In preparation for the kickstarter I wanted to record an actual play of Fearful Ends, both as promotional material, and as a practical example of how the game plays. It will be a very short intro scenario with a very small group of players, likely folks from TDR for all you Wandering DMs fans out there. This does mean running the game online, which presents an interesting problem – how do we show the cards?
Mental and physical stress are now both represented with cards, which is really the big selling point of this game. Personally of course I prefer to run these games in person with physical cards, but I’d like to support playing online as well, and I definitely need that for recording an AP. So I started investigating options.
The big two contenders were Roll 20 and PlayingCards.IO. The latter is incredibly light weight, it really does nothing more than create a virtual shared deck of cards and playing space, that’s it. That was very appealing to me. However, I suspect Roll 20 will be a bit more familiar to the RPG playing community, so that’s what I’m targeting.
It has a pretty good system for creating virtual decks, allowing players to draw cards into their hands, and play them into the shared space. It also has all the nice little tools like the ability to flip cards, move them to the top/bottom of a stack, and group them to move stacks around as one object. My favorite feature though is that you can click on a card and it pops it open in a big window all by itself. With as much text is on my cards, this is actually pretty important.
The picture included here is a quick test I did with the current prototype cards. No, that’s not the final art/layout of the cards, that’s still being worked on. But I hope to have that complete in time for the AP, we’ll see how it pans out. Ultimately I’m hoping I can figure out how to package this up and distribute it as part of the digital version of the game for folks who want to play with PDFs and VTTs. Ultimately not my preferred method of play, but in this day and age I think it’s important to support that style.
