Several initiative cards
When I started running 4th edition D&D I was intimidated by the prospect of being in charge of a combat. The sheer amount of information that you need to handle during a fight is kind of overwhelming. There are piles of monster defenses, initiatives, and all sorts of powers to juggle. The GM needs to make sure combat flows smoothly, which seemed incompatible with keeping all of that stuff straight and keeping 4 to 6 players on task.
Luckily, I met Jeff Sorensen at GenCon and he showed me how to use monster initiative cards. These cards let me literally hold all the stats I needed for a fight in a single hand. This massively upped my confidence in my ability to run fast, fun combat encounters.
Monster cards for some of my NaMoDesMo creatures*
When I got home I made up my own quarter-sheet card template similar to Jeff’s and started making cards. I made cards for monsters and cards for heroes. They made my game seem so much more polished when I had them ready to go each week.
All my monsters “take 10″ on initiative to speed up the beginning of combat and the players write their initiative values on their cards and pass them up to me. Then I sort the cards by initiative and flip through them as the fight progresses. I turn cards sideways to denote PC’s holding actions and move their card if they delay their entire turn to a different place in the order.
As I collected more and more of these cards I realized that I needed somewhere to store and organize them if I was going to reuse them. So I commissioned a custom recipe box on etsy from this gentleman. I affectionately call it my box of death.
The box of death
I make my cards with a semi-manual process because it forces me to read through the creatures’ abilities and consider how they could be used in combat. I pull the text for a monster from the Compendium using my D&D Insider subscription and then format it onto a Word template manually. The template has been refined many times over the last two years. When I’m done formatting, I print my cards on cardstock and cut them with a paper cutter.
Sometimes I make custom monsters for game sessions and sometimes I pull from what’s in my box. At the moment I’m working through the first Monster’s Vault in my spare time and making cards for all the monsters. I already did something similar with the MM3. This gives me lots of random monsters to pull from if I need to create an encounter on the spot.
If you’d like to make your own cards for personal use, please feel free to use my monster card template or my PC card template. If you redistribute monsters made with the template digitally I ask that you link back to this post and credit the template to me. (I hope it goes with out saying, but) Please don’t redistribute the blank templates, instead link to this post if you want to show them to people. ;)
Both templates are Word files and I can’t promise they’ll layout correctly in other programs like OpenOffice. I’m not a graphical designer, so my layout ability is shaky even without Word “helping” me. The text uses styles, so when you add new powers, you’ll want to look at the existing styles and reuse them. If you want to use the same icon set that WotC does, this gentleman has made a lovely font called Game Icons available for that purpose. I’m too lazy to use it much of the time, but it’s really neat!
If you use my templates I’d love to hear any feedback you have. I’ve tried to make them as usable as possible over the last two years. I’m sure that other people will have different thoughts and use cases beyond my own.
* A pdf version of this set of monster cards is also available. I’m slowly making cards for my NaMoDesMo creatures, but don’t currently plan to releasing the rest of these publicly.
Yay! More postings!
My sole concern is how much harder clustering initiatives can make things. I’ve used monster cards before for both initiative tracking and just as quick reference combat tools. (Ooh the initiative thing might make a tactica talarius post…
Comment by Michael — August 31, 2011 @ 10:00 pm
If you want to handle initiatives differently you can handle them any way you normally would with paper. Put them all together, roll them individually each time, just shove them in-between the PC’s wherever you like… :P
Comment by Eva — August 31, 2011 @ 10:11 pm
I love how the different color temperature plus motion blur in the box’o'death shot makes it look like it’s about 40 feet below sea level outside your window. I can totally see some starfish and corals out there.
Comment by Ben — August 31, 2011 @ 10:48 pm
Having prints of monster abilities in some form or other is very important to running a smooth game. It is quite difficult to try to page through books during combat. I actually think running a game that is entirely improvised is easier that paging back and forth through books.
For my home campaign, I often copy text out of the builder to drop into an encounter synopsis that includes the monsters, scaling info, environment details, and tactics.
Comment by Sunyaku — September 1, 2011 @ 1:23 am
Sunyaku, I’ve tried running from some of the Adventurer Vault’s combat summaries, which have monster stat blocks, terrain descriptions, and basic tactics condensed onto a page or two. I found it awkward. Having stat-blocks in a synopsis page is too distracting for me. Possibly if I’d built them myself it would work better, but when I use someone else’s my brain tries to juggle and memorize all the info and fails. I still have to reference the stat blocks and the tactics on the paper while I manage the rest of the combat, which is a bit rough.
Also the cards have the advantage that I don’t need another person, a whiteboard, or scratch paper to track initiatives. I still need scratch paper to track monster damage… but that generally only goes up! ;)
Comment by Eva — September 1, 2011 @ 8:36 am
Interesting article. I just don’t understand all the work for creatures you may use only a few times in your life. Does it work better? Is it more comfortable to use at the table. I have never used them before.
Comment by Alton — February 28, 2012 @ 11:16 pm
Alton, I’m not sure I understand your questions. I’ll do my best to respond.
I find having a box with many types and levels of monsters helpful for impromptu combats. Even if any individual card in the box is used infrequently having the range is good (and I built the collection up over time). If you look at it from a different angle, everything I ever prepare for D&D is “only used a few times in my life”… so I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re making. Are you saying it would make more sense to draft up nice monster cards if I published modules?
As far as whether using cards works better or is more comfortable, I find it a lot easier to manage the information I need in combat when it’s on cards (as compared to stat-blocks on a sheet of paper in front of me… that being the other main method I’ve tried). I don’t know what system you’re using to manage information in combat, so I can’t tell you whether cards will be better or more comfortable for you. Maybe try making/using monster cards for one session and see if you like it?
Comment by Eva — March 8, 2012 @ 6:14 pm