This Thread Helped Me Design My First Game. Thanks Guys!

This thread helped me design my first game. Thanks guys!

I'm working on a Wild West/Horror fusion RPG that uses playing cards instead of dice. The main conflict resolution system has The Dealer (GM) lay out 2 or more cards face-up and the final card face-down to represent the difficulty of the action. This is a Challenge Hand!

The Player then must choose cards from their hand to beat the Challenge Hand. Only there are a few obstacles in their way:

1. How many cards the Player can choose is restricted by how they're handling the situation. Are they bashing down a door? That's Strength, aka Clubs. Say the Player's Character has a Clubs of 3. They can only play up to 3 cards to beat the Challenge Hand!

2. The suit of the highest card the Player chooses must match how they're handling thr Challenge Hand. In the aforementioned example, that would mean the highest card the Player chooses from their hand would have to be a Clubs card. Spades are wild-cards in this system so those can be used in place of the required suit if necessary.

3. Because the last card in the Challenge Hand is face-down, the Player only has partial information of the score they need to beat the Challenge Hand. It could be anywhere from +2 to +11 more than the face-up cards show!

4. Players don't get to refill their hand of cards back to 6 until their hand is empty! This means the Player will occasionally have to face a Challenge Hand with very few cards in hand. This creates intense situations where players really have to cross their fingers and pray that the face-down card in a Challenge Hand is low.

So Challenge Hands use both the partial information from face-up vs face-down cards, as well as the extra values a card can have instead of dice, namely the suit.

I've also got additional mechanics that tie into other points mentioned in this post, like using the cards in character creation to determine what personality traits a Character has through a large random table, but I've gone on long enough for one post.

Just wanted to say thanks to the people I'm rebloging and share what I've done with their ideas!

Ultimately an RPG that uses playing cards as a randomizer but doesn't actually utilize the cards for. You know. The things that cards can do. Is just using them as a fancy, weirdly shaped die.

A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.

You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.

You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.

There's suits as an added bit of information that can be utilized for some mechanics. Maybe matching suit with an action type results in an extra benefit?

RAAAAAH I LOVE WHEN GAMES HAVE NON-STANDARD COMPONENTS FOR PLAY

Gonna start posting my one pagers on Tumblr because why not. This one is about a weird dome I saw five minutes from my house that I’d somehow missed for an entire year

Solving this exact design problem is why I've been toying with the idea of a GM-less horror game where the details of the monster are revealed via playing cards as the players encounter the monster in increasingly dire situations.

The card system would be inspired by Sleepaway's Lindworm events, but each encounter would then be logged into a Monster Sheet that documents what the players have learned about the monster so far.

if you want to make your players roleplay out the process of trying things on the monster to learn its weaknesses in a challenge game, it behooves you to invent a monster they don't know about.

them playing dumb until you arbitrarily decide they've experimented enough to be allowed to try what everyone knew was the correct answer going in is not a satisfying play experience for anyone

Just finished my first playtest of my wild west horror game, and my biggest takeaway is this:

It is equally important to be good at communicating your rules as it is to have fun an interesting rules.

Now, this is an obvious token of advice that any game designer worth their salt should be aware of, but it's not until I sat down to playtest that I understood the GRAVITY of it.

Because my poor players, my dearest friends who were willing to take time out of their day to understand my game and play it through, read the rulebook up and down multiple times. And each and every one of them came to the table with a sheepish admittance of guilt that they didn't understand the rules.

But they shouldn't feel guilty for that, that's MY fault as a communicator of the game's rules. See, I initially wrote the rules of my game for myself, as a designer. I made a step-by-step list of the procedures between the GM and the Player. But to someone that isn't a designer, my rules were described in a way that was positively USELESS.

My point is, it's very difficult as a game designer to communicate your mechanics to non-designers without hands-on demonstration. But you don't have that luxury when selling that game to strangers once the playtest is over. It's a skill you have to develop, a skill where you need to view your game from the perspective of someone who has never encountered it before. That's difficult.

Now, once the Players understood the mechanics, they actually got really into my game. And for that I'm very proud, and even more so relieved. I was worried I would have to rewrite my rules from scratch because the game wouldn't be fun.

Turns out I will be rewriting my rules from scratch, but not because the rules were bad, but because my communication was bad!

What if there was a TTRPG where you're only a part-time adventurer? So all of your abilities and toolkit are specific to your mundane job and you need to find ways as the player to apply them to dungeon crawling.

I'm just about level 100 in Elden Ring and my favorite quest line BY FAR has been Ranni the Witch and Starscourge Radhan.

My jaw dropped the first time I wandered down into Siofra River and saw the starry night beneath the earth. My jaw dropped twofold when I was told how those stars got there.

A lot of fantasy games should take notes on this kind of worldbuilding. Too often I find that settings (my own included) are unwilling to do things as outlandish as "arresting the stars and imprisoning them underground" because the writer is worried that such a concept won't be taken seriously by Players. Perhaps this is because said writer is concerned that it will ruin the suspension of disbelief for Players, as it directly contradicts the cosmology of our own world.

But brother this is FANTASY, let your cosmology go wild and let your Players get elbow deep in that cosmology in turn. Freeing the stars from Radhan's grasp and watching that crater to Nokron appear on the map has been one of the coolest things in the first 100 levels of Elden Ring.