The Gaming Den

so, based on the idea of character mechanics being sold in booster packs from the Magic Setting thread, I started working on a test of concept, before realizing that it's not even that great an idea financially, because people aren't actually that gullible.

However, I did work up a proof of concept of reference cards, starting with the Bard class, as shown below.

But first, a bit of explanation:
Colours represent power sources:
Black- Shadow
Blue- Psychic
Green- Nature
Red- Arcane
White- Divine
"Artifact"- Martial

Power is Base Attack
Defense is HD size

Level minimum for abilities is expressed in the type line, Requirements are noted as necessary

ideally, there'd be a scant handful of spells/day casting schemes instead of crazy one off stuff so you can just say "Spells, partial caster, arcane"

so, how's it look? Ideally feats, spells, magic items, mundane equipment, and pretty much anything else a character might have would be a card, leaving the basic system to be printed on a small poster sized sheet that's folded into a "deck box" and this could be produced instead of books. Then in addition to "Splat Decks" there could be non-randomized boosters of classes, feat chains, magic item sets, etc, or small packs of all the feats from a book, or all the spells, or whatever.

Spells would present difficulty, as many will go beyond the limited space of the card, but we'll see how that works when I get to them.

For listing spells, I've come up with a system that shortens them significantly. In fact, I was originally using it in a card format, but switched to a list because cutting out the cards was more work than it was worth. But it could be fairly applicable.


First, you have the ur-spell:
Components: V,S
Casting Time: Standard Action
Range: Touch
Target: One creature or object (usually specified in description)
Duration: Instantaneous

Then for a given spell, you only list what's different than the baseline, using keywords. So for example:

Resist Energy 10Lm
Mass Snake's Swiftness medium, radius 20’

SR is a special case, because there isn't really a good default. What I do is assume that spells which affect creatures directly have SR, and spells which create lasting things don't. If a given spell doesn't match that, I give it the SR or no-SR tag, as appropriate.


Then you list the spell's effects, in as condensed a form as you can while remaining readable. The target and save are listed in the effects, not the keywords. When referencing caster level (in descriptions or keywords), I use L.

Mass Snake's Swiftness medium, radius 20’
Selected creatures can immediately make a melee or ranged attack.

Rot of Ages close, 2r
Target sickened (Fort negates) and foes have concealment. Stacks to nauseated.

Death Ward: Lm
Target is immune to death effects, energy drain, and negative energy.


The keywords I'm currently using:
Components: silent, still, material (#), focus, xp
Casting Time: swift, 1-round, ritual #
Range: personal, short, medium, long, range #
Duration: #r, #m, #h, #d, concentration #, permanent, discharged, (D)
Area: radius #, cylinder #, spread #, cone #, line #, shapeable #
Other: ray (ranged touch attack), nray (same 'material depth' limitations as Detect Magic)

Prak_Anima wrote:so, based on the idea of character mechanics being sold in booster packs from the Magic Setting thread, I started working on a test of concept, before realizing that it's not even that great an idea financially, because people aren't actually that gullible..

You have seen the new Gamma world game right, with Mutations and Technology items in booster packs?

What's the point of these cards supposed to be? As you noted, it's not a great idea financially. MtG works differently because you're assumed to be playing against strangers, but tabletop RPGs you're usually playing with friends where it's trivial to say "Everyone has access to every ability from every card set".

I guess you could insist that buying the cards is necessary for organized play.

The point of cards in Gamma World (as far as I understand it) isn't that you build up a deck of your character's personal abilities. But instead that you have a giant gonzo stack of cards everyone draws from at the start of each encounter and then lose at the end.

So the weird part is selling them as "booster packs" instead of just a complete expansion pack (like Munchkin).

Sashi wrote:The point of cards in Gamma World (as far as I understand it) isn't that you build up a deck of your character's personal abilities. But instead that you have a giant gonzo stack of cards everyone draws from at the start of each encounter and then lose at the end.

So the weird part is selling them as "booster packs" instead of just a complete expansion pack (like Munchkin).

You'd think that characters who were psychic would make decks out of the psychic mutations cards and characters who were biomorphs would make decks out of biomorphs and cyborgs would make decks out of cyborg gizmos. Or something. But... no. There is one big deck and it is composed of mutations that are both good and bad, and some of them are psychic and some of them are biomorphs, and your stone yeti can spontaneously develop psychic powers or metal implants for one fight, only to have them go away again for no reason at the end.

In short, the one thing you might consider the cards to be "for" (namely: having cards instead of a chart would allow you to automatically filter out all the entries that don't make sense) is something they specifically don't do. The entire thing is a horrendous waste of time.

-Username17

Sashi wrote:The point of cards in Gamma World (as far as I understand it) isn't that you build up a deck of your character's personal abilities. But instead that you have a giant gonzo stack of cards everyone draws from at the start of each encounter and then lose at the end.

So the weird part is selling them as "booster packs" instead of just a complete expansion pack (like Munchkin).

So the implication is that there will be one deck of cards per group?

The booster pack idea makes sense (well, not really) in the way that some people would be willing to buy 8 booster packs of 10 cards for $5 each (resulting in maybe 40 unique cards), but not willing to pay $40 for a deck with 40 unique cards. (All numbers completely made up.)

From what I've heard, each character does have a separate deck. There's a minimum deck size requirement, so the reason you buy boosters is to get an "all good card" deck.

hogarth wrote:What's the point of these cards supposed to be? As you noted, it's not a great idea financially. MtG works differently because you're assumed to be playing against strangers, but tabletop RPGs you're usually playing with friends where it's trivial to say "Everyone has access to every ability from every card set".

I guess you could insist that buying the cards is necessary for organized play.

It's supposed to be for reference. I'd originally thought of making them the way of building a character in a system, but that'd be dumb, it's better as just a simple reference system.

Were they to actually be incorporated in a system, the core "book" would be a small soft bound pamphlet type deal that tells you how the system works, then all the character mechanics would be cards, and organized in classes, feats, weapons, etc. There'd probably have to be a fold out sheet for listing the cards and maybe a short description of what stuff does, but it'd still likely cheaper than RPG books.