Flora and Fauna table

[zot]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

Hi Zot,
I would add a column that gave the page number where this monster could be found, (e.g. ItL pg 56 for Basilisk).

Warm regards, Rick.

Derp!

Yeah, that's important.

[guymc]

Just off-hand, which would you rather have:
1) A book of beasts with adventure hooks listed with each.
2) A deck of beast cards with pics and stats and a separate smaller booklet of adventure hooks.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by guymc

Just off-hand, which would you rather have:
1) A book of beasts with adventure hooks listed with each.
2) A deck of beast cards with pics and stats and a separate smaller booklet of adventure hooks.

Hi Guy, I would prefer #1.

The reason is that creature cards have a strict limit to the amount of space for art and write ups. Where as a book can give as many words as they want to describe weird monsters. And I like weird, unusual monsters that may take several paragraphs to describe well.

Warm regards, Rick.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by guymc

Just off-hand, which would you rather have:
1) A book of beasts with adventure hooks listed with each.
2) A deck of beast cards with pics and stats and a separate smaller booklet of adventure hooks.

I infinitely prefer #1. (Because I also want the descriptions that usually come with Steve's creatures, and cards simply won't give me as much information.)

[Jim Kane]

Agreed on #1 - A book of beasts with adventure hooks listed with each.

Disagree on #2 - A deck of beast cards with pics and stats and a separate smaller booklet of adventure hooks.

I understand that *cards* are a very popular and proven gaming vehicle for things like: Magic the Gathering and Pokemon, but *personally*, I would not be into having to deal with, store, keep track of, and shuffle through a bunch of fiddly cards - where 150 beasts would be roughly 3 decks!

I have enough headaches to keep track of already ;-)

I guess if the sentence: "Cards are a superior information vehicle and product format to a traditional book in the case for TFT, because _______"; I might have a different feeling.

Because I cannot complete that qualifying sentence, I *must* vote for the traditional book format; however, if someone can express a legitimate benefit (beyond: "cards are more modern for modern audiences, and card games are popular"), I might be swayed.

JK

[Chris Rice]

I'd much prefer the book, although I can see that cards might attract a new crowd, perhaps appealing to a younger generation of players.

[John Brinegar]

One difference between cards and books is that cards allow you easy access to only those monsters you're using in a particular encounter. You can pull the cards and put them next to each other instead of having to flip through the book. I will confess that this is not enough to make me prefer cards to books, but others may feel differently.

[Steve Jackson]

My two cents worth, as a GM rather than a designer, is that cards have two big advantages - you can quickly hand them to a player, and they are easy to randomize. I can see myself wanting to randomize in order to get, say, three thugs from within a deck designed around a small range of point values. Completely random monsters is questionable. Oh, look, you found (rolls dice) three Plutonium Dragons.

[JLV]

There's some value to cards based on Steve's point. However, that's not the kind of cards we're discussing here -- we're talking about a monster deck that (presumably) has one of each kind of monster in it.

The kind of deck I think Steve is talking about is what we used to do in my very first group -- create a bunch of 3x5 index cards, each with a thug, or an orc, or whatever, on it and then keep the decks separate so if the players ran across an bandit group, the GM could randomly pull however many "thug" cards he needed in order to create the group on the fly without having to sit there in the middle of the game and make them up.

At one point, I had several hundred of these cards in an index card box, with little dividers separating the types of creatures. Alas, all disappeared over a decade ago...

[Shostak]

I'd prefer option 1, though only if it was an either/or case. I might prefer to have both to take advantage of their respective advantages