Making your own power cards

Nail · Aug 4, 2008

Grandpa:

For rituals, I think only one "icon circle" is needed, and really only for an icon that means "ritual".

I bow to your superior icon-making skills.

Second: For my own use I've been putting a bit more space between the lines of text. Like this Fomat => Line Spacing => _1.0_ line, 0.5 before paragraph. (see attached picture) Is there some reason I've missed for not spacing the lines out a bit more? They seem kinda crushed to these old eyes of mine.

Third: I indent the second line of each paragraph, after the bold text. I notice your tutorial says to indent, but your cards aren't indented. Am I missing something?

Lastly: I'd really like to print these cards right next to each other on a page, without *any* white space in between. I use doPDF to convert PPT to pdf as you say, but I can't get the spacing right when I print the pdf. Tips?

Foxman · Aug 4, 2008

Grandpa:

The magic wand is listed as level 11+ it should be 1+

Love the cards, we use them in our game!

Ghaerdon Fain · Aug 4, 2008

DonAdam said:
Which program are you using to open them?

When I use Preview (I'm on Mac, obviously) to open Grandpa's cards they're giberish, but they work fine in Acrobat. Likewise for the ones I made.

Mac :-(

Ghaerdon Fain · Aug 4, 2008

I need a Card Set that has the Sword Mage cards from the RPGA Living Forgotten Realms quick peek.

I don't have access to MSE yet as I have not installed Vista on my Mac (yup lazy and hate calling MS for activation arrrrrggggg). Last time I think I had issues with MSE in Parallels.

So a set in PDF would be awesome. ATM I'm using Ander00's set, but have been really impressed with everyone's contibutions.

Suggestions?

grickherder · Aug 5, 2008

Grandpa said:
Thanks for sticking up for the card editing and letting me know that someone is using the magic item cards. Woot!

I've been using the PPT files and the magic item cards (pretty much all the cards actually). Would also like to report that the PPT files work under OpenOffice.org running on Linux. The only thing that doesn't quite display right is that my Linux machine doesn't have whatever font you used and I have to choose a new one that fits right. But that is entirely on my end.

Fedifensor · Aug 5, 2008

Ander, will your cards be updated to include the Swordmage powers in the Living Forgotten Realms preview?

tintagel · Aug 5, 2008

My new template for items is done. It looks similar to my Power Cards, but allows for a picture to be put into the card. Feedback is always welcome.

Grandpa · Aug 5, 2008

Bayuer said:
That's nice icons Grandpa. I love them! I can't wait to see your rituals cards..

I'm glad you like them. I've attached a preview of the ritual card test I did of the worst (i.e., largest) ritual I could find, as a test to make sure the cards could hold every ritual. It's the only card I've abbreviated rules on, and I was very, very careful about what I abbreviated and how. One of the reasons for going through the effort of creating the cards was to be as "official" as I possibly could, with rules info you know are good (typos withstanding) right off of the card.

Nail said:
For rituals, I think only one "icon circle" is needed...
Second: Is there some reason I've missed for not spacing the lines out a bit more?
Third: I notice your tutorial says to indent, but your cards aren't indented.
Lastly: I'd really like to print these cards ... without *any* white space in between ... I can't get the spacing right when I print the pdf.

First: Indeed!

Second: I just went with the default PowerPoint spacing, and PowerPoint will automatically adjust the line spacing to try to fit the font size to the card. Sorry if it's hard on the eyes. It would be too hard to go back now.

Third: I didn't know how to standardize paragraph indenting when I started the project, so I was selective about when I did it by hand. If I ever decide to be completely insane, I might tackle getting all of it adjusted and standardized throughout the set, but at the moment, we're talking a hella-lotta cards that need to be reviewed and tweaked after the formatting (certainly a disadvantage of doing it in PowerPoint).

Lastly: As far as I know, this is just a limitation of printing from PDF. Each card is edge-to-edge black, and I don't know of a way to force Acrobat Reader to print multiple pages next to each other like that. The question is out of my league, unfortunately.

Foxman said:
The magic wand is listed as level 11+ it should be 1+

Love the cards, we use them in our game!

Got it. Thanks for the fix and the usage!

grickherder said:
I've been using the PPT files and the magic item cards (pretty much all the cards actually). Would also like to report that the PPT files work under OpenOffice.org running on Linux. The only thing that doesn't quite display right is that my Linux machine doesn't have whatever font you used and I have to choose a new one that fits right. But that is entirely on my end.

Cool, I haven't used OpenOffice, so that's good to hear. The font is Calibri, and according to Wikipedia, you can download it with PowerPoint Viewer 2007 here.

Grandpa · Aug 5, 2008

tintagel said:
My new template for items is done. It looks similar to my Power Cards, but allows for a picture to be put into the card. Feedback is always welcome.

So pretty!

eloquentaction · Aug 5, 2008

Ghaerdon Fain said:
I need a Card Set that has the Sword Mage cards from the RPGA Living Forgotten Realms quick peek.

I don't have access to MSE yet as I have not installed Vista on my Mac (yup lazy and hate calling MS for activation arrrrrggggg). Last time I think I had issues with MSE in Parallels.

So a set in PDF would be awesome. ATM I'm using Ander00's set, but have been really impressed with everyone's contibutions.

Suggestions?

Fedifensor said:
Ander, will your cards be updated to include the Swordmage powers in the Living Forgotten Realms preview?

For both of you guys, my new set (Version 3), has all of the SwordMage cards produced in the Forgotten Realms preview.

Currently, version 3 has two different look and feels.

Or, if you can wait a bit -

Version 4 of my set will have seven different styles including Dzokvik's new style.

Version 5 will include an eighth style specifically for Monsters (which will be included) and it will be adding about half a dozen ENWorld races and classes, Rituals, and any ENWorld monsters I can find that look decent.

Lastly, Version 6 will have my Items, Magic Items and Artifacts. Some of the styling I will rip off from Tintagel to allow pictures to be added to them (although I'm hopefully going to stay away from WOW pictures *COUGH*).

Version 4 should be rolling out the door sometime this week.

BTW - Since Version 4 will be the next big step in Power Cards, I'll try and make a set of PDF's for each set (although I'm going to have to automate it somehow - no way in hell I'm making PDF's for 7 sets by hand).

-- Hirahito