Cards as alternatives to dice?

[Asmor]

Has anyone tried alternatives to dice for RPGs? In particular, I'm thinking it might be interesting to have a system based on a deck of playing cards or even tarot cards.

Ace through ten could just be straight "rolls" and you could either leave the face cards out of the deck, or assign special things to each. For example, King could be a critical success, Jack could be a critical failure, and Queen could be an automatic (but not critical) success, or possibly draw two cards and use both of them for the task at hand.

For normal tasks, it would be as simple as shuffling the deck and either drawing or cutting. In combat, it could get really interesting; people get a hand of 5 cards and can play them whenever they want to either make an attack or avoid one, and prevent damage if you'd rather have armor prevent damage than make you less likely to get hit. You have to use all 5 cards before you get a new hand, though... But there could be feats for warrior types that allow them to draw 4 new cards when they have only one left.

You could do fun stuff with the suits, too... Strong and weak suits, for example...

Actually, the more I think about this, the more I like it... I think I'm gonna start working on a basic system based on this...

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

Pincale - makers of Deadlands, Hell on Earth and Lost colony... the non D20 versions use playing cards for initiative, determining stats, other weird effects and Deadlands has a poker based spellcasting system. Uses both suit and value...

I really like Deadlands - think it's a lot of fun and is great for playing wild west/horror games - captures the theme well and the rulebooks are quite funny... I'm not so keen on the other 2 systems, have balance/fun problems. YMMV.

 

[Whisper72]

Would also be quite useful if you want to play in a location where rolling dice is not very handy (either cuz they roll away, like in an aeroplane, or cuz some dice can make a hell of a lot of noise on some tables depending upon the materials involved).

 

[Asmor]

Would also be quite useful if you want to play in a location where rolling dice is not very handy (either cuz they roll away, like in an aeroplane, or cuz some dice can make a hell of a lot of noise on some tables depending upon the materials involved).

Hmm... Roleplaying on an airplane... Somehow I think that might not be the wisest of ideas...

Excited player: "I cast magic missile!"
Unamused air marshall: "Could I speak with you in the back of the plane for a moment, sir?"

 

[Whisper72]

Asmor: well, that depends... I think that it may be obvious what you are doing if it is in moderate voices and with rulebooks and pencils in hand...

Now, to LARP in an airplane might be frowned upon.... but then again... dice are not an issue then...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Castle Falkenstein uses cards, not dice, for all task resolutions.

Torg uses cards for some aspects (and on all other occasions, a d20): Comptlicated Task resolution (More or less "dramatic" tasks), initiative, special events during combat, special bonus/penalties and options during combat or regular game.

How to use it in D&D? :
Maybe make it something like 17+4. Each card has its own value. You may draw as many cards as you like per round, but if you exceed 20, you subract 20 from the result number and can continue drawing. Everybody is limited to a certain amount of draws per task - maybe 10. (Depending on the actually used values for the cards... You might also want some cards with negative points to increase the chance for lower numbers again, so you come nearer to the probability distribution of the D20).
It becomes very complicated if you use it for damage rolls and so on - I suggest using the average result of the dice result. (Round numbers up, or double HP and damage values to get integers)

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[Mystery Man]

Somewhere I have a system of rolling up a character using a deck of cards. If I can find it somewhere I'll post it.

 

[Karanov]

The SAGA system from TSR (Dragonlance 5th Age RPG) used cards exclusively. Not the standard deck, though. And I heard that the original (german) version of Engel uses tarot cards. There are also quite a few diceless systems (i.e. without random task resolution) around (Nobilis and Amber for example).

I haven't played any of these games, though.

 

[evildmguy]

A few that haven't been mentioned:

Everway uses a Tarot like deck in handling most situations that require a random element.

The SAGA system uses a special deck of cards with five suits as its resolution system. It also uses the same cards to create the character. This is for both the Marvel game and the Dragonlance version.

The Amber system is diceless, using only a (very) few attributes, skills and role playing to determine the outcome.

There are many skill based systems that say if X number of successes are needed but the character has Y skill in it, where X < Y, the character automatically succeeds in non opposed skill checks. The system might still have dice but the point is that the rules allow for another type of resolution. There are other variations of this. One such is X is the target number and Y is the skill, or dice pool, and X < Y then it succeeds with a number of successes equal to Y - X. etc.

As I understand it, WW's LARP rules use keywords and attributes or abilities on cards to decide the outcome.

I am sure there are more but here are a few that I knew about.

Have a good one! Take care!

edg

 

[Asmor]

Here's what I've got so far, after 3~4 hours of work. It's inspired largely by White Wolf's systems, which I think works well since they're based on d10s and a deck of cards is essentially a d10.

It's still missing a lot. For example special abilities are mentioned in character creation, and are basically meant to be analogs to feats. In general they allow you to use aces as 11 instead of 1 in a certain situation, although there are going to be some with unique abilities.

The skills are meant to be entirely free form, although if I get far enough I'll probably include suggested skill sets for various settings.

I'm also using another mechanic that I came up with while working with it. Basically, instead of simply having hit points, there are four depletable stats to each character. Will is similar to hitpoints except applies to intimidation and interrogation and such. A PC who loses all their will points will tell their torturer whatever they want to know, for example. Fatigue and Stress measure how far your character's been pushed in physical and mental tasks, and having low amounts of either results in penalties to applicable tasks.