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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SabreCat" data-source="post: 5082389" data-attributes="member: 76245">Abbreviated VersionWant to spruce up your D&D4 game with rewards for players roleplaying, adding to the setting, introducing plot twists, and making dramatic descriptions of their actions? Do as follows!1. Buy 150 index cards.2. Download <a href="http://cheri.shyou.org/%7Esabrecat/docs/Purple_Index_Cards.docx" target="_blank">http://cheri.shyou.org/~sabrecat/docs/Purple_Index_Cards.docx</a>.3. Print the document onto the index cards.4. Deal out two cards to each player at the start of each session. Played cards go into a discard pile. Collect unused cards at the end of the session and shuffle them back into the deck. When about half the deck's cards have been used, shuffle them all back in! The BackstoryIndex cards are a DM’s best friend. When setting up my face-to-face D&D 4e campaign, I bought a bunch of colored cards for various purposes. White cards would track hit points, initiative, etc. and come in handy for taking general notes. Red, blue, and yellow cards would be used to record quests: major/storyline quests, side quests, and characters’ personal quests, respectively. Green cards were for noting major NPCs and factions in the setting, and recording the party’s favor or disfavor with them.But in your typical pack of colored index cards, that left one unused color: purple. What was I to do with those?After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with the following system. I love new-wave roleplaying games where all the players share in the authorial role traditionally granted only to the Dungeon Master. Unfortunately, in my experience telling the players “oh, by the way, you can make up setting information too” in an otherwise traditional game rarely goes anywhere. Between the mother-may-I setup of the rules and a bit of blank-page paralysis, players never made use of the authority I granted them. With the use of these purple cards, I’d give the players discrete ways of hijacking the DM’s seat, providing jumping-off points for creativity and rewarding them for collaborating in game authorship!My first go at the deck also included cards that didn't so much create collaboration opportunities as encourage the players to try new tactical tricks or reward them for spectacular success/failure in combat. In this draft, I've split them out to their own deck--still purple, just used differently.How It WorksAt the start of the session, players are dealt two cards each from the main deck. They choose one to keep for the session, and return the other to the deck. If they don’t use their card before the next deal, they can choose to hang on to it and forego drawing any new cards, or return their current card to the deck and draw as usual.A card is also turned face-up from the Achievements deck at the start of each session, replacing an unscored Achievement there, if any.Players can choose to use a card in hand at any appropriate moment, following the card text. Any player can choose to score the visible Achievement when its conditions are met, or hold out for a better score on it.“Minion XP” means experience equal to a minion of the party’s current level, and “Monster XP” means experience equal to a standard monster of the party’s current level. This experience is shared among the party as normal.Skill Challenge-related cards are meant to work with Stalker0’s “<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-fan-creations-house-rules/241440-stalker0s-obsidian-skill-challenge-system-new-version-1-2-a.html" target="_blank">Obsidian</a>” houseruled skill challenge system; the “in-combat skill challenge” cards will probably need adaptation to work with core skill challenge rules. Similarly, some references to “factions” are meant to dovetail with a system in which the party works on long-term Skill Challenges with groups in the setting, trying to win them over to the PCs’ cause.Despite the placement of this thread in the 4e forum, I expect this could work in any fantasy RPG where players normally gain experience by defeating monsters or other traditional means: earlier D&D editions, Pathfinder, GURPS Fantasy, etc. You'd need to fill in different values for the rewards, and tweak some terminology, but the basic system should still work fine.</blockquote>

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