Making your own power cards

quindia · Apr 30, 2008

thc1967 said:
Would you be willing to produce a card background using royal blue or deep purple? The blank JPG or PNG format you posted of all 3 cards earlier would be the best format for me for this since I don't have access to CorelDraw.

If you'd be willing to do that, (and with your permission) I'll do the community a service and package up a PhotoShop native file as a template that might help people produce their own cards based on your awesome templates. When I have it ready, I'll post it here.

Thanks!

I'll make a blue card for you later this evening (my weekly D&D session is about to start).

BTW, anyone feel free to take the cards and edit them anyway they wish, including working them up into a different format. That's why I dropped them in even though I announced I wasn't going to produce a full set. I was happy with the design and I thought I'd share it.

randolph · Apr 30, 2008

baberg said:
I couldn't get the *-to-dot conversion to work in the Power Descriptors textbox, but at least this way we can get some auto-formatting. I've attached the file here if anybody else wants it, or if you want to incorporate it into your work later.

Okay, I got it working, albeit in kind of a kludgey way, and attached the updated version here.

[SBLOCK=In case you want the ugly details...]The script wasn't working because:
1) The fields in question did not call the text_filter script.
2) Even if they had, they would have replaced an asterisk with a dot, but the font used for the descriptor field does not have a dot character!

I got it to work by:
1) Adding script calls to most of the fields, as appropriate, and defining the D&D symbol font as the symbol font to use for those fields.
2) Creating another png-symbol character for the D&D symbol font directory, with alpha channels, etc...
3) Changing the replacement script ask for a symbol instead of a character.
4) Then I realized that, as a static image, it wouldn't share color changes with the font, so I had to create a white version of the symbol, and have a separate script for the fields that are affected by card background changes.[/SBLOCK]

Edit: Version update, all necessary files are now in this post.

rogueboy · Apr 30, 2008

Trolls said:
Tutorial is done and attached.

Happy power card making!

Trolls: I was trying to take a try at making some cards, following your tutorial, and in step 2 (Title), you say to use different font sizes for the first letter vs the rest of the title. Now, this may just be me, but when I try to change the font size for one letter, all of the text changes size. Am I missing something, or do you simply have to make the first letter a separate text block from the rest of the title? Oh, and the updated tutorial won't open for me (something about a corrupted file or something).

Thank you all for the templates and cards, they all look great! I've been playing around with all of them as they're posted.

randolph · Apr 30, 2008

quindia said:
BTW, anyone feel free to take the cards and edit them anyway they wish, including working them up into a different format. That's why I dropped them in even though I announced I wasn't going to produce a full set. I was happy with the design and I thought I'd share it.

Here's the MSE template of your layout; the star-to-dot feature is also included.

I can't open Corel files, so I had to use the jpegs you posted earlier, but if you (or anyone) can put up pngs or similar, I can work the higher-quality backgrounds back in. Also, it's currently missing a 4th and 5th type of cardframe (white and blue in my template), so if you feel like making those, I can include them too.

NOTE: The attached file is just the Quindia-style MSE template to save space. You will need my MSE game file for D&D to use it with a clean MSE install.

Edit: Version update, all necessary files are now in this post.

Khaalis · Apr 30, 2008

randolph said:
Yes:
1) Open the game file in the D&D.mse-game subdirectory with a text editor.
2) Find the line mana_sort := sort_rule(order:"WUBRG")
3) Add M (and any other character you want the filter to recognize) to the WUBRG string, within the quotes. This filter is case sensitive.
4) Save the game file, start MSE.

I'll also post the complete DDXP pregen powers set file when I'm finished, possibly tonight.

D@mit. I knew I was missing something relatively simple. Thanks for that.

Trolls · Apr 30, 2008

rogueboy said:
Trolls: I was trying to take a try at making some cards, following your tutorial, and in step 2 (Title), you say to use different font sizes for the first letter vs the rest of the title. Now, this may just be me, but when I try to change the font size for one letter, all of the text changes size. Am I missing something, or do you simply have to make the first letter a separate text block from the rest of the title? Oh, and the updated tutorial won't open for me (something about a corrupted file or something).

Thank you all for the templates and cards, they all look great! I've been playing around with all of them as they're posted.

Yes, you'll have to type the first letters separately to the rest. The same goes when it comes to writing the main power description, since you can't bold individual words, only the whole text block. It's a little annoying, yes, but once you get used to it it won't slow you down too much.

I'll reupload the tutorial, try this:

http://www.dragon-above.com/files/powercards_tutorial_v1.zip

quindia · Apr 30, 2008

Blue Card...

thc1967 · Apr 30, 2008

Thank you for the blue card!

The PhotoShop PSD file is around 2MB so I can't upload it here. Instead, I'll host it as a download on my own site for one week only (unfortunately I don't have unlimited bandwidth). If someone else cares to enhance this, please do the community the favor of sharing it!

Download Link

Happy crafting!