I don't know if this is the best place for this post, but oh well, here goes.

I've decided to design a hack-n-slash dungeon-crawl with a card-based resolution system. You can read about the concept here in the indie design forum. (Note that originally I was going to use dice.) I came up with a basic combat mechanic for it and would like to hear some criticism on it, if y'all don't mind.

Basic Rule: Clubs > Diamonds > Spades (> Clubs) has a Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship. Hearts are trump.

When a combatant attacks, they throw down a card, any card. The defender then has a couple of options:

- The defender can defend by throwing a suit that beats the attack's suit. (ie defend against Clubs with Diamonds.) A defense automatically succeeds. However, if the defense is equal or lower than the attack, then the attacker retains initiative and can make another attack. If the defense is higher, the defender steals initiative, and the process starts over with the old defender being the new attacker.
- The defender can immediately counter-attack by throwing a higher card of the same suit. This immediately steals initiative, however, the original attacker gets a chance to respond to the counter (by either defending or counter-attacking himself).
- As I said, Hearts are trump. A Heart beats any other suit, regardless of value. Throwing a Heart is considered a counter-attack and follows the same rules as a normal counter, with the exception that a Heart can only be countered with a higher Heart.

Throwing cards continues until one combatant can no longer defend/counter. Losing a round of combat incurs a Wound. Players will probably have like 5 Wound points. In the event that one player runs out of cards, that player automatically loses. If both players run out at the same time, then they go into sudden death mode. Each player picks one card from the deck and plays it. If by chance the defender defends the attack, then the players pick another card, and so forth until one player loses.

I played a few practice rounds by myself. I gave myself 8 cards for each hand, though in the game the number will probably differ between players. It usually took 4 or 5 attacks before one of the players lost, and 3/2 of the time ended by one or both of the players throwing a Heart.

Things to still be decided:
- How to refresh the Cards. At first I thought about the winner taking all the cards left in the loser's hand. But that might reult in "steam-roller" effect for winners. It might also lead to a built up of low cards in the winner's hand. So I thought maybe Cards will just refresh to a pre-set number each round. I also thought about tying the number of cards to Wound levels.
- How Magic will work.
- How skills/ equipment/ and special maneuvers will effect combat.
- How to resolve non-combat tasks. Non-combat tasks will be kept to a miminal (see my game concept). I thought about the GM assigning a Target number, and then tying suits to task types (Spades = physical, Diamonds = Mental, Clubs = Magical, Hearts = any, maybe?).

Thanks in advance!

BTW, I wanted to thank everyone who posted in the other "What are some RPG's that use playing cards?" thread. Though I didn't get a chance to check out all the games listed, I tried to take into account the issues with card-based mechanics that people brought up.

Kind of reminds me of playing eucher.. and I never did like playing it.

Timfire... have you read Dance of Steel? It handles a similar situation to your own, and IMO more effectively. Points I don't like about yours:

1) Having a single trump suit puts a lot onto luck. The largish hand (eight cards) will have helped minimize that effect, but then you get eight cards which starts to push the decision-making threshold and slow the game down. Smaller hand sizes will help speed things up (cf. Shannon Appelcline's 'Thinking Virtually'column at RPG.net) in terms of player cognition, if you can counterbalance the increased effect of luck... but IMO a trump suit would make this tricky.

2) Counterattack with trump - even a lower trump - particularly bugs me. Your counterattack setup makes it actually a parry&riposte combination, because it stops the attack as well as striking back. Which is fine, but makes it pretty strong in combination with point #1.

One way to reduce this would be to have counterattacks function more like stop-thrusts... they do their damage, and may (but may not) stop the hit from landing due to this. [Seventh Sea handles this very nicely, in the Vodacce sourcebook, but mangles this by having it limited to only one, generally unavailable, school of the fence.] A version yours might use:

- Damage = reduced hand size (or, discard N cards), discarding at random.
- A counterattack using a higher card (higher same suit, or higher trump) does its damage first. Lower cards are slower, whether or not they're trump, and do their damage only after the first one lands, if then.
- As soon as you're hit for damage, pick up your card play and lose the required number of cards at random from your hand. If that takes away the card you had played, too bad - the attack's been stopped. Otherwise, your attack follows and the attacker retains the initiative.

Something like that.

But I think you could do much, much worse than to use a variant on Dance of Steel, if this is the sort of thing you want. I've played it, it's very satisfying and clean. (I play with the timing on parries inverted, though, such that parrying "before" the strike means that it's ready in time, and parrying "after" the strike means that it was a hasty and less effective defense.) Adding additional reach brackets would be doable, if nasty (no Spiked Chains, or it's broken), as would some option to spend game resource for additional actions (card plays) per round - the latter wouldn't even be hugely overpowered.

- Eric

At first I was skeptical, but I've come to like this idea. I know a few people who are turned off to rpgs by the use of dice. I like the Castle Falkenstein mechanics, especially those proposed by Christopher Kubasik, but I see a lot of promise here too for a simple, card-based mechanic.

timfire wrote: Things to still be decided:
- How to refresh the Cards. At first I thought about the winner taking all the cards left in the loser's hand. But that might reult in "steam-roller" effect for winners. It might also lead to a built up of low cards in the winner's hand. So I thought maybe Cards will just refresh to a pre-set number each round. I also thought about tying the number of cards to Wound levels.

timfire wrote: Things to still be decided:
- How Magic will work.

timfire wrote: Things to still be decided:
- How skills/ equipment/ and special maneuvers will effect combat.

timfire wrote: Things to still be decided:
- How to resolve non-combat tasks. Non-combat tasks will be kept to a miminal (see my game concept). I thought about the GM assigning a Target number, and then tying suits to task types (Spades = physical, Diamonds = Mental, Clubs = Magical, Hearts = any, maybe?).

Harlequin brought up issues with the trump suit, and he may have something. I play-tested it a bit more (with myself, again) and I think I made trumps too powerful. I realized that a round ends with throwing a heart like 90% of the time. The general strategy was "play what you can, and when you can't throw a heart." Thus each round was really a test of who had the highest heart. That's no good.

I still like the idea of hearts being special, so maybe, rather than hearts being trump, ie beating all suits, they could simply be wild, meaning you can substitute a heart for any suit. Thus they will still be valuable, but not all powerful. If they're low they won't automatically win.

Harlequin:

...but then you get eight cards which starts to push the decision-making threshold and slow the game down. Smaller hand sizes will help speed things up...

Forgive me if I duplicate someone else's comments; it's a longish thread, and I don't want to forget things so I'm starting to write while I read.

Question: why are the suits in that order? There was a thread here long ago in which we old-time cards players questioned the issue in another game. The traditional suit order is Spades>Hearts>Diamonds>Clubs, and if you tamper with that order, you should have 1) a good reason and 2) a good mnemonic, because otherwise your card players are going to get messed up and blame the game for it.

Question: how can both players run out at the same time? It seems to me that I don't play a card until I see what card you've played, and you don't play a card until you see what card I've played, and thus when I play my last card, you either have another card or you don't. If you do, I lose; if you don't, I win. So either you weren't thinking clearly about how it works when you wrote that, or I didn't get how card play progressed.

Hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

I've spent a lot of time looking at card based ideas for combat, as I have found that dice systems do not reflect the realities of combat in a satisfactory manner, for me at least.

I started looking at using a regular card deck, and have now moved away from it. And am now using illustrated cards, similar to an old GW game that never went beyond appearing in WD, called "Chivalry"

Some points based on what you have,
You currently don't have any avoidance/dodge movements. That has the potential to allow a breaking away of the combat at which point one could refresh the deck. In this situation the more skilled fighter would seek to keep the fight going longer to force the oppoenet to run ot of cards and then be stuck with only being able to draw random cards off the deck. The weaker fighter would be looking to use the dodge to get the hand refreshed.

Another point, you don't deferentiate between attacks, are they cuts, thrusts, grapples, punches, knees, hitting with the hilt of the weapon etc. It is the choive of attack and reaction that creates an enjoyable tactical game and it is this that make the real leap away from dice driven mechaincs. This was my main reason for moving away from regular cards as I was having to adapt my ideas to fit with the cards rather than being able to come to a satifying solution based pon what i wanted.

All the best
JW

I just looked at the Damce of Steel rules. They were good for what they did, but are too based in fencing, I know that is what the author says they are for that is fine. But they rely too much on only movement forward and back. This doesn't really work for weapons 0r rather styles that he mentions. Even then during the periods when the use of the rapier and small sword were being used, off line and other forms fo of non liner movement were incorperated.

JW

M.J. Young wrote: Question: why are the suits in that order?

M.J. Young wrote: Question: how can both players run out at the same time? It seems to me that I don't play a card until I see what card you've played, and you don't play a card until you see what card I've played, and thus when I play my last card, you either have another card or you don't. If you do, I lose; if you don't, I win. So either you weren't thinking clearly about how it works when you wrote that, or I didn't get how card play progressed.

Hereward The Wake wrote: You currently don't have any avoidance/dodge movements. That has the potential to allow a breaking away of the combat at which point one could refresh the deck.

Hereward The Wake wrote: you don't deferentiate between attacks, are they cuts, thrusts, grapples, punches, knees, hitting with the hilt of the weapon etc. It is the choive of attack and reaction that creates an enjoyable tactical game and it is this that make the real leap away from dice driven mechaincs.

In my rules I have a leap back which can be used to break combat, if the defender does this, the attacker can beat the move and follow up with another attack. I also use a dodge move, which can be used to gain a break or an advantage, it is more of an off line movement to the side in this case of the defender succeeds and has cads in hand they can launch a counter attack. If they don't have the cards in hand then they can a tempt to break distance to allow a refreshing of the hand.

I only asked as different attack can require different reactions to counter them, and you therefore can develop a stratergy. you can also develop different "styles" favoured by fighters working with mainly thrusts/cuts etc.

Don't get me wrong, I think that there is a place for dice in RP, but I think that cards work just as well, on their own and in other situations with dice. I also make sure that the players descibe what they are going to do and how they are going to do it, that combined with a card will help modify the chances of success for the action

JW

timfire wrote:

Hereward The Wake wrote: You currently don't have any avoidance/dodge movements. That has the potential to allow a breaking away of the combat at which point one could refresh the deck.

Good point. I was thinking I might add some special maneuvers that required a face card to perform. Maybe a disengage movement could be one of those special moves.

Hereward The Wake wrote: you don't deferentiate between attacks, are they cuts, thrusts, grapples, punches, knees, hitting with the hilt of the weapon etc. It is the choive of attack and reaction that creates an enjoyable tactical game and it is this that make the real leap away from dice driven mechaincs.

I will add some moves, like grappling, and I will probably add a "range" feature. But you're right that I don't have a provision for different weapons. But it's interesting that you bring up "leap[ing] away from dice driven mechaincs." Not wanting to derail this thread, I think I may start a new thread on that topic.

timfire wrote: So you think it would be better make it Spades = Wild, Hearts>Diamonds>Clubs(>Hearts)?

timfire wrote: You can only win a round of combat if you throw an attack. Thus, if both players only have 1 card left, and the attacker throws his card and the defender defends by throwing a different suit, then that isn't considered a win. (However, if the defender responds with a counter-attack, ie throwing a higher card of the same suit, then that would be considered a win.)

This is why I believe that you need, moves that can break the passage, a jump away, or dodge move that you can try to carry out to get free and take a short beather and in game terms refresh the hand.

Also with counter attacks. Theoretically any parry can be tuened into a counter attack. Like wise a counter attack 'action' is not sure to work. My feeling with my system now is that their is no specific counter attack card.
it is rather something that you can try to do with any parry.

I feel that you have to have some form of extra affect to the cards, based upon the skill of fighter. otherwise the drawing of the cards deteremines too much nad largely make the situation rather too random.
I use a combat pol of dice, these are used to beef up an attack parry etc. to increse it chances of success.

All the best
JW

Hereward, and everyone else, thanks for the advice.

Hereward The Wake wrote: This is why I believe that you need, moves ... that you can try to carry out to get free and take a short beather and in game terms refresh the hand.

Hereward The Wake wrote: Also with counter attacks. Theoretically any parry can be tuened into a counter attack. Like wise a counter attack 'action' is not sure to work. My feeling with my system now is that their is no specific counter attack card. it is rather something that you can try to do with any parry.

Hereward The Wake wrote: I feel that you have to have some form of extra affect to the cards, based upon the skill of fighter. otherwise the drawing of the cards deteremines too much nad largely make the situation rather too random.

Hmm, I was originally hoping that this thread would turn into a more general discussion about card-mechanics.

If I may drift my own thread, I find designing mechanics around cards to be interesting. The suit dimension has me thinking about more than just numbers. (I could use the cards as simple random number generation, but I don't think that would fully utilize the potenial of the card medium.)

I also have to find ways to make all the cards valuable, or at least useful, due to the well documented phenomonon that you will run out of "good" cards unless you reshuffle. This is why I'm trying NOT to correspond certain actions with specific suits. For example, if Spades = attack (ala Dance of Steel), than that would obviously make Spades extremely important. This is also why I said you can defend with low cards. High cards are obviously more valuable, but low cards are useful as well.

BTW, can anyone tell me where I can a summary of Castle Falkenstein's rules? I was unable to find one in my web search.

Going with the drift. I find that the potential in cards is great, but is limited by the inherant nature if the regular card set. One needs to customise te deck by blending a number of decks or completely design a deck which suits the ideas one wants in the system. I found that I was spending more time trying to work around the cards and adapt my system to that rather than finding out if the system worked on its own. Why only have 4 houses, if you need 6 use 6 etc. and the value attached to the cards does not always help, a more average value spread generally helps with inly a few very high and few very low cards.

JW

I've been tempted for a while to use baccarat-style resolution in a roleplaying game. Off the top of my head, I imagine the following situation:

Each participant (individual or group) in a conflict gets a certain # of cards from the deck, to put in their hand. How this # is determined is left up to other parts of the game system.

Then, going around the table, the participants put a card down in front of them. This is their starting card. Ace is one. Tens through Kings are all zero. (Maybe face cards have special abilities that can be invoked).

Anyway. After the initial cards are put down, it's a free for all. Anyone may place any card on any stack, ally or enemy... the numbers are added together, and if it goes over 9, it goes back down to 0 and starts over again. All cards MUST be distributed.

Conflicts are then determined starting with the person with the highest total (remember, 10=0) and going down. What they can DO in the conflict would be based on the suits they have in their pile (some use for the face cards right there).

Anyway, just some brief thoughts.

quote"timfire"

I have added in a "disengage" feature that lets combatants break from a fight. My idea was (1) combatant's must hold the initiative (2) Play a Face card. When I get around to play-testing we'll see if the Face card requirement is too strict.

Do you not think that it will be rare for the person with initiative wanting to disengage? I can see it happening, but it would be just as likely and more benficial for the person on the recievng end, to try to get away, using the 'disenage' instead of a parry and get away?!

I understand what you mean with the counter attack, but I started to find that even with the same number of parry/counter attack cards in the deck it was a bit arbitrary, for me any way, whether it was real or cinematic

I also understand the idea of the different sized hand for the different fighters based upon skill. Again I was finding it a bit to random. The theory was that the more skillful fighter would have the chance of getting better cards but of course that didn't always happen, which is fine, but I was getting the better fighter going to often for it to feel right for me. I've not found the right solution yet!

How you play your hand also has a big effect.

I like the idea that the playing of the hand is the key it really adds to the skill of it which is what I wanted, as I am sure that you do to.

All the best
JW

timfire, you said you were looking for more generic comments on card mechanics, and when reading these posts, my mind starts to wander...

I have some ideas that will need a couple of decks to realize. It's also probably best suited for onetimers or just a night of orc-bashing fun, although it could be used for longer campaigns.

Say whe define the four suites as the foru different characteristics of a character (a bit Falkensteinesque):
Spades - Brawns (Fighting, Taking damage)
Hearts - Charisma (Priests?, Bards?)
Diamonds - Brains (Magic?)
Clubs - Speed (Athletics, Archery)

Ok, so we sit down at the beginning of the evening to create characters. The GM has prepared a number of decks (at least as many as the players divided by two, preferrably more) by dividing them into suites and then shuffling the suites, ending up with four piles of cards, one per suite.
Each player now draws a card from one suite. This is repeated 25 times, leaving each player with 26 cards. These 26 cards define the capacities of the character.

As the game starts, each player draws, say five cards from his 26 card pile. A player will then play the cards for their value. This can be combined with different ways of refreshing the hand and different task resolution mechanics. A few thoughts I had was:

* Each player always holds five cards. A used card goes to his discard pile and is replaced from his card pile.

* Each player ha a joker in their pile. When he draws a joker it means reshuffle the cards with the discard pile.

* The GM draws cards from an ordinary deck (with a reshuffle-joker) to represent difficulties. For task resolution, the player must match or beat the value of the card drawn, using the correct suite as dictated by the GM. An idea is to have them GM using two or more different piles for different task difficulties. Only non-Face cards represent difficulties. If a Face card is drawn, it represents a twist of faith (as called by the GM) and more cards are drawn until you get a non-Face card representing the difficulty. The suite of the Face card may give inspiration as to the type of twist.

* Face cards have special meanings. For each face card in a players deck, he may assign it a special ablity when creating his character (combat feats, magical feats, etc) from a list of feats for each face card or in dialogue with the GM. The face card is then played together with another card, so that a fighter may for instance activate his Cleave by playing a queen of spades in addition to his 6 of spades card.

* If you want to play more than one adventure, the players may draw one or more new cards after each adventure, discarding cards down to a deck of 26. These cards may be drawn at random or from a selected suite (or from a suite decided by the GM depending on the adventure). The cards are then saved (or written down) until next adventure.

Ulmus wrote: * If you want to play more than one adventure, the players may draw one or more new cards after each adventure, discarding cards down to a deck of 26. These cards may be drawn at random or from a selected suite (or from a suite decided by the GM depending on the adventure). The cards are then saved (or written down) until next adventure.

The question (in my system) would be, should the GM know the hands of the players and/or should he/she know the decks of the players. I would say that hands are secret to the GM, as I'm leaning the gamist-narrativist side of things, and the GM knowing the hands of the players would be a bit like cheating. The GM should however know the deck of the players, to aid him or her when writing adventures.

The players should only know what suites the other players drew from, not the values of the cards.

A few questions that popped up:

In what order should cards be played? Should the GM play the difficulties first and the players be able to choose cards after that or should it be the other way around?

How do I handle NPCs? Grunts, animals and the like are comparatively easy. Just have a deck made up for them with five-ten cards and draw. More dangerous critters lean towards the high end. Swarms of similar critters may use the same deck, reshuffle as necessary.
Important NPCs should probably have a deck and a hand of their own. This means that no more than two or three important NPCs should be played at the same time. Preferrably not more than one.