New Systems

Recently I sat down with some friends to try to come up with a new and interesting system. I decided to try a system using tarot cards. There are two main reasons that I wanted to give this a try. 

The first is that many games have a magical or mystical feel to them, using tarot cards can be perfect for keeping the mood in such games. I think the cards can carry the mood of a game much better than most other props. 

Secondly, I have recently watched a rather interesting video of Richard Dawkins discussing cold reading and thought that many of the concepts discussed could be applied to gaming. Tarot cards are vague enough, while sounding concrete, that I can twist the cards to my story. 

The human mind is great at finding patterns, especially where there are none. This often can leave the players with the unseetling feeling that a card drawn was perfect for the situation. 

Of course there are cards that have enough meaning attributed to them that your story must change to fit the cards. 

While trying this system out, I returned to Cobblestone creek. One of the players was missing from the last session and his character was sent of on some vague mission. So to try out the system we followed his adventures. 

The system seemed to work well. Karma issues where being dealt all over the place. Eventually I drew some cards that where unmistakeably loyalty followed by a great revelation followed by a great gift. It was similar to rolling a few critical successes in a row. So I pulled it into the game and ended up giving the character a few extra powers. 

Not long after that, I pulled some cards that read close to the opposite. So I ended up taking the characters arm half off.

The problem that did aries came from the lack of influnce from the character makeup. When rolling dice, the character's sheet will have a modifier or of some form or another change the likelyhood of success. This is largely removed from a tarot based game. I could see this bothering enough players that I do not think that a tarot system on its own would be preferable. At the very least, this type of system needs the right crowd. 

Another aspect that I had examined: using the tarot cards as a random event generator. First, draw a card, but do not reveal it to the players. Keep a mental note of what it stands for. When the topic or event on the card is brought up or about by the characters, thats when you deal a few cards to change things up. 

I have had some decent feed back from this idea, and I think I will give it a few more tries to see if it keeps me amused.