Tales from the Rocket House
Seriously, though. The point of this month's column is to avoid muddying up your game mechanics by using them aimlessly. If you don't have a good reason to deviate from the simple norms of basic dice roll mechanisms (roll under, roll and add, and dice pools), don't do it. “Clever” but pointless mechanics are generally wasted and typically just slow things down.
Variation from the accustomed norms should be purposeful, otherwise it's distracting. In other words, don't use a deck of cards as a randomizer unless you're going to do something with them that dice couldn't do. Worse, a resolution mechanic that involves square roots, multiplication, division, rankings of poker hands, or multiple table lookups had better deliver some serious goods. As clunky as it was, Rolemaster's tables added an over-the-top gory “color” to combat that (as far as I know) nobody else had ever done before, and that was a large part of the game's success. Plenty of games handled the rules better, but doing 13 hit points of damage and killing the dragon just isn't the same as a three sentence, graphic description of the damage done to its spine, heart, brainpan, or arteries.
Returning to the card-mechanic example, some games have players deal cards from a “hand” for their players' actions. This provides a strong “meta” content, with more player control of the success of their characters' actions than many people are comfortable with. On the other hand, it allows players to save back high cards in order to deal with “Big Bad Evil Bosses” instead of wasting them on faceless hench-persons. This is much harder to do with dice, though Weapons of the Gods does manage a form of this mechanic.
There are plenty of other ways to use cards that are not terribly “meta,” but which still do things that are much harder to do with dice. For example, specific suits, face cards, and combinations of face/suit can trigger specific results. I'm using cards as an example because I have the most experience (and ideas) with using them, and because I think they're the easiest “alternative” mechanic to use well.
Let's posit a fairly simple mechanic, with Traits ranging from Very Bad (1) through Average (3) to Legendary (7). To resolve tests, you draw three cards. Each Spade is worth +1, Clubs and Diamonds add nothing, and each Heart drawn gives -1 (this gives a -3 to +3 total). The “stunting” system I detailed in Column 15: Please Buckle Your Swashes and Return Your Blades to an Upright, Locked Position uses this core mechanic.
It would be easy to add a “critical” rule in which Face cards count as Double (whether good or bad), leading to a (very unlikely) -6 to +6 spread, with the vast majority of totals falling between -3 and +3. Though to be honest, a lot of dice systems have critical rules that are just as easy and just as elegant.
Something that's quite easy to do in a card system like this, but harder to pull off in a dice system, would be to allow characters to have Specializations or “gifts” within their skill areas. When using these Specializations, positive Face Cards (the Jack, Queen, and King of Spades) count double, and negative Face Cards (the Jack, Queen, and King of Hearts) count as 0. This gives a spread of -3 to +6, though the overall average is still close to the same range as a standard -3 to +3 draw.
If you wanted to keep the possible range exactly the same, you could instead say that positive Face Cards not only count as +1, but also cancel out a negative card. This still leaves the result spread at -3 to +3, but it skews the results closer to the higher end of the range.
You could also increase the randomness of a result by increasing the number of cards drawn, or decrease the randomness by decreasing the number. Since every card is as likely to be -1 as it is to be +1, increasing or decreasing the number of cards only changes the range, and thus the effect of luck, not the actual mean result. Changing the range does have several effects, though: mainly, it increases an expert's chances to fail and increases a novice's chances to succeed. To be fair, this process can be mimicked in any +die-die system, such as Feng Shui or FUDGE.
Further, you could use the card system to add dramatic and seldom-occurring, randomly occurring aftereffects to toxins, wounds, magic, or other traumas. For example, a wound could re-open and cause bleeding and pain whenever a 7 of any suit is drawn, or alternately, when a single card of a single suit (like the 7 or Hearts) is drawn. A character with uncontrolled visions or prophesies could gain them any time a Queen is drawn (or a particular Queen), and so on. This could be a permanent aspect of the character, or a temporary state that applies due to injury, or enchantment. For that matter, unusual forms of affect, such as potions, toxins, magic, etc., could have different lingering effects based upon WHAT cards were drawn during the original “saving throw” contest.
It's also helpful to try to link your game mechanics directly into the setting, if possible. With a basic deck of cards, you've got four suits, each with ten number and three face cards, which gives you a lot of possibilities for linking with a setting. Each of the suits could correspond with one of the four elements (not terribly original, but sometimes the oldies are the goodies), or could represent a means of approaching a problem: force, persuasion, deception and stealth, for example.
Each of the individual face cards could represent one of the powerful forces/spirits/planes/dragons/etc within the setting. For example, if the Jack of Diamonds represented Coyote, the Trickster, something specific could happen related to Coyote if one of his devotees drew a Jack of Diamonds, whether it's a simple as letting a card that is normally +0 be +1, or whether it causes some unexpected ill fortune to befall the person's opponent. If one a devotee of Coyote's enemy (we'll say he has a beef with Anansi in this setting) drew the Jack of Diamonds, perhaps something bad would happen (some misfortune, or maybe the card just counts as -1 when it would ordinarily be +0), even if that character isn't in direct confrontation with a Coyote devotee.
One thing you probably don't want to have happen is to let different suits be +1 and -1 for different characters. Any thematic niftyness is likely to be overwhelmed by the mechanical confusion. You also might not want to predicate the use of characters' abilities or powers on drawing specific cards (for example, “your ___ power activates on the Queen of Hearts, but your _____ power activates on the Jack of Hearts”), because the card draws are rare, about a 2% chance per draw, and it takes too much control out of the players' hands.
Summing Up
I've spent a lot of time on the specifics of card-based mechanics, but I wanted to be able to talk specifically about the concept. The most important idea here is that all aspects of the mechanics must be intentional, and serve a specific purpose, otherwise, they just end up being “too clever by half,” which is, in truth, not that clever at all.
