A Game of Artifact Control (idea)

I had an idea for a card game today. I don't know what it is about me and card games, they're like an addiction. I don't know why I ever bother designing these because I don't have the resources to buy the necessary art to ever publish one. Here are my ideas anyway.

A Game of Artifact Control

There are objects of power in the universe. They do things that are unexplainable. Various people and factions want them for all manner of reasons. You are one of them.

The core of the game revolves around control of these artifacts. Factions clash as they try and recover, collect, destroy, and control these items. The game consists of two or more players facing off against each other, each bringing their own artifacts to the field. When one player no longer has any artifacts under their control they have lost.

Players come to the table with a deck of at least 60 cards as well as an artifact collection of 6 total artifacts. The artifact cards are each placed face down in a row in front of each player.

Mystical, Technological, and Financial resources are used to play cards. At the beginning of each players turn they choose one of these resources and places them on one of their Artifacts. These resources are usually represented by coloured beads (Financial = Yellow, Technological = Blue, Mystical = Red). Resources can be taken in any amount from the Artifacts to play cards, but to activate Artifact abilities/powers the resources need to have been placed on the Artifact in question. Resources are consumed when used and placed back in the shared pools they came from. On the first turn only the players distribute 3 resources among their artifacts, although they many not put more than one on each.

Resource control can be an alternate win condition for the game. If any one player is able to control all of a specific resource (Financial, Technological, or Mystical) then they win the game. To be clear, this means that none of the other players nor the common pool have any of the chosen resource.

Each turn a player may attack their opponents Artifacts with any Units that they have in play. These Units may be intercepted by Units that the defender control. The Unit with the least power in such a clash is destroyed. Equal powered Units are both destroyed. Multiple Units may intercept an attacker. If a Unit successfully attack an Artifact then resources equal to the Unit's Power are removed from the Artifact. Some Units specify a specific type of Resource that must be removed, if none is specified then the Defender chooses.

Artifacts

Each player has six Artifacts and all of them have their own powers and abilities. At the beginning of play they are placed face down in front of each player. Resources are assigned to artifacts each turn. Over the course of play the artifacts may be re-arranged, stolen or destroyed. If a player ever has control of all remaining Artifacts then they win the game.

To use an Artifact’s ability it must be revealed at the time of use. Flip it from face down to face up. It stays that way unless another ability or card is used to turn it face down or to shuffle the artifacts. Two Artifacts of the same name can not be in the face up position at the same time (unless otherwise noted).

An artifact can be destroyed using special operations or equipment cards or unit and artifact abilities. More commonly, they are destroyed by attacking them with units. A unit deals damage equal to its power as normal. For each point of power 1 resource is removed from the artifact. If there are no resources remaining it is destroyed and placed into the discard.

Deck Cards

Deck cards come in a number of different varieties. The three most common are Unit, Operations, and Equipment Cards.

Unit Cards are your troops on the ground. While they may have other uses, they are primarily used to defend your artifacts and attack/steal your opponents artifacts. Unit cards can be played by spending resources. The type of resource used to bring them into play depends on the unit and the faction it belongs. Units may have special abilities that can activated by spending resources.

Operations Cards are one time use tactics or effects that you can play by spending resources. They are things like calling in reinforcements, rearranging artifacts, and getting intel (revealing artifacts or an opponents hand).

Equipment Cards are just that, equipment. These are attached to Units to improve them in some way. The most common benefit of an equipment card is that it will add a special ability to a Unit.

Example Artifacts

Humming Scrap
Type: Alien Artifact
This mysterious piece of unidentifiable metal gives off a faint vibration despite having no power source.
Power Surge - Destroy all units attached to Humming Scrap and receive 2 Tech for each one destroyed this way.

Statue of Moloch
Type: Religious Artifact
This large statue contains 7 cabinets. Within each cabinet is a different sacrifice.
Sacrifice - During your turn you may sacrifice any Unit you control. The resource cost of the unit is placed on Statue of Moloch in the form of Mystical Resources. You may not sacrifice a Unit engaged in combat.

Example Units

Thieving Smoke
Type: Mystical Unit
Faction: Brotherhood of Smoke
It is well known that the Brotherhood can steal the unstealable. It is less known how they do it.
Power: 1 (Financial)
Special: When Thieving Smoke damages an Artifact place the lost resources on an Artifact that you control.
Special: Pay 1 Mystical to prevent Thieving Smoke from being intercepted.

Templar Knight
Type: Mystical Unit
Faction: Templars
The sword of a Templar Knight is feared by monsters everywhere.
Power: 2
Special: If Templar Knight enters combat with any Unit with "Monster" or "Beast" in its name then its power is 6.

Categories: Artifacts, Card Games, Game Design, Idea, Secret Societies

A Dwarf loadout for a game that doesn’t exist.

Just as the topic says. Remember that role playing card game I mused about several months ago? I kept thinking about it and produced enough cards to make a sample character loadout. What you see above is a loadout for a stereotypical Dwarf character.

Based on the card layout for this character our dwarf has:

• 2 Strength
• 3 Toughness
• 1 Dexterity
• 1 Wisdom
• 1 Intelligence
• 1 Charisma

If you’ve read those previous posts you would know that these stats are derived from the colour of the cards used in the loadout. That means that if you add up all of the values it should equal 9. Thus, all characters must have a value between 0 and 9 for each attribute. That’s pretty straightforward, I think.

The question is, what are these attributes used for? In a nutshell, they relate to the Hit Deck. A communal deck of cards made up of 9 suits, each matching an attribute. Depending on what your character is doing their attribute could affect anything to the number of cards they get to draw to a bonus to the card value. Typically it’s going to be card draw. If our dwarf wanted to kick down a door, for example, the GM would have them draw a number of cards equal to their Strength attribute +1 (since you can’t draw 0 cards). They get to use the card with the highest value for their attempt to knock down the door. To further complicate things, there is a system of trumps. Basically, every attribute has one other attribute that trumps it and counts as a straight up failure if used. I haven’t figured out the trump relationships at this point.

If you look through the cards you might notice a few other things I haven’t previously talked about. I make reference to wound types on some of those cards. The way I envision injuries working in this game would be that the GM has a stack of wound cards of different types. He tosses those out to characters/monsters as needed. I feel that this is one of the strengths of using a card-based system. You can have the granularity of different types of injuries without having to look rarely used rules. What you need is printed on the card that has handily been placed next to your character.

I don’t believe I’ve spent much time talking about the difference between Ancestry, Ability, and Equipment cards either. Mechanically, it comes down to how they are swapped in and out of your character loadout. Ancestry cards can never be swapped out unless something drastic happens like a polymorph spell or disownment. Ability cards require retraining of some kind to change and Equipment cards can be moved in and out on a character’s turn. Fluff wise there are some differences, but I’m sure you can work those details out on your own.

I think the cards are pretty self-explanatory and give an idea of how I imagine this game playing out. I think it’s worth noting that a player could easily mix and match cards from different loadouts to quickly and easily create all kinds of different characters.

That pretty much does it for now. I don’t know how much further I’ll pursue this idea. It seems like fun to me, but I’m not sure if it really appeals to anyone other than me. I might post up some card templates so that anyone could make their own cards. If you want to see more of this then let me know.

Categories: Card Games, Game Design, RPCG

Quick mock-up of a Role Playing Card Game card.

I know I said that I wouldn’t play around with my role playing card game (RPCG) until I finished up my revision of In Between, but I just couldn’t help myself.

Here is a mock-up of what one of the Persona Cards might look like.

I think I’ve missed my true calling in life: art. 

Apart from the terrible art and questionable graphic design skills what’s going on here exactly? Well, let’s start from the top and work our way down.

First off you’ll notice that the card is red. Various colors represent different attributes. In this case that attribute is STRENGTH. Don’t worry, I’ve considered colourblind players. You see that tiny little icon at the top? It’s supposed to look like a muscely bicep. It’s there as a secondary way of telling what attribute the card is linked to. I’ll talk more about attributes at some later point in time. For now, just know that they exist.

Next up is the title of the card. That would be Orc Hatred. That’s pretty straightforward, as is the the stick-art below.

Now we reach the good stuff. In the text box you’ll see the bolded word ANCESTRY on the right. That’s to tell us that it is an Ancestry TYPE card. That’s important for random character creation and also for any other cards that might affect Ancestry cards. There are other Types as well. Right now they are limited to 3 types for Persona cards. That is Ancestry, Ability, and Equipment. As an aside, Persona cards are those that make up a player’s character . Character cards just sounded kind of boring so I decided to use Persona instead.

Beneath the TYPE is the RULES TEXT. This is the meat of a card. It has some role playing information which I think is really important to help drive home that this is a RPG and not a competitive card game. Following that is the actual mechanics aspect. In this case it talks about TRUMPS. Trumps are going to be a major part of the resolution system. Everything has a trump, think of it like rock-paper-scissors. Rock trumps paper which trumps scissors which trumps rock. Only in this case everything has a positive and negative trump which for the sake of simplicity we will equate to Critical Success and Critical Failure. Essentially what this card is saying is that if you’re fighting an orc and you roll a 1 you treat it like a 10 OR if you are negotiating with an orc and you roll a 20 then you treat it like a 10. Trumping and resolution is a bit more complicated than that, but this post isn’t about that. I’ll talk about the resolution system some other time.

That’s everything that is on this card. There is room for more information and some of the non-persona cards do have other stuff on them. Monster/NPC/Challenge cards, for example, require attribute information as they aren’t built out of 9 separate cards. This will be represented by colored symbols.

That’s enough about this game for now. If you’ve got a (relevant) opinion I’d love to hear it.

Categories: Card Games, Game Design, Idea, In Progress, RGCG

Combining card games and RPGs

Gamma World relaunched as a D&D 4E based game a couple of months ago. I picked it up since I’ve always been a fan of randomly generated character creation and the wacky universe that Gamma World is set in. We only played it once and it could only be described as a failure. I had intended it as a pickup and play kind of game when our regular games get waylaid for one reason or another; that's how we use Icons. It doesn't work too well for that. 4E is too heavy a ruleset and none of us are particularly familiar with it, which amplified the problem. We did, however, somewhat enjoy playing with the cards.

I didn't really think the cards were used as well as they could have been. They really were not used to any better of an effect than a table in the rulebook. Still, an interesting experiment.

Not long after our disastrous Gamma Worlds game, when I was poking around on the ‘net, I discovered an odd game called Dragon Storm. Dragon Storm is a mashup of RPGs and CCGs. I took a look at some of the cards and art and decided that it wasn't really for me, but it did get me thinking. How would I put together a mashup of RPGs and CCGs?

I’m not really looking to take on another project right now, at least not until In Between has been rewritten, but here are a few ideas I have bouncing around.

• Character cards are split into 3 types: Ancestry, Ability, and Equipment. For random character creation these are split into 3 seperate piles and 3 from each are drawn.

• Player Characters are built out of 9 card loadouts. They do not necessarily require 3 of each character card type, but randomly created ones will.

• Ability cards may be changed through retraining and Equipment cards can be changed at any time.

• A communal “Hit Deck” is utilized. This deck would consist of numbers on different suits as well as a few other special cards.

• Cards from this deck are drawn instead of rolling dice.

• Every card is assigned a suit. This is used when determining critical success and fumbles and may be important for abilities and other things.

• There should be at least one GM only deck. This could be split into two. One containing monsters/npcs and another containing adventure seeds. These could be drawn from to create random adventures and other such factors, but would be by no means mandatory for play. The GM may or may not utilize their own Hit Deck, although its purpose would be the same.

That's all I’ve got for now. It should make for quick and dirty games right now, but maybe one day I’ll flesh it out some more.

I’m actually aware of two other RPGs that use cards as a core mechanic. The first is the StoryCards system, which is really more of a tarot deck. The second is the 6d6 Fireball RPG in progress. I don’t know much about it yet, but they seem to be playing around with some similar ideas.

Categories: 6d6 RPG, Card Games, CCG, Dragon Storm, RPG, StoryCards