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Old 08-30-2019, 01:46 PM   #21
tomc
 
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Default Re: Outdoor adventure cards?

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Originally Posted by philreed View Post
That is how I would handle it. If I wanted to manipulate a deck, as a designer, I would include multiple instances of the same card in the deck.
If you're replacing tables with decks of cards it can get out of hand quickly if you add a card for each combination of dice on a one to one basis.

For instance: a 3d6 table will have only 16 entries (3 through 18), but represent 216 (6x6x6) combinations of dice. So to perfectly preserve the bell curve you get from rolling dice, you'll need a deck of 216 cards to draw from, with many duplicates so the odds of drawing each result remain the same. This many cards might make your game too expensive to print.

You can mitigate this by using fewer cards for each combination, in effect flattening the bell curve. This will make the less likely items come up more often, but perhaps make things more exciting.
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Old 09-03-2019, 09:13 PM   #22
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Default Re: Outdoor adventure cards?

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Originally Posted by tomc View Post
If you're replacing tables with decks of cards it can get out of hand quickly if you add a card for each combination of dice on a one to one basis.

For instance: a 3d6 table will have only 16 entries (3 through 18), but represent 216 (6x6x6) combinations of dice. So to perfectly preserve the bell curve you get from rolling dice, you'll need a deck of 216 cards to draw from, with many duplicates so the odds of drawing each result remain the same. This many cards might make your game too expensive to print.

You can mitigate this by using fewer cards for each combination, in effect flattening the bell curve. This will make the less likely items come up more often, but perhaps make things more exciting.
Since I bought the decks through the kickstarter (before they went mainstream...), I have the PDFs and can print them as desired and put them in opaque backed card covers. Using this concept you could easily weight the deck in any way you want. You could even create a deck for special occasions.
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Old 09-04-2019, 05:08 PM   #23
Skarg
 
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Default Re: Outdoor adventure cards?

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Originally Posted by Chris Rice View Post
Split the Deck into two or more piles depending on the desired frequency/likelihood. Then roll a dice:

2 piles: 1-4 likely pile. 5-6 less likely pile.
3 piles: 1-3 likely pile, 3-5 less likely pile, 6 unlikely pile.

Something like that.
This seems like the most practical way to do it, unless you can print as many cards as you want to match the odds you want.

I'm not about to try to use cards to replace encounter type tables (which are much more compact and transparent, and I'm not great at shuffling).

However, the type of combination table/cards Chris mentions is like many detailed encounter tables I made starting with TFT circa 1983. That is, they used something like a 4d6 table, and then each line often had sub-chances that were often linear. That way I could have common types of encounter in the middle range, rare things on the ends, and the rarest things be near the ends and also be only one of the things that can happen for that roll. That would be very similar to having a weighted table map to different card mixes as Chris suggests.
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Old 09-04-2019, 05:30 PM   #24
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Default Re: Outdoor adventure cards?

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Originally Posted by Skarg View Post
This seems like the most practical way to do it, unless you can print as many cards as you want to match the odds you want.

I'm not about to try to use cards to replace encounter type tables (which are much more compact and transparent, and I'm not great at shuffling).

However, the type of combination table/cards Chris mentions is like many detailed encounter tables I made starting with TFT circa 1983. That is, they used something like a 4d6 table, and then each line often had sub-chances that were often linear. That way I could have common types of encounter in the middle range, rare things on the ends, and the rarest things be near the ends and also be only one of the things that can happen for that roll. That would be very similar to having a weighted table map to different card mixes as Chris suggests.
I had a huge table driven dungeon generator that used 30 or so tables, mostly 3d6 or 4d6. It felt tedious pretty quickly, as the average rolls kept coming up, and the interesting things were off on the edges of the tables. It helped when I started checking things off the chart when they were first rolled, and using an adjacent unused value the second time.

But it flowed much better when I converted the tables to decks of cards. Cards took up less space, it was faster to draw a card than to roll and look up on a table, and I could just discard a card when I was done so it wouldn't come up again. And as mentioned, you have precise control of the odds with a deck of cards, and you aren't bound by the faces on a die. You can have 15 cards in a deck, or 237, populated exactly as you like.
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Old 09-06-2019, 09:54 PM   #25
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Default Re: Outdoor adventure cards?

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Originally Posted by tomc View Post
I had a huge table driven dungeon generator that used 30 or so tables, mostly 3d6 or 4d6. It felt tedious pretty quickly, as the average rolls kept coming up, and the interesting things were off on the edges of the tables. It helped when I started checking things off the chart when they were first rolled, and using an adjacent unused value the second time.

But it flowed much better when I converted the tables to decks of cards. Cards took up less space, it was faster to draw a card than to roll and look up on a table, and I could just discard a card when I was done so it wouldn't come up again. And as mentioned, you have precise control of the odds with a deck of cards, and you aren't bound by the faces on a die. You can have 15 cards in a deck, or 237, populated exactly as you like.
Wow! That's pretty complex. The only way I managed to do that was by using Inspiration Pad Pro (by NBOS). With that I could build hugely complex, interdependent tables that would generate entire galaxies if I wanted them to...
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Old 09-16-2019, 02:31 PM   #26
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Default Re: Outdoor adventure cards?

I have been working on such a deck for months now. Draw-n-delve I call it. It's in third revision and I started it based on the random 3d and 2d tables. I boiled some of the 216 possible results down by combining and rounding. I abstracted treasure from the base table which allowed me to combine beasts with treasure and beast categories. I figured the ratio of results with treasure and without treasure to get a proper frequency of how often a drawn treasure card should result in a treasure vs. nothing. Same with checking that treasure for traps. Then I created a test deck with the simple concept of a bandit base.

When I started testing is where I found the impracticality factors based on those strict ratios from the table. It's not practical or fun to have a deck of (for example) 100 cards where the ratio is 1:100 leaving you with a single card that gives a result and 99 or 100 cards that give a result of "nothing". Plus, if the table says you can have the possibility of 10 different treasures, and the ratio is 1:100 you need hundreds of cards just to give the proper ratio and some randomization of the positive results.

So I ended up revising my concept to be based on the random stocking tables. This newest revision I've been able to condense into three decks. One is the room deck which tells you what, if anything, is contained in the room. If there is an opponent, such as bandits, there will be a treasure score and an XP amount. The treasure score is the number on 2 dice you must roll at or below to allow a draw from the treasure deck. The rule with treasures is that you must draw from the trap deck. Results can be negative (no trap), or positive, resulting in a trap. I've determined rules for such things as parlaying with some opponents using Diplomacy, or using Detect Traps to avoid a trap.

It can be played using a map, or mapless scenario. With a map, the players may choose when they've had enough and can turn around at any point and leave. With mapless, difficulty can be controlled by how many exit cards are included in the room deck when you begin. In this scenario, your characters are considered trapped in the dungeon until they turn over an exit card and find their way out. A melee hex map/megahex tiles are still used in mapless mode to run the combats.

There are a number of other features or concepts that I am still working on currently. Some give variations and make the adventure either more or less challenging which allows for a range of character quantity (but usually between 2 and 6) and difficulty. It's been fun so far but more testing is required. Right now I'm working on testing a concept where some cards cause a reshuffle of that particular deck, while some cards are one-time use only and are removed from the deck for that particular game. This allows for one time rarities such as a boss opponent, and some magic item treasure that's a bit more powerful.
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