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XionUnborn01
2013-11-04, 12:25 AM
So a few days ago this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=311485) brought up the idea of using cards instead of dice to determine rolls. I got inspired by this because anything that you can do to add some spice to a game system that's been around for a while is a good thing to me.

Now the real question is how exactly to go about doing this? I've started working on what I think would work, along with a few un-worked ideas I have.

Without further adieu, I give you my beginning attempt at...

Decks & Dungeons & Dragons

D20

Red cards A-10 would use their face value for the roll's result.

Black cards A-10 would use their face value +10 for the roll's result.

This part is simple enough and gives the whole 1-20 spread. The court cards have been giving me trouble though. The linked thread has some different abilities that they were assigning to the cards, but I didn't really like the direction they went with some of the abilities.

One idea I had was;

Red Jacks are 11 Black Jacks are 12
Red Queens are 14 Black Queens are 15
Red Kings are 17 Black Kings are 18
Regular Joker 19 Trademark Joker 20

In addition to that I wanted to give all the Court cards and the Jokers some sort of ability that's not necessarily huge but something flavorful.

How I had thought of implementing this in a game is something like this.

Whenever you would roll a D20 you would instead draw three cards from your deck and use one of them for the result of the roll. You would have to use all the cards in your hand before drawing three more. At the end of the encounter or after whatever situation caused the roll, you shuffle any remaining cards from your hand and any used cards back into the deck. You also shuffle your deck after every two draws if the encounter is still ongoing.

This of course requires an agreement that characters will not just use any low numbers on unnecessary skill checks or something like that during combat to avoid having to use them for attacks and the like.

Some random ideas I had regarding this are as follows:



Classes that allow a reroll could instead let you draw a new hand.
Some luck based classes could allow you to have bigger hand sizes temporarily.
Possibly implement a mechanic to allow anyone to replace their hand x times per session.
Magic items that allow you to add additional instances of cards to your deck (such as an extra queen or something).
Weapons could have mini decks of 4/6/8 etc. cards based off damage die.
Damage dealing spells would be harder to implement, I'm not sure what the best way to do a fireball would be for instance.
On the same line, sneak attack would require more work.




Obviously some abilities would need to be reworked, I'm sure that I'm not even thinking of half of them right now. Any input would be helpful, I look forward to seeing what you guys have to say.

SciChronic
2013-11-04, 01:10 AM
the biggest issue is that you need to make this system an fluid as possible. having to constantly reshuffle every 2 rounds would be a hassle and would just slow down gameplay.

this means you need to reduce the number of reshuffles.

i would do something like Red A-10 = 1-10, black A-10 = 11-20. Players draw 3-5 card and place them face down on the table. When the players need to make a roll, they can flip a card, this used card is immediately replaced with a new card after use (so you can choose the same space when making iteratives, etc.)
This introduces an amount of player choice, but still keeps it somewhat random on what the resulting value is.

As for face cards that get played:
Jack: peek at another facedown card, you can decide whether to play that card, or use another one instead.
Queen: draw two cards, look at their values, choose which one to play, both cards goes to the discard pile
King:Discard hand, and replace with a new hand of face down cards
Joker: reveal entire hard, choose to play a card from this hand, or play the top card from the deck, regardless of choice the hand is discarded afterwards and replaced with a new hand of face-down cards.

the jack and joker offer a risk/reward situation where you can play a card you know, or risk it on an unknown potentially getting a higher value. The queen allows for a more assured advantage, and the king can be a good or bad thing depending on the draw and what was in your hand.

at the end of combat or when resting, shuffle the deck

you could even do something like emulating battle fatigue, doing an alternate reshuffling mechanic, when you dont reshuffle until the entire deck is used, but when you reshuffle the first time, you place a counter next to the deck, and every reshuffle from then on increases the counter (you can use a d6 for this) every card used has its value decreased the the value of the counter, the minimum being a 1. after resting the fatigue value is decreased by X (Con modifier + str/dex modifer, whichever is higher)

you could then introduce feats that elongate the lifetime of a deck or reduce fatigue (dicard pile is placed at the bottom of the deck unshuffled, decrease fatigue by X value, etc.)

Fitz10019
2013-11-04, 07:25 AM
Here are some less time consuming options:

Tribute:
Jack: choose a card from the hand of a neighboring player
Queen/King: demand a card from the hand of any player
Joker: reveal two new cards, and choose between them

Bonus:
Jack: +1 to next card
Queen: +2 to next card
King: +3 to next card
Joker: +1d4 to next card (option to save to play later)

CombatOwl
2013-11-04, 08:57 AM
So a few days ago this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=311485) brought up the idea of using cards instead of dice to determine rolls. I got inspired by this because anything that you can do to add some spice to a game system that's been around for a while is a good thing to me.

Now the real question is how exactly to go about doing this? I've started working on what I think would work, along with a few un-worked ideas I have.

Without further adieu, I give you my beginning attempt at...

Decks & Dungeons & Dragons

D20

Red cards A-10 would use their face value for the roll's result.

Black cards A-10 would use their face value +10 for the roll's result.

This part is simple enough and gives the whole 1-20 spread. The court cards have been giving me trouble though. The linked thread has some different abilities that they were assigning to the cards, but I didn't really like the direction they went with some of the abilities.

One idea I had was;

Red Jacks are 11 Black Jacks are 12
Red Queens are 14 Black Queens are 15
Red Kings are 17 Black Kings are 18
Regular Joker 19 Trademark Joker 20

In addition to that I wanted to give all the Court cards and the Jokers some sort of ability that's not necessarily huge but something flavorful.

How I had thought of implementing this in a game is something like this.

Whenever you would roll a D20 you would instead draw three cards from your deck and use one of them for the result of the roll. You would have to use all the cards in your hand before drawing three more. At the end of the encounter or after whatever situation caused the roll, you shuffle any remaining cards from your hand and any used cards back into the deck. You also shuffle your deck after every two draws if the encounter is still ongoing.

This of course requires an agreement that characters will not just use any low numbers on unnecessary skill checks or something like that during combat to avoid having to use them for attacks and the like.

Some random ideas I had regarding this are as follows:



Classes that allow a reroll could instead let you draw a new hand.
Some luck based classes could allow you to have bigger hand sizes temporarily.
Possibly implement a mechanic to allow anyone to replace their hand x times per session.
Magic items that allow you to add additional instances of cards to your deck (such as an extra queen or something).
Weapons could have mini decks of 4/6/8 etc. cards based off damage die.
Damage dealing spells would be harder to implement, I'm not sure what the best way to do a fireball would be for instance.
On the same line, sneak attack would require more work.




Obviously some abilities would need to be reworked, I'm sure that I'm not even thinking of half of them right now. Any input would be helpful, I look forward to seeing what you guys have to say.

Im not sure this would work well trying to directly convert cards to d20 results. The way youre proposing has some odd statistical consequences, like making values replicated by face cards way more common than values not replicated by face cards. Because you have given all face cards a value higher than 10, youve skewed the results to the high side. To be honest, i'd use something like blackjack if I were dead set on directly converting face values to d20 rolls. Natural 21s are equivalent of a nat 20, etc. When you bust, subtract 21 from the total and thats the result.

OTOH that still has significant statistical deviation from a d20 roll. High results are still much more likely than on dice. To account for that, DCs should be higher.

To be honest, if I were dead set on playing D&D with cards rather than d20s, I would just replace DCs with face values, and let characters draw extra cards on a test for every 6 points on a D20 bonus modifier. "I have a King of Diamonds AC, you need a King of Hearts or better to hit. Your +13 to hit means you draw four times. Since you have iterative attacks, pick the three cards you want to use for each attack." Obviously, some feats and equipment would need changes, like weapon focus. Damage would almost have to be based around the suit of the card used for the attack. Weapons would have their an average damage value. Clubs would be -2, Diamonds at -1, Hearts at +1, and Spades at +2. Alternately, just resolve by face values, as above.

BWR
2013-11-04, 09:04 AM
Dig up a copy of the old Dragonlance 5th age SAGA system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAGA_System) for some ideas.

DedWards
2013-11-04, 12:29 PM
A few months ago I came across this (https://persona.obsidianportal.com/wikis/how-to-play). It has what I think is an interesting use of cards instead of dice. The system even goes so far as to granting special abilities based on the cards, like drawing extra cards, or shuffling your hand back into your deck and drawing that many, etc. It's worth a look, even if only for a few ideas.

Yakk
2013-11-04, 03:38 PM
I see little advantage in mapping them to d20s. I'd rather you draw 2 and add than that.

Then we can have fun with the suits, instead of wasting them on +10.

If we can find some way to make draw 3 work, then we can have pairs, triples, flushes, runs and face cards all doing something interesting.

DaTedinator
2013-11-04, 06:18 PM
I've also toyed with similar ideas. My basic concept:

Each player has their own deck. They don't have a hand; they just draw directly from the deck when they need to roll a d20.

As you have it, red A-10 is 1-10, Black A-10 is 11-20. But for me, you draw again whenever you draw a face card.

If you draw a jack, the next card you draw is treated as being its suit. So if you draw the Jack of Spades and then the 4 of Hearts, it would be a 14 instead of a 4. If the card you draw is the same suit, no difference.
If you draw a queen, the next card you draw is treated as being red. So if you draw a queen and then the 4 of Clubs, it'd be a 4 instead of a 14. If the card you draw is already red, no difference.
If you draw a king, the next card you draw is treated as being black.
If you draw a joker, the next card you draw is treated as being the opposite suit.

If you draw a face card after drawing another face card, ignore the first one and abide by the second.

You can reshuffle your deck at any time outside of combat, but in combat, you have to play your deck until you can't draw anymore cards, then reshuffle.

And finally, you can't examine your discard pile in combat.

The main difference (in theory, at least) between my system and rolling dice is an element of predictability; if you've drawn a dozen red cards and two black cards, the odds are in your favor, and you can try risky things. Alternatively, if you've drawn a lot of black cards and no reds, you know the odds are against you and now's not the best time to take risks.

The face cards serve primarily to randomize things a bit, and make it slightly trickier to count cards.

The reason you can reshuffle whenever you want outside of combat is to prevent the whole issue of players making meaningless checks from coming up. The reason you can't reshuffle or look through your discard pile in combat is simple time-saving, along with reshuffling at will in combat skewing things a bit too much in savvy players' favor.

Granted, this system already skews things a little in savvy players' favor, but that's half the point.

So yeah, that's my system. I really like the idea of somehow including hands of cards, I just can't think of a way to do it that doesn't make it way too easy to game the system.

XionUnborn01
2013-11-04, 10:57 PM
i would do something like Red A-10 = 1-10, black A-10 = 11-20. Players draw 3-5 card and place them face down on the table. When the players need to make a roll, they can flip a card, this used card is immediately replaced with a new card after use (so you can choose the same space when making iteratives, etc.)
This introduces an amount of player choice, but still keeps it somewhat random on what the resulting value is.

This is possible. The only reason I wanted to use a hand instead of having them face-down was then you force the player to make a decision. If they have a 10, a king, and a 3, I think you get an interesting dynamic of player choice and I think that it also lends itself better to manipulation by feats and/or class features. I'm not against changing it, just want you to know where I was coming from.


As for face cards that get played:
Jack: peek at another facedown card, you can decide whether to play that card, or use another one instead.
Queen: draw two cards, look at their values, choose which one to play, both cards goes to the discard pile
King:Discard hand, and replace with a new hand of face down cards
Joker: reveal entire hard, choose to play a card from this hand, or play the top card from the deck, regardless of choice the hand is discarded afterwards and replaced with a new hand of face-down cards.

the jack and joker offer a risk/reward situation where you can play a card you know, or risk it on an unknown potentially getting a higher value. The queen allows for a more assured advantage, and the king can be a good or bad thing depending on the draw and what was in your hand.



Now that I think of it, having the DM use facedown cards would make the game really interesting, especially if they have different rules for the court that the players do. You could have the opposing player or the party as a whole choose which card is used, and the DM picks it up without revealing it. Then you have a Choose Your Fate (tm) element to the game.


at the end of combat or when resting, shuffle the deck

you could even do something like emulating battle fatigue, doing an alternate reshuffling mechanic, when you dont reshuffle until the entire deck is used, but when you reshuffle the first time, you place a counter next to the deck, and every reshuffle from then on increases the counter (you can use a d6 for this) every card used has its value decreased the the value of the counter, the minimum being a 1. after resting the fatigue value is decreased by X (Con modifier + str/dex modifer, whichever is higher)

you could then introduce feats that elongate the lifetime of a deck or reduce fatigue (dicard pile is placed at the bottom of the deck unshuffled, decrease fatigue by X value, etc.)

I might be reading this wrong, but I'm not quite following how this fatigue would work, so I don't want to comment without fully understanding it.


Here are some less time consuming options:

Tribute:
Jack: choose a card from the hand of a neighboring player
Queen/King: demand a card from the hand of any player
Joker: reveal two new cards, and choose between them

Bonus:
Jack: +1 to next card
Queen: +2 to next card
King: +3 to next card
Joker: +1d4 to next card (option to save to play later)

That is definitely a simple option if not a little boring. I was hoping to make the rolling element of the game more exciting and almost like it's own mini game.


Im not sure this would work well trying to directly convert cards to d20 results. The way youre proposing has some odd statistical consequences, like making values replicated by face cards way more common than values not replicated by face cards. Because you have given all face cards a value higher than 10, youve skewed the results to the high side. To be honest, i'd use something like blackjack if I were dead set on directly converting face values to d20 rolls. Natural 21s are equivalent of a nat 20, etc. When you bust, subtract 21 from the total and thats the result.
This is certainly another option that could be worked on. Would you fully play blackjack for each roll? So you could have a roll that came from 6 cards, or one that came from only 2? And would you do this with each character using their own deck or actually have the DM deal from multiple decks for each player? Because the more I think of this, the more I think it would be a fun alternative, even if it's not something I would necessarily want to implement in my games.



OTOH that still has significant statistical deviation from a d20 roll. High results are still much more likely than on dice. To account for that, DCs should be higher.

To be honest, if I were dead set on playing D&D with cards rather than d20s, I would just replace DCs with face values, and let characters draw extra cards on a test for every 6 points on a D20 bonus modifier. "I have a King of Diamonds AC, you need a King of Hearts or better to hit. Your +13 to hit means you draw four times. Since you have iterative attacks, pick the three cards you want to use for each attack." Obviously, some feats and equipment would need changes, like weapon focus. Damage would almost have to be based around the suit of the card used for the attack. Weapons would have their an average damage value. Clubs would be -2, Diamonds at -1, Hearts at +1, and Spades at +2. Alternately, just resolve by face values, as above.
This...seems like it could be extremely complicated to actually implement. I could see it being totally workable, but there's a lot that would need to be worked on. Which suit beats which? Would you use the classic CHSD for this or make a new system?


Dig up a copy of the old Dragonlance 5th age SAGA system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAGA_System) for some ideas.

I'll look into trying to find this, thanks for the heads up.


A few months ago I came across this (https://persona.obsidianportal.com/wikis/how-to-play). It has what I think is an interesting use of cards instead of dice. The system even goes so far as to granting special abilities based on the cards, like drawing extra cards, or shuffling your hand back into your deck and drawing that many, etc. It's worth a look, even if only for a few ideas.

I'll check this out and see if there's some ideas we could use.


I see little advantage in mapping them to d20s. I'd rather you draw 2 and add than that.

Then we can have fun with the suits, instead of wasting them on +10.

If we can find some way to make draw 3 work, then we can have pairs, triples, flushes, runs and face cards all doing something interesting.

I'm certainly not against changing it to two cards added together if we could make that work better and more efficiently, though as I said earlier in this post, the idea of having a hand to work from feels like it works better for feats and class abilities. I'm not unwilling to change, I just don't want to lock out possible features if we don't have to.

Working with the suits could be really fun if we can make it happen and if we were to change it to using two at a time, we could still let it happen from a hand of 3 or four cards, you would just choose your pairs, and then we could use flushes or two pairs and so on in the idea.


I've also toyed with similar ideas. My basic concept:

Each player has their own deck. They don't have a hand; they just draw directly from the deck when they need to roll a d20.

As you have it, red A-10 is 1-10, Black A-10 is 11-20. But for me, you draw again whenever you draw a face card.

If you draw a jack, the next card you draw is treated as being its suit. So if you draw the Jack of Spades and then the 4 of Hearts, it would be a 14 instead of a 4. If the card you draw is the same suit, no difference.
If you draw a queen, the next card you draw is treated as being red. So if you draw a queen and then the 4 of Clubs, it'd be a 4 instead of a 14. If the card you draw is already red, no difference.
If you draw a king, the next card you draw is treated as being black.
If you draw a joker, the next card you draw is treated as being the opposite suit.

If you draw a face card after drawing another face card, ignore the first one and abide by the second.

I could see this working well though I have one question. Why would the face cards change the suits? Does the suit make a difference? Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly.


You can reshuffle your deck at any time outside of combat, but in combat, you have to play your deck until you can't draw anymore cards, then reshuffle.

And finally, you can't examine your discard pile in combat.

The main difference (in theory, at least) between my system and rolling dice is an element of predictability; if you've drawn a dozen red cards and two black cards, the odds are in your favor, and you can try risky things. Alternatively, if you've drawn a lot of black cards and no reds, you know the odds are against you and now's not the best time to take risks.

I do like the idea of being able to predict and work with your deck based off what you've used.


The face cards serve primarily to randomize things a bit, and make it slightly trickier to count cards.

The reason you can reshuffle whenever you want outside of combat is to prevent the whole issue of players making meaningless checks from coming up. The reason you can't reshuffle or look through your discard pile in combat is simple time-saving, along with reshuffling at will in combat skewing things a bit too much in savvy players' favor.

Granted, this system already skews things a little in savvy players' favor, but that's half the point.

So yeah, that's my system. I really like the idea of somehow including hands of cards, I just can't think of a way to do it that doesn't make it way too easy to game the system.

I understand not wanting unlimited shuffling in combat, I also said in the OP that I know a certain amount of gentleman's agreement needs to be in effect for something like this.


Thanks for all the replies everyone, I'm hoping we can work together to make this into a viable system.

Yitzi
2013-11-04, 11:30 PM
Don't use cards to imitate dice; if you're going to use cards as your randomizer, build the system around that mechanic.

DaTedinator
2013-11-04, 11:57 PM
I could see this working well though I have one question. Why would the face cards change the suits? Does the suit make a difference? Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly.

The suit matters because A-10 of, say, Hearts, is 1-10, whereas A-10 of Clubs is 11-20.

XionUnborn01
2013-11-05, 12:11 AM
Don't use cards to imitate dice; if you're going to use cards as your randomizer, build the system around that mechanic.

While I appreciate what I'm assuming is concern for a futile time waste, it's not exactly constructive for this.

I'm not so much imitating dice as replacing them. I've stated that I know there are many things that would need to be altered to implement this. I don't expect to just throw this into a game and assume it would work, if I did I wouldn't have made a thread asking for help to make it work.

XionUnborn01
2013-11-05, 12:14 AM
The suit matters because A-10 of, say, Hearts, is 1-10, whereas A-10 of Clubs is 11-20.

Oh, duh! I don't know why I didn't connect that.

NichG
2013-11-05, 08:14 AM
What if you do something like this:

Draw 5 cards, you can use these for rolls however you like. At any point, you can completely refresh your hand, but whenever you do so, the DM may discard one card and draw a replacement. Whenever the DM is out of cards, they draw a new set of 5 and all players refresh their hand up to 5 cards at this point.

Basically this discourages the 'I'll throw away low cards on lots of rolls that don't matter' because the DM's hand slowly gets better and better if you make more rolls than the DM does.

XionUnborn01
2013-11-05, 11:18 AM
What if you do something like this:

Draw 5 cards, you can use these for rolls however you like. At any point, you can completely refresh your hand, but whenever you do so, the DM may discard one card and draw a replacement. Whenever the DM is out of cards, they draw a new set of 5 and all players refresh their hand up to 5 cards at this point.

Basically this discourages the 'I'll throw away low cards on lots of rolls that don't matter' because the DM's hand slowly gets better and better if you make more rolls than the DM does.

That is actually a good idea to make sure the players are careful with their cards, but still leaves them the opportunity to redraw if it's a really dire situation.

DaTedinator
2013-11-06, 11:28 PM
What if you do something like this:

Draw 5 cards, you can use these for rolls however you like. At any point, you can completely refresh your hand, but whenever you do so, the DM may discard one card and draw a replacement. Whenever the DM is out of cards, they draw a new set of 5 and all players refresh their hand up to 5 cards at this point.

Basically this discourages the 'I'll throw away low cards on lots of rolls that don't matter' because the DM's hand slowly gets better and better if you make more rolls than the DM does.

I really like this. Tying players' benefits to the DM's is a really elegant solution to that problem.

Jlerpy
2013-11-08, 06:29 AM
For a live game, we used a couple of decks of cards, with the face cards removed. Black cards were 1-10, reds were 11-20. Need to roll a die? Pull a card.
It worked really well.

XionUnborn01
2013-11-12, 07:12 PM
I've been doing some pondering on the court card abilities and I've thought up a few ideas that I think are thematic but not game breaking. The drawing and hand size references are from the current method of having a hand size of three and having to use them all before drawing again, I'm using that just so I have a base idea to work with.

Diamonds:

Jack- Draw 1 card. Use the drawn card added to another card in your hand for your roll. Afterwards discard your remaining hand and draw 1 card. The next black card you play is treated as red.

Queen- Draw 2 cards. Use one drawn card and one card from your hand added together for your roll. Afterwards discard your remaining hand and draw 2 cards. The next black card you play is treated as red.

King- Draw 3 cards. Use 3 cards from either your hand or the drawn cards added together for your roll. Afterwards discard your hand and draw 2 cards. The next black card you play is treated as red.

The Diamonds I chose to represent as a greedy good now/bad later mentality with the drawing and penalty to the next card.

Spades:

Jack- Reveal the top 2 cards of your deck and use one of the revealed cards or a card from your hand for your roll. Place your hand and the revealed cards on the bottom of your deck and draw 2 cards.

Queen- Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck and use a revealed card or a card from your hand for your roll. Place your hand and the revealed cards on the bottom of your deck and draw 2 cards.

King-Reveal the top 10 cards of your deck and use a revealed card or a card from your hand for the roll, adding 2 to the face value of the card. Place your hand and the revealed cards on the bottom of your deck and draw 2 cards.


I haven gotten the hearts and clubs worked out yet, but I think these abilities are fun and flavorful without being brokenly good.

Feedback or suggestions? I know the playgrounders have something in their mind.

Rephath
2013-11-12, 08:57 PM
Draw 2 cards and consult the table below:
A-10: Adds 1-10 respectively. So if you draw a 3 and an 8 you have a "roll" of 11.
J: BUT Draw another card. So if you draw a 2 and a J, and then a 5, you have a result of 7. Also, some unexpected problem comes into play.
Q: AND Draw another card. Same as J, but something unexpectedly good comes into play instead of a problem.
K: Crit success.
Joker: Critical failure in hopefully a funny way.

DarkLightHitomi
2013-11-17, 02:51 PM
My card system doesnt seemlessly replace a d20, but I figure Ill post for your enjoyment ad braintorming.

Each player has their own deck, however which cards are in the deck depends on the character. The deck starts with no queens or kings. You start with four full suits, however you can double up a suit, using two copies ofone suit. As the character levels the character can remove cards, usually lower numbered ones, and special abilities can add face cards.

The suits are each for certain types of situations, hearts for social/charisma, swords for knowledge/specialty, clubs for magic/will, diamonds for combat/physical. If you draw a card from the wrong suit, you just take the face value, if you draw the right suit you add 5.

Face cards are criticals and special abilities will sometimes use them.

Each player starts with a hand of 5 cards.
The player draws one card per round, but can play multiple, either together for one value on a check, or on seperate checks. How many cards you use doesnt effect how many you draw.

This is really intended to have abilities that depend on the cards, such as one ability that when activated with a queen of hearts allows the character to charm a person without expending any spellpower.

The different suits represent different catagories thus making specializing very important without mechanical penalties for jacks of all trades.

This is just the basics but I hope this gives you some great ideas.

Jlerpy
2013-11-17, 07:57 PM
My card system doesnt seemlessly replace a d20, but I figure Ill post for your enjoyment ad braintorming.

Each player has their own deck, however which cards are in the deck depends on the character. The deck starts with no queens or kings. You start with four full suits, however you can double up a suit, using two copies ofone suit. As the character levels the character can remove cards, usually lower numbered ones, and special abilities can add face cards.

The suits are each for certain types of situations, hearts for social/charisma, swords for knowledge/specialty, clubs for magic/will, diamonds for combat/physical. If you draw a card from the wrong suit, you just take the face value, if you draw the right suit you add 5.

Face cards are criticals and special abilities will sometimes use them.

Each player starts with a hand of 5 cards.
The player draws one card per round, but can play multiple, either together for one value on a check, or on seperate checks. How many cards you use doesnt effect how many you draw.

This is really intended to have abilities that depend on the cards, such as one ability that when activated with a queen of hearts allows the character to charm a person without expending any spellpower.

The different suits represent different catagories thus making specializing very important without mechanical penalties for jacks of all trades.

This is just the basics but I hope this gives you some great ideas.

Reminds me a lot of Castle Falkenstein, although the twist of each player having their own deck is new and could be quite nifty.

XionUnborn01
2013-11-18, 11:43 PM
My card system doesnt seemlessly replace a d20, but I figure Ill post for your enjoyment ad braintorming.

Each player has their own deck, however which cards are in the deck depends on the character. The deck starts with no queens or kings. You start with four full suits, however you can double up a suit, using two copies ofone suit. As the character levels the character can remove cards, usually lower numbered ones, and special abilities can add face cards.

The suits are each for certain types of situations, hearts for social/charisma, swords for knowledge/specialty, clubs for magic/will, diamonds for combat/physical. If you draw a card from the wrong suit, you just take the face value, if you draw the right suit you add 5.

Face cards are criticals and special abilities will sometimes use them.

Each player starts with a hand of 5 cards.
The player draws one card per round, but can play multiple, either together for one value on a check, or on seperate checks. How many cards you use doesnt effect how many you draw.

This is really intended to have abilities that depend on the cards, such as one ability that when activated with a queen of hearts allows the character to charm a person without expending any spellpower.

The different suits represent different catagories thus making specializing very important without mechanical penalties for jacks of all trades.

This is just the basics but I hope this gives you some great ideas.

That's a really cool system. I just thought of something like this for my system, what if every class had different abilities for their face cards, or if they only got face cards from two suits/one color. That way, each character plays a little different and has different options than others of their same class.

Haldir
2013-11-19, 02:29 AM
Why not just deal out a hand to everyone, they get to hold and see their hand, and when they take an action they play the card they desire, which substitutes for the roll. When all of their cards are played, they get a new hand dealt.

For extra fun, run a little bit of poker on the side, let them bet and discard to build hands, playing hands lets you draw again or gives you a modifier to an action.

Vermithrax
2013-11-25, 03:16 PM
If you start from the following:

Approximate d20: Draw 3 cards, face up. Add the two highest Number cards. Face cards are 0 value. Jokers copy your choice of one of the other cards drawn.

Approximate d100: Draw 3 cards or until you have at least 1 Red and 1 Black card, face up. The highest value Red card represents the ones place, the highest value Black card represents the tens place after subtracting 1. Face cards are 0 value. Jokers either copy your choice of one of the other cards drawn using the opposite color, or have 0 value but swap the places Red and Black cards represent.

You'll have a whole bunch of card mechanics left over to fuel special abilities, criticals, fumbles, etc., and they'll give you a lot of control over success probabilities.

For example, you could make critical confirmation faster by replacing it with: If you hit and drew a King (Replaces threat range 20); If you hit and drew a Queen or better (Replaces threat range 19-20); etc. You could have precog and luck spells/abilities/bonuses allow you to draw more cards, let you draw and look at them before choosing your actions, or even have a sideboard of the leftover cards you didn't add but haven't discarded to store your luck for future occasions.