4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

Cameron,

Dude why havent you done more with these?  I have been all over trying to find more of your cards.  I finally got to your blog site and got those there but for the love of Gygax please do more.  Yours for me by far are the best I have seen yet.

Zey - 26 June 2008 04:50 PM

Cameron,

Dude why havent you done more with these?  I have been all over trying to find more of your cards.  I finally got to your blog site and got those there but for the love of Gygax please do more.  Yours for me by far are the best I have seen yet.

Sorry.  When Black Plague fixed the code for the new MSE, I was left with having to restart.  All the cards I made for the older MSE are SOL and I’m back at square one.  I’m working on them.  I promise.  I’m just a little scatterbrained and trying to work on too many things at once (Summoning Spells, running a PBP, creating Power Cards, being a husband and father, and writing poetry for my thesis and trying to get things published).

I’ll see if I can’t knock out Warlock 1st level powers with the new MSE set.

Awesome Cards! Can’t wait for the finished product.

Sample with Fort icon and Fort icon.

All, here are samples from the latest run.

I will be posting the MSE files to recreate these cards shortly, as well as the MSE-SET file I used to create the cards.

This way, you can recreate your own cards and tweak the look and feel of them as you like.

Hope you guys enjoy them.

-- Hirahito

OK.  The following is the C#.NET project and program I used to take the raw text file and create a non-compressed MSE-SET file from it.

This program expects the input file to look like:

>Corellon’s Blade Wizard of the Spiral Tower Attack 20
You swing your glowing longsword around you, striking nearby
enemies with the flat of the blade and banishing them into the
Feywild.
Daily ✦ Arcane, Radiant, Teleportation, Weapon
Standard Action Close burst 1
Target: Each enemy in burst you can see
Attack: Intelligence + 4 vs. Will
Hit: 3[W] + {blah blah - removed for copyright}
space (its choice).
Miss: Half damage.

Notes:
* The > is needed to start the entry.
* If you add another class, you’ll need to modify line 19 in the main .CS file to add your new class name.
* The ✦ is required as well as a few of the keywords.  The parser program uses these to parse the output file correctly.

This is now in the public domain.  As the author, I give free license to use as you see fit.

OK.  Now here’s the real beef.

This is the MSE and MSE-SET files for all current powers / feats / etc.

There’s a readme in the zip file that tells you how to install everything, it assumes you’ve already used MSE2 before.

Let me know if there’s any problems with the file or the MSE.

-- Hirahito

EDIT:  Just as a clarification, this is everything you need (short of downloading MSE2) to create your own set of cards.

I’ve already printed out a set for my current group, they look great!

Fort looks good Cam.  I’m adding it to the style files now.

I’ll work on the modifications for multiple damage types and multiple defenses this weekend.  I think I’ve figured out how I’m going to do it.  It won’t be as clean or as elegant code as I might like, but the code features I want don’t seem to be available.  The MSE developer seems to be planning on putting them in the next update though, so I may eventually be able to clean up the code.

As I look at the set, the icons that are still needed are as follows:

Will (both with and without text)
AC (with text version only)
Fort (with text version only)
Ref (with text version only)

The card back also needs to be figured out.

Once those and my code revisions are done, I think we’ll have the styles completed and just have to work on the actual set files.

Almost there!

Very cool.  As a side note, I’ve been working on creating a card stock box that you can make at home.  I have a prototype completed and am working on details now.  I’m looking at the dragon I did for the back to be on the card box, and have been thinking that maybe the back could be fairly non-descript - just the D&D logo - something like the back of Magic Cards which don’t have fancy art.

Will - we had said the heart needed modification.  I’m not liking the heart at all to be honest. I’ve tried changing the gradient around and it still looks like a pansy heart (no offense if you’re a pansy or like hearts...)

Text versions are easy and I’ll have them done shortly.

I’m fresh out of ideas for Will then.

As for the card back, something simple could work too.  If you took the parchment stuff that you’ve been using for a back ground, put the “D&D” logo on it centered and a bit larger than what you’ve been using with the dragons, I think we’d have something to start with.

Perhaps adding some kind of border to finish it off?  A simple color?

Or maybe some kind of scroll effect?  A quick Google search turns up the following:

Something like that with the “D&D” logo in the center might work.

Card box - prototype.  Still in work, but wanted opinions.  Obviously pics are not to scale, but the pdf in the zip should be.

Brand new to the boards and my 1st post.

Love the power cards, but I’d been toying around with the idea of sticking the monster’s stat blocks onto a card too. Would make for easy use with dry or wet erase pens once in a sheet protector to track power usages and HP. Plus the use of a couple 3x3 Card sheets would make for a handy way to track initiative ...

I made a mock up in PS of what i think would make a decent template, but the scripting language used in MSE2 confounds me.

Heres the template ... perhaps someone would like to play with it:

Thought perhaps you could use the top portion for the monsters Name, type, level, role, and XP value. You could even reference the page in whatever book the monster is from in the lower right corner.

Just a thought as it might be fun to mess around with a few other types of cards too.

Neat ideas. I don’t know that all that info is necessary, but it bears some thinking about.  Feel free to start a new thread if you want some more exposure. Once we (Black Plauge and I) get the Power Cards to a finished state, my next project in my own head (I’ve done a little bit of a mockup) was to move on to monster cards.

Black Plauge - 27 June 2008 11:25 AM

Will (both with and without text)
AC (with text version only)
Fort (with text version only)
Ref (with text version only)

EDIT - Why are those two showing up weird?  When you click on them, they look fine.
EDIT2 - The AC looked wonky.  I changed the text to say “Armor Class” and reuploaded.

Okay, I’ve redone the card box and made it into a zip.  Unfortunately, because of the quality of the images, the zip is about 11 MB.  I’ve hosted it at mediafire so that you can download it.

I printed and made this model which you can see below.