Cards Instead of Dice

I've done that using DramaSystem. Was pretty fun, but I kind of feel like almost a different beast from most dice systems I'm familiar with.

Like - the way DramaSystem set things up felt a lot like poker to me in that you were taking much less safe, though much more calculated risks when you turned to the cards to resolve an issue. (Especially if you were hoping that things would *not* go in your favor.) Dice systems usually have more buffer to feel safe when you rolled, because you had so many modifiers you could call on. I can't remember if DS specified you shuffled the deck every time, but in theory you could just put all the cards used in-play into a discard pile and shuffle only after the deck had been gone through, meaning if you were able to card-count, you would be able to know your odds more and more as the deck dwindled. (Our group used random.org for the cards, so I don't think that was possible.)

In general - IRL I just prefer rolling dice because it's more satisfying than card flipping. But if I ever hear of a game that incorporates tarot well, I feel like I'd prefer that over dice and standard playing cards, because the visual impact of flipping over a beautifully illustrated card of fortune or misfortune would be a fuckton more amazing. There's a good reason for the Death card flip being so popular, after all.

Why not a Megaman Starforce game? Each player has two visually-different decks - one for battlecards, and one for Noise Poker equips.

In my gaming system each character gets a Tarot draw to determine their destiny. It was inspired by Ogre Battle and uses a 100 card Tarot deck (inspired by Piers Anthony's novel Tarot). After a character completes a destiny, they draw a new spread. Like most things, players like it when it works for them, and hate it when it screws them.

It works and it's cool. Though the excitement of watching a dice spin for a few seconds is what usually makes dice games ever so more exciting.

Another thing to keep in mind though is that using a whole deck of cards means that randomness is removed from the game. Once you've found your 2-3 Kings, high cards become uncommon etc.This is a plus but also a con as sometimes you have to factor this in.

Tokyo Nova is amazing.

Miles Christi use a system with cards, and it's really accurated.

There's been times where I've thought about writing a tabletop RPG that uses cards that are similar to tarot cards to help tell the narrative.

I've flirted with the idea of having players use a deck for the various attack/spells and actions they have so that they are not overloaded with their options per turn but also consider using lesser used game mechanics more often.

I ran an RPG like My Name is John with all tarot cards, including the minor ones. I need to refind my book because it was hell of a time.

Basically, players can have various skills to interact with certain suits, Red Joker is an auto success and Black joker is an auto failure. Players construct a hand of twist cards, of multiple suits, ranging from ace to King with which they can replace drawn cards.

I saw a demo of a game like this that seemed pretty interesting if you can get past it running through a phone app to process the cards. It justifies the app a bit by having the card combos and orders changing what cards mean, and it changes entirely based on the setting.

And if anybody else knows what I'm talking about, tell me, because I've forgotten what the name of the game is and it's driving me nuts.

It rarely ends well if I'm involved because I just start counting them out of habit and then base my plays around what is most likely to be my result from the deck.

At first you feel good because you know that somewhere in that deck you've got a critical success and you can't be denied it simply by bad luck.

Then you start card counting and reach that existentially painful spot where you find yourself doing stupid stuff because the deck has more favorable cards remaining or avoiding any action because all you have left is failures.

I like them, but they require the developers to properly understand the fundamental differences of probability it's creates.

Needing to get a certain card introduces deterministic factors completely different from needing to roll a certain number.

A lot of games that use cards simply treat it as of generating random numbers, and would probably work better just using dice.

>lambda of hearts

AFMBE can be played with cards. You draw up to ten and MUST use all of them or are rewarded with a redraw in various ways (resting, rewarded for good role play, getting over certain success levels etc)

I found this worked really well becuase you had to really role play and build up thematics in what you were doing to get bonus' to your otherwise shitty cards.

Was in a knife fight with a possessed hill billy and burned through all my cards trying to get away from him, throwing chairs and shit, getting knocked on my ass and kicking him away and a few punches here and there and then having to use a critical fail to refresh my hand (two of my fingers were sliced off) thankfully I had an Ace in my new hand managed to throw him out of a window.

I've never heard of this but it sounds really interesting.

I think I found it--it's called Weave.

youtube.com/watch?v=FtNt7TEAEgU
Here's a demo of it that may or may not be what saw, in a very Goonies/Stranger Things setting. They also talk about what other settings it comes with and how it'll likely be opened up for people to make and share their own.
Seems like the card generation stuff can be used to whip up plot elements for the GM to work with if they don't already have something to do, and the difficulties the GM asks for are a sort of deck/hand thing to try and have some baked-in tension--they draw some cards and play a difficulty from the drawn cards for certain tasks, or something.

In high school we didn't have any funky dice aside from d6s so we used an UNO card deck. We'd shuffle the deck before every encounter and the DM would arbitrarily cut the deck in two. After describing an action the player would draw the top card off either the two decks and whatever card you got dictated success or failure. We all were judges in interpreting just what a card meant. It worked for us until we got our hands on a set of polyhedral dice.