With all the other card sets out, why in the world isn't there a set of spell cards?
You guys know what I'm talking about.
Director of Brand Strategy
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With all the other card sets out, why in the world isn't there a set of spell cards?
You guys know what I'm talking about.
Maybe because the revised spells aren't done yet? I know this has been suggested before and I imagine we'll see these as a GameMastery product at some point. The problem is how to handle spells added as more books come out, and what the pricepoint would be for a set of all the core spells. I guess they could be sold in spell list blocks, so you'd buy all the cleric spells in one go, and all the sor/wiz spells similarly. But this method would require someone wanting all the sets to get quite a few decks and some people might be opposed to that.
Right, spells aren't done yet. I'm dumb.
Otherwise, yes, sell them in as a "total spell pack" and individual class packs.
With boosters coming out as new spells are released.
I'm certain they would sell.
Probably better than the equipment packs.
I love this idea. I would buy them in a second. No second thoughts.
Right now I use index cards for spells I cast a lot.
Or you can just use a combination of THESE
and the SRD or copy and paste from the Pathfinder Beta into them.
Print them out on card stock. Cut with exacto knife and cutting board. Viola! Not so instant Spell cards.
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Or you can just use a combination of these:
www.theothergamecompany.com/download/SpellCards2.pdfand the SRD or copy and paste from the Pathfinder Beta into them.
Print them out on card stock. Cut with exacto knife and cutting board. Viola! Not so instant Spell cards.
I've done this.. sure did take a toll on my ink though.. well worth every cent..
I've done this.. sure did take a toll on my ink though.. well worth every cent..Or you can just use a combination of these:
www.theothergamecompany.com/download/SpellCards2.pdfand the SRD or copy and paste from the Pathfinder Beta into them.
Print them out on card stock. Cut with exacto knife and cutting board. Viola! Not so instant Spell cards.
Yeah, I suppose if you print from an inkjet printer it would kind drain the cartridges. I use a HP Laserjet 2200d from home so it wasnt really that big of a drain on me. Between my wife and me it usually takes us at least 6-7 months to go through a tone cartridge sometimes less depending on how much we're printing.
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Director of Brand Strategy
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I've done this.. sure did take a toll on my ink though.. well worth every cent..
Me too. I used color coded card stock for each spell list. I don't think I actually did Bard, Ranger and Paladin spell lists, though. I rarely play half-casters.
Saddest of all is that I haven't played a caster since. At least not in 3.5.
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I've done this.. sure did take a toll on my ink though.. well worth every cent..Or you can just use a combination of these:
www.theothergamecompany.com/download/SpellCards2.pdfand the SRD or copy and paste from the Pathfinder Beta into them.
Print them out on card stock. Cut with exacto knife and cutting board. Viola! Not so instant Spell cards.
Yeah, I suppose if you print from an inkjet printer it would kind drain the cartridges. I use a HP Laserjet 2200d from home so it wasnt really that big of a drain on me. Between my wife and me it usually takes us at least 6-7 months to go through a tone cartridge sometimes less depending on how much we're printing.
I need to invest in a laser printer...
The problem I can see with Paizo-manufactured spell cards is when you try to use anything that's not OGL. With weapons and items this isn't nearly as big of a deal since most of the weapons and items that see play are OGL or at least have something that looks similar in the OGL stuff.
I draw spells from both the PHB and the Spell Compendium and I'm thinking Spell Compendium isn't OGL so that causes a problem. Then there's the host of other books that I draw spells from that aren't OGL. The guy in our party that learns from scrolls currently knows spells from PHB, Spell Compendium, Heroes of Horror, Champions of Valor, and Book of Vile Darkness.
In this case, index cards/homebrew just seems more practical.
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CEO
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The other thing that has stopped us in our tracks on making spell cards is the amount of verbage contained in some spells. If you are trying to fit the text on one side of a playing card, the text would have to be tiny, tiny. Now, we could use both sides for the text, which might help a bit, but then most spells would have a blank side. Not ideal. So now we are waiting for the final Pathfinder spell text to be done and we can revisit the idea. I know that my group will love to have them!
-Lisa
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The other thing that has stopped us in our tracks on making spell cards is the amount of verbage contained in some spells. If you are trying to fit the text on one side of a playing card, the text would have to be tiny, tiny. Now, we could use both sides for the text, which might help a bit, but then most spells would have a blank side. Not ideal. So now we are waiting for the final Pathfinder spell text to be done and we can revisit the idea. I know that my group will love to have them!
-Lisa
I think it would be great to have spell cards that give a visual of what others would see, when you cast the spell. Sure PCs can still make a Spellcraft check to know what the spell is, but to have cards to hand them would help limit metagaming, instead of writing down the spell on a piece of paper and handing it around to others at the table.
I presently use the PDF cards produced by The Other Game Company, but would also happily purchase spell card decks from Paizo... as others have said, it would save me alot of ink, and they're so handy at the table.
I would also buy feat cards, if those were made.
I presently use the PDF cards produced by The Other Game Company, but would also happily purchase spell card decks from Paizo... as others have said, it would save me alot of ink, and they're so handy at the table.
I would also buy feat cards, if those were made.
Spell and Feat cards would be awesome. Most of my group already does their best to copy the pertinent info onto character sheets with page refs so they don't have to be flipping through books in the midst of combat, but having them handy in card form -- I like the idea!
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The other thing that has stopped us in our tracks on making spell cards is the amount of verbage contained in some spells. If you are trying to fit the text on one side of a playing card, the text would have to be tiny, tiny. Now, we could use both sides for the text, which might help a bit, but then most spells would have a blank side. Not ideal. So now we are waiting for the final Pathfinder spell text to be done and we can revisit the idea. I know that my group will love to have them!
-Lisa
I ran into that exact problem time and time again. I decided instead of the small collectable card size to use a 5x7 index card. I get a nice font size, and while most spells EASILY fit on one side, the few spells that need more have plenty of room. The extra side allowed me to add a cute art logo for the classes, domains and schools.
I could have used 4x6 cards instead but had the 5x7 cards handy.
The advantage of using 4x6 cards is there are so many picture albums available for that size. I know people like the collectable card size so they can put a bunch in sleeves and have them in one place, so 4x6 would do that as well.
If you have to go to two sided on some spells, and one sided on most spells I really do not think anyone is going to mind all that much at all.
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The other thing that has stopped us in our tracks on making spell cards is the amount of verbage contained in some spells. If you are trying to fit the text on one side of a playing card, the text would have to be tiny, tiny. Now, we could use both sides for the text, which might help a bit, but then most spells would have a blank side. Not ideal. So now we are waiting for the final Pathfinder spell text to be done and we can revisit the idea. I know that my group will love to have them!
-Lisa
I ran into that exact problem time and time again. I decided instead of the small collectable card size to use a 5x7 index card. I get a nice font size, and while most spells EASILY fit on one side, the few spells that need more have plenty of room. The extra side allowed me to add a cute art logo for the classes, domains and schools.
I could have used 4x6 cards instead but had the 5x7 cards handy.
The advantage of using 4x6 cards is there are so many picture albums available for that size. I know people like the collectable card size so they can put a bunch in sleeves and have them in one place, so 4x6 would do that as well.
If you have to go to two sided on some spells, and one sided on most spells I really do not think anyone is going to mind all that much at all.
TSR had index card sized spell cards for second ed. I'd like some Pathfinder spell cards, 3x5 or 4x6 cards.
I used to like the idea of spell cards, but 4e has honestly soured me on the concept.
Item cards are cool, NPC cards migt be nice. But I think I'd have to skip these ones.
(Yeah, who am I kidding. I'd have to buy them to satisfy my collectors urges. *sigh*)
I have the 2e mage and priest cards in a box in my closet... When we played 2e the cards largely went unused. Though nifty at first, we quickly learned that writing down a summary of each spell in your character folder served as a mnemonic as well as reference. Oddly enough, the act of reading one's notes on spells for a session equates roughly to a wizard or cleric memorizing or preparing spells for the day. Works quite well... better than using cards, which serve as a crutch. Actually remembering spell effects when needed is quicker than shuffling through and reading a deck of cards.
In terms of play-time, it's really a matter of pay me now or pay me later. Paying now is taking time to check your spell notes at the start of a session for use without interrupting the game. Paying later means a quick start of a session, but a serious bog when players have to look through their cards at the start of each encounter (or even round). Such can be devastating to dramatic timing.
In my experience, taking notes on spells (and even feats) and reading them at the start of each session saves huge amounts of time and helps the adventure run without speed-bumps for look-ups.
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The other thing that has stopped us in our tracks on making spell cards is the amount of verbage contained in some spells. If you are trying to fit the text on one side of a playing card, the text would have to be tiny, tiny. Now, we could use both sides for the text, which might help a bit, but then most spells would have a blank side. Not ideal. So now we are waiting for the final Pathfinder spell text to be done and we can revisit the idea. I know that my group will love to have them!
-Lisa
Lisa,
I would suggest then to leave out the super long spells like that. Granted there are a decent amount of wordy spells. But spell cards would still be of a great boon to us all. Especially for us lazy ?@$ players or DM's who hate to book dive just to remeber something about that spell.
What about giving the meat/mechanics of each spell (duration, saves, etc.) and the descriptive text for the short ones, and subsitute a page reference for description for the wordy ones? Would save the eyesight of all us players, and still be very useful for having the cards for info ready to go?
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Just DO NOT use tiny fonts.
The Critical Hit and Critical Fumble cards are USELESS to me. SO much empty space and TINY font. I can't read anything on there at all. Great idea, but no reason at all to have used such small fonts.
I LOVE the idea of spell cards, but if the font is as small as the Critical Hit cards, forget it. Unless you include a magnifier in the box.
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Paradign Concepts came out with 3 sets for 3.0 spells. A set for arcane, divine and natural spells. They are about 3 1/2"x4 1/2". The sets contained all the spells from the core rulebook. Each box was a good 2" thick and contained about 150 spells. They contained everything that was in the core rulebook, even if it needed both sides. It wasn't too dificult to write in the changes for the 3.5 eddition. There were also some blanks for adding spells.
If someone is interested in buying them, my local game store has a couple in stock. You can e-mail them here "sales@comicquest.com".
The advantage of using 4x6 cards is there are so many picture albums available for that size. I know people like the collectable card size so they can put a bunch in sleeves and have them in one place, so 4x6 would do that as well.
Genius. ^_^ I'm SO doing that. Thank you Krome. Might keep me from having a small stack of 5x7 cards loose in every character folder.
I would likely buy Pathfinder spell cards no matter the size, but I like the 4x6 idea.
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I made a set of spell cards using the SRD for 3.5, then expanded them with spells from other WoTC products. Individually, there was over 600 spell cards in the PHB before adding in sources such as Spell Compendium, the Complete series, etc. I used a font size of 6 (just barely about the "mouse-print" TSR used for the original FR1Waterdeep), formatted on 4 X 6 cards (sometimes having to use front and back).
I am now in the process of making my Pathfinder set to replace those. It is a slow and time-consuming process, made more complex since I want each card to be able to "stand alone" without referencing a previous spell card.
On the other hand, I would happily purchase a product like this if Paizo were to publish it! The TSR spell cards were my favorite product of 2nd Edition.
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So, five years later....is there not enough interest for Paizo to make an official version of these, or have I just missed them somewhere?
When I look, all I see are solutions by individuals like Perram's Spellbook and RPGBooster, etc.., which are fine and handy, but nothing like the spell decks TSR used to sell back in the AD&D days, which were great.
Any news whether or not Paizo will ever release official spell decks? Or do we just keep printing our own?
I wish they would, I would purchase them. Pazio makes great quality products and printing them out myself is too expensive.
Since the spells are not done, what Paizo could do is make the pack of spell cars for each book. Like core rule book has one set of cards, then advance players guide has their set of cards. This way when new books come out they can just print the new spells as a set. Would that be good?
So, five years later....is there not enough interest for Paizo to make an official version of these, or have I just missed them somewhere?
When I look, all I see are solutions by individuals like Perram's Spellbook and RPGBooster, etc.., which are fine and handy, but nothing like the spell decks TSR used to sell back in the AD&D days, which were great.
Any news whether or not Paizo will ever release official spell decks? Or do we just keep printing our own?
I think this issue is not interest, but something Lisa Stevens said upthread a few years ago... there are a number of wordy spells that just would not fit onto an index card, not even if you used front and back. You'd either have to use multiple cards for some spells (which gets unwieldy, as you have to keep them together) or omit text.
Way back, I attempted to do spell cards that would fit on 3x5 index cards -- larger than the playing-card size cards GameMastery products use. Even there, using as small a font as was readable in as pleasing a layout possible, there were a number of spells I had to omit text from and just say "please see page x of the Core Rulebook." (I gave up on making the spell cards at the time because new spells and classes were coming out all the time and I could barely get through the existing core spells let alone consider adding the new ones. Now that there's a single spell index on the PRD it'd at least be easy to be sure I included all the spells I wanted, but at least in the way I was doing it (copy pasting the text into a templated document and adjusting formatting and editing for size for each spell) it just took too long.
And the end bit is the thing... even if they've got good software to import text into layout easily, they'd still have to edit the text for the spells that didn't fit into a card properly and that would take a lot of time.
And given the murmurings I hear on occasion on these boards about production schedule... and considering things like we had only a four week playtest for TEN classes (as opposed to a few years ago, when we had a three month playtest for eight classes)... I gather Paizo barely has enough time as it is to keep up with the schedule they've set for themselves.
Yeah. This just doesn't seem to be in the cards (no pun intended). Which is a shame, because I for one would be at my local game store screaming Take My Money! if they came out with these.
I've since found a few alternatives for those who have additional resources. Hero Labs can print out a player's spell book, and this does a fairly good job of filling the need. It can lead to high printing costs as you regularly reprint a character's spell book at every level, though. There are some spell book apps for mobile devices that are incredibly handy as quick reference. SRD Spellbook (for the iPad) in particular seems to be a great answer. It has almost every spell, baring a few from the more obscure splatbooks. Even then, the app has a feature that allows you to import spellbooks from the similarly named computer program where you can create custom spells, so it's nearly a perfect solution. The only downside is that you need an iPad to run it.
For the player who doesn't have regular access to a computer or mobile device... Perram's Spellbook is about it. A third party company gave a shot at Pathfinder Spell Cards a couple years ago, but AFAIK the only got released as a PDF. The printing cost seems to be what bars this from being done in 3rd party land.
Actually, I am really surprised that nobody has done a kickstarter for this.
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The other thing that has stopped us in our tracks on making spell cards is the amount of verbage contained in some spells. If you are trying to fit the text on one side of a playing card, the text would have to be tiny, tiny. Now, we could use both sides for the text, which might help a bit, but then most spells would have a blank side. Not ideal. So now we are waiting for the final Pathfinder spell text to be done and we can revisit the idea. I know that my group will love to have them!
-Lisa
I still think this is a GREAT idea. As a GM, I hate it when a player casts a spell that no one has ever heard of and then we are all scrambling to the PRD or our books to find the description. For long text spells, even if the card gave the basics and then referred to a page in a specific Pathfinder book, it would help me greatly and keep the game moving...
Carthane
Im sorry i missed out on this. I hope they do another kickstarter!
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I have the 1991 Wizard and Priest Spell Cards from TSR..May see how Many of those I can use in Pathfinder..They are nice..forgot how they looked after being stored so Many Years...
Keep in mind Not every Group uses every books so They could be done in sets by Books...We use just Core so we don't need all the other spells.