What are some RPG's that use playing cards?

[xiombarg]

My own Card Captors Cabal uses Tarot cards for resolution.

http://ivanhoeunbound.com/ccc.html

[Mernya]

Dragonlance: Fifth Age used cards instead of dice, though I don't think their cards were the same as a standard deck.  The card values represented the numbers off of dice, and the suits represented various kinds of tasks (and thus playing the magic suit on a spell gave some sort of bonus).  You had five cards in your hand at a time, unless you were injured - wounds were represented by reducing the number of cards you could hold until you got to no cards left and couldn't do anything.

Not quite, but close.

The cards were more than just a resolution system, they were part of the actual character design. To understand the mechanics, you have to start there.

There were suits that corresponded to traits (I might be off on some nomenclature, it's been since 1996 Gen Con that I demoed it) + Dragons suit.

Physical
Strength : Sword -> Melee Weapons
Endurance: Helm -> Armor

Agility: Shield -> Shields
Dexterity: Arrow -> Ranged Weapons

Mental
Reason : Moon -> Magic
Perception: Orb -> Acute or Dimunitive Traits

Spirit: Heart -> Mysticism
Presence: Crown -> Leadership

Dragons

Each Suit went to 9, Dragons went to 10 I believe

Character creation had you draw some cards. One for each Attribute and then a couple others to determine your starting 'level', social and wealth status, your nature, and demeanor.

If you placed the correct suit into its corresponding field at character generation, you got an A. If you placed it into its couplet mate (ie, put a Sword (strength) into Endurance), you got a B. If you put it into the same side (a physical in a physical), you got a C. If you put it on the other side, you got a D. If you used a Dragon, you received an X.

So each score was a number and a letter. The letter determined (usually) what you could use.
So an A in Swords could use any melee weapon, while an X in Endurance might not allow you to use Armor. An A or B in Spirit or Reason gave you magic abilities. An A gave more spell points and spheres to use. (3 I think, 1 for a B)

You didn't necessarily get 5 cards in your hand. You had as many cards based on your adventure level. You could start with 3-6 cards, I think. Five was ideal though.

Mechanics resolution worked like this...
Any given task had a difficulty based on a multiple of 4, up to 24 I think. Difficulty was not revealed to the players.
The character described how they were resolving something and the appropriate trait is declared. The player must lay down a card equal to or better to the difficulty, minus your base score in that trait and any bonuses.

Example: Difficulty is 12 to strike the bad guy. Weapon is a +2. Strength score is 6, for a total of 8. The card put down must be a 4 or better.

Suits (and to a lesser degree the 3 moon colors) play a part in this, too. If you put down a Dragon and don't make it, that's the equivalent of a botch. If you put down the suit that corresponds to the task (a Sword in the example), you Trump. That lets you add the top card of the deck to your total (and this can happen as long as you keep drawing the right suit). This is how you get the truly mythic feats. You always replace the cards in your hand unless you take wounds.

Take 5 points in woulds? You need to lay out 5 points in cards and hopefully can do it in one card.

Anywho, that's the old SAGA system

[jhawkins]

On making low cards useful, and this is purely hypothetical, suppose a mechanic like:

Player has a hand of cards to play, high ones are good.

GM doesn't have a hand but turns over cards from the top of the deck when doing an opposed resolution. The more difficult the opposition, the more cards the GM turns over.

To make low value cards useful, the rule is that the player can play a card of the appropriate suit to replace a card the GM has turned.

Example:
GM turns over a 10 and a 5, giving a total of 15.
Player has only a 9 and a 3 of the correct suit. That would give a total of 12, lower than 15 thus failing.
But the player can replace the GM's 10 with the 3 from their hand.
Now the GM has 3 and 5 for a total of 8, whilst the player has 9 and success.

Like I say, purely hypothetical, although I would like to move to a card-based mechanic (not sure why) and have put in some thought.

Cheers, Jim

[JamesSterrett]

A slightly different take on card use:

I use them in lieu of dice for the small LARPs I run for friends.  So far, so un-interesting to all of you; cards 1 - 6 for results 1 - 6, mirroring a d6.

More interesting, perhaps, is an experiment I tried once or twice:

When players draw cards against each other, they draw from the opposing player's hand, and keep the card.  Thus, if I draw a 6 from your hand, and you draw a 2 from my hand, I'll win - but now my hand is 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, making me easier to defeat next time around, while your hand is now 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, making you harder to defeat next round.

In practice, the mechanics of this got too complex for group combats, especially since my target audience includes players who have never, ever played any kind of RPG before, and I intentionally keep the game system as rules-light as possible to make the game as accessible as possible.

In addition, in the course of a 6 to 8 hour game, there wasn't enough combat to make the card-switching mechanic worthwhile.

However, it may prove useful or entertaining to one of you....

[Doctor Xero]

On a purely personal level, I am not comfortable with games which use Tarot
cards as substitutes for dice.

It seems a tad irreverent, sort of like running a game with communion wafers
as the playing pieces.

That's a personal response, however.

Doctor Xero

[apeiron]

Quick Draw uses a poker deck:

http://digital_imp.tripod.com/down.htm

@ i like the idea of the pool of luck, that you may either hold or spend at will, forcing players to choose and prioritize their actions.  Sometimes a person will have a bad day, nothing goes right (low cards) and sometimes you can do no wrong (hand full of good cards).

[AlecAustin]

I think it's interesting how most card-based mechanics seem to be based off of some variation on poker.  I know that someone mentioned a game based on blackjack earlier (Criminal element?), but it seems like there's a whole lot of territory out there that's still untapped as far as card-based mechanics go.

I may say more on this topic in the design forum later; I'm working up a draft of the homebrew system I've been using in my current campaign.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

And now that it's finally posted, my proto-game Zero at the Bone uses playing cards, specifically a variant (or hideous mutation, really) of the solitaire game Accordion.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

I think it's interesting how most card-based mechanics seem to be based off of some variation on poker.

I'm not sure whether this is a valid assessment. Deadlands, I thought, introduced Poker as the core mechanic; prior to that, most were more related to War, which is a Whist variant (like Bridge): high card wins contest. Either that, or they were straight out draw against difficulty (which I think is what we're working on in our current design).

I could also see some interesting adaptations of a rummy variant, but I haven't seen them.

--M. J. Young

[Hereward The Wake]

When I have used cards I vary the value need, so some times the high cards are useful but at other time the low cards are usefull. In that way the players have to plan ahead a bit in case a situation arises needs cards that they may not have.

JW

[Nuadha]

Another thought on using cards:

If you use them without keeping a hand but just flipping over the next card, it keeps the numbers more balanced than dice rolling.   For example, if you have a deck of cards and the ace is the best result possible that you can pull and you pull two aces in the first scene of a game, you have greatly reduced your chance of pulling an ace in the climactic battle ahead.   If you keep pulling low cards in the beginning, your luck is guaranteed to eventually turn around.

Sure, the laws of averages say that dice will eventually change for you, but you may have to wait awhile.   In a card deck, it is more likely to happen the further down the deck you go.

[clehrich]

Shadows in the Fog, my game-design project (see weblink below for an alpha-version; beta coming soon), uses Tarot cards; the point is to produce occult effects, so I hope it doesn't overly offend.

For me, the advantage of cards is that players have hands, and can spend cards in those hands deliberately.  That is, if you need to win now, you can spend a high card.  The thing is, you don't get a card back automatically, and not rapidly, so you need to be a bit wary about blowing high cards since you don't know when you'll get more.

I actually eliminate Nuadha's thing of finite randomness to some degree by having multiple decks shuffled together, making card-counting or its random-generation equivalents a mild effect.  Still, it does mean that if you have two Fools, the chances of getting another soon are small.  I recommend one deck per player, including GM, which makes a pretty fat stack to shuffle as it is.

You also keep your hand from session to session, which makes long-term planning of numerical strategy an issue.

The other nice thing about cards is that they naturally add another dimension, in that you have suits; Tarot of course adds Trumps as a suit as well.  If you make these meaningful, you have different kinds of successes, useful for different purposes, adding a major strategic element to the fortune mechanic.  So long as you correlate this to something in the game-world, something I think is important when straying from pretty standard dice-mechanics, you have a whole range of new IC and OOC dynamics to play with for developing stories.

Chris Lehrich