Vad hade hänt om de första rollspelen inte hade använt tärningar?

[Quadrante]

Marc Miller valde ju att köra helt med d6 i sitt Traveller 1977, utan att gå på tärmningspöl. Så även om han kände att det var svårt att få tag på andra polyedrar, körde han rätt så D&D-likt, fast med 2d6.

Vilket kan ha varit det första d6-pöl-systemet? Star Wars från West End Games?

Minns att vi körde nåt liknande när vi hängde på biblioteket och spelade innan vi läst rollspelsregler och bara visste på ett ungefär hur de var skrivna. Rulla och läsa av högt/lågt i förhållande till något man sa innan känns rätt naturligt utifrån att man spelat brädspel nån gång i livet.

 

[Hellzon]

Det finns ett helt inlägg på Tumblr med fördelar med kort:

Ultimately an RPG that uses playing cards as a randomizer but doesn't actually utilize the cards for. You know. The things that cards can do. Is just using them as a fancy, weirdly shaped die.
A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

• You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.
• You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.
• You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.
• There's suits as an added bit of information that can be utilized for some mechanics. Maybe matching suit with an action type results in an extra benefit?

A few other stupid card tricks you can use in your tabletop RPGs:

• Playing cards can be used to implement large random lookup tables where duplicate results need to be avoided without resorting to forced rerolls. (Tip: remove the aces, jokers and court cards from a standard poker deck, leaving only the 2–10s of each suit, and you've got a set of cards which can be used to double-index a full d66 table to allow it to work with either cards or dice. Also, you just set aside 18 cards, so you can use those to double-index a separate half-d66 table if you need both.)
• Even when you're using playing cards as ersatz dice (i.e., just drawing the top card from the deck and treating that as your roll), the drawn card automatically furnishes a persistent token representing the result of that "roll"; this token can then be fed into a resource economy, retained as an historical record of the outcome, or both. (For example, Rose Bailey's Beautiful Anomalies, in which "rolled" cards are played face-up on the table into a linear queue from which the GM draws, allowing players' actions in the present to control the GM's dice rolls in the future.)
• In physical play spaces, the fact that cards have face-up and face-down states allows randomised outcomes to be made known to some but not all players much more easily than with dice. The face of a drawn card can be selectively shown only to certain participants, while a played card can be placed on the table face-down to offer assurances that the unrevealed outcome hasn't been tampered with. (This can be done with the outcomes of dice rolls via note-passing, of course, but using cards in this way removes the need to trust that the note accurately reports the unrevealed roll, which can facilitate some types of adversarial play.)
• Building on the previous point, cards have extra axes of statefulness. A die typically offers only the rolled number and its position on the table as stateful information, but a card can be face-up or face-down, placed in an upright or rotated position, etc. In face-to-face play, cards are also much easier to move from zone to zone on the table when position-as-state is required, making them better suited to applications where randomisers double as resource tokens or playing pieces.
• Deckbuilding. It's a lot more feasible to give each player a personalised mini-deck of cards to draw from than it is to give each player a set of dice with customised faces; if you're determined to bring deckbuilding mechanics to the tabletop, basing it on actual playing cards is going to be a much easier sell for potential players than asking them to screw around with papercraft tokens or blank dice and markers. (Or, heaven forefend, asking them to actually buy custom dice which can only be used with your game!)
• Finally, standard playing cards get you a lot of cards for not that much money (you can usually buy three to five full 54-card decks for the same cost as a single set of standard polyherdrals), which is a strong selling point in contexts where you need (or want) to be throwing around lots and lots of individual randomisers and would prefer not to go the "great thundering handfuls of dice" route.

(Min blog, men det är en reblog.)