A Game of Cards

This week I did something in my current campaign that I've been meaning to try for years and years -- ever since I was about 15 and saw the Arduin treasure cards that came with one of their adventures.

What I did was put everyone's significant gear on index cards, and put the treasure that they found during the session on cards also. By significant gear, I mean magical stuff, important adventure-related things (like a vital key or a journal they found with information), some masterwork stuff, and some miscellaneous things, like the rings signifying friendship and allegiance the characters all received from the lords of an important and magical place called Castle Shard.

To be clear, I put together all the cards. This was due to the fact that the players often leave their character sheets in my game room (and, let's face it, due to general player apathy to doing outside-the-game work -- we all know about that, don't we DMs?). It wasn't so bad, though, because I'm not running an overly treasure-heavy game right now, and the PCs aren't too high level yet. Plus, it allowed me to create a "format" for the cards.

First off, they're color-coded. Blue cards for weapons, purple for armor, green for miscellaneous magic, white for one-shot items, and so on. Secondly, each card has a description of the item at the top: "Vial with bubbling blue liquid," for example. And then, whatever details they know about the item are written below, like, "potion of cure moderate wounds."

When they get new treasure, however, the card has just the description. Only when they get the item identified or experiment with it somehow do they get the details (which they then write on the card).

Despite my anal-retentive system, however, I've made it clear that the cards are for the players to do with as they wish. They can write notes to themselves about an item's power or significance or anything else.

In Play
Some of the benefits of the cards were immediate and obvious. The group has a number of special, powerful magic items that they went to great lengths to obtain specifically to help them on their current very important mission. Since they got the items, though, not a session has gone by that there hasn't been some confusion or disagreement about who had which item. The cards alleviate that issue entirely.

More generally, the cards make determining the exact location of an item much easier. Trading or lending items becomes easy and confusion-free. When one player gives his friend the wand of cure light wounds, he just hands her the card. When a player drops his bow in order to draw his sword to confront the oncoming foe, it's easy to remember. He drops the card on the table.

The cards also give treasure more -- well, for lack of a better term, I'll call it "urgency." My group had got into a bad habit of just having one player record all the treasure they might collect on an adventure and never really give much thought to who was carrying what or what was even in the "loot" until the adventure was over. This bad habit kept them from using useful items they had right there along with them at the time. When I hand the group a couple of cards representing the important items they find after a careful search of a room (or a fallen foe), there is more urgency to deal with those items immediately and treat them like, well, actual physical objects.

Keeping it Real
Thus, the cards make the items seem more real. Another way to put it would be to say that the cards make your items seem less intrinsic to you. When you've got your gear right alongside your spells and your feats written on your character sheet, it all just feels like a part of you. A player might never think to lend his friend his wand of cure light wounds with it written on his sheet, even if it's the smart thing to do in the situation. In a way, there's something permanent about something written on your sheet. If you erase an item from your sheet and someone else writes it on theirs, it feels like that thing is gone forever.

Of course, real objects get used. We've all seen it. A player writes down some item on his character sheet, but it gets lost amid all the stats and skills and notes and he just doesn't think to use it. With the cards, however, it's very obvious what you have, and thus the items get used. I saw more item use in that last session than in the previous three, I'll bet (although circumstances dictated that as well: the spellcasters were pretty much out of spells and the whole group as pushing themselves way past their limits -- which is to say, things got very tense and interesting).

I like one-use items. I always have. I like the idea of potions, scrolls, oils, or things like the detonations from Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed. They give a character an interesting power to use, but only once, so the player has to be careful with them. Using the cards makes me like one-use items even more. In this particular session, they kept finding one-use stuff and using it (and others they'd found) just as quickly. In this particular scenario, a lot of the NPCs carry pills with them, as described in my steamtech mini-supplement, "Harnessing the Natural Laws," so there was a lot of "pill popping" as they PCs came across these -- particularly since these guys conveniently scratch a clue as to the function right into the pills themselves. Since the rule is that, when a one-use item is used, the card gets passed back to me, the cards were flying. It added a really fun element to the session.

One player, Erik, found that the cards made it easier for him to organize what he was going to do next (by the order in which he stacked them), which I thought was cool. Hopefully the color coding helped the players find the cards they needed when they needed them. I noticed that some players wrote all the game stats needed for their attacks on their weapon cards, and copied ranges and durations and such on their scroll cards.

Lastly, the cards make for treasure dividing among the players easier and much more straightforward.

Some Questions Remain
In a way, the cards worked so well, I'm tempted to get everyone to put all their gear on cards. For many characters, that would mean a serious stack of cards. That might make things more confusing, not less. I figure there's a compromise in there someplace, but I'm not sure what. I'm for sure going to start including alchemical items on cards, though. Rope also seems like something that could be nicely kept track of (players are always cutting up their rope to tie up prisoners, or leaving it behind after they climb down a shaft, or something like that). Beyond that, I'm not sure.

The cards also pretty much mean that, unless the PCs use a detect magic right away, I'm going to have to make a card for everything they take that might be magical -- otherwise, I'm telegraphing to them that it's not. "Well, you find a ring, but, uh, you don't need a card for it." That clearly gives away the fact that it's not magical. But I don't relish the idea of creating a card for every gem or bit of jewelry they come across. I just don't know.

So, it's an idea that still in the working stages. I don't know yet if the color coding will survive (it's nice, but kind of superfluous). I don't know exactly what I will or won't be putting on cards in the future. But I know it's an idea that is going to stick, and I can't recommend it highly enough.