Know When to Hold Em

Hello, friends!

Hope you’re having a spooky and wonderful October season.

Today, I’d like to share with you an experimental system I’ve been working on. I had a hunch that there should be more interactivity with skill challenges, so I thought up a quick little card challenge to go along with those. Something a little like this:

Art is very temporary, but the idea is that when you start a challenge, you draw a number of tarot cards based on your skill, and then try to get enough value off of those cards to beat the challenge. Major arcana will have varying effects (in or out of the challenge), and additional benefits can be gained by collecting a given suit or a set of the same number.

I’ve also tied this system to karma, which I’ve discussed a little in the past. There are eight possible karmas that could show up in the deck (the opposites on four axies). Two are chosen to go in the deck based on the current task, and two more are chosen at random. Bonuses and penalties are applied to the cards’ values based on the acting character’s karma scores.

In the screenshot, you can see Carolos is a little positive on fear karma (purple), giving him a bonus on the 7 card shown as an 8 below, and a little negative on hate (green), giving him a penalty on the 2 card.

You can also redraw some of the cards a number of times based on perks and other effects, allowing you to try and get a better hand if things aren’t working out–or to try and get a special bonus if you want to press your luck. There’s always a chance that the death card will show up causing automatic failure, or some other arcana that ruins the hand, or you might finish out a set that gives you extra XP for your active skillsets.

“What are active skillsets,” you say? I’ll cover that next time. 😉

Thanks for stopping by!

P.S. Some of you are probably wondering how business discussions went earlier this month. All I can say is that it moves at its own pace.