Cards as a Game Mechanic (Or: I've Talked with People who Think This is a Good Idea)

So before, it was mentioned that cards as a game mechanic could have some very practical uses in game.  Not only that, but the collectible card game scene is booming right now, Wizards of the Coast is reporting that Magic the Gathering is raking in about 60%-70% of their income every year, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, especially with how popular Pokemon TCG still is, as well as Yu-Gi-Oh.  Suffice to say, the kids like their trading cards.  They even published an RPG trying to turn it into a quasi-collectible card game: Gamma World.  It was received with some success (mostly due to the Gamma World name rather than the card portion itself), and did quite well for itself, proving that the model of combining RPGs with cards does in fact hold water.

Now that's not to say that trading cards are an easy market, or one that is guaranteed for success, quite the opposite.  If I had a nickle for every card game that didn't work, well I wouldn't be rich as it's sort of a niche market, but I certainly wouldn't be broke.  They just can't hold the audience that has grown up on Magic the Gathering and many have fallen, from Marvel VS, Cyberpunk, Yu Yu Hakusho, Naruto, Dragonball Z, Duel Masters, and a plethora of other card games that have failed that I won't go into.

I think the failure lies in the way collectible card games work.  It costs a lot of money to keep up to date with the new sets that are constantly coming out (as often as every three months), getting a tournament scene started takes work and a dedicated fan base (Friday Night Magic took years to craft), and for a small niche market, it's hard to carve out a piece of it.

So, in my opinion, following the collectible card game route is not a good idea.

That being said, cards are still a viable option, as recently we have seen an increase in the success of "deckbuilding" games (Such as Dominion, Nightfall, and Ascension), not to mention the classic alternative card games such as Uno, Flux, and Munchkin.  The major difference being that with these games all the cards come in one box.  One tied up neat package.  You spend a flat amount of $30-$50 and you're good to play the game ... indefinitely.  Sure, every once in a while an expansion is released, but these are mostly  for flavor and diehard game fans.

Therefore, my take on the whole thing is that if we include cards, we should include the entire set and keep it at that.  Seeing as how cards come in sheets of 110, I figure that if we package 110 cards with the game that will be enough to have some  nice variance, while also not being overwhelming.

As for how we would work in the card mechanic, my idea is this: each time a player's character beats an encounter, they get a card.  They are able to have so many cards equipped to their character at any given time depending on their level.  So at level 1 they can have say 2 cards equipped.  At level 7 they can have 9 cards equipped.  They can also hold cards in their hand and switch them out with equipped cards, as say, a "swift" action.  I'm just throwing out ideas right now, but if interested, I could throw together some more concrete mechanics if necessary.

As for the cards, I figure that we could follow Cabana's idea of increasing the power, length, etc. instead of giving new powers, and also following the original tenant of giving the players choice, we could have each card contain 3 choices for the player, they could select which they wanted and switch between them as a "swift" action if wanted.

An example of such a card would be as follows:

  - +1 to Dexterity (or whatever we use for the ability)
or
  - +1 to hit and +1 to damage
or
  - +2 rounds to spell length

Maybe each card also gives  the character an extra 2 or 3 HP, so that way instead of leveling them on the character sheet, we do all leveling through the cards themselves.  Anyway that's essentially my idea, in this way we can do multiple things:

 1. Players abilities grow without the traditional clunky and time wasting "leveling"

 2. Cuts down on clutter and confusion on the character sheet.

  3. Streamlines things, makes all the numbers easy to see and on the table (harder to cheat)

  4. Randomness of cards makes it much more difficult to min/max or break a character.

Looking at it, I think that this may definitely be an avenue that we want to pursue as a main gameplay mechanic.  It might be more expensive on our end, but the usability would easily make up for it.  I'll investigate this further and see if I can tighten it up a bit, unless someone sees any very obvious problems.