How Could TSR Have Made a Better Card-Based Product in 1992?

Last time: Making Sense of TSR's 1992 Collector Cards

Let’s go back to that question I posed at the start of the last post, regarding who or what these cards were for. Famously, late-stage TSR produced products with little or no consideration for market demand. The company started multiple unprofitable game lines and packed warehouses full of unsold product. These decisions nearly drove them out of business, and eventually forced the sale of TSR to Wizards of the Coast. Books and articles by Jon Peterson, Ben Riggs, and others cover this history in greater detail.

So it’s not hard to understand why these cards missed the mark. Someone had the idea of a card-based product for D&D (great!) but no idea how to develop, test, optimize, produce, and market such a product (not great).

But let’s say you’re a designer at TSR in the early 1990s and you get the assignment to create some D&D themed cards. What form should it take? 

Let’s say we don’t expect any TSR designer to predict how Magic: the Gathering (MtG) would soon reshape the market for card-based fantasy gaming products. You’re just expected to make the best-possible product with your circa-1992 knowledge.

Cut the NPCs. I didn’t go through and count how much, but much of this product line was composed of NPC cards. Obviously the pack I pulled was 100% NPCs, and in a pre-Internet world, it would be easy to assume that’s all there is to the product. Which is a shame, because the NPCs are the weak link here.

I mentioned the “let me tell you about my home game” energy in the “Cain Blizzard” entry last week, but the pack I pulled isn’t even the worst example by any means, because at least it wasn’t trying to be funny. For example, I assume this card was a joke from a designer’s home game, and while it may have gone over well in that context, it is neither amusing nor gameable as a commercial product. I have seen incredibly funny things happen in games that I can never properly convey to someone who wasn’t there; RPGs are truly one of the great “you had to be there” areas of humor.

Focus on the monsters. Monsters appeal even to those who don’t play the game. Ask someone what got them into fantasy, or D&D in particular, and there’s a good chance they will say dragons, or beholders, or some other iconic monster. They don’t need to understand what AC or HD is to understand that  the monsters are cool. Spells and magic items also fit more comfortably on cards than NPCs do, but they require a lot of context, and don’t sell the idea of the game on their own in the same way that monsters do.

Our hypothetical 1992 designer need look no further than TSR’s own history for ideas.

Update the cards with new art. No shade on the Jim Roslof art in those early 1980s cards. I like the old-school style, and I think it works well in the OG Monster Manual, or in the context of Dungeon Crawl Classics, a product with a primary audience that is mostly already familiar with RPG aesthetics. But monster cards should be, in part, a way to grab the attention of people without any previous exposure to the game. 

I mentioned how baseball cards would have been a common reference point for an American game designer in the pre-MtG world, but there was another then-recent model that could have been copied. Garbage Pail Kids cards would have played in a similar space. The whole subgrenre of trading cards from that era appealed to a sort of grotty, Mad Magazine rebelliousness. D&D monster cards wouldn’t have to go as far down that road, but some of that energy (on both the front and the back of the card) would have given the product a better chance of catching those young players that TSR was always after.

The art doesn’t have to be perfectly cutting edge for 1992; early MtG itself had a jumble of art styles, with inconsistent tone and art direction. And that included a fair share of MtG fantasy art that would have been more at home airbrushed on the side of a Ford Econoline van than on the cover of a glossy magazine at Waldenbooks. But MtG mixed in enough contemporary art, with a wide range of artists, so it never felt stuck in the past. Compare MtG to some of the CCGs that sprung up in its wake; whatever the gameplay merits of Wyvern, that art style was always going to feel like something off the cover of a yellowed Del Rey paperback, not a cutting-edge 1990s product.

Make the information on the back more gameable. There's room to build on the 1980s TSR cards beyond just art direction. As noted here, the cards from the early 1980s didn’t feature all the monsters, so a new product could serve in part to better capture D&D's ever-expanding bestiary. 

The early ‘80s monster cards are more gameable than the 1992 collector cards reviewed here, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. They hew closely to the style of the 1977 monster manual. The Gygaxisms of that era have a certain magisterial authority that reads well in the context of a big rulebook, but a card needs to be much more concise.

As with the 1992 collector cards, the wording in the 1980s cards is indifferent to the utility of the product, wasting words describing physical features that are already obvious from the art, or providing deep lore that’s unlikely to come up at the table. That kind of thing may be fine for a monster manual, but not for a card that is primed for table use.

But someone iterating on that model could have really focused on immediately usable information, even if we can’t assume that they would have foreseen the lean efficiency of the OSE house style for presenting monster information, or the impeccable utility of the Monster Overhaul, my current preferred monster manual. 

Custom reaction roll results? Typical behaviors and desires when first encountered? Tactics employed? A sample treasure hoard? It’s easy to imagine a lot of things that could go here, even limited to a 1992 design lexicon. The same blog I linked to earlier notes that D&D still hasn’t cracked this nut in the modern age, so perhaps the ideal D&D card product is still yet to be discovered.