Law of the Hammer

[gbaji]

I'm curious if you have any examples of specific games and/or mechanics that you think would be better served by a specific, non-dice mechanic. The only thing I could come up with is if you have a set of events pre-decided, and need to determine what order they happen in, not which ones happen. But that's not something I've ever seen a system tell you explicitly to resolve with dice.

This is pretty much the only reason to use cards instead of dice IMO. if you want a set of results, and each happen an exact number of times within the set, drawing cards (without resetting the deck) works. If you just want probabilities of any given outcome, you can use decks (and reset the deck each time), but why? Dice are just so much more convenient, and there's a ton of different sizes and shapes to use in different combinations, to represent any odds you want.

[Satinavian]

I'm curious if you have any examples of specific games and/or mechanics that you think would be better served by a specific, non-dice mechanic. The only thing I could come up with is if you have a set of events pre-decided, and need to determine what order they happen in, not which ones happen. But that's not something I've ever seen a system tell you explicitly to resolve with dice.

The old Engel RPG (obviously the Arcana version, not the d20 knock-off) used Tarot cards. Those worked both as resolution mechanism and as a prompt to narrate how an action succeeded or failed.

[Rynjin]

This is pretty much the only reason to use cards instead of dice IMO. if you want a set of results, and each happen an exact number of times within the set, drawing cards (without resetting the deck) works. If you just want probabilities of any given outcome, you can use decks (and reset the deck each time), but why? Dice are just so much more convenient, and there's a ton of different sizes and shapes to use in different combinations, to represent any odds you want.

I can also think of another potential benefit to cards instead of dice, which is giving people more control over when and how bad "rolls" happen.

Deal everybody a set of cards at the start of the combat, or session, or whenever. Players can choose when to use a specific card for a resolution.

Maybe they get dealt a 2, 6, 8, J, K or something.

They use the 8 on something their character can succeed at on an 8. They dump the 2 on a check that doesn't matter as much, etc.

Would be interesting for a more "cinematic storytelling" type of game.

[GloatingSwine]

I can also think of another potential benefit to cards instead of dice, which is giving people more control over when and how bad "rolls" happen.

Deal everybody a set of cards at the start of the combat, or session, or whenever. Players can choose when to use a specific card for a resolution.

Maybe they get dealt a 2, 6, 8, J, K or something.

They use the 8 on something their character can succeed at on an 8. They dump the 2 on a check that doesn't matter as much, etc.

Would be interesting for a more "cinematic storytelling" type of game.

You could do that with dice rolls, of course.

Also the number of times any given card can be live in the scene is going to depend on the number of players you have. The more players the more of the deck is live. Few enough players and everyone might have a hand of trash and the scene is a farce where nobody can succeed at anything, and everyone knows it from the start.

Choosing how to allocate a randomly assigned resource pool is interesting (there's a couple of PC games that do this, Citizen Sleeper is the most recent one I can think of) but I think you want to do it with smaller variances than standard playing cards. (Citizen Sleeper and the other one I can't remember the name of use D6). A custom deck, of course, would be a good way to do it because it also gives you hidden information where you don't know who has what left to spend.

Card probabilities can do you wrong. I was once involved in playtesting a tabletop wargame that used them for wound resolution. (IIRC hearts were a wound, spades were a rout, everything else was ignored, aces let the attacking player assign that wound/rout). Because it was a reasonable scale with quite a lot of attacks being thrown every round it pretty much ran through the whole deck every turn and that basically [i]guaranteed[i] the power cards would come out every round, and if one came out when your army general was in the target regiment you just lost the game (because an army without a general was paralysed).

IIRC we kept the cards but we had to do a lot to mitigate that effect.

[Stonehead]

This is pretty much the only reason to use cards instead of dice IMO. if you want a set of results, and each happen an exact number of times within the set, drawing cards (without resetting the deck) works. If you just want probabilities of any given outcome, you can use decks (and reset the deck each time), but why? Dice are just so much more convenient, and there's a ton of different sizes and shapes to use in different combinations, to represent any odds you want.

Exactly. I had to stretch pretty far to come up with even one use-case where cards outperform dice.

The old Engel RPG (obviously the Arcana version, not the d20 knock-off) used Tarot cards. Those worked both as resolution mechanism and as a prompt to narrate how an action succeeded or failed.

That's super cool. My gut feeling is that you'd need a DM with a lot of skill in order for it to be fun, but that's a legitimate, creative reason to use cards over dice.

[Satinavian]

That's super cool. My gut feeling is that you'd need a DM with a lot of skill in order for it to be fun, but that's a legitimate, creative reason to use cards over dice.

Oh, not just the GM. If i remember correctly (it has been around 15 years that i played it), the one who drew a card had to narrate it.

[gbaji]

I can also think of another potential benefit to cards instead of dice, which is giving people more control over when and how bad "rolls" happen.

Deal everybody a set of cards at the start of the combat, or session, or whenever. Players can choose when to use a specific card for a resolution.

Maybe they get dealt a 2, 6, 8, J, K or something.

They use the 8 on something their character can succeed at on an 8. They dump the 2 on a check that doesn't matter as much, etc.

Would be interesting for a more "cinematic storytelling" type of game.

Yeah. I can see that working in some games (and definitely has a specific "feel" to it, with a literal hand of fate thing going on). Also gives players some latitute in terms of dealing with their hand in the course of play.

[GloatingSwine]

Although to return to another thing discussed in the thread, if you are literally holding your options in a hand of cards, non-card actions are going to be even less considered.

I think that resolution system probably would work better in a board game that focused on it than an RPG where you also have non-numerical options from the environment or inventory.