This is a fantasy roleplaying game done with a limited hand of cards as the character sheet.
My idea right now is to distribute the cards via PDF, and just have people cut them out and stick them into sleeves or write them on index cards or whatever.

Whatever your hand of cards is, thats your character sheet.

Each card has to have some cool art on it too. If this were real.

Ok.

So basicly the game is just about fighting and adventure. I'm not even going to worry about that right now.

Ok, so each card probably adds some attack bonus, some hit points, some defense. And might have some other weird abilities.


Typical card:

 Elven Blood: This card grants the following:
 1. use any single sword, bow, or magic spell card in your hand.  
 2. +10 hit points.
 3. +2 attack.
 4. +5 defense.
 5.  allows a single woodland spell card.

Another typical card:
 Rapier of Voivode
 1. +2 attack (stacking)
 2. +1 defense (stacking)
 3. use one additional woodland spell in your hand.
 4. +5 hit points.  
 5. 1d6 damage

Another typical card:
 Run Like Hell
 1. +5 hit points
 2. Grants +2 defense (stacking)
 3. Your character can escape from a single encounter or outrun any opponent. Afterwards turn this card over for the rest of the game.

And another:
 Mage Bolt
 "Place 3 tokens on this card. On your turn you may remove a token and cause 1d8 damage to any opponent. If you skip your turn you may remove all three tokens and do 3d8. "
 1. +1 attack (stacking)
 2.  +10 hit points.

and another:
 Armor of Thanol
 "place 1 token on this card. At any time you may remove the token to turn a hit into a miss."
 1. grants +5 defense (stacking)
 2. +15 hit points.
 
Etc.

Ok, and the deal is, you have like a million of these cards available (and endless expansion- just released on PDF or whatever). And you can pick and choose any 3 or 4 cards for your character, add up all the hit points, defense, attack and whatevers.

..and thats your guy.

and like certain cards: like if you had the "elven blood" card and the "demon blood" card on your guy, he becomes a half-elven/half demon character.

Some cards are equipment, some cards are maneuvers. Doesn't matter, really. You just jumble them all together. Every card has stats.

You could even randomly generate a character.

maybe a third kind of card, "character" or "traits"?  then you could include the -blood type, or "tremorsense" or things like that

Every character has 4 cards.

Each card will have a hit point value between 5 and 15 points.

You add the entire hand up to determine hit points.

So a first level character might have between 20 and 60 hit points.

Some cards will do things like make you lose a card. and thus- everything on it. Hit points, whatever.

You will have the possibility of levelling up which gives you an additional card slot. So you could have (at max) 8 cards in your hand.

The fictional world of this game would be on e in which a conceit is that the characters are always changing, so you could switch cards out every game. Maybe in one game you have elven blood (or abberant blood or venusian blood) and maybe in another you have changed that card out. .

Quote from: beebermaybe a third kind of card, "character" or "traits"?  then you could include the -blood type, or "tremorsense" or things like that

yeah, definitely! well, maybe we just leave off all 'type' o card or something. I like the idea of just drawing 4 cards and having them be a dude somehow.

I'll have to work on this. It's just brainstorming right now....

Feel free to add you r thoughts...

I think what I need to do is

1. invent a resolution system.
2. come up with a unique fictional fantasy "world" where these characters are adventuring.
3. Then get a pack of index cards and start inventing cards.

would there be a GM or adventure deck?  one that had locations, monsters, treasures, incidents?  hand of 10 or 12, as opposed to the 8 for a player.

or maybe a location/incident pile he draws from, and maintains a hand for "opposition" (monster/loot/gear)

i guess resolution would have to be around a draw one or two, play x number?

should there be a minimum hand size?

Yeah, definitely should be a minimum hand size, a GM and an adventure deck type deal.

Ive already gone to bed, but I got up to write this:

Every card could have hit points, attack and armor. Each is numbered 1, 2 or 3. If you have a 3 in something you have to have a 1 and 2 in the other two stats.

Certain cards will have a value of 4 in one stats, but a value of 0 in the other two stats.

So you could have an elite armor card that gave a +4 to armor, but no hit points or attack.

And a normal attack card might give a +3 to attack, a +2 to hit points and +1 to armor.

i'm done for the night now too, but one more thought:

split into physical attack/defense, and spirit (magical) a/d?

keep one set of h.p. tho

The Poisoner's Needle

                 /\
                 []
                 []
                 []
             |-----|
                 []

Physical:  3/0/10   attack is +3/defense is zero/+15 hitpoints
Spirit:  0/1/10  attack is zero/defense is +1/+10 soulpoints

This card has one token.  You may remove the token to cause GM to discard one card.  

A few random comments:

1.  I like the hitpoints in units of five.  For some reason, that sounds a bit cleaner to me but thats IMHO.

2.  Related to the first comment, I just added soulpoints to round off the design.  Maybe soul points let you do other things like replace tokens, etc.  

3.  It reminds me of a game for the Nintendo GC where all of the character's items, attack, defense, and magic were represented by cards.  You could only do actions related to cards in your hand.  

4.  You could even add flavor text if you like.  Any implied setting would be introduced one line at a time.

5.  The ASCII artwork won't turn out on here but that's ok. :confused:  Hopefully, it helps with card design.

Cool idea, thanks!

I am compiling something that I'll put up in a wiki and make public domain.

That way anyone who wanted to could make it into a game.

My idea right now is I want to do something weird with this fictional world where this  game takes place (like maybe the characters are all insectoids, or maybe it's a futuristic furry type world like Sonic the Hedgehog).

...and since it will be public domain on a wiki, any of you guys could borrow what you like of my ideas and totally do your own take on it, and vice versa. In case I go off in a direction you think sucks.

I was thinking the GM doesn't have to have his monsters play by the same rules. So he could have a single card with 5 monsters on it. The monsters do only 1 or 2 points of damage and generally get blown away quickly, and stack up points, but they wear the characters slowly down. Adventures would be series of challenges, encounters, and bosses.
When you defeat a boss monster, you capture one of his cards or even special loot cards.

If we could somehow put races and chases as part of the adventure design for this game that would be awesome.

you could use a die (any type) to represent character level.  then max hand size would be 7 + level.  a win mechanic could be first to whatever level.  short game?  use a d4 or d6.  feeling uber-heroic?  use a d12 or d20.  have a weekend to kill, or running an insane campaign?  just use ye olde percentiles (d100)

you're right, GM's hands should use different rules.

Hmmm,

Maybe you could have some static cards that don't go away which would be called race cards and class cards.  Each cards would list an ability or two to define them.  For instance, the fighter card could say something like, all equipment cards are +2 attack more than listed when used by the fighter.  In addition, each card has +10 hit points more than listed.  

Woodland elf:  may use nature spell cards even if they are not of a spellcasting class.

In any case, my point is that they would give some stability to a character that might look like a samurai one moment and a computer hacker the next moment.  That may or may not be a good thing depending on what you are looking for.  Of course, the card choices would look different if you went sci-fi, superheroic, etc.