Card-Based Dungeons And Dragons

Though not precisely old-school, A Pack Of Gnolls is one of the blogs on my reading list, as Sully makes some interesting observations and seems to appreciate the old-school aesthetic.

He recently published this Magic Mouth spell-card, which was designed for D&D 4E. In that version of the game, non-combat spells seem to have been reclassified as "rituals", which can be used on those rare non-combat situations.

It seems like a year or more since I last blogged about my D&D resource cards project. That project was my attempt to create small, 1" x 1.5" cards that could be used for resource management at the game table. Those cards included magic items, equipment, spells, rumours, and spell components.

I have not spent much time on that project of late, but the recent developments with 4E have me thinking again about this.

Would I love to have a set of spell-cards for Dungeons and Dragons, similar to the one designed by Sully, and accompanied by old-school artwork and descriptions of the spells? Absolutely. It would be great fun for the players to actually play the cards when they want to cast the spell, flipping it face-down when that spell has been used.

I think 4E adherants misunderstand the objections of many old-schoolers to the recent 4E resource and ability cards distribution. It's not the idea of cards at the table that has many of us shaking our heads. It is the blind, collectible format, where players must spend significant amounts of cash to ensure they collect the ultra-rare cards. The inevitable rebuttal from that crowd is that the cards are optional. Today, perhaps. The same can probably be said of M:TG cards. After all, I suspect it is not too difficult to print a copy of a rare M:TG card and place it in your deck, if you're simply playing a friendly Magic game with your friends.

If someone designed a set of D&D spell cards, for old-school tabletop gaming, i'd be all over those. I'm just not interested in buying them in a blind, collectible format.