Making your own power cards

CLAVDIVS · Jun 19, 2008

I apologize if this has already been asked and answered, but I'm reading this on my breaktime at work and, well, long thread is loooonng.

Regarding Ander00's cards and MSE, the encounter and daily banner colors are hard to tell apart at a glance when printed in greyscale. (At-will and item might have a similar issue, but I haven't checked and the card formats are different enough anyway). Is there a way to change the style definitions (or whatever) to make for greater contrast? Or rather, I assume there is, but can anyone tell me how? I couldn't find it in the program itself, and the documentation on the MSE site is (to be diplomatic) lacking.

What we're doing with the cards, BTW, is exporting images from MSE, pasting them into an OpenOffice template, and printing them to Avery "name badge" cardstock. It's 2.25 by 3.5 inches, the closest we could find to standard game card size (2.5 by 3.5), and saves us the hassle of manually cutting them out.

I still wish someone made actual 2.5 by 3.5 perforated cardstock; there's gotta be a market for it.

mvincent · Jun 19, 2008

Rhianni32 said:
I think wotc would have issues about this.

I had similar thoughts. Still, I'd love to see more services like this.

Maybe you could present it as (say) $5 for time/materials, and $5 for shipping/handling. The card designs themselves are freely available for anyone that wishes to do it themselves (and you could even provide links to them)... so you could merely be providing some paypal links for common, pre-estimated requests.

This could also allow you to print out different types of cards for people (maybe even taking special requests).

Relbanan · Jun 20, 2008

Ander00 said:
I'm gonna add those once I have some time on my hands. I am really stressed out at the moment though and will be for the rest of the week.

For the people interested in cards for Second Wind and such, I guess I can then add those as well, even though I wouldn't use them myself.I'm not following. If you came here late and just grab the latest set, what is there to compare against? I can see where specific information about fixes would be nice though. I'll keep that in mind for future updates.

cheers

Thank you THANK YOU for the cards, they're great. I'm back into D&D as of Father's Day, haven't played in almost 20 years.

I'm teaching my kids and these cards are great. I was actually about to post a question to you about cards for Feats and things like Second Wind - ie. the Dwarven Fighter I have rolled up has the Power Attack feat and it'd be great to have a card with that info as an example.

beverson · Jun 20, 2008

CLAVDIVS said:
I still wish someone made actual 2.5 by 3.5 perforated cardstock; there's gotta be a market for it.

Here you go: http://plaincards.com/Playing.html

Zaukrie · Jun 20, 2008

Hijack for MSE question:

Great stuff everyone.

I installed MSE and one of the data sets. I've tried to extract other data sets into the data directory, but I don't see any other choices other than the one with like 5-6 templates (ending with the great DDM template). Is there a way to get other templates/game files to show?

Bill Castello · Jun 20, 2008

Fantastic work

Just wanted to thank everyone for all the creativity. I am so motivated right now!!!

Relbanan · Jun 20, 2008

Is there a post that explains the various symbols used in Ander00's set? ie. the left side is type of action (fist is standard?) and right is range?

edit - nevermind, found what I was looking for - Magic Set Editor 2\data\D&D-Ander-symbol.mse-symbol-font, all in there.

CLAVDIVS · Jun 20, 2008

beverson said:
Here you go: http://plaincards.com/Playing.html

Well I'll be. Good to know.

For the time being, tho, I think the name badges will do the job. They're only a quarter inch narrower, and easier/cheaper to replace. We'll probably be printing cards as needed for each character, even when duplicating ones already used by someone else.

Also, I tried exporting images in "plain" style, and I think they look better that way in greyscale. Encounter and daily powers are easier to distinguish, and it just looks cleaner without the shadow effects. The regular style looks great... in full color. In greyscale, OTOH, I think the cleaner look is better. Thanks for including it.

On the topic of the symbols, I probably would've used one for action type and one for cooldown, but that's just me.
EDIT: Eventually I figured out that the upper-right symbols are based on the ones used for powers in the monster stat blocks. So that makes more sense now.

CLAVDIVS · Jun 21, 2008

CLAVDIVS said:
Also, I tried exporting images in "plain" style, and I think they look better that way in greyscale.

I was justy checking out the images, and some of them were still in "default" style with the shading. I checked them out in MSE, and they still display the shading even when set to "plain" style. Acid arrow is the first one I notice when looking at the thumbnails, but there's others. When I go into the style page on another card, uncheck "options specific to this card" and switch the look to plain, it changes most but not all of the cards to match. What gives?

jonathan.g.wilson · Jun 21, 2008

Trolls said:
Ok, try these on for size. We've got an experiment with a long power (Bigby's, as requested), and then versions with the new action symbols in the bubble. You can imagine the top ones without the colour in the bubble, if you wish.
Note that I've removed the power source notch from the bottom ones, and left the action in. I've done that to clarify action type, and because space is low and power source doesn't actually matter.

So, a new round of opinions!

Troll and all,
I think these are totally awesome (yes I'm from the '80's.). But I was wondering if you had a magic card set editor template file or can easily make on for those of use like me that are not that graphically design talented.
Because I'm inspired to work on sets for all my characters and my player's characters as a reward for playing.

Jonathan Wilson

Update: Well about 20 pages later I found the link to download the templates and I'm working with them now. A few errors in Dependecies with the 0.3.6 verson. I do see one issue with some of the really long named powers not shrinking to fit the text field (i.e. Channel Divinity: Divine Meddle)