Destiny Cards
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A diceless system with a flavour similar to Simple D6.
You know your character will succeed or fail, but you get to choose when.
Gonna need some players, a storyteller, a story, and a deck of poker cards. At four players or more, you'll want a second deck of cards with the same backs. Sort the cards into a stack for each suit, shuffling the cards in each stack. Discards go face up, and shuffled back into the stacks when a stack is exhausted.
The card suits represent the different types of challenges: Mental ♣, Social ♦, Spiritual ♥, and Physical ♠. Players will discard appropriately-suited cards from their hand to resolve conflicts; ranks determine the outcome.
Characters have a name, age, history, and three career/competencies. They're assumed to have typical gear for their competencies. They also have one 'strong' suit, and one 'weak' suit. The player draws cards from the piles into their hand: three cards for their strong suit, one card for their weak suit, and two cards from each of the other two suits.
When the character is taking a risk, or success is not guaranteed and failure would be interesting, the storyteller declares what type of challenge it is, and how difficult (Hard, Typical, Easy). If the player character has an appropriate competency, or an extraordinary item that could help, the difficulty is lessened by one step (less than easy is automatic success). The player discards from their hand -- the card determines success. Playing an off-suited card changes "Yes" to "No."
| Hard | Typical | Easy | Any | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| King | Queen | Jack | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Ace/Joker |
| Yes, and | Yes | Yes, but | Yes, and | Yes | Yes, but | Yes, and | Yes | Yes, but | No, and | No | No, but | +1 bennie; try again |
Players cannot refresh their hand until it is empty; then they draw up to a full hand. If a character has taken Mental/ Social/ Spiritual/ Physical damage, they draw one less card of that type when refreshing until they've recovered from that damage (ie: sleep, people forgetting, reassurances, medical attention). Players don't die when they cannot draw any new cards of any suit, but they'll always need to play off-suited cards for challenges of that type, insuring they will fail and be worse off at other types of challenges.
"Bennies" are like luck points. Spend them to lower the difficulty of a single challenge as if they had an appropriate competency, or to discard harmlessly and replace any one card in their hand.