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Design Document

Drafting specifics

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Core Design Principles

Deck of Adventures is, first and foremost, designed for accessibility, both in ease of on-boarding and ease of access. Not everyone has specialty dice or the time to study complex interconnected rules released over a long history. While becoming a Game Master (GM) may take some time and dedication, a player completely new to tabletop roleplaying should be able to pick up Deck of Adventures and start playing within an hour. This means mechanics should be easy to learn, and easy to explain during a first session. One only needs a standard deck of playing cards.

Second, Deck of Adventures is designed to be flexible, across the many types of stories GMs want to tell. While our mechanics have been workshopped with lore from the World of Erdania, all core mechanics should be portable to another setting. In other words, Deck of Adventures is setting-agnostic. No core mechanic should imply a specific setting (e.g., magical fantasy) and all settings should be playable by ignoring or reflavoring a subset of optional mechanics (e.g., the Mystic Aura is EMP tech).

Third, participants should be able to quickly and easily engage in rich storytelling with only a standard deck of playing cards. Any component that doesn't contribute to this end should be revisited. Accessible and flexible doesn't, however, mean sparse. A first-time player can pick up a pre-made character in minutes, but then optionally spend much longer planning out how to make a bespoke character that speaks to them, with creativity fueled by the wide array of choices.

Design Axioms

Though iterative design, developers have landed on the following as touchstones.

  1. Pip value is contextual. The number on the card has no inherent value. There's nothing good or bad about a 2 or a King, a Spade or a Club. The randomized context determines how good the outcome is.

  2. PP = HP = AP. During rests, players decide which of these resources to replenish. Characters may have different maximum, but expending one should feel roughly equivalent to the others.

  3. Target Cards remain on a character at all times. Each character is always represented by a Target Card. Between combats, the TC remains active on a character for any other Checks. A new TC is drawn at the start of the next combat to shuffle the turn order around for each combat.

  4. Target Cards changing often is important. When Player Dealers are drawing cards constantly aiming at a specific TC, the likelihood of a success decreases as more cards that hit are drawn from the deck. Changing TCs to represent each enemy or challenge keeps the odds of drawing a success balanced over the course of an Adventure.