I'm thinking about doing my second RPG with a card-based mechanic rather than using dice. The cards would be a custom deck that each player would need. So I have two questions:

1. Is it financially reasonable, at this point, to expect people to buy a deck of cards along with an RPG rulebook? What are the printing costs for cards?

2. If the primary mechanic for the cards would be matching suits, using a tarot-like deck, is it too complicated to also number the cards and have "target numbers" in addition to suit-matching?

Justin,

Do you think you could outline more details of how you see this resolution system working out?  It's hard to guess whether it'd be reasonable or not with what we have.  For example, if the entire game only needs a deck of cards, that seems reasonable.  Also I can't understand the second question really without more context.

Sure thing, sorry about that.
I'm thinking about a deck with 6 suits (earth, air, fire, water, arcana, and quanta) and a sort of major arcana that would count as two of the minor suits, or as 2 of a single minor suit. So The Inferno would count as two fire cards, but The Door could be used as arcana or quanta. Currently, I'm thinking a deck would be 60-70 cards.
The success mechanic as I had initially envisioned it would involve matching cards of the same suit and converting cards of other suits using character special abilities, with certain suits acting as trump suits in different situations. Fire would be the best for offense, arcana for magic abilities, etc. Players would draw something like 3 cards+their skill or attribute rating.
A friend of mine brought up the idea of also numbering the cards so that numerical values could be added together towards a target number or to determine damage values. I'm not sure if this wouldn't add an unnecessary layer of complexity.

As I've outlined the system above, I think each player would need their own deck of cards. As such, I'm sure no one would want to play if they had to shell out, say, $15 for the cards. Thus my question as to the print on demand price a deck of tarot-sized cards would likely cost.

So this is a specialized deck that would have to be sold with the game and couldn't be bought outside of the game?  Would each player need their own or would one for the table do?

The mechanic is sort of confusing to me but I think I get it and it might be the kind of mechanic that plays easier than it reads.  That said, it doesn't seem to me that adding up totals at the ends adds significant complexity.  Certainly not the level of complexity introduced by changing suit.  That could be a bear.

That said, these are vague impressions which actual play may disprove (though if it does, and you go with it, you're going to have to be careful about how you word things in the rules).

JustinB wrote:

1. Is it financially reasonable, at this point, to expect people to buy a deck of cards along with an RPG rulebook? What are the printing costs for cards?

Is there Print on Demand for this kind of thing?

Can your idea be adjusted to work with a standard tarot deck?