I’ve been working on a little fantasy adventure RPG system to do Court of Swords in a more system-integrated way. I’m going to be publishing it in the Patreon zine eventually, but for right now, I’m going to do a bit of development on it publicly - feel free to stop by!
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Not 100% on topic, but is there a list of contents for the zine anywhere each month? I can’t afford it every month, but would jump up the tiers to get something like this occasionally! Sounds really cool
So I’ve bugged Adam a bit on twitter, and he seemed receptive but not super keen on a thought that occurred to me. I was wondering if there was a simple mechanism with tarot cards that could emulate the PbtA 2d6.
I tried draw 3 cards and pick the middle value and it isn’t too bad. It is a bit broader in general and has much longer tails, but if you change the middle values from 7-9 to 8-12 it is pretty good.
+1 with the cards is worth a bit more than +.5 with dice so you would need to take that into account in terms of starting stats and progression.
There is a tonne of design space with this mechanism; way more than necessary for a microRPG. You can make top card matter, bottom card matter, draw additional or fewer cards. You can make the major arcana matter, or the suit of the attribute matter, or the suit of the character’s alignment matter. Specific cards that are tied to the character’s fortune could trigger things. And there are many other things that could be done as well. Obviously packing all of those things into a microRPG would be ridiculous.
I totally don’t want Adam to think I’m stepping on his toes, the core mechanism is way less important to a design than the structures around it. I have put a little investigation into one mechanism that could be cool, that Adam is free to use without attribution or not if he feels something else is better. But it seems ridiculous to keep this to myself, once it occurred to me.
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