I'd like to design a deck of cards and need some idea's on glyph designs. That artwork will be as simple as possible. Theme is not so important, consistency is.
The deck will be 60 cards organized such that each card will belong to three distinct groups. One group having 5 members, another group having 4 members, and the last group having 3 members (ie: 5x4x3 = 60 cards).
For example, the theme I came up with is a stick figure. The stick figure will carry a shield in one hand, a weapon in the other, and a helmet on it's head. The shield will be one of 4 distinct designs depicting the army (similar to the 4 suits in a standard deck of cards). The weapon will be one of 5 weapons (ie: sword, pike, lance, flail, bow&arrow, ?). The helmet could depict one of 3 possible ranks.
Here's my dilemma: I want a system that is simple, makes sense, and is consistent. In my example, having a card depict a soldier carrying a shield and a bow doesn't make much sense. Solution would be don't have a bow be one of the weapons, or don't use a shield to depict that army. It's the minor details that I'm having a hangup with. Maybe instead of 5 weapons, I have distinct character classes. What sort of simple symbol could I use for each class. Then if I do use character classes instead of weapons, then I need to rethink the helmet. Maybe instead of a helmet, I have three distinct races (ie: Humans/Elve/Dwarves?), and what symbol would I use to depict those?
I'd like to get my symbols down to a very basic art design. For my deck, I'll be needing 12 symbols (ie: 5+4+3), with the thought that I will be putting those symbols on a custom 12 sided die as a later date.
Anyone care to shed some idea's on how you brainstorm a consistent system of symbols to be used in a game? I'm hardly the artist, so the simpler the better :-)
Thank you, everyone for your excellent idea's. It just so happens that what I'm trying to design is a generic card deck with no particular game in mind.
Say we had a deck such that each card could have a rank of {1,2,3,4,5} and belong to {A,B,C,D} as well as a color of {red, green, blue}.
Imagine a trump game where you call 1's trump. That implies 12 trump cards are out there. If A's are trump, there's 15 trump cards out there. If red was trump, there's 20 trump cards.
The thought was to have a generic deck of cards to craft various games from. However, a theme always helps. So like a regular deck of cards, I thought four suites representing four armies might be nice. Each card could depict a person's class (ie: nobility, scholar, warrior, spiritual, worker). Then have each person belong to a race as well (elves, dwarves, humans) or be a rank within that class. In such a themed deck, one could spin back stories if they wish. Elves have banded together, dwarves and humans must stop them. The warriors declare militia rule, everyone else fights to stop them. Each army of course wages it's own war, and so on.
So now come the symbols. A theme would be nice, but I'd like to keep everything generic. That's where I thought of just having a stick figure. Left hand shield denoting army, helmet on head (or head itself) denoting the race (or rank?), and item in right hand denoting their occupation or class.
As for custom dice, there too, this generic deck works out well. All symbols can easily fit on a single 12 sided die. Such a die could be used to create it's own game, or supplement the cards for an interesting game.
As a side marketing toy, this sort of theme might be cute if you had a board game where your figure (ie: a generic person), could change it's shield, helmet or occupation as they move along depending on how dice or cards are drawn. I'm not necessarily trying to build a specific or targeted deck of cards. I'm really working on a generic game system.
There's no particular game in mind. So far, all I've done is visualize various classic card games played with a deck like this. Imagine playing rummy using such a deck. One could be quite creative in the melds they make. Scoring is also interesting as the probabilities change depending how the sets are made. If, hypothetically, this deck/dice/figurine with pieces was ever published as a game, it would be done so with an open ended rule set. Play the game, or use the pieces to make your own. That sort of idea.