Here is a Quick Reference guide we put together for the game, back in 2008. dropbox.com/s/dz7lo1x4o3dh05e/DRTarotQuickReference.pdf?dl=0

@CaM It's blocked here, but I will definitely take a look at it later, thanks.

Did you base your RPG on any existing system, trying to swap out the dice, or did you start from scratch?

The system used no dice at all; all actions resolved via Tarot.

Um, it's darkest past had begun as a homebrew hack of Vampire, but by the time we introduced the Tarot rules into the system, it had long since lost any resemblance to it. By the time we quit playing, it was basically a generic "urban fantasy" / "modern horror" engine.

How did you come up with the idea to use Tarot cards instead of dice for resolving the actions?

I'm not really sure? We kept tweaking the dice engine, but the other two guys who did the bulk of the work never really felt happy with the dice systems... so one day they decided to try Tarot. We went through about 3 or 4 different rules before we decided on the method in that document.

The system involves drawing cards until either the player decides to quit drawing OR until they draw a trump (major arcana card) that they can't ignore. The trumps were split into 3 categories, but failing on a trump was always a failure. So a trump failure may be a "good" outcome, a bad outcome, or a neutral. Failing on a good trump meant what you wanted to happen failed, but it triggered some kind of positive side effect.

We weren't very good at detailing those mechanically (the primary architect / our GM was one of those people who could interpret Tarot cards almost instinctively)

A success was any non-trump who's face was at or lower than the character's attribute for that check. (so you could get multiple successes on an action). Skills, special abilities, etc. could be used to ignore trumps.

For non-combat actions, the GM determined how many successes were required for an action to succeed. If you got at least that many, you got the thing. More meant an exceptional event, but not a critical success.

@CaM I'd have to detail those a bit more in that case. I've read a bit about Tarot, but it's a far cry from interpreting them instinctively.

In combat, the attacker and defender both draw, and whoever gets more successes "wins." (with modifiers for dodge abilities, suitable protective gear/abilities, and so forth.

Each character has a specific card (1 non-trump card) that is a special card and it alone represents a critical success.

@CaM That reminds me a bit about a very simplistic RPG I've read about recently: Cats of Catthulhu. (I only really know DnD 5e when it comes to non-videogame RPGs)

Cats of Catthulhu? A spoof of Call of Cthulhu, I guess?

@CaM Yes (as far as I know), the players are playing cats and have to fight evil monsters - and humans not giving them their favourite treat. Funny and short rules, such as "when carrying something you have to put a pen between your teeth because that's how cats carry stuff" and simple mechanics such as "roll two dice and if it's easy succeed on one, if it's hard succeed on two"

:)

You have to throw a "save" for example when the fireplace is started and you are on a comfy chair in the warm

The Fool was always the WORST POSSIBLE card to draw. It was worse than rolling a 1 in D&D, since it was not just a critical failure, but a critical failure compounded.

@CaM Even worse than critical failure?

Sounds fun. My wife is a cat lover, I'd better never tell her that game exists.

Like, "near instant death"?

Like combat began with "draw to see how many actions you have." If you drew the fool, you had stopped drawing, so you could end up with NO actions (defenses included) that turn.

@CaM That is really bad. So you could end up with no actions and your opponent with a handful of actions, like attacking and defending?

So if a critical failure was like dropping your sword in D&D, then the Fool was more like dropping your sword, it cutting your own foot, then either sliding way out of reach or breaking, and then you not getting to fight for a few rounds.

Exactly.

That is instant death when thinking about low-level combat in DnD

And an interesting mechanic.

The game was intentionally designed to make it hard to succeed. You almost always failed at least once per session on something. And not in a D&D "you missed on your attack roll" way but in a "Now the GM has to figure out the side effects of your spell going haywire" kind of way

Was there a way to prevent the fool?

Nope.

(Well, other than awkward attempts at creative card shuffling)

How long were you playing with your group with this system?

About 2-3 years, before careers took all of us in different directions. (One is in California, one in Tennessee, and I'm in Ohio. Other players but not designers in Kentucky, TN....)

I still have most of what we managed to commit to paper. But it is probably only about 50% of what it needs to be (a lot of the verbiage is great background, but not great mechanically)

It sounds like a very flavour-full system where you need quite a few creative people to interpret the cards on the fly.

Yeah. That's where it was weakest. We had some very general guidelines to interpret the cards, but only like a sentence or two per trump card. (There was no need to interpret the other 4 suits).

It's easy to do the random parts with cards. But to assign meaning to each card is far more complex.

Also, it takes longer. Rolling a die takes 2 seconds. Drawing a hand of cards takes a minute.

So we had to make combat less granular than in D&D. A turn in this game was more like 3-4 rounds of D&D. Far less tactics were involved.

How many players did you have in your sessions?

The average was 5-7. We ran two sessions at Dragon*Con in Atlanta. Those had about 8-10, if memory serves.

Since the gaming style was less combat-focused, it went smoothly.

But I wouldn't want to try to run a D&D dungeon crawl style of game with the rules we had

Combat was more deadly, too. Taking damage wasn't just ignorable like in D&D. We had 4 tiers of damage. If your HP dropped from the highest to the 2nd highest tier, you took temporary negatives (sustained injuries that made you less combat effective).

At the next tier, you picked up injuries that required treatment or long healing over time/magic to fix (broken bones). At 3rd tier, the injuries could be life threatening over time (internal bleeding). At 4th, permanent (losing a hand in a sword fight, for instance).

So you didn't mess around in fights.

We argued internally about that death spiral, but in a horror system, it made sense.

Yeah, definitely sounds like a horror game where you would probably have a lot of natural hazards and such instead of "There are three goblins in front of that door you have to pass"

Our favorite game sessions tended to be what we came to call "awakening" sessions. Where we began the game believing we were humans, but ended the game realizing we weren't human at all. Discovering that we had died and become ghosts, or vampires, or... Those tended to be the most interesting games.

We also had games where the players had to try to contain some great evil (like Call of Cthulhu).

Or escape some evil we could never contain.

Currently I am trying to explore different systems, which is why I came up with my "Why would a staff increase magic power?" question. One answer mentioned Tarot in relation to magic and I only knew that Tarot was used for divining the future and had a lot of cards. The information that some suits in Tarot are related to things like Earth and Air for example was new and interesting and the amount of cards in a deck sounded like it would lend itself to an expansive magic system.

That's why I thought a worldbuilding-resources question might be in order to get some more information. Just to learn what others have done. I am thinking about adapting some things for my DnD campaign, or maybe just think about possible systems for video games.

Cool.

Nothing concrete basically, just a fascination for complex and creative magic systems and the hope to use some of the things I learn.

There are tons of books for Tarot, focused on using them for divination. I own a couple. The web has some stuff, too.

But what we found in playtesting for the above system was that doing standard Tarot draws ("the cross" or whatever) took too long for round-by-round roleplaying.

Because that kind of Tarot use assigns meaning to the cards and to where they land in the pattern because each card location means something specific.

Too many variables.

Your GM ends up having to learn the cards, and the card places, and then factor all that together to adjudicate the outcome of that round's action.

Which is why we scrapped all that and just used the cards for a pass/fail system. We only had to do an interpretation on the major arcana, a small subset of the deck, and then only in special cases.

And then your players come along and something you have never thought of and you can throw everything you memorized out the window and improvise anyway :D

The thing about a magic system is that a big and complex system is very fascinating and leads to lots of opportunities, but to paraphrase an old security principle "Opportunities at the cost of complexity come at the cost of opportunities"

Or something like that :D

The magic system we had was complex, but not because of the cards. We divided supernatural "things" into six categories, based on what they did. And then further into 5 or six tiers based on how strong they were. ALL supernatural powers fell somewhere on that table, so a vampire might know about one or two columns, and have access to just specific tiers based on power level...

SPELLS in specific, were complex things that combined at least 3 of the powers on that chart.... magic was hard, and never done lightly.

The more flexible your system, the more work it takes for the GM to manage.

And the more opportunities for any rules-lawyering players to get upset. :)

Have you ever looked at Deadlands RPG?

Nope. I have heard about it one or two times while browsing RPG.SE, but I've never taken a closer look.

What's it about?

It's a setting that combines westerns (the movies, not the real-world) with horror/magic/steam punk. It's set around the time of the civil war or just after. Magic suddenly comes back to the world.

The rules are dice-based, EXCEPT for spellcasters, who use poker cards to cast spells.

This is done by trying to make a good poker hand. I think the more powerful your spellcasting abilities, the more cards you can draw/discard to make your poker hand.

(I played it a few times back in the day, but not in a long time)

That sounds pretty interesting, too. Especially when thinking about incorporating into any system I know, because my players are probably, like myself, more familiar with poker than with Tarot.

Maybe I should have a look at that one.

:)

Thanks, you gave me a lot of input :D

Hope it helps!