Prepping for RPG

In my last update, I mentioned that I wanted to complete a Napoleonic knockout round and an RPG adventure every month. Well, February is over and I already failed - no RPG session. But I made some progress!

Creature Cards

One of the deterrents to my solo RPGing is creating the encounter charts. I've been jotting down the encounter stats in a notebook and then running the game from that. But sometimes (often?) I don't feel like doing the prep work.

The answer is to have cards with the creature stats. Then I can reference them quickly.

I've dabbled with cards before.

• Here's an experiment from 2016.
• And a rather fancy design from 2022.

None of those prior efforts went very far, however.

Recently, I started a new project to make cards for the creatures from the 1st edition Monster Manual. First, I need to convert their stats to my system. I created an Excel spreadsheet to do the conversions, but I am still working on it.

I had some free time this past week and decided I wanted to play. I decided to jot the stats on index cards rather than in a notebook.

I ended up with this - a stack of cards ready for play!

Using the Cards

One of the issues I had with cards is with creating weighted encounter probabilities. Let's take a simplified example. I have two possible encounters - either a bunch of orcs or a dragon. I decide that the party is more likely to encounter the orcs than the dragon. But if I have one card each, then the probabilities are the same. To increase the probability of encountering orcs, I need multiple orc cards.

The solution is ridiculously simple, but I was so caught up in using cards that it did not dawn on me until now. I can still roll on an encounter table. Then I can consult the card for the stats. This saves me the trouble of jotting down the stats every time.

The Experiment

I started the next adventure in Ser Killian's tale using the cards. More on that at a later date!