For years I’ve been tinkering with an idea for an rpg rules system that tries to capture something that I don’t think a lot of rpgs capture; how the effort and attention you put into something can often be more important than your skill level in doing it. I’m not saying no rpgs do this, but rpgs tend to assume you’re putting maximum effort into any task you are taking the time to resolve with rules.  My hope is by involving effort I could give players more control over their success rather than leaving it up to chance.  Let the player decide if they are going to allocate enough of their effort to succeed even in the face of bad luck and then face the consequences for their lack of effort or attention elsewhere.  So you could throw everything into one blow but have nothing left for defense.    

I’ve been working on this system so far with playing cards. Each player would have their own deck of standard cards with no jokers (I had been toying with a tarot version of this but that got weird and complicated with the major arcana).  Preferably the cards for each player should look different so they don’t get mixed up. Players would normally have some number of cards in their hand drawn randomly from the deck.  So far I’ve been working with 5 cards.  When a player wants to act in a risky or dramatic way that they may fail at they can play these cards and total up their values).  So if you play a 2 of clubs, 5 of spades, and a 6 of hearts  your total would be 13.  You would be limited in terms of how many cards from your hand you can play per round for a type of action by your skills. For example if you have a Melee skill of 2 you can only play 2 cards to attack in melee during a round. If the total of your cards played for an action is over the target number or the total of the opposition you succeed. Every five points over the target number is an extra success, doing extra damage or somehow improving your results. Some tasks like moving would not have a Target Number and just determine a result, like how far you moved. If you wanted to run up to someone before you attacked them you could put two cards in Athletics to make sure you crossed the distance. Then at some point the “round” is up and you get to refresh your hand.

Face cards like the Jack, Queen, and King don’t add on like numerical cards but instead give you some manner of “bonus points” that characters use to activate special abilities like ignoring armor, completing the task faster, or knocking a target back. One bonus point for a jack, two for a Queen, and three for a King. This would give each contest two measures of success which I’m a big fan of in games like the One Roll Engine or the custom dice games from Fantasy Flight like Warhammer 3rd ed.  Coming up with those options for every situation is daunting, but I think it could be fun.   

The thing I like about this is you get random numbers; i.e. your cards, and then you make decisions for your actions based on those rather than deciding your actions and then getting a random number (a die roll) to determine your success.  You can alter your tactics based on how well you draw rather than being stuck with whatever you roll.  So if one round you had hoped to go attack and defend against your enemy in melee and you draw low cards maybe you just defend.  Or maybe go all attack in the hopes you put them down before they attack.   I often get frustrated by RPGs when I have some awesome thing I want to accomplish but one roll of the dice and I can’t, with no recourse or metacurrency to spend to change that. 

Players could assist each other by combining cards using the highest skill total between the cooperating characters as the card limit.  So if you have one character with low skill but good cards they can assist a more skilled player by using their cards with the more skilled player’s skill level.  

Each card can represent a different action; so if you have five  cards you could theoretically take five actions a round, but they’d be unlikely to succeed.  If you have a Melee of 3 you can assign up 3 cards per round to melee attacks, that may be resolved as one attack with all three cards totaled up, two attacks(one with 2 cards and one with 1 card), or three attacks with one card each.

My thought in this system is the GM would not play a hand of cards for every opponent or challenge. That seems like a heavy mental workload.  For the simplest tasks they’d just state a Target Number based on the difficulty of the task and the player would play cards accordingly.  More fluid Tasks would be assigned a difficulty 1-5 normally and the GM would draw that number of cards to create the target number for the player.  Order of play would go something like:

1. Players draw cards and look at them.,  
2. Players declare actions in whatever order they want to go in. 
3. GM declares the difficulty of the current player’s action
4. Curent player allocates cards based on the difficulty they just learned but not knowing the exact Target Number.
5. The Gm reveals the difficulty cards for the current player’s action and it is resolved.  If the player’s total is higher than the GMs cards they succeed. Every 5 points over the Target Number is an extra success.  
6. GM characters act, using their difficulty and drawing cards against the cards allocated by the players to defense. 

Named opponents would likely get their own hands of cards, but mooks and minions would be grouped up into squads that are treated as one character.  

What is a “round”?  

Everyone runs out of cards? That seems to make the most logical sense but not everyone will run out of cards every round.  So run out of cards or stop taking actions? That works for something like combat that is fast and everyone tends to be acting as fast as possible, but what about something like diplomatic events or exploring and surviving in the wilderness over time.  Situations where one person may run out of cards long before someone else if they are the expert for that situation.  But maybe that’s a feature not a bug; it forces everyone to share the spotlight once they run out of cards. You would have to find something everyone can do in every situation, which may be tough.    

Health

Each character has some value of health or damage they can suffer before they are defeated.  Having different tracks for  Physical vs Mental vs Social would not be a bad idea. As players suffer more damage they have to allocate cards from their hand to their health to stay active. Like putting a 10 in your Health lets you stay active after taking up to ten more points of damage than your base health. I’m not sure if such a naked death spiral is a good idea though. It certainly make things grittier, but I’m not sure that fits with the rest of the system.

Destiny

Each character has a number of Destiny points that can be spent to aid them.  Probably something like five to start with and they are regained by taking actions to further your character’s drives, beliefs or vices. Destiny can be spent to aid other players as well as yourself. Destiny can be spent to:

• 1 Destiny to Mulligan your hand.
• 1 Destiny to draw an extra card and play it.
• 5 Destiny declare your aristeia; clear your health and draw an extra card each round for the rest of the scene.

If you ever have 0 Destiny or fewer luck is against you. If you end a scene at negative Destiny you will die somehow in the near future.  Fate has decreed it.