Every so often, I get the chance to work with the folks Dirty Vortex, designing or editing game materials. This week, I get to make a set of critical hit cards for some new game lines. These are in the d20 5th Edition ruleset, starting out in a Fantasy theme and possibly expanding to Modern and Science Fiction settings.
This seems like a good opportunity for a portfolio piece and a good chance to talk through my design process.
Expectations
I’m making a set of cards to represent critical hits in tabletop roleplaying games. These products have existed for some time, and they were made especially popular with the series of card products that Paizo Publishing made for their Pathfinder roleplaying game. Generally, these cards are meant to either stand in for a rule book (so players can just keep a small pile of cards representing their skills or abilities in front of them rather than flip through a few hundred pages of rules) or expand some aspect of gameplay. This set does the latter.
[su_spoiler title=”What’s a critical hit?” icon=”arrow-circle-1″]A critical hit is when a character or monster makes an exceptionally good attack roll (typically the greatest number their attack die can roll, like a 20 on a 20-sided die). In game terms, this means the attack will do additional damage, usually double or triple its normal amount. In storytelling terms, this means the attack hit an especially vulnerable or critical area of its target.[/su_spoiler]
I’m creating a deck of 54 cards. As I begin, my contract doesn’t specify whether these will be playing cards as well, but we’re leaving that option open once we see how the cards themselves shape up. The cards may also include coin flip results and other odds and ends to make them extremely versatile at the table.
Each card will have several possible results on it, depending on hit location, attack type, effect or other traits. Plenty of products exist that provide 3-4 different effects depending on the original attack (e.g. describing different effects of a club attack versus a sword attack). We want to do something different, but it’s my job to figure out what different will look like.
My job is text creation and ensuring the material will fit on a standard playing card. However, I put a lot of thought into production medium whenever I’m making something, so my design process will include a little bit of layout to make sure it works.
Early Design Process: Clarifying Boundaries
I asked for and have been given a green light on gore heavy material, so some of the screenshots below are going to be censored. I didn’t ask for juvenile or prurient reasons: there simply are not as many products in the d20 system that cater to an adult audience as there used to be. Heavy Metal was influenced by and strongly influenced tabletop roleplaying games for decades. In the early 2000s, Wizards of the Coast and a few other publishing companies (like AEG) put out some material meant for adult players, but the audience wasn’t large enough to give much traction to the product lines. This is probably one reason D&D has become so popular again with kids and families: the gameplay is a little simpler and the content is more PG.
But, other companies have produced material meant for older audiences. White Wolf, for example, started in the 1990s with its Vampire: the Masquerade line. They saved the truly dark and adult content for their Black Dog imprint, but very little of their game content could be described as “family friendly.” (My daughter regularly picks up my second-edition copy of Changeling: the Dreaming‘s main book to tell me how pretty the pictures are. The joke about that game is that the art has to be lighthearted and beautiful because the game itself, centering on themes of lost childhood and innocence, can be pretty depressing.)
So, as I craft my materials, I’m going to think about products like Human Occupied Landfill from Black Dog, the World of Darkness Combat book from White Wolf and some of the more grotesque things I’ve seen in the Palladium series.
Getting Started
There are several ways to approach card design. Start writing on notecards with a pen. Fire up InDesign, make a playing card template, and get to doing some layout. Play through some dummy combats by myself with some D&D characters, and write down interesting ways to describe critical hits.
Everyone’s going to have a different process. Because I’m making a series of individual documents (individual cards) that use the same template, I’m going to fire up Excel and start making card content. I’ll start with a simple table that I think will represent the cards.
Draft 1: Pieces without a Plan
I made a sheet with 54 rows, differentiated first by attack type, the degree of critical effect (Low being a regular critical hit, Medium being a hit with some additional effect and High being something truly devastating) and spaces for descriptions. As I worked through it, I found that there wasn’t enough structure to really wrangle in my thoughts. A high effect, single-target melee attack to the head might blind or incapacitate the target, but what about a high effect, single-target ranged attack? Wouldn’t that be the same?
A few cards in, I decided to copy the descriptive text into another sheet and take a new approach. This is also around the time I got the gore green light.
Draft 2: Hit First, Damage Second
I remembered the hit location rules from Cyberpunk 2020. First, roll to hit. Second, determine hit location. Third, determine damage. So, I decided to lead off this table with hit locations and a magnitude note. I simplified the attack types to range, melee or social for now. I also added some calculation columns to make sure I wasn’t writing too much. I’m assuming 70-100 words per card total, so my text blocks need to stay around 25-30 words if I’m doing three per card or 20-25 if I’m doing four per card.
I’m still running into the repetition problem here. To take the same example above: a high effect hit to the noggin isn’t necessarily going to be different if the attack was a sword or an arrow, but it might look different if it was a club or a thrown hammer.
Hmm. Ideas…
Draft 3: Nature of Trauma, Location, Effect
Alright, let’s get medieval on this problem. I’m talking specifically about the old Wounded Man medical texts from the middle ages. A head wound isn’t just a head wound, and a laceration isn’t just a laceration. A laceration to the head? Now we’ve got something we can treat!
Now, five attack types is going to be a challenge. If all five go onto a card with 70-100 words, then I’m looking at 15-20 words per description. A creative name for a critical effect might have 3-4 words, and I’ve got to have a narrative description and a mechanical effect. (No, those aren’t in the contract, but they aren’t not in the contract either. I’m making game components I’d actually buy.)
But, this problem feels easier to solve. Each card already affects a single location. I could probably consolidate some of these other fields to get more space for creativity.
Draft 4: Efficiency of Space
Creativity took the form of making the hit location and its effect the main features of the card. The damage type (a sword, a club, a fireball, etc.) was changed to flavor text rather than mechanical effect—after all, if the point of a critical hit card is to say “you bonk your opponent on the noggin, so they’re stunned,” it really shouldn’t matter whether the bonk was a lightning bolt, an arrow or a club. Since my task was designing the text and the general mechanics of the cards, I left the iconography up to my client, but I advised him that I was generally thinking of something like the graphic below (his work).
It doesn’t quite follow along with all of my planning processes along the way, but the ultimate constraint of words per card is what led to the consolidation here. I would love to do a more detailed “wounded man” set of cards, but experimentation here leads me to believe I would have to create a separate deck for each type of wound. That would be fun, though.
In talking about it with the client, that option seemed a little more plausible for other game settings. In a sci-fi game, for instance, it would be a little more reasonable to make an entire deck of crit cards for laser and blaster attacks.
Final Draft
The final spreadsheet was delivered. Following some other design notes we’ve been tossing around, the cards double as a set of playing cards (note the 5♣ in the top corner) and triple as coins (note the ➕ in the other top corner). We’re still trying approaches to make a 54 card deck work as a set of D&D dice, but I think that’s a larger math problem than I should be solving at 5 cents a word.
Ultimately, the cards do the thing they were supposed to:
- Critical hit name and effect (top and bottom of card)
- Multiple functions per card (playing cards, coins)
- Add description to something that can become a simple math problem in D&D games
- Speed up gameplay by giving quick numbers to a critical hit rather than asking people to roll several more times
The project has also opened up a few other design doors, specifically in thinking about narrower combat types, as well as options for things other than combat.
Update to be posted when the product is live!
