This is a guest post by Troy Taylor (who goes by Carolina on the GMing Q&A Forum), who won 3rd Place with this entry in the Treasure Tables GMing Tools Contest.
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My favorite GMing tool is my homemade initiative index cards.
The best part of the initiative cards is that I no longer have moments where I have to tell a player: “Oh, it looks like I skipped your turn this round. Sorry.”
Description
Each 3×5 index card has a dark box in the upper right hand corner where I can record their opening initiative score.
Very quickly after initiative is rolled and recorded on each card, I can shuffle together the PCs’ and NPC/monster cards in their initiative order, and combat can ensue.
I use a blank card or one marked “End of Round” to indicate the bottom of the pile.
A PC that delays his action simply gets his card turned on its side in the shuffle. Any changes to the initiative order during an encounter simply means re-arranging cards accordingly.
Additional Use
In addition, these initiative cards have become an integral part of my game prep, and have been an immense aid to my organization.
I’m no longer juggling large, loose sheets of paper with NPC/monster stats. I prepare an initiative card for each NPC/monster planned for an encounter, then paper clip it to the appropriate page in my three-ring binder, which contains my notes for that adventure.
When that encounter comes up, I simply pull out the correct card(s) and the first initiative roll quickly follows. No longer do players have to wait for me to find the right stats in an index or monster manual.
Moreover, the paper clip comes in handy too. The left side the card has the hit point entry, including a sliding scale (1 through 10) where I use the smaller loop on a No. 1 size paper clip to track the NPC/monster hit points.
If the hit point total is greater than 10, I use a tally in the 10 slot to indicate the multiple of 10 the hit point total is currently at. Or, if the card represents more than one monster of the same type, I simply make tally marks on the scale.
Afterward, used cards are kept in two alphabatized index file boxes, one for NPCs, the other for monsters. They are kept handy if I ever need to use them again.
Each card is essentially a PC sheet/NPC stat block in miniature. I have three kinds. The first two are forms with blanks that I can fill in by hand, the third is made using a computer database, which I find is more useful for keeping NPCs on file, reprintable at a moment’s notice. All three cards were made using AppleWorks.
One card is for general fighter type NPCs/PCs, another is for spellcasters, and the third is the database version which includes the most information.
I have come to rely more and more on the database version, since I can prepare them more quickly than the handwritten versions. I always keep the handwritten blanks around, however, in the event there is a random encounter or the PCs take the adventure down unforseen paths.
I have provided versions of all three cards as PDF attachments: sample 1 and sample 2.
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Thanks, Troy!
Initiative cards were a hot topic in the comments on the TT post Tools of the Trade: Index Cards, and they’re a great implementation of a simple tool. Troy added a lot of functionality to his versions — I particularly like the sliding paper clip idea.
Do you use initiative cards in your games, homemade or otherwise? They really shine in D&D 3.x, but they’re handy in other games too — have you found any other RPGs that benefit greatly from using cards like these?
An addendum: I just realized that I can actually type text into the TGM PDF files and then print them out. While I’d still like a singular card to print, this development makes the cards even more useful to me. No more handwriting all the stats in for me!
I have to second Larry’s comments. The Game Mechanic’s initiative cards are very handy, and yes, they can be edited and printed out in batches of 4. They can also be saved and stored for future use.
I would also like to second Martin’s comments on Carolina’s sliding paper clip idea. I’m intrigued by this. I also like the idea of attaching the initiative cards to the section of the adventure that they are used. Seems so obvious now.
Good post, and congrats Carolina!
I had first encountered the idea of intiative cards for d20 games with the release of The Wheel of Time rpg in 2001. At that time, the Wheel community was looking for ways for GMs to juggle all the statted NPCs, since the game relies more heavily on encounters with humans than it does with monsters.
It seems funny, but none of the various intiative card creations then appealed to me then, primarily because they were being designed four to a page, not for index cards. Printing out and then cutting up regular bond paper didn’t seem worth the bother for me personally, although many others reported using the tool successfully.
What got me thinking about making my own was the release of new stat block in the DMG2 and in Dungeon magazine last summer. Seeing the stats diplayed in an organized, tabular format made much more sense than the dense paragraph. The problem was those numbers were sometimes spread out over two columns of type or split between pages, depending on how they were displayed in print.
Then I remembered that back in the 1980s, when my friends and I played Basic D&D, we had used 3×5 index cards as player sheets. It worked out great, because we could just paper clip that card in our three-ring binders, carry a few dice and we could adventure anywhere — on the bus, at lunch, after school, etc.
So when I made these cards, I blended the three ideas — the Wheel of Time NPC cards, the new stat block and our old D&D player cards. The design of the cards has gone through several variations since last summer — but two things have remained constant: Initiative scores in the upper right so I could glean them at a moment’s notice and a hit-point tracker.
I just wanted to say thanks again to TT for having the contest. It’s been great fun and I was honored to be selected from among so many very fine entries. A lot of really good ideas were presented in this contest.
Troy, they look great. Only problem is I don’t have AppleWorks or even Photoshop to make up my own. Otherwise, I’d probably do the same.
AppleWorks is an integrated word processor/database/spreadsheet for the iMac, and in this case the database has a layout function (basically I can design any layout format to display the information).
I imagine that the same could be done with any other integrated software, such as Microsoft Office or Open Office.
I tried out initiative cards recently. I enjoy the, however I found out that I fiddle with things too often for my own good, so I do tend to ruin the purpose of the cards by pratically shuffling them like a deck of cards. 🙁
So, if you don’t fidget, I highly recommend using index cards 😀
(Troy) I just wanted to say thanks again to TT for having the contest. It’s been great fun and I was honored to be selected from among so many very fine entries. A lot of really good ideas were presented in this contest.
You’re welcome! It was a fun contest to run, and a tough one to judge. I hope you like your prizes. 🙂
The two sample links are giving me fits.
Whenever I click them, they take me to the login page, but after logging in, it just goes to the main section of the forum.
Anyone else having this problem?
Fletcher: I just tried to DL them, and had the same exact problem. I can’t figure out what’s going on, so I PM’d Troy and asked him to email them to me — that way I can host them locally, and skip the login issue entirely.
Sorry about that, and thanks for letting me know!
The samples are now hosted locally — if you couldn’t DL them before, try again. (Thanks, Troy!) 🙂