Monster Cards

[Incendax]

Power Cards are pretty worthless to me. I can easily memorize all the powers that my character has and never worry about forgetting my modifiers. However, because I only use a given monster a half dozen times per campaign I tend to have poor retention of monster abilities. I am wondering if there is anything like Monster Cards?

It's pretty often I have to have all three monster manuals lying open on my table and constantly cross reference. It's a logistical nightmare. I've taken to writing down the monster stats then printing it off to use as a cheat sheet but this required a lot of work from one game to the next. I would love to have the monsters from the Monster Manuals turned into cards similar to Power Cards. I could just flop them down and quickly reference all their abilities with a minimum of space required.

 

[OnlineDM]

If you have the Monster Builder, you can export monster stat blocks as images or rich text and put them on a page in the way you like. Granted, the downloadable Monster Builder is no longer updated (there's a web-based version coming at some point), but it's still useful for this sort of thing.

 

[erf_beto]

I've edited a couple of MSE templates to do just that... it's been a while since I used it, and I can't check it while at work, but I still have it online...

betoMSE.rar - D&D, 4th, edition, monster, template, MSE

Would this help?

PS: what's the status of sharing power/monster cards TEMPLATES according to WotC now? Legal, not legal... I never get those right.

 

[Incendax]

This is really good. I love the first template the most, but the second might be good for conserving ink. I'll have to dig through those files and figure out how to use them.

 

[Sefotron]

Outstanding

Fabulous work! These are hugely appreciated

 

[buddhafrog]

I would love WotC to publish a box set of rolodex index cards for monsters. I'd pay a hefty price. The problem is, for example, how many various Orc cards would be included? Never enough for what you'd eventually need. The set should come with plenty of blank cards for you to make your own edited monsters - or even better, the new Monster Builder would have a printing function that allows you to print edited monsters that match the index cards.

One side could have stats and powers with a small image; the other side could have fluff with a large image in the background.

How awesome and useful would that be?!

I don't think it be too hard, either. I don't know why they have never done this - it makes a lot of sense to me. They make quality cards cheaply already - can't they just do so in this organized manner?

I bought a carrying folder with 12 dividers. I print out all my monsters through the MB and just organize them in folder divided into 12 different categories so I can pull out needed monsters relatively quickly. This works. However I'd much rather just have a massive index card Monster Box Set.

Let's go WotC, snap to it!

 

[Almacov]

For the record, WotC does include monster stat cards with their prepainted miniatures, which can be fairly useful if one has a large collection.

That said, the early 4e minis sets were riddled with inconsistancies between their stat cards and the stats included in the books. (Presumably due to differing lead times.)
They made for an interesting snapshot of the game's design process though!
(And were generally still technically usable. Sometimes even more flavourful. I like the Shadow Demon stat card...)

 

[erf_beto]

This is really good. I love the first template the most, but the second might be good for conserving ink. I'll have to dig through those files and figure out how to use them.

Glad you liked it!

If I'm not mistaken, I think there are lots of other colors inside the zip. They were designed to follow the old DDM line, and then edited with the 4e colors in mind (you know, PHB blue, DMG red, MM green, magic item yellow, martial power purple...), and a simple B&W for saving ink - wich is the most important, IMO.

I would love WotC to publish a box set of rolodex index cards for monsters. I'd pay a hefty price. The problem is, for example, how many various Orc cards would be included? Never enough for what you'd eventually need. The set should come with plenty of blank cards for you to make your own edited monsters - or even better, the new Monster Builder would have a printing function that allows you to print edited monsters that match the index cards.

One side could have stats and powers with a small image; the other side could have fluff with a large image in the background.

How awesome and useful would that be?!

I don't think it be too hard, either. I don't know why they have never done this - it makes a lot of sense to me. They make quality cards cheaply already - can't they just do so in this organized manner?

I bought a carrying folder with 12 dividers. I print out all my monsters through the MB and just organize them in folder divided into 12 different categories so I can pull out needed monsters relatively quickly. This works. However I'd much rather just have a massive index card Monster Box Set.

Let's go WotC, snap to it!

I agree with you, they would be awesome and very useful - much more useful than the power cards deck, wich you probably are never going to _need_ when the CB already prints your powers with all the math done for you. Not to mention that you can't use all those with a single character, the ever increasing number of powers, that each player in a group needs one or more decks, that's a lot of ca$h!.

And I think that's waaay overdue: the first DMG talked about using cards for random monsters. True they may have thought we'd buy loads of DDM boosters to get them (the fools! ), but now that (sadly) they're (almost) out of the picture, maybe we'll finally see a Monster Cards - A Monster Vault Accessory for Dungeon Masters, or even a simple Export Monster Card function on the builder.

One can dream, right?

 

[sunrisekid]

Old-timers might recall that late 2nd ed. Monster Manuals were printed on easily removable 3-hole punch pages, one monster per page - stats on the front, flavour text on the back (an entire page of flavour text!).

It was trivial to take out the monsters for the session and bring them to the table in their own little binder. Additional volumes and alternate campaign monsters could be assembled together, organized as seen fit. I loved that system, so convenient!

But this talk of index cards is even better. I recently started printing stat details on 6x4 index cards for monsters that were easily re-skinned and frequently seen in the game (eg, kobolds/goblins can just as easily be thieves or thugs).

 

[buddhafrog]

Old-timers might recall that late 2nd ed. Monster Manuals were printed on easily removable 3-hole punch pages, one monster per page - stats on the front, flavour text on the back (an entire page of flavour text!).

Well son, even older timers who skipped over 2e had no idea this ever existed. Interesting.