Tabletop but with cards to supplement/replace dice?

[Clive Howlitzer]

I regularly run tabletop sessions, mostly D20 based games. Recently it is the Numenera setting. Anyway, two of my players have mentioned several times how much they dislike dice and the idea of random chance destroying carefully laid plans. Numenera has some systems for spending XP to reroll dice and such, which isn't bad but they began asking me about more options being available.
They talked about how they'd be interested in there being some kind of card mechanic, where you held a deck of various kinds during a session, or earned them, and could use them for various effects like turning a 1 into a higher roll, adding numbers to rolls, other in-game effects and such.
I was curious if there are any systems out there, or anyone has any ideas to adapt such a thing to Numenera. A deck building aspect to supplement dice rolls, or even to replace them. I did some quick searching and noticed Savage Worlds has a system for this.

Anyone aware of anything like this? Personally, I am just as fine with dice myself, but open to checking out new things.

 

[DoPo]

I think Deadlands has some card mechanic, but I am not sure how exactly it works. I think it might not be what you're after, though.

FATE has the...erm, I think they were called Fate points, anyway - you can spend them to dictate what's happening instead of rolling for it. As long as it's an aspect your character possesses, for example a nimble athlete can jump, swing across and land behind somebody perfectly, but not, say, disarm the bomb.

Actually, a lot of systems use a similar style of "awesome points" - you spend them and stuff happens. Shadowrun is another example I can think of right now. It's just that FATE does it best, I believe. Anyway, it's easy to implement - just add a new stat to the game to reflect them (say, call them Luck or Favour of the Gods or whatever) and then just figure how to ration them. Depending on how much leeway you want to give your players, you have various ways of distributing them - maybe 1 when something exceptional happens (a player manages to do something really really well or, like, really fuck things up) maybe at specific milestones in a session or a story (a boss is defeated? a chapter is completed?) and so on. Just try and experiment with several ways over a few sessions until you get the right feel.

There is an alternative of using cards as you describe, and they work similar to awesome points, but the difference is that the cards represent specific things (while the awesome points are sort of general - you can spend them to, say, reroll or maybe change something, while if using cards - you'd have one for each effect, perhaps). I can't recall which games did this, however, but it's not exceptionally hard to make your own. As I said - cards work the same as awesome points, so you could just have players draw a card instead of awarding them a point. You just have to define what each card does - again, you could just go through trial and error - perhaps try several cards at first and expand/change them as you go along. You don't even have to do it all yourself - get your players to help with suggestions and if you (any of you) don't like how something works in a game - change it.

Also, back to dice things, you can use other things than a d20. The d20 gives this...well, randomness to a game because of how it works - even the best swords man has a 5% chance to utterly miss each attack. In fact, because each number is equally likely to show up, you get paradoxical situations of the best swordsmen being the ones who suffer the most from self inflicted wounds - since they do the most attacks with a sword, statistically they would also get the largest amount of critical fumbles.

So, instead of a d20, you can just use 3d6. It works exactly the same way (so you roll 3d6+/- modifiers) but now the average result (and nearby outliers) are way more likely so the best swordsmen would actually not keep stabbing themselves. It helps a lot but it also makes extremes more rare. Whether this is good or bad depends on the game - D&D uses the d20 to evoke the heroic fantasy feel where everything is possible - even the greatest thieves can fail and even the a non-thief can succeed. If using 3d6 these two are both probably not going to happen.