Well, I just got home from my game. I've been DMing for years now, and after some time you naturally get this feeling of the things that are going to work with your group, and the things that aren't. I was expecting this card system to be a success. What I never expected was for it to be the mind-boggling overwhelming success that it was!
The players loved the cards. They never asked to be allowed to shuffle and draw the cards, they just assumed so and did this in my place during combat. I never once had to say "Your turn Thalon", they just celebrated when their card showed up and went straight to the description of the attack. They explicitly commented on the thrill of not knowing beforehand who was going to attack next, and the tension that build up until their card was drawn (again, during some of the draws, the group as a whole indeed celebrated when their card showed up). And they literally didn't allow me to take the cards back home when the game ended.
Technically speaking, there were two things that impressed me about the system (besides my players excitement):
1. When I used the normal dice system, I rolled initiative for groups of monsters instead of individually, in order to reduce the overhead. With this card system, I can basically just pack one card for each monster in the fight with zero overhead (no rolling, no order tracking). There was a continuous back and forth between sides really made the combat a lot more dynamic. I didn't expect this to happen beforehand.
2. The random combat order every round was great, and also with almost zero overhead (only the reshuffling). Combat became unexpected and surprising, and this naturally made everybody stay more alert than usual, making combat flow faster. Even more so when the very players were drawing cards and doing the reshuffling, and taking enemy cards out of the deck as combat went on. Which I loved because I had one less burden to manage.
To add fire to the discussion:
After trying the system firsthand, I can say that one of the things that really make it great is the speed and tension that it causes. During one combat, a player killed an enemy in the beginning of the round. When this enemy card showed up later in the round, the player tossed it across the table screaming "DEAD"!
This is something that wouldn't happen if the enemy card (or even the player's card) kept showing up multiple times. Each draw of the deck had value, no card was there uselessly. And in my humble opinion, I'd value this sensation much more than trying to be faithful to the rules by adding multiple cards. But, to each its own.
Fabio, thanks a lot for making my game much better!
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I printed a batch of 30 cards using the template I posted here. There were 5 PC heroes, 5 placeholder monsters, 5 faction information, and 15 NPCs/monsters for the Hoard of the Dragon Queen game. Some of them are below, together with some burned documents that the players found in the Dragon Hatchery.
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How do you get the corners so perfectly rounded?
.Another followup to this amazing initiative system!
In the game last night I decided to push it to its ultimate limits!
Disclaimer: During Episode 4 of the Hoard of the Dragon Queen, I decided to make some of the Road Events happen during the trip to Baldur's Gate in the River Chionthar, to better distribute some of them and make the river trip a little less "uneventful" as the adventure puts it. As such, you can see the cards for Arietta and Zelina below (Event: Roadside Hospitality)!
As everybody knows, no ship-based adventure is complete without a giant Kraken Fight, so the players faced a combat with a tuned down Giant Octopus. There were 14 cards in total, ALL of them performing interesting actions, with no need to track their order at all, and with this order changing every round:
- One card for each of the 4 PCs.
- One card for each of the 4 tentacles (melee, ranged and grapple attacks).
- One card for the Giant Octopus (it would shake the whole ship, DEX Save required).
- One card for the Ship itself (which meant that a cannon/harpoon was ready to be fired by a PC for major damage).
- One card for each of the 4 PC's sidekicks (which granted the PCs an extra action with some strings attached. For example: Arietta and Zelina were the Thiefling's sidekicks, and whey would be grappled by the tentacles when their card showed up, granting an extra attack for the Thiefling in order to save them. Also, the Ship's Captain Kelsia was the Dragonborn sidekick, and when her card showed up she would have done preparing a Pirate's Arquebus with powder, and would throw it to the Dragonborn granting him an extra Ranged Arquebus Attack, etc...)
The Giant Octopus completely lifted the ship from the water using 4 of its tentacles, and was attacking it with the other 4 tentacles, while it remained hidden below the ship, out of the line of fire (which the players quickly found a way around by swinging from ropes outside of the ship's deck)... the idea was to defeat/weaken the 4 attacking tentacles, so that the Giant Octopus would lower the ship back into the water, and then the players would be able to fight the creature itself.
There was so much dynamic back and forth between PCs, NPCs and monsters, that it would be IMPOSSIBLE to be properly done with the normal dice system. The whole combat flowed great, all the massive overhead I would have had in order to track this mess were used instead to give interesting options to the PCs and to do a lot of talking/shouting from the NPCs during the combat...
This combat was insanely crazy, and due to the sheer grandiose of it, it lasted for almost 2 hours with no slow down whatsoever, round after round, and a constant thrill throughout the whole event, alternating between all the participants of the battle. Everybody was literally EXHAUSTED after it from non-stop action, roleplaying and laughter, that we were forced to wrap up the game: The Thiefling was so into his sidekick girls after saving them and being congratulated with kisses during the combat, that he took them directly to the ship's bedrooms, only to discover that their lipstick was infused with a muscle-freezing poison and they were ready to cut him open in bed while he was still conscious. A cliffhanger scene for the next game.
The combat was played without miniatures, and just a hastily-drawn ship's deck sketch.
The session (which was 90% the combat) was really praised by the players after the game!
I say it again: this system is great and changed my game!
Thanks once more Fabio!
Some extra cards made for the last session (some weren't even used):
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Ok, so as far as DM prep time, I KNOW this takes time for you to think about and plan, same as making a battlemap. The template really saves times, and if you have access to a quick color laser printer, it's really a snap. Print and Cut and Gloss and you're done. If the time invested changes the game into something new and fantastic (and honestly I have hated the standard Initiative system for many years now) then it's worth it! And the more cards you queue up into your collection, you can really cover any situation, you don't need each Kraken tentacle per say. Badass as that is.
Indeed!
Right now I have 37 cards, 30 printed for the penultimate session and 7 more printed for this last session.
Since RPG and improvisation walk hand in hand, I like to have both generic cards to cover a lot of situations, and also specific cards to add flavor to the adventure and inspire my players. And more, some of the cards (like the informative faction cards) will probably never be part of a battle.
I am planning on printing one card sheet per session (up to 8 cards), and as you said: as you collect them, they can cover a lot of ground, and this work diminishes over time! In this battle, each tentacle was represented by a generic Monster Card (printed in 4 different colors), and the Giant Octopus itself had an specific card (not to scale, but nobody cared!).
Right now, the majority of the time is spent finding and adjusting good images to make a pack of cards. The process of physically creating the cards (printing, glueing, varnishing and cutting) is streamlined and takes less than 1 hour. I add "glueing" because I use two kinds of paper glued together; later I'll try to post a tutorial on how I do it!
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