I was reading an article about people who play D&D inside prison, and since most prisons ban dice but not card decks some prisoners deal out cards face down and use them instead of dice rolls.
I found that idea compelling since it could bring an extra layer of strategy to the game. Dice rolls are totally random but you have SOME knowledge of what kind of cards you may have in your deck. You could have a system where the DM can see their cards but players can’t so they can play cards based on how challenging they want to make something, or have player abilities that let them see their next three cards, or play three cards and pick the best, what have you.
Idk, there’s probably flaws with this system I haven’t thought of but it seemed cool as a random thought.
Me and a buddy of mine worked on a card-based TTRPG a while back. I think it has great potential. There’s loads of options for mechanics, even just using an unmodified deck of cards.
Playing cards have a lot of information to pull from to make decisions. Every card pull you get several binaries (color, high-low, odd-even, etc.), a 1-of-4 in the suits, 10 numbers and 3 face cards in the card value, and each card is technically unique in the deck so you have a 1-of-52, as well. That means with one card pull you could resolve several different things at once. Maybe you’re looking to get over a certain number, but then you also get a bonus if you get a certain suit, and maybe a face card does something extra beyond just being worth 10. And that’s all before you get into hand or deck management.
The fundamental thing that you need to decide with any TTRPG is the core resolution mechanic. Could be as simple as using the cards as a random number generator, or getting certain combinations of cards a la poker, or you could have more complex hand/deck management mechanics like in a deck building game.
The thing I really noticed is that it was very tempting to make a whole game out of things you could do with the cards, but that the more complex the mechanics, the more the game moves away from the roleplaying aspects. It’s great to give players options and agency, but ultimately, if you’re trying to make a roleplaying game, you want something that supports the players in telling a story through their characters. If the mechanics reward the players too much for bieng good at the game, it’ll lead them to make decisions based on that and not on what their characters would be doing. You have to decide whether you want the players to get good at the card game, or use the cards as a more basic resolution mechanic. It’s a balance.
We had fun tinkering, even if we never quite cracked the code. I still haven’t seen a published game that uses a deck of cards instead of dice, but I think there are some great games that could be made with the concept.
One thing that’s always mildly annoyed me about D20 systems is you can have a super badass character get totally owned just because you had an unlucky night where you kept rolling crit fails. I feel like cards would eliminate that somewhat cuz there’s only so many 2’s in a deck, so you could plan out actions with a bit more forethought.
Absolutely. Could take a lot of the swingyness out of the game while still leaving plenty of room for variety. The cards become a sort of metacurrency that players spend thoughtfully instead of just doing things and hoping that they don’t fail. I mostly play Savage Worlds these days, and I really appreciate the benny mechanic, where you get to spend a benny (metacurrency) to get a reroll (although we don’t allow rerolls of critical failures). As a player, it feels really good to have a bit of a safety net for when the dice are being stubborn.
Another thing we really liked about the idea of playing from a hand is that it limits the number of potential decisions at any given moment, which could speed up the game while also encouraging players to be creative. If you have to play one of the X cards you have in front of you, then you’re thinking about what you could do with those specific cards, not perseverating about all the things you could do before deciding to do the same thing you always do in that situation. Being able to have a pretty good idea of what will or won’t succeed encourages players to take risks or think outside the box.
What I like about it is that people usually have some ability to deal with the variance in their own abilities, like some inkling of rolling generally higher or lower, that this can work as a really rough simulation of. Being able to plan around the odds of your current deck I think is more interesting than just rolling dice, even if it’s somewhat higher-maintenance in a few respects.
In a digital format, I think this would be incredible because you don’t need to worry about manually shuffling well enough and so on, plus you could handle all sorts of manipulations of the content of the deck automatically.
Deadlands uses cards for some mechanics.
never tried it, but evil hat did a deck of cards that emulates dice for the fate system, which I think works out to be the same probability as the dice
it’s the polar opposite compared to your idea of leaning into the unique mechanics of cards but it’s neat at least
This is more of a logistical comment than a game balance one, but an advantage of dice over cards is that you need to shuffle cards well so the odds are fair. Dice are already fair with no setup. It can get annoying if you have to shuffle often.
Now, what you mentioned about trying to remember what cards were drawn and what cards remain is a cool feature, and makes cards superior to dice. Dice have no memory, every throw is independent to the other. Cards involve another layer of conditional probability, which if you’re into that, is very fun.
Had an idea for a one page osr game that uses a tarot deck. Each class (fighter, rogue, cleric, mage) gets bonuses for each suite (swords, pentacles, cups, wands) and every player would have a card from the major arcana serve as their patron and one as their nemesis (how this would work would be roleplayed at the GMs discretion). I did the math and the distribution of card values roughly tracks with d20 rolls. Also there are gameplay opportunities for deck modification, such as scrying and shuffling the deck.
