[Homebrew] Cards > dice

[loverdrive]

What it says on the tin.

The inherent issue I see with dicerolls is that they generate randomness after the fact, and, combined with consequences for failing the roll, it makes rolling low stats a bad idea.

A Cutter with 3 Skirmish and 0 Consort is going to avoid ever rolling for Consort unless really hard pressed (which is unlikely, there probably will be someone with better stat around) or it's really low stakes (in which case, who cares anyway). It leads mostly to calcinisation of characters into whatever they are good at. Risk avoidance and all that.

So what I'm proposing: cards! And with just a little elbow grease, dice can be painlessly replaced with cards in almost any system.

UNO cards are great for it — they are already just numbers. Remove all the picture cards (or numbers that can't happen on the dice you are replacing) , shuffle a couple decks together and voila! At least anything up to D10 is emulated one-to-one, D20 would require some workarounds like playing two cards together.

So the advantages:

1. You can strategize around your hand, consider your next move, weight the utility of leaving high cards for defence vs spending them on actions
2. You can play around with simultaneous resolution, to add the component of yomi (reading your opponent) into the game — you can feint an attack and make the opponent waste a high card when a low one would suffice, for instance. I would advise against incorporating suits/colors, unless you make them unequal and orthogonal in effects.
3. You now can attempt actions you wouldn't do otherwise. A Cutter can attempt to diffuse the situation instead of always relying on a specialized Face character for social interactions, for one

The way I adapted it to Blades is very simple: whenever the rules tell you to roll dice, play a card from your hand instead. Then, draw a card for each dice you'd normally roll. Then, discard to four.

Works like damn clockwork. Made the game much, much deeper than it was before, and added nice texture where PCs do their bread-and-butter expected actions to generate resources, and then spend those resources where it matters.

 

[The Firebird]

Fun idea. It seems to me it would increase the power level of the PCs in a significant way. And especially would interact with the push yourself & devil's bargain mechanics, which seem less useful because the benefit is tossing a bad card rather than increasing your odds of success.

In typical play, pushing yourself on a skill of 1 increases your odds more than pushing yourself on a skill of 3. But now the benefit is the same in both cases--you draw more.

 

[Koloth]

I think you left out the part about dealing the cards out to each player to form a supply hand. At least your advantages imply each player has a hand vs drawing the unknown top card for each die 'roll'.

Assuming player hands, interesting idea. One possible downside is if a combat(or other encounter) goes long, players may expend all the good likely to succeed cards and the next several rounds are fail, fail, fail, fail until all the low cards are expended. Could also see a player getting a crap hand and trying to avoid any encounters until the next redraw. If you know all cards left are no higher then a 4, probably a bad idea to engage an encounter if you can avoid.

 

[Deset Gled]

With dice, a proficient player can calculate odds and know something about the probability of a success. But the outcome will always have a randomness to it.

In this system, a proficient player counts cards instead. If they see all the 8s and 9s played early, the know that later tasks will fail until the deck is reshuffled. Other variants of gaming the system abound. For example, one player could intentionally horde 1s to ensure they don't get shuffled back in.

IMNSHO, that kind of prescience and control is not good for the game or the story. YMMV.