Battle System for RPG

**tallman16** · 05-11-2009, 04:56 PM

Okay, so me and my friends have decided to make our own game, and we want to use cards as are battle system with no dice involved. We want something original. Okay, we are trying to figure out how to use cards as a battle system, though. You see we can't figure out how to.... calculate damage. You see we have a melee and ranged attack base stat and our original idea was draw card, add zero at end, add card drawn to base melee/ranged atk and then divide by 2, but sometimes damage goes to high or low, and we need it balanced, and for enemies atks we have no idea...any help?

**nijineko** · 05-11-2009, 05:15 PM

use the same system for defense. if you really want to stick with cards, you'll have to use more than one deck.... unless you want to split off cards.

say use the non-trumps for the random effects. you'll have to decide when you shuffle drawn cards back into the deck. use the trump cards for status. instead of hitpoints per say, you can have the k, q, j, and joker be the four levels of status, the fifth level being knocked out or dead, depending on how deadly you want to go. you could even set having no status card as knocked out, and taking any more damage auto-kills you.

you might also want to check out "deadlands", it had a fully functional card based system presented in the game.

**jade von delioch** · 05-11-2009, 11:18 PM

I think it depends on what the cards will have on them.

There is a game called Fireborn. the combat system in that is pretty interesting and to make it easier on the players they printed up cards with all the actions on them. The reason for this is because in this game (much like Conspiracy X) the attacker and defender has a number of moves in their one action. These moves where split up further in to two groups: mental and physical. The number of moves that a attack or defend had depended on their fighting skill. The higher the skill the more moves they could take. It was set up so well that if the defender had more moves left they could get an extra attack out of it for free as part of theri defence.
To illustrate this further:
Attacker: Dash+dash+Jump+kick strike (A relatively simple action that allows the attacker to run up, leap, and kick the enemy)
Defender: ready+ready+block (the ready move is used to draw or move a melee weapon into position).

Mind you this is not the only thing taking place in the context of the rules there are some rolls involved and each success dicates whether or not any or all the move succeed; you need at least one success per.