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?

In reply to Alexei Yaruk-Mundhenk (msg # 1):

Sounds awesome. I'm not sure I follow the categorization, but I know you're really limited with only 4 suits to use.

I think you'd have more success with this if you dropped the "suits" and just made the card game from scratch. That being said, you also mentioned you're designing the game to be easily accessible, so keeping the suits helps people to reuse existing cards. So I'm not sure if you'll be able to, but if you could, it would certainly help you develop this.

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You could simplify your suits to something like the following:

Heart: Buffs, healing
Clubs: Attack, special attack
Diamonds: Items, crafting, and other misc abilities
Spades: Special movement, terrain-shaping or debuffs

And each class can use the cards differently. For example, if a BARBARIAN gets a Spades card, they can activate their great speed or ability to smash through walls. If a DRUID gets a Spades card, they can active their Entangle or Plant Growth spells to slow others down.

This way you don't completely hinder the WIZARD that draws Hearts or the ROGUE that draws Clubs.

Well, I had a simpler sistem on my defunct sub 20 game. start with a common deck of cards, remove faces to keep only pips. On a "roll" the player shuffles and draws two cards and adds them together, that is your roll. Damage is calcuulated according to the colors of the suits -two blacks: max damage, two reds: minimum damage, one and one: average damage- (if you draw two 1s you get a 1, everything else remains the same).

It even allows for advantage and disadvantage, just draw a third card and keep the best two (advantage) or the worst two (disadvantage)

In reply to kaiisaxo (msg # 3):

That's an easy way to keep the game as it normally is but use cards instead of dice.

You should post that as your own thread! I think it's a great idea I'd consider trying as well.

In reply to Alexei Yaruk-Mundhenk (msg # 1):

This seems like a really good plan. I would like a clarification of the central mechanic. You wrote effects are capped by the character level. So what exactly happens when the level is exceeded, deminished effect or nullified effect? Using you example of the healing power, let's say I have a 5th level priest as my character. My only heart is a 6 of hearts. I lay down that card. Does this mean I have healed 5 hit points or 0 hit points?

This is an interesting concept. I don't think it's sufficiently developed yet for me to get a handle on it and make a useful input, but I'll lurk the thread and see if anything occurs to me.

Kaiisaxo, that's a brilliantly simple idea. It doesn't quite reproduce D20 results, but it should be a perfect substitute for 1D10, 1D6, or 2D6. I'm not sure it's quite what Alexei had in mind but, as a Traveller player, it's something I'll borrow, thanks. :)

In reply to chupabob (msg # 5):

GOOD QUESTION!!!!

The limit mechanics are intended to force players to learn when they need to cooperate and/or pass up what might seem like good opportunity but are in fact traps.

Let us go back to your example.

Say you are a level 5 priest and have a 6 of hearts. It is useless to you! You can only play cards of value 5 or less. So when an opportunity to discard comes up you should throw that 6 away and hope to draw some cards you can actually use.

Now consider if that character goes up a level and draws a 10 of hearts. They are now in the legendary tier and can play cards up to level 10, but only are level 6, so the effect is capped at 6. They can play the 10 of hearts to heal 6 damage.

Now consider if the character is part of a party: they have a 5 of clubs, but need hearts to heal one of the other players. They then can ask their team mates if any of them want to trade a heart for a club: thus teaching the players how to compromise and work together to achieve mutual goals.