Homebrew - Project Codename: Touchstone
This thread is intended to look for help with my project "Touchstone", a classic fantasy based RPG intended to be accessible to people incarcerated in the federal penitentiary system: which means it needs only the following things to be played: Pencil, Pad of Lined Paper, Rulebook, and a Deck of Standard Playing Cards for each player.
The game is based around Classes like in D&D, which each have a set of abilities drawn from standard lists: expanding on these lists will be the primary purpose of expansion books. The Abilities are each based on one suit of cards, those I have come up with ideas for so far are as follows:
(Abilities underlined like so are 'generic' abilities which can be selected for classes that have the capacity to chose abilities instead of having them assigned.)
Hearts: Healing, Charisma, Vitality, Divine Magic.
Clubs: Close Combat, Building, Hunting, Arcane Magic, Savagery.
Diamonds: Wealth, Larceny, Toughness, Alchemy, Science.
Spades: Ranged Weapons, Construction, Farming, The Silent Kill, Necromancy.
The Core Mechanic is to play cards of a matching suit to the ability you are playing them for. The value of the cards indicates how powerful the ability is for that use, but their power is caped at the character's level: A card will have no more effectiveness when played than the characters level and at each tier the character can play only certain cards: 1-5 at tier 1: 1-10 at tier 2: and a rising set of 'specials' as a player passes through tier 3.
I am debating the effects of most of the abilities, but I have one example to present:
Healing: Play a heart up to your level limit to heal that many points of damage.
Specials:
Level 11: The Ace of Hearts May now be played as 11s instead of 1s for healing.
Level 12: The Jack of Hearts may be played to Cure any diseases a person is suffering.
Level 13: The Queen of Hearts may be played to remove any status effects that a person is suffering.
Level 14: The King of Hearts may be played to restore any limb loss or other crippling effects suffered by a character.
Level 15: The Red Joker may be played to resurrect and completely restore a character who has died.
Unless a character with this ability is from a Hearts based class this ability can only be applied to themselves.
What do you all think, can this be developed into a full game?