Using cards instead of dice

[Lorthanoth]

Everway used faux-tarot cards for just about everything.

 

[Jack7]

I've been experimenting with designing a Deck of Many Things for Combat, and other challenge situations.

Rather than determining combat it would modify it.

Most of the time we use a diceless form of combat and skill resolution, but sometimes my players want to use dice (I give them the option to use a diceless form, or a dice-form for each particular combat or skill situation) and when they want to use dice then I'm going to allow combat cards to modify combats, such as in cases of parry, blow evasion, unanticipated counter-strike, etc.

Also I'm gonna try to design the new card-sets to allow unanticipated things to occur in combat, as well as in magic-use.

 

[half-dragon dragon]

Thanks everyone for all of the recommendations, I'm always looking to check out new games.

 

[Dr. Confoundo]

I've run a whole Mutants & Masterminds campaign using cards instead of dice. There are basic rules for it in the Masteminds Manual, but the short of it is:

Discard the face cards from a two standard decks, giving you 1-10 eight times. Reds are face value, blacks are value +10. The players have a hand of five cards, but they don't draw more until they run out of cards. This way, they can choose when to use that good roll, but they'll still have to use the crappy cards before they can get any more. M&M also has hero points, which you can spend to discard your current hand and draw five more cards.

I enjoyed it, because it gave the players some amount of control over what they were doing in combat. Nothing worse than setting up the BBEG for a big smackdown, and then rolling a 1.

 

[DracoSuave]

The old SAGA system for Dragonlance/D&D used a special card deck for various resolution effects. Depending on your 'level' you got to hold x number of cards, and could not redraw until all were used. Basically, it was like pre-rolling a series of d20's, then choosing when to use them. You could save the '20', hoping for a big event, or hope you could spend the '1' on something inconsequential before it's the last card in your hand and has to be spent.

Actually, your hand size was your injury tracker. You had a 'trump' which was something if you matched the suit of, you got a free additional card to add. Cards were replaced after using them, however if you got injured, you didn't replace the card you used.

And the system, in practice, wasn't that great, and sacrificing Dragonlance to it just to generate a new system to sell is one of the reasons TSR is not spoken of in polite terms in many gaming circles.

 

[Walt C]

The Unisystem (by Eden Studios) has a cards-only option. It's described in WitchCraft (which is a free download) and can be used for pretty much any of their games.

Walt C

 

[Piratecat]

There was a Marvel Superheroes RPG that used cards instead of dice. I rather liked it, but the system failed to gain traction.

This was WotC's Marvel SAGA, designed by Mike Selinker. My whole group loved this game. Its major weakness is that it assumed that I'd rather play a Marvel Superhero instead of my own, but once you got past that it was consistently fun and exciting. Nowadays I prefer MnM, but I'd certainly go back and play this again.

 

[M.L. Martin]

And the system, in practice, wasn't that great, and sacrificing Dragonlance to it just to generate a new system to sell is one of the reasons TSR is not spoken of in polite terms in many gaming circles.

Except for the detail that Dragonlance had already died as a game line a year or two before SAGA was created, and it was only on condition that it be resurrected as a non-AD&D, diceless game that TSR let it go ahead at all. From TSR's point of view, trying to do AD&D DL again would probably have been throwing good money after bad, given how long it had been stumbling, and that a major relaunch push had just failed in 1992. The new system, though, was an attempt to try and attract all those novel fans who it was believed would have been interested but put off by the bulk and rules-heaviness of AD&D.
Personally, I think SAGA was too innovative a system for a setting like DL that is wedded to AD&D 1E assumptions and a single overarcing metaplot, but I'm a heretic that way. ;-)

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Deadlands uses poker hands to resolve huckster's magical power. The better the hand, the more powerful the spell. Wicked range of power there.

Did they fix it? I think my copy of Deadlands is first edition, and whomever created the table for spell effects had a seriously warped idea of the relative frequency of poker hands. Even considering the possibility of drawing extra cards, hucksters' magic would fail most of the time.

I created an initiative system using cards, once. My players were afraid to even playtest it, so I have no idea how it would have gone. Lemme see if I can dig up the email (it was over five years ago).

Here we go:

I was thinking about the 3E initiative system and what I liked about it and didn't like about it, and it struck me that one thing I don't like about it is its predictability. A goes, then B goes, then C goes, then A goes, then B goes ... it's not very cinematic. There's no "ebb and flow" to battles.

For instance, I was watching Spider-Man last night, and in the climactic battle with Green Goblin, the Goblin just PUNISHES Spider-Man. Beats the living hell out of him, without Spider-Man having much of a chance to respond ... until the tide turns, and Spider-Man beats the living hell out of the Goblin. A LOT of cinematic fights go this way, and it's a pretty cool dramatic technique.

So I was trying to figure out how to do it in 3E. What if the first round of combat went normal, and after that every four rounds or so was randomized? IE, each participant would have four index cards in the mix, instead of one, and they'd be shuffled together.

Think about it ... it's POSSIBLE that your PC would be able to act 4 times in a row without the villain being able to respond. (And vice versa, of course, though in party-on-one fights it's very highly unlikely NOBODY would get a chance at the villain during his rampage.) If the villain gets his actions in early, you have to suffer through them, but you do so in the knowledge that soon things are gonna change and you'll get YOUR turn. Similarly, if you get all your actions in, and don't quite put the bad guy down, there's a lot of dramatic tension involved as you wait to see how he bounces back.

What do y'all think?

This has the potential for a billion unforeseen implications, so it's not something I'm advocating switching to. But would y'all be up for giving it a try sometime in one of our games' battles, just once or twice, to see how it plays?

Actually, the easiest way to do it would be to use a deck of playing cards, and assign each participant one rank (Ace through King), then shuffle and draw the cards in order. Either unused ranks could be set aside, or the DM could use an unused rank as a signal to pause for some description or to bring the environment into the battle.

Hmmm. This could really be a cool system, especially for a super-heroes genre game.

 

[Wik]

It's funny how the two people in the RPG design contest are thinking of using cards in their game design... I was planning on using cards for my initiative system (a la Savage Worlds). Great minds think alike!

In any case, there's a lot you can do with a deck of cards. If you had four attributes, each tied to a suit, you have a good starting place.

(P.S. The initiative system would also be tied into the magic system).