Making a deck of playing cards work for D20?

[randomhero00]

Has anyone done this? I am looking for clever solutions. My friend is up in Alaska, snowed in, has no dice. He wants to play a play by postcard (hehe, bet thats a first you've heard?) So we're trying to figure out a way to make a D4 through D20 come from playing cards with the same percentages.

[Erom]

The easiest way is to just build a deck for each dice.

IE the D4 is H1,H2,H3,H4. Shuffle every time you draw. Simple.

For larger dice, you'll need to use face cards or two suits. Example, the D20 can be Diamond 1-10 and Clubs 1-10. You add 10 to the face value if you draw a diamond. Shuffle, draw, done.

For small dice, the deck gets small enough that it's kind of hard to shuffle, so you can more than one suit without messing with the probability. For example your D4 can be 1-4 of a couple of suits, and just always take the face value. That way you have more than 4 cards to shuffle.

Obviously, coming up with a way to split a single 52 card deck into a standard array of dice with no overlap would be a bit tricky, but not too bad.

[Wabbajack]

Just write numbers from 1-20 on the cards? If you shuffle them well it shouldn't be different than a dice.

[Kobold-Bard]

I'm going to assume your friend has no internet since you're going with postcards rather than online. On the offchance they do have web access you can use invisiblecastle.

Do they have a smart phone? Because there are several rpg dice roller apps.

For cards: take as many cards as you need in numerical order. Ace-Queen = d12, Ace-10 of two suits; decide which is 1-10 and which is 11-20 beforehand. Then just shuffle those cards and draw to get your "roll".

[RaggedAngel]

This will work for you:

d4:
Hearts - 1
Diamonds - 2
Clubs - 3
Spades - 4

d8:
Same as the d4, but 2-7 is 1-4 and 8-King is 5-8, ignoring Aces.

d6, d10, d12, and d20:

For these, the simplest option is to remove 6, 10, 12, or 20 cards, assign each a number, and shuffle. Not as fun, but very easy.

In actuality, it is easiest to simply assign cards numbers, shuffle, and draw. Not the most fun, I know, but it simplifies everything.

[CapnCJ]

Has anyone done this? I am looking for clever solutions. My friend is up in Alaska, snowed in, has no dice. He wants to play a play by postcard (hehe, bet thats a first you've heard?) So we're trying to figure out a way to make a D4 through D20 come from playing cards with the same percentages.

Up to d12 he can just get the right number of cards of the same suit, shuffle, and draw one. For the d20.. Err.. Some clever mathy solution :smalltongue:

[Erom]

I did the math on splitting up the deck. It's obviously not possible without overlap. That said, it's not an insurmountable difficulty. Here's one way.

Use Diamonds 1-10 and Clubs 1-10 as your d20, by adding 10 to any Diamond drawn. Use the same deck for your d10 - just ignore suit.

Use Hearts 1-8 as your D8, and use it as your d4 as well by subtracting 4 if you draw 5-8.

Use Spades 1-10 plus Jack and Queen as your d12, use it as a d6 same as you did above.

That shouldn't be too hard to remember. Three piles, only need one standard deck to do it, and you only need to remember the values of a couple of face cards.

[randomhero00]

I'm going to assume your friend has no internet since you're going with postcards rather than online. On the offchance they do have web access you can use invisiblecastle.

Do they have a smart phone? Because there are several rpg dice roller apps.

For cards: take as many cards as you need in numerical order. Ace-Queen = d12, Ace-10 of two suits; decide which is 1-10 and which is 11-20 beforehand. Then just shuffle those cards and draw to get your "roll".

Yeah, he just went up there a few weeks ago to teach the "spring" semester. Currently snowed in, and the cable guy ain't comin out for awhile. He doesnt have one of those phones, hence why he's desperate enough to work in Alaska ;P

Anyway, he gets extremely bored. Play by postcard was all we could think of. What's the best way to do this so it goes along quickly?

[woodenbandman]

don't require him to do many dice rolls. At all.

[graeylin]

You can do d20 by assigning red as the base 1-10 digits, and black as the teens. Ignore the face cards.

7 of hearts=7
9 of spades = 19

[Elric VIII]

If you have a single deck you can do it without multiple piles, but you would have to disregard cards.

d4 - by suit; diamond = 1, heart = 2, spade = 3, club = 4
d6 - by #/2, rounded up, disregard kings. A-2 = 1, 3-4 = 2, etc.
d8 - by suit and odd/even. odd diamond = 1, even diamond = 2, odd heart = 3, even heart = 4, etc
d12 - #, disregard kings. A = 1, ... J=11, Q=12
d20 - by # and color, disregard face. red 3 = 3, red 4 = 4, black 3 = 13, black 4 = 14.

It may be a bit convoluted, but it can be done without making separate decks for each die type.

[Kerrin]

You could do cooperative storytelling by postcard instead of trying to play with all of the D&D rules. Basically, you describe the current situation, he writes back with what he does, you write back with a description of what happened, etc.

It helps a lot if you are both creative and get really colorful and express the mood of things in what you write.

I did this once with a play by post game in college. There was no game system and no rules. Everyone just has to play nice, be creative, and keep the story flowing. The important thing is that it's creative and cooperative so everyone has an awesome time and gets their time to do awesome things.