you already have, and I am missing it, I'll be happy for a little re-education.

Thanks!

No promises. But I think I have what you need in the next version of my set.

I have an option called 'Use alternate backgrounds' which switches Red to 'Blood' and Blue to 'Water' and green to 'Grass' (and so forth). The important part of that being; when you print these in black and white, it should still be easy to distinguish blood from grass.

I have something similar to that now if you look at the 'FLASHY' version of my current (4.3) set.

Take a look at that and see if it solves your B&W problem.

-- Hirahito

tecnowraith · Oct 13, 2008

For printing with MSE or in PDF, is there any way to use sheets from Avery products instead using standard card stock sheets?

tristan_tewksbury · Oct 14, 2008

eloquentaction said:
Dragon #368? I don't think so. I can see you guys (meaning the users of my cards) are going to force me to buy the Dragon and Dungeon subscriptions. You are, don't lie about it. I can hear you guys already...

Not true. If you actually release the code for the card generator, then some of us might just generate a set of cards from a particular Dragon and make them available. That way other folks can use them, or they could be included for download as well.

I am not swearing it will happen, but it is much more likely to happen

tristan_tewksbury · Oct 14, 2008

eloquentaction said:
Printing cards to PDF is a royal pain in the arse...

Amen to that! :angel:

I do the same thing you do -- export the images and then import those images into a word processor to print them out. That way I get the ones I want.

eloquentaction said:
Needless to say, over 3000 cards does not make a small PDF file.

Hey, I told you a while ago to break that beast into smaller pieces and have them available as separate downloads. :devil:

That way if someone is playing a dwarven cleric, they can download the cleric cards, the race cards, and the action cards and be ready to go.

If you discover a problem with the keys for the barbarian, you just have to generate a new set of barbarian cards, and those who are playing the barbarian just have to download those cards to get the update, without having to download all the Adv. Vault cards, Dragon cards, etc. along with it.

As more splat books are released and more articles are printed, this issue is only going to get worse. I know you currently generate a monolithic file, but it would not take that much to rewrite the generator to create mutliple files from the data based on keywords or some other field (such as the source field for instance)

Grandpa · Oct 14, 2008

Drabix said:
Here are the Genasi racial powers using Grandpa's template.

Fabulous! Seriously! I've added them to the main card set post.

eloquentaction · Oct 14, 2008

tecnowraith said:
For printing with MSE or in PDF, is there any way to use sheets from Avery products instead using standard card stock sheets?

I believe you can export the card as an image.

Then open up MS Word (or Open Office) and load in the proper Avery template (you can download them from their web site).

Then paste the images into the template for printing.

-- Hirahito

eloquentaction · Oct 14, 2008

tristan_tewksbury said:
Not true. If you actually release the code for the card generator, then some of us might just generate a set of cards from a particular Dragon and make them available. That way other folks can use them, or they could be included for download as well.

I am not swearing it will happen, but it is much more likely to happen

I'm scheduled to release the C# proggy with the 4.4 release. I've been hesitating to do so because it's really not intuitive at all to use and I don't want to have to answer 1000 questions on how to get it to work.

I'll probably slap a small document together explaining how to operate it with a huge 'Use at your own gwave pewil!'

-- Hirahito

eloquentaction · Oct 14, 2008

tristan_tewksbury said:
Amen to that! I do the same thing you do -- export the images and then import those images into a word processor to print them out. That way I get the ones I want.

Hey, I told you a while ago to break that beast into smaller pieces and have them available as separate downloads.

That way if someone is playing a dwarven cleric, they can download the cleric cards, the race cards, and the action cards and be ready to go.

If you discover a problem with the keys for the barbarian, you just have to generate a new set of barbarian cards, and those who are playing the barbarian just have to download those cards to get the update, without having to download all the Adv. Vault cards, Dragon cards, etc. along with it.

As more splat books are released and more articles are printed, this issue is only going to get worse. I know you currently generate a monolithic file, but it would not take that much to rewrite the generator to create mutliple files from the data based on keywords or some other field (such as the source field for instance)

The current program DOES split it up by category. I tried doing that for the 4.0 release and found it to be a giant, knobby, puss-filled pain in the ass. So I'm just releasing the MSE-SET separated from the template files and updating each separately.

Compromise.

It's how the world works.

-- Hirahito

Fedifensor · Oct 15, 2008

eloquentaction said:
The current program DOES split it up by category. I tried doing that for the 4.0 release and found it to be a giant, knobby, puss-filled pain in the ass. So I'm just releasing the MSE-SET separated from the template files and updating each separately.

Even split up by category, that is a BIG list. Have you thought about separating powers and items into separate sets?

eloquentaction · Oct 15, 2008

Fedifensor said:
Even split up by category, that is a BIG list. Have you thought about separating powers and items into separate sets?

As I mentioned previously, my proggy currently splits it via: Information, Powers, Optionals, Items... and something else (which I forget).

I can start doing it this way again - it's just so much easier (for me) to do it as one monolithic MSE-SET.

-- Hirahito