Essentials Power Cards

[Narl]

The new Essentials books have me planning on running 4e for the first time. A lot of the new ideas make it less daunting to get into the game (limited ruleset, in-print dungeon tiles, counters, no years worth of errata to digest) but I do have one area of concern -- power cards.

Can you play 4e without the cards? Or will that result in constant page flipping in the new books looking up powers?

I run a Mac and can't run Character Builder (I'd rather not go the Boot Camp/VMware route). Is there any other way to get power cards I can print out? I see in the Compendium I can print out a power summary but it is one per page. Any way to get multiple powers on a page and print that.

Should I assume all the Essentials powers will be added to the Character Builder and Compendium at some point?

Thanks in advance for any advice on this. It seems to be the one area that Essentials doesn't deal with out of the box.

Narl

 

[mneme]

Over time, I've found that the power cards hurt rather than help, and that it's better to just use a checklist of the power you have.

Compendium/Character Builder will defininitely get updates from Essentials--it's just more 4e material, and they haven't failed us yet.

 

[Ahrimon]

Since you can't run character builder I suggest finding a third party card program. Or just create a doc/spreadsheet with your powers and check them off as you use them.

 

[AngryMojo]

I've taken to using the compendium to copy and paste the appropriate information into a document, then fill in all the relevant attack bonuses and damage. That way, you have the information on hand, but aren't constrained by the space limitations of cards.

I did this with character abilities back in 3.X, but the compendium does make life much easier.

 

[Aspeon]

When I didn't have access to Character Builder, I used Ander's power cards. (The Dungeon Crawl - Power Cards) I actually kind of liked crunching the numbers and filling in the blanks myself. They don't exist for Essentials yet, of course, but he's got a template up.