WIP: Monster Cards

One of my original ideas for a story/game was that writing combat sucks in a lot of ways. Reading about heroes bashing up villains isn’t generally very fun; there’s only so many ways you can do “and they stabbed each other with swords and some of them died” without being boring. Also, there’s the Civil War story problem always hanging over your head: The heroes win in the end and everybody quietly agrees not to talk about that when discussing your story. So when writing stabbing with swords action parts, most if not all of the swords get stabbed into the bad guys, and very few, if any, go into the good guys.

So I wanted to have the audience play with that part. Yes, the good guys still need to win in order for the story to progress, but at least the reader can have fun with that a little by playing with the struggle. Plus, it helps define the characters in combat better to set up what they can do, and then let the players, well, play with them. Since the Also-Rans are pretty mediocre as far as RPG characters, they’ll struggle, but that’s by design and hopefully not Cait Sith levels of why god why design.

Of course, if you need to stab bad guys with swords, then you need bad guys with which to stab. These are very much WIP in that I have no idea what a good amount of HP and armor for monsters should be until I playtest, but I wanted to give my mediocre starting area monsters some abilities and create card art for them, since I’m going board game for this.

Behold! My monsterinator! I’m setting them up to make their moves like a video game RPG; you bounce a 6 sided die for each one and they do whatever move that is. So each kind of monster will have some attacks and some abilities, just like the players do, but they only get one move per round. Fair? Well, there’s more of them..

I haven’t ponied up for the icons yet, so here’s my citations for my sources. I’m trying to keep it obvious enough what they do but will have a little “here’s what the icons do” cheat sheet for each player:

Health icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

Heart icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

Poison icons created by Smashicons – Flaticon

Shield icons created by IYAHICON – Flaticon

Blind icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

Stunned icons created by CapVora – Flaticon

Silence icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

Pacifier icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

Forbid icons created by Roundicons Premium – Flaticon

Nerf icons created by Febrian Hidayat – Flaticon Goal icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

Rpg icons created by Febrian Hidayat – Flaticon

Gaming icons created by Vector Squad – Flaticon