I challenge you to a children's card game!

I'd already been giving this a bit of thought, as had others, apparently, but then it came up in Skype and I decided to make a thread about it.

So, you want to play a gambler, or maybe you just want a slightly different combat system that uses cards instead of dice. Well, we're here to get this concept put together so Dan 'n Friends only need to review it to make sure it's balanced before they okay it for official game use.

So! Battling via cards. One prerequisite is that it must be able to run alongside the current combat system. We're not out to make a whole new game here, just to create a new way to play the game. Dan suggested having card players gain 3 pips every turn (in case they don't draw any [+] cards), and raising the pip cost for all talents by 3 to compensate.

We can tweak things as we test it out, but for now I'm going to throw out some numbers: 6 cards per hand (end every turn with six or less cards in your hand), draw a card every turn (start combat by drawing 5 + 1), 48 cards per deck, when you draw the last card then you shuffle all discarded cards and replace them in your deck. If you play all the cards in your hand, then you get to draw a new hand of six cards.

Now, this new battle format allows for lots of new things. For one, we can differentiate between cards that can be played at different times. Then we can cards that let you draw more cards. And any sort of Interrupt or Reaction talent is going to be a little differently. Here's how I'm thinking we divide up card types:

Spell: You can only play one Spell card per turn.
Item: You can play as many Item cards per turn as you want. You must play them face up (declare what the effect is). Item cards generally have a temporary or immediate non attack effect.
Trap: You can play as many Trap cards per turn as you want. You must play them face down (the enemy doesn't know what it is). Trap cards generally have an Interrupt or Reaction effect (though not always) and can be activated at any time (you must play the card first, though).

Although... while all standard actions would become Spell cards, not sure what to do with minor actions... Maybe have standard and minor spell cards. Anyway! In addition to all the usual combat talents you could build your deck with, how about the likes of the following?

[0] Draw Two - Item
Draw two cards.

[-3] Draw Four - Item
Draw four cards.

[+3] Empowerment - Item
You gain three pips.

[-1] Stoneskin Potion - Item
You or an ally have Resist 2 until your next turn.

And my attention is starting to wander, so I'll stop there. Maybe the above aren't even so great. Just try to think, what would Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, or other such card games have? Except, you'll probably be using more direct attack cards than summoning monsters.

Ok, but how exactly would we have a deck of randomized cards to draw from, if we wanted to do this?

Seems like the most imortant issue to address first.

I sorta assumed that it was a IRL/tabletop supplement more then a skype one, and that the DM would make up the cards to give to players.

Bronymous wrote:Ok, but how exactly would we have a deck of randomized cards to draw from, if we wanted to do this?

Seems like the most imortant issue to address first.

I'm not entirely sure myself. There's probably resources to do a virtual card deck on the internet somewhere. Otherwise, you could assume combat talents to particular cards in a deck, so that, for example, the ace of spades would correspond to It's Over or something. You could even do it with dice rolls, you'd just need a table relating certain values to particular cards (bonus points if you're using a roller that will let you exclude certain values, so you can leave out cards you've already drawn, otherwise you'd just reroll if that number came up again). I'm sure there has to be online tools for customized card games and things like that, though, and if there aren't, then a basic version wouldn't be that hard to create.

It's an issue, yes, but it's more of a "hardware" issue than anything to do with the actual gameplay mechanics. We can still talk theory before resolving this, we just need to make sure we have a solution by the time we want to playtest the idea.

Hayatecooper wrote:I sorta assumed that it was a IRL/tabletop supplement more then a skype one, and that the DM would make up the cards to give to players.

The deck would replace ALL of the player's combat talents. They would only fight using cards from the deck. As such, I think it's only fair to allow players to build their own decks. Or is that not what you meant?

I'm a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering, and as such my friends and I have tried things like this many times, but never had a long enough attention span to finish. From playing lots of MTG, I want to point out that drawing a new hand when you run out of cards is a bad idea, especially if you plan on having items that draw you cards. It has to do with the concept of card advantage, which is basically how many cards did you use to get rid of one of your opponents cards? If by using the last card in your hand you removed one of your opponent's cards and managed to get 6 more for yourself, that would net you so much card advantage that is kinda broken and could be abused really easily.
I'm definitely looking forward to see how this turns out.

Check out Wizard 101 for some inspiration. They do a good job creating a very basic framework for a card-based rpg. It's surprisingly fun, even in their extraordinarily simplified implementation.

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:Check out Wizard 101 for some inspiration. They do a good job creating a very basic framework for a card-based rpg. It's surprisingly fun, even in their extraordinarily simplified implementation.

Seconded. Wizards 101 even has pips.