I was curious about games that use playing cards instead of dice. I had a thought about a game that would work exactly like a dice-game except players would choose a card out of their hand instead of rolling a die. (Maybe give the players 5 or so cards, and let them pick a new card after everytime they used one.) I became curious about how other RPG's that used cards worked.

Thanks in advance.

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.

Hi Tim,

This is a quick list off the top of my head.

Tarot: Psychosis, and many other free/internet games (do a search)

Playing cards: Castle Falkenstein, Dust Devils, alternate system in Armageddon, Nine Worlds (in development), Criminal Element (in development), La Famiglia (in development)

Customized cards: Everway, Lace & Steel

The "in development" games above have good draft versions available. I suggest a quick run through the games listed at the Resource Library at the Forge as well.

I've probaby missed tons of titles. Anyone else, please help out.

Best,
Ron

Hmm. Savage Worlds uses a poker deck for initiative determination, and so does its parent game, Deadlands.

Best regards,
Grex

Torg used a specialized deck for story/narrative help and initiative & combat resolution (but used a d20 for skill tests etc).

2300AD used a standard deck of cards to determine NPC motivation.

Starchildren uses cards for its main mechanic. Each player has a hand, and plays suits to activate skill numbers on their character sheet which then get compared to GM played cards which are used at their face value.

Miles Christi (a wonderful French RPG) used a similar system, except that cards were simply added to your skill number like a die roll. It had an awesome mechanic where you could burn high cards out of your hand (probably failing the current task) placing them into a "miracle pool" which could then be used to produce acts of divine intervention later at moments of great duress.

Starchildren!! I knew that. I am ashamed not to have included it.

Best,
Ron

Heaven & Earth 2nd Edition used a Tri-Stat compatible card-based mechanic.

Best,
Adam

thanks Ron for the mention of my game (Criminal Element). My game uses a mechanic based on the rules and card-draw systems of Blackjack. sadly, my previous host has taken the original playtest file off of hiw website and my updated PDF isn't ready for consumption yet. I should be getting a new website all of my own this week, so i'll hopefully be able to have the original, semi-crappy playtest version up for you in about a week.

the other games mentioned are all quite a lot of fun. hope you have a good time with your research.

laters.

The original Trystell system used a standard poker deck.

I find the problem with using a hand of cards as a random number generator in an RPG is that players tend to hoarde high cards in their hands for really big actions. That and sometimes when players get low cards, they never use the lowest ones and they simply sit in the player's hand taking up space.

beholdsa wrote: players tend to hoarde high cards in their hands for really big actions.

That and sometimes when players get low cards, they never use the lowest ones and they simply sit in the player's hand taking up space.

And there are games where this isn't an issue... games where each separate task or conflict is a new hand. Or games where you draw 5 cards, then have to use them all before you can refill...

rafial wrote:

beholdsa wrote:

That and sometimes when players get low cards, they never use the lowest ones and they simply sit in the player's hand taking up space.

This is ultimately self correcting. If you don't find opportunities to slough your low cards, eventually your hand will fill up, and you'll be stuck with losers when it really matters. So it forces the players to occasionally deliberately choose to fail if they want better odds later.

Well... What happens then is the players start to find ways to perform trivial actions to set down a card, pruposefully failing said trivial actions in order to get rid of unwanted cards.

Easy: You make sure that not a single action is trivial. Only resolve an action when it MEANS something.

Shadows in the Fog [no link, because new version coming soon] uses Tarot cards exclusively for everything.

As to the whole low cards problem, if you make it worthwhile not completely to whack every obstacle in your way, then the low cards become useful. That is, if difficulty is 5 and you have a 3 and a 7, and the 7 will get you critical success (2 over difficulty) while the 3 will get you failure, then the 3 is basically weak. But if the 3 gets you a success if you pay for it in some cool way, as in Shadows where you essentially have to invent interesting plot elements as a way to pay for success [stolen from lumpley's Chalk Outlines], then players with neat ideas will use the 3 instead of the 7 because the 3 gets success and fun while the 7 is (a) boring and (b) useful for something big.

Don't know if that helps, but a new version of Shadows will arrive soon and you can check it out, or else search the Forge site for the game and read the previous edition and commentaries from brilliant Forgeites (about 8 months back, actually, but a search will find it all).

Chris Lehrich

My own Card Captors Cabal uses Tarot cards for resolution.

http://ivanhoeunbound.com/ccc.html

jdagna wrote: 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.

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

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....

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

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).

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.

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

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

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

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.

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