FIST\deck
For a TTRPG, FIST character sheets are remarkably minimalist. Drawing one of the 32 Role cards and of the 216 Trait cards is enough to get started. Because these are print-and-play cards rather than a product, it makes sense to treat the cards as disposable from the start, meant to be written on and discarded as necessary.
Role cards were honestly the easy part, because there are only a few number fields and the role texts are pretty short. If I were to make this as a physical product, I would probably use the back side for either character creation rules summary OR sort of a graveyard marker where you describe how this character was KIA.
Unlike many other games, FIST weapons don’t have complex attributes so there’s no need for a separate weapons form and having simple empty gear grids works wonders.
Readability first
Traits range from super succinct to pretty wordy. Making them readable meant I had to do actual usability testing for varying font sizes, line heights, letter-spacing and paragraph alignment. I included Space Grotesk because it’s the brand typeface of FIST: Ultra Edition.
Key takeaways from the testing:
- Justified text without proper hyphenation is absolutely terrible. You can see the wild gaps on some of the cards in the right column.
- Atkinson Hyperlegible deserves its name, being the overall winner.
- Space Grotesk doesn’t really work as tiny paragraphs, still great for headings though.
- 8.5pt text with 10.4pt line height and reduced letter spacing looks best even with a shitty printer.
- Figma for some reason rounded percentage line heights to pixel values, so the 10.4 is slightly off.
Final card layout is pretty much pure form-follows-function, including the gear in the footer because of course each trait comes with some accessories or weapons.
Print and cut and play
The published deck contains 36 Role cards, 216 Trait cards and 9 blank gear cards arranged in a 3×3 grid for printing on common A4 and Letter paper. Players print and cut as many pages as they need,
Download the deck
Based on FIST: Ultra Edition by CLAYMORE, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
You’ll need these rules to actually play!
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