Drama Cards

The back of the cards

Drama Cards are a series of cards to introduce drama into your 4e D&D campaign while simultaneously giving your players a small measure of say in what goes on. They are awarded at the DM's discretion, mostly for being a good player, and then played by the player at any time. While made specifically for a 4e campaign, some of the dramatic situations presented in the cards generalize fairly well.

Now available in Shadowrun flavor!

Unlike the Touhou Power Cards, the Drama Cards feature western art, and are therefore less shameful to use at your table.

The Drama Cards have been released in a beta stage, pending spelling and grammatical corrections.

Get them here. Bonus: MSE-set file and custom MSE data for style customization (yes, it will screw up your custom Magic: The Gathering cards).

OP's Post

Drama cards are a set of printable cards that you, as a DM, can introduce into your game as a reward for your players; give them out as a reward for your players providing you with a character history, story log, or if they go above and beyond with their in-game actions, do something amazing/funny in-game, or just outright bribe you.

This set of cards contains 180 different cards; some with mechanical effects, many with, appropriately enough, dramatic effects that may change the course of actions of an NPC, a monster, the environment or the story as a whole. The cards are sorted into different "values" - copper, silver, gold and platinum; generally reflecting how rarely you should award these cards. For example, in my campaign, I intend on printing them out in a ratio of 8:4:2:1, so that the copper cards show up a great deal more often. Whatever the case, I recommend you only use these cards if you're confident as a DM.

The cards are also sorted by type of action - Adventure, Assist, Attack, Combat, Defense, Movement, Recovery, Subplot and Meta; these categories are pretty self-explanatory, and their purposes for drama cards are deliberately vague; it's just another means to allow you to sort through cards you may or may not want your players to have access to, or perhaps only use in certain situations.

Using a card itself, in-game, takes no action, although there are cards that can only be used under special circumstances. There is no limit to how many cards a player may have, or how many a player may use at any given time; however, once again, this is just how I'm using them; you can limit a player to a set "hand" of cards, forcing them to discard a card if they want a new one, you may limit how many can be used at once, or when they can be used. Find the way they best suit your campaign, and use them as you see fit.

You can download the cards here.

You can download the MSE data files here and the MSE-set files here. (I made alterations to the Magic data files, however, so, if you have custom M:tG cards, this WILL screw them up)

If you use the cards in your game, I would absolutely love to see them in play; send me any pictures of the cards in action to dramacards@gmail.com.

And now for my damning moment of self-interest - if you liked these cards, at least take some time to look at the campaign I'm currently running, S.P.I.R.E.: Sharn Private Investigation and Risk Elimination; at most, if you're feeling particularly charitable, and want to donate some of your hard earned money to a poor DM, send me an email to the above address, and I'll happily provide you with the means (artists welcome, too).

And one final note: these cards are in, for the lack of a better term, a beta - I wanted to get these cards out to you, but, there's bound to be glaring grammatical errors and other problems; if you find them, let me know, I'll be sure to fix 'em up for the next "release". And keep the ideas coming; you guys really pushed this idea to the edge, and I want to keep going.

Rarity Generation

This is useful for having your players draw from whenever they do something worth a card, and you don't want to have to figure out the relative value of each category of card.

d20	Value
1-10	Copper
11-16	Silver
17-19	Gold
20	Platinum

Examples

• 
  Parry
• 
  Walking Arsenal
• 
  All Or Nothing
• 
  Gusto
• 
  Coldcock
• 
  Fluke
• 
  Just As Planned
• 
  The Gazebo Effect

See Also

• Shadowrun Drama Cards
• Touhou Power Cards
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition
• Dark Heresy Warhammer 40,000 Drama Cards Download