What's missing in card-based rpgs? Anything?

[Norfleet]

If a game is very complicated, with hundreds of different items, even if it mechanically random like blackjack, so long as hands can be very long, equivalent to complicated "character building". It soon becomes a game of skill almost like a deterministic game.

That's why I said small-scale RNG, yes. Card-style games generate small amounts of randomness. It's not something like combat in the Dominations games, which are jampacked with so much RNG that the player pretty much never directly engages with the RNG, because enough randomness just becomes noise, keeping the game from being 100% predictable, but still creating a very predictable character. When you roll 1d6, the expected value is 3.5, but this is completely meaningless and has no real bearing on your immediate situation. When you roll 10000d6, the outcome is gonna be 35000-ish, with very little variation.

[Lich]

You mean card RPGs, or just card games in general (ie Magic, or even things like poker/cribbage/rummy/etc...)?

Would a game like Thronebreaker count as a RPG card game?

I would say so.

RPG basic play, conflicts resolved in card games. For me, if I play a card game, I prefer simply playing a the card game. If I want to play an RPG, I prefer an RPG.

Micropose had a 1997 PC game of Magic the Gathering which contained both. It had a "duels" game (which also had AI ran opponents) and then it had a RPG style implementation of it called Shandalar. The card game is the first screen and the second is the RPG area for shandalar. All conflicts were resolved with through the duels game space, but you walked around with RNG encounters, dungeons, and towns to buy cards.

While shandalar wasn't bad, ultimately it is just the Duels game with a bunch of fluff and like I said, this kinds of detracts from the intended play.





The problem I see is that the more focus put on either area detracts from the other and if massive effort is put into both, you get this constant battling between the two. It is "interesting", but at least for the implementations I have seen, it just doesn't seem to work and most seem to result in just being weak card games to avoid any real attention to combat/development mechanics. It seems either focus would be better served having the full attention, but I do see why some may choose it because making a simplistic card game for conflict resolution is often far easier than a detailed RPG combat system.

The environment and movement in Shandalar don't add much that's meaningful to the main card game. Time spent watching your character waddle around the environment is mainly there for simulation. One might as well remove the environment and movement parts of the game completely, or make them more integral parts of the game by borrowing from old roguelike games.

[rusty_shackleford]

I like the aspect of having to react to what you're given and making the best of a bad hand, but it's also very abstract and there's no good way to reconcile this outside of some magic systems.

To be fair, this applies to most combat systems that aren't magical. Trying to make it anything other than "fighter uses fight" can introduce awkwardness.

Anyone have any examples of actually good non-magical combat systems that feature more than "fighter uses fight"? I don't consider "use ability when off cooldown" to be good.

Obligatory,

[rusty_shackleford]

I completely forgot that psionics in AD&D 2E used cards



Pretty sure this was just for the complete psionics book and not any other kind of 2E psionics too.

What did they do?
No idea.

[Norfleet]

I'm pretty sure those are clue and note cards rather than playing cards that have a mechanical function.