What’s on the Cards?
One thing that consumes me as a designer is accessibility. The space between that little lump of grey matter and the gameplay should be short, easy, and as fast as you can make it. Your average dice-stacking table-jockey simply doesn’t have the luxury of computer gubbins to calculate values on the fly or keep track of everything that is going on. Yes-yes-yes, you can use gubbins like Roll20 and the myriad of juicy sub-gubbins therein, like automated sheets and the like. However, I feel those things can quickly become a crutch. You can’t rely on those tools in the long run, and not everyone has the time (or will) to endure the extra work that comes along with using those tools. If your system requires those ancillary extras to approach the marmitey ‘mersion zone your players need to get their fix, those extra minutes of ‘Huh, whuh, euuuuugh?’ when faced with yet another CSS plugin or ‘This time it’s fixed’ patch makes all the difference.
Enter the most beauteous of all tabletop creations, able to summon a chef’s kiss that shatters concrete in any hot-blooded GM: the monster card.
These little doodahs are the epitome of forced design elegance, or at least they should be. The sheer swaggering bravado of staring down a stat block that could choke any stock fantasy lizard of choice and saying 'Sorry, ain't fittin' is so intoxicatingly brusque I sometimes have to lie down. I have run games with huge stat blocks, and I have tangoed with the two-column bigguns'. I don't like 'em, no sir. I understand the concept of stakes, I understand the concept of grand monsters. What I don't understand is the need to cram 400-word bricks into my brain whilst running a combat encounter. The concept of forcing you to trim that flab by imposing a physical limit is glorious anathema.
Luckily, some systems (especially our linocut-loving pioneers of the 'Old School Revolution') have embraced this ethos of simplicity. Monsters on cards, monsters on postcards, dungeons on postcards! Unluckily, some persons-who-will-remain-nameless see cards as yet another sorry vector for 'crap you'll buy' and whose concept of what constitutes a 'card' is...generous. Sometimes I wonder if the ever-growing stat blocks on these products and ever-shrinking font size are part of a ploy by Big Optometry, who already have a stranglehold on geek-kind.
Regardless, I have been tinkering with various card designs and approaches, and feel I can look my potential players in the eye with a Tarot-sized card (roughly 7cm x 12cm) that is readable without any of the smaller orbital telescopes and be proud. I never think I will ever have my perfect monster card, but until then here's a start!
