Making your own power cards

VBMEW-01 · Mar 28, 2008

mvincent said:
I don't know if this has been mentioned yet - from Dave Noonans blog about "The Colors of 4e":
"One of the things you'll see when you get a real copy of the Player's Handbook is that color conveys meaning in the graphic design. Specifically, at-will powers get green headers, encounter powers get red, and dailies get black."

This is why I did my encounters in red and my dailies with a black border. I'm not doing cards for at-will powers, the players have to do something!

Knight Otu · Mar 28, 2008

mvincent said:
I don't know if this has been mentioned yet - from Dave Noonans blog about "The Colors of 4e":
"One of the things you'll see when you get a real copy of the Player's Handbook is that color conveys meaning in the graphic design. Specifically, at-will powers get green headers, encounter powers get red, and dailies get black."

Yeah, I've seen it in the other thread and when I get the time, I'll update my templates to utilize that info. I believe that Lord Tirian has something in store, as well.

Zinovia · Mar 28, 2008

Impressive work everyone. I'm just getting way too much of a Magic Card feel since some of these are produced using a template for Magic.

I'd prefer D&D power cards to be landscape format for more text, and less association with MtG. I don't see artwork on the front of the cards to be at all important. On the other hand, each power source, or class could have their own artwork on the back of the card. Martial could show some weapons (classic sword and axe in saltire kind of thing), arcane could be glowy and magical, with divine I envision a person nearly washed out by the golden radiant energy of the gods. Primal could be nature themed. Or something of the sort. No need to have matching backs, as these *aren't* Magic cards.

Certainly I could make up my own, but if WotC is reading this thread with the idea of making an official power cards product, or a free web PDF, then please consider landscape, just for the sake of differentiating. I think most of the powers will have text descriptions that will fit well on a landscape type card.

mikekannard · Mar 28, 2008

My Ideas

Here is something I through together on an graphics program. The background is a dark red, which is what I chose for the wizard card color, may change that to blue. This has At-Will in green because it can be used the most, Per Encounter would be Yellow, and Per Day would be Red. The type of action to the left is in Red, because it take the most amount of time. Move Action would be Yellow and Minor would be green. To the far right is the level of the power, and the rest is pretty self explanatory.
Let me know what you guys think.

mvincent · Mar 28, 2008

Other ideas.
- Player's "deck" can also contain specific gear items (like treasure cards for paizo).

Make cards for:
-Action points (i.e. use instead of other action point tokens, plus they have rules on them)
-Conditions (like Dying, for the DM to hand out)
-Character sheet: to save room and allow the player to deal with less types of items. Might consist of 2 or 3 cards (1-stats/combat values, 2-skills/gear, 3-picture/fluff text)

Nytmare · Mar 29, 2008

Shadewyn, I suggest printing the cards out on normal paper and sticking them into sleeves with a scrap card as the backing (or printing out a front and a back and having the scrap card as the middle layer). Printing onto and cutting card stock, even with a paper cutter, gets to be a pain, and the cards don't have the lifespan that a sleeved card will have. Gluing them would be even more of a headache.

I would also like to suggest making them look even more like Magic cards, putting more anime styled (maybe even Exalted!) art on them, and then writing a computer program with a multi-person online inferface to keep track of who is using what cards on who, just to cheese everyone off.

EDIT: On a more serious note I would also suggest adding recognizable patterns to the colored backgrounds. I end up having to redesign more stuff cause Pittsburgh is overrun by colorblind gamers.

vagabundo · Mar 29, 2008

Ive gotten some 6x4 cards to try printing them on. Two per card.

The 3x2 cards were too small.

WhatGravitas · Mar 29, 2008

Knight Otu said:
Yeah, I've seen it in the other thread and when I get the time, I'll update my templates to utilize that info. I believe that Lord Tirian has something in store, as well.

Sort of. I'm trying to do something neat with the DDM design for monster stats, but I'm wrestling with the MSE program itself - I have to figure out how to get text aligned to a curve - but a side product will be the power cards in DDM-inspired design.

I've attached a preview of the design I intend to use for the power cards, but I'm still looking for ways how to get more information into the header, without making it ugly.

Zinovia said:
I'd prefer D&D power cards to be landscape format for more text, and less association with MtG.

I prefer landscape as well, and I've really tried - but the power write-ups are not very suited for that, because of the entries after the title - At-Will, Standard action, Target: X and so on. Listing them, without separating them with line breaks makes it much worse to read.

Cheers, LT.

Kirnon_Bhale · Mar 29, 2008

Lord Tirian said:
Sort of. I'm trying to do something neat with the DDM design for monster stats, but I'm wrestling with the MSE program itself - I have to figure out how to get text aligned to a curve - but a side product will be the power cards in DDM-inspired design.

I've attached a preview of the design I intend to use for the power cards, but I'm still looking for ways how to get more information into the header, without making it ugly.

I prefer landscape as well, and I've really tried - but the power write-ups are not very suited for that, because of the entries after the title - At-Will, Standard action, Target: X and so on. Listing them, without separating them with line breaks makes it much worse to read.

Cheers, LT.

That looks really nice. How do I use it though? I am new at card making and don't know how to add this to the list of cards available.