Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday: Futzing with nanDECK

Hello hello hello, it’s time for another TTR- wait, what day is it? It’s Monday? Not Tuesday? But that would make this… dear God… a Mechanic Monday? In this economy?

In truth, I don’t have a fun new game mechanic I wanted to noodle out today (a few in the hopper though, I should get on those)(holy shit my last Mechanic Monday was like 14 months ago), as I’ve spent the last few hours tinkering about and learning nanDECK, and my brain’s a bit fried but I wanted to get my thoughts together.

First off, it’s a cool tool.  Free, runs on my work computer, or off a USB drive, some great tutorials (shout out to Ryan Langewisch of Ludo Lodge), and boyyyyy does templating cut down on the repetitive work.  I’ve been using Fantasy GM Squared as my test, as I want to completely change layouts/formats from the one that’s in my existing prototypes, and this seems the perfect chance to try out some new ones without having to painstakingly redo every card.  I spent the day taking the old table that held all the card data in the middle of a Google Doc, put it into a spreadsheet (after defining the columns a bit better to suit my planned layout[s] in nanDECK) and poking around the basic unit and display settings, and then this evening I actually went downloaded the CSV and tried linking it and getting it to display various objects that corresponded to my columns.  Some mixed results! Lost a LOT of time because I didn’t cotton on to that crucial little “key length” field in Icons.  But still, promising - I just need to reconsider how I display all my little icons, and honestly, what the priority of information is.  And I should get at least a few standin images to go where art will eventually go, just so I can actually properly visualize the proportions of the icons to the illustrations to the text etc etc.

GOOD LORD note to self remember to do a find and replace all to change all the numerals-icons to multiples of the same icon.

All in all, I like it a lot.  It’ll take some getting used to (and even then, it’s not without some quirks that I don’t think will ever quite gel for me) but it’s about time I graduated out of… um… Microsoft Word and Paint as my main design tools.  For the automation, if nothing else.

I’ll leave you with some possible card layouts, then go cool off and get some rest.  Take it easy and have a good week!





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for Alice, left for Cat) and thro
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the application was rather more literal, which was a fascinat
Post a Comment
Read more