Money & Equipment Cards

To allay some of the accounting (and to help reduce the problem of occasional "mistaken" accounting on player character sheets without me having to keep track of everything), I've decided to make money into a prop in-game. I've ordered a few sets of Monopoly money off eBay, and players will physically have their characterr' money. When they buy something, they'll actually hand it to me. When they get paid or find loot, I'll actually hand it to them. The rule will be "if you don't have it, you don't have it".

So far, so good. Easy to introduce, simple to use, and the prop is easy to obtain.

However, I also want to do the same with equipment, gear, treasure, etc. A card for each item. If one player lends his spare shiny magical longsword to another, he physically hands him that card. If they climb down a well shaft with a rope and leave the rope hanging there, they hand me the rope card.

This is more difficult to do, though, because there are (to my knowledge) no readily available card sets for this sort of thing. I figured there's no point have individual cards for every combination of magical property an item might have, but to have a base template card for the item type with room for options - e.g. a Longsword card, where it is easy to note on it that it is silver, +2 and flaming.

So, this begs some questions:

1) Is anyone aware of any such prepared cards that I can print out? I don't really want to have to make the damn things given the massive variety of equipment available, although I will if I have to.

2) Assuming I have to make them - what bases should I cover? All the basic gear and weapons in the PHB. All the magical items in the DMG. Some blanks for assorted non-standard stuff. Anything obvious I'm missing (assuming I don't want to go through every splat book and find everything there, too)?

3) Any thoughts on a good layout for the cards? I was thinking a checkbox for masterwork, a box to enter the magical bonus (if any); presumably the bonus type should be indicated too in some way. Some notes on the item. The value of the item.

4) Is this task gonna be too big?

I would just make them as they are needed. Make them with the equipment the characters actually have (and can find, if you prepare treasure ahead of time, which would work well here) and enough blanks to cover any in-game purchases.

Bye
Thanee

I believe the Paizo store had equipment cards on hand at one point. At any rate I remember seeing them for sale and thinking to myself "Damn, I wish I had the money for that." Anyway, a brief search there didn't turn up anything, but I didn't look too closely. Let me know if you find them. http://paizo.com/store

I like the idea of the money prop though. Good call.

Here they are :

http://paizo.com/store/paizo/gameMastery/itemPacks

Lizard Lips said:

Here they are :

http://paizo.com/store/paizo/gameMastery/itemPacks

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They're pretty, but don't appear nearly comprehensive enough.

I've whipped up a one-page draft. Not happy with it, but it's a start.

I purchased some pdf cards (Artefacts of the Arcane) from RpgNow a while back. They are from a guy/manufacturer called 'V Shane'.

Here's a link to one of the demo's they have up:

http://www.wacomknight.com/Remote_Art/APE_1_demo.pdf

The two sets I have got have a nice mix of mundane and magical-looking stuff on there, but are mostly just picture cards (but stuff like the quiver which comes with an arrow 'check-off' sheet can be pretty useful).

Might not be what you are looking for (your generic cards with room for notes may prove more useful)... but these are the only other alternative to the paizo ones that I am aware of right now.

Buy a couple of packs of index cards, hand some to each player and tell them to write down each piece of gear on it. Bribe them with little bit of XP if nessacarry. Do not be surprised if they laugh at you. I have tried this. It lasted one game. This coming from a group of people who played a ton of RPGA in the day, the game with all the "certs".

Morrus said:

When they buy something, they'll actually hand it to me. When they get paid or find loot, I'll actually hand it to them. The rule will be "if you don't have it, you don't have it".

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That's a really cool idea. I assume this is for a modern game? I wonder if there are plastic coins out there that could be used for D&D?

Morrus said:

Assuming I have to make them - what bases should I cover? All the basic gear and weapons in the PHB. All the magical items in the DMG. Some blanks for assorted non-standard stuff. Anything obvious I'm missing (assuming I don't want to go through every splat book and find everything there, too)?

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I would use picture cards that are already available and just write in the details. I would have just one sword card and just write on the type of sword and its abilities for instance. Anything more would just be too much. Also, for generic equipment, I would just have a single card and just write in what the item is. Anything else is just going to be a ton of work.

I think the best method of creating a set of cards for equipment would be to use business card paper (for producing your own business cards), then use some sort of stock collection of art which are available quite cheaply at places like office max. This will get you the bulk of the equipment pictures you might need. To fill in the gaps, you may need to get a little skill with various art programs and a little scanning & copy/paste work.

I think this idea will be really great with stats on the card for the items (weapons, magical items, skill adjusting masterwork items, etc.).

To make this even more prominent in your game, have your players either hold their weapon/shield (or other obvious items like scrolls, wands, etc). This would really enforce handedness rules and the dropping, changing weapons, spell casting while holding other items. All in all, seems like a cool idea, but a lot of prep work.

Morrus said:

4) Is this task gonna be too big?

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I tried this in one of my games a while back. I created the cards myself, using business card templates and the card stock that will break apart when you fold it. I just did it for masterwork or magic items. I wouldn't do it for equipment - looking at some of my more complete character sheets for a wizard in one game, I have 34 items listed for equipment - and that's not breaking out the spell components seperately, or including magic items.

The challenge that I ran into is that instead of having to make sure the stuff was kept track of on someone's character sheet, we had to make sure the players kept track of physical little pieces of cards. Its fairly easy to keep track of you character sheet, and to get the DM a copy so that if you misplace it, you're not out of luck for the session. But with the cards now everyone needs to have some method of storing them, and making sure they don't get misplaced between sessions. Ultimately, I decided that just wasn't going to work out, and I abandoned the project.

If you can solve that problem, or your players are the type that will respond to it, and keep diligent track of such things, it could be really neat.

Example of my cards: