I'm designing a fantasy roleplaying game now that utilizes a deck of cards instead of dice for task resolution.
Each player has a hand of cards equal to their Stamina stat, and it costs actions to refresh their hand.
Players make 'tests' by melding two or more cards from their hand of matching suits or ranks, adding the values plus modifiers, and comparing the result to a target number to determine success or failure.
A major arcana is included in the deck for use as 'bugs'; the major arcana cards normally count as aces of any suit, but special conditions allow players to count them as cards of any rank.

I want to build a fantasy setting that ties thematically into the resolution mechanic I'm using.

I imagine a world ruled by a hostile personification of Causality, vast and inimical to humanity.
Before the age of man, an arthropod race of beings known as the prestiges* were able to escape from Causality, and now dwell outside of time in the limitless void beyond the stars. Though alien, these beings are sympathetic to the suffering of mankind.
The prestiges plant armaments and sorcerous lore in the past for humans to find in the future, so that humanity may fight and free itself from fate. They place certain weak monsters in the world as a sort of vaccine to train humanity's defenses against the corruption of entropy. The prestiges favor the unbound: orphans, amnesiacs, to the wandering and unattached drifters of common birth, because only the man without a past is truly free to choose his future.

*I was originally going to call them the triumphs, like trump cards, but then Donald Trump got elected. Now I'm calling them the prestiges, from prestidigitation. If you have a suggestion for a different name, I would love to hear it.


I'm going to use this thread to bounce ideas off of you guys, and receive feedback.
If you have any ideas on using playing cards or tarot cards and their iconography for world building, I would love to hear it!

Sources of inspiration I'm channeling:
D&D's Appendix N
Dark Souls/Bloodborne
Berserk
Jojo's Bizarre Adventures

This brings to mind Everway (link to Wikipedia entry)... but really just in the use of the cards. It had interesting ideas and the setting was a bit like Planescape but not tied to D&D-isms. It's pretty cool from what I recall.

I hate card decks as a randomizer. It's a pain in the ass to count cards, and it takes away from the immersion. That said, I have playtested a convention scenario for Through the Breach, based on the miniature game Malifaux . Here.

I liked Everway, from what I recall it didn't involve counting cards. Castle Falkenstein also used a card mechanic as do some storygames. I think cards can be a good mechanic, not sure why counting them would break 'immersion' anymore than adding dice rolls does.

You are putting the cart before the horse in my opinion focusing on the mechanics over what types of campaigns you want to support. Also the way it is currently setup players will too focused on fiddling with cards rather than focusing on roleplaying their character or the situations they find themselves in.

You are better off turning this into a boardgame and put in the same class of game like Tomb or better yet Arkham Asylum or Elder Sign rather than a roleplaying game. Of course set in the fantasy genre.

Quote from: Moracai;947789I hate card decks as a randomizer. It's a pain in the ass to count cards, and it takes away from the immersion. That said, I have playtested a convention scenario for Through the Breach, based on the miniature game Malifaux . Here.

I assume the immersion breaking part is being able to choose a card from your hand, which I can understand. Most RPGs I have played that use cards don't actually use hands. Everway, Hillfolk and Savage Worlds all use cards, but none of them use the concept of hands.

You will sometimes draw multiple cards in Savage Worlds, but it's a case of simply using the highest card dealt, and discarding the rest.

Quote from: Moracai;947789It's a pain in the ass to count cards

It's not blackjack, dude.

Quote from: estar;947800You are putting the cart before the horse in my opinion focusing on the mechanics over what types of campaigns you want to support. Also the way it is currently setup players will too focused on fiddling with cards rather than focusing on roleplaying their character or the situations they find themselves in.

I would have to ask Gronan what came first: the wargaming mechanics, or the fantasy milieu, when designing D&D.

I'm inclined to say that you can put either mechanics or narrative first in the design process as long as the developmental push and pull between them results in a satisfying synthesis.

QuoteYou are better off turning this into a boardgame and put in the same class of game like Tomb or better yet Arkham Asylum or Elder Sign rather than a roleplaying game. Of course set in the fantasy genre.

Roleplaying games are just boardgames with narrative.

Quote from: Baulderstone;947809I assume the immersion breaking part is being able to choose a card from your hand, which I can understand. Most RPGs I have played that use cards don't actually use hands. Everway, Hillfolk and Savage Worlds all use cards, but none of them use the concept of hands.

You will sometimes draw multiple cards in Savage Worlds, but it's a case of simply using the highest card dealt, and discarding the rest.

The melding mechanic gives players the ability to control the outcome of their actions within the constraints of their available resources. Randomness lies in how the cards are shuffled and dealt, and opposed tests add an additional layer of uncertainty.
In other words, it emphasizes player skill over randomness. I want players to have control over their actions, so that when they fuck up it is their own fuck up, and not just the dice fucking them over.



But anyway, I should shift gears and try to get onto the topic of card based world building. How might I utilize Tarot card readings to randomly generate scenarios?

Quote from: Cave Bear;947827I would have to ask Gronan what came first: the wargaming mechanics, or the fantasy milieu, when designing D&D
.

What came first was people figuring that refighting the Battle of Waterloo was fun. Then they figured out the rules on how to do that. Mostly based on research on how historical weapons works. Which was based on various military studies giving the effectiveness of weapons at various ranges. This was stated in percentages which was translated into dice rolls.

Quote from: Cave Bear;947827I'm inclined to say that you can put either mechanics or narrative first in the design process as long as the developmental push and pull between them results in a satisfying synthesis.

Yes in the general sense of designing a game but not in when designing a roleplaying campaign.

Quote from: Cave Bear;947827Roleplaying games are just boardgames with narrative.

If that your opinion then you are going to have issues designing a good roleplaying game. What RPGs are tools for a referee to use when adjudicating the actions of the players while interacting with a setting as a character. If the rules don't make sense how characters interact with a setting then they are not a good rule to be using to adjudicate what the players are doing. In most genres and setting characters don't cease to have the ability to hit something because they depleted a pool of resources. The closest concept is fatigue but the card mechanics you propose it not intended to depict this.

Also to state RPGs are just boardgames with X is silly it obvious to the industry and hobby that they are entirely different class of games and are treated as such.

Quote from: Cave Bear;947827I want players to have control over their actions, so that when they fuck up it is their own fuck up, and not just the dice fucking them over.

This is the heart of the matter. You don't like the randomness of the dice. What type of dice you were using that you felt were too random? There are different sets of probabilities associated with rolling the dice in different ways. For example 1d20 in the short term can produce wildly varying result compared to 3d6 which tends to generate numbers in the middle even over the short terms. Then there are the diceless systems like Amber or Pundit's Lords of Olympus.

Quote from: Cave Bear;947827It's not blackjack, dude.

Most people play Blackjack without counting cards.

But if you want to play at top tier and you're playing a card game - you count cards when possible - whether you're playing Blackjack, Uker, Poker, Crazy 8's, or an RPG.  If you know how to count cards and don't, you are intentionally nerfing yourself (or just slacking off depending upon how you look at it).

Without some kind of reason for being, this is just a gimmick.

You can lock the thread if you want.

When I started the Snails, Rabbits, and Monkeys threads, I went into them with a pretty clear objective: to use imagery from medieval marginalia as a starting point to brainstorm ideas applicable to medieval period fantasy roleplaying games. I didn't go into any details about what I intended to use those ideas for exactly. Had I done so, people would have just argued about that.

I gave too much context in the first post. I should have just posted a picture of cards and said "How have you used Tarot card decks in your games." In the future I will not share so much with you guys.

Quote from: Cave Bear;948465I gave too much context in the first post. I should have just posted a picture of cards and said "How have you used Tarot card decks in your games." In the future I will not share so much with you guys.

If this is meant as a response to Pundit's post, I read him more as saying that you didn't share enough about your idea, not that you shared too much.  It may be a novel mechanic, but what's its purpose?  Why would people continue to use it after the novelty has worn off?  If you don't have answers to those questions, then you're just wasting your time trying to develop the idea.

Quote from: Cave Bear;947827I want players to have control over their actions, so that when they fuck up it is their own fuck up, and not just the dice fucking them over.?

Show us on the doll where dice touched your character in a bad way.

Unless players can simply decide what cards they get and how many, there is randomness, it's just at a different point in the process.  Dice don't fuck anybody over, that just shows a misunderstanding of both probability and how games work, which is a shitty reason to write a new game.

People are still arguing over the use of cards in RPGs in 2017?