Outdoor adventure cards?
 

I just saw a FB post that seems to show a new fantasy trip product involving randomized outdoor adventuring cards. Yay! But I can't seem to figure out whether and where and when it can be bought. Any clues?

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

I was gonna get that posted here today.

http://www.warehouse23.com/products/...ncounter-cards

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Hurray! Thanks for making this.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

I'm guessing this is not already part of the Decks of Destiny kickstarter.

I'm not organized enough to know if I've backed/bought/pre-ordered these or not without doing some research and sifting my emails...

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Correct, these were not a part of that campaign. This is the first time that Steve Jackson Games has offered these cards for sale.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Just pre-ordered.

Thanks!

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Phil, these look exactly like the Outdoor Encounter Cards you kickstarted yourself a while back. Is this a branded subset of those two decks, or is there new content here for folks who already have your decks?

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Steve liked what I created. He reworked, adapted, and stylized the cards for TFT. Not quite identical.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Will these be a available as addons for the next TFT kickstarter?

Hate to have to pay that shipping cost on hex 2 and this since I ordered hex2 days before I saw this.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

So will Steve convert your other card sets?

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Please e-mail orders@sjgames.com and they can help you out.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Added to backerkit for cards of destiny. Boy is that going to be a big box for me.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

I just went through these and compared all of them to Phil's Kickstarter versions.

The 53 cards are drawn roughly evenly from Phil's Outdoor Encounter Cards 1 and 2 - Cards 1-25 are from Set 2 and the remainder are from Set 1.

• About a dozen cards have been radically reworked, to the point where they're completely different from their Kickstarter version.
• All the cards have had their text tightened up, some slightly and some extensively - Phil's writing voice is significantly more florid and verbose than Steve's is on these, apparently. :)
• A few are described in a noticeably creepier way, or add an interesting mystery or hook.
• On 3 or 4, generic creatures have been given TFT stats (usually via reference to ItL), or at least guidelines for such stats.
• A few cards have had details changed to be GM's choice instead of having an effect prescribed by the card.
• A number of pieces of advice to the players of other recommendations of particular player responses have been removed
• On about a third of the cards, the art has been slightly recomposed to show more of the edges of it.

Interestingly, most references to goblins, kobolds, and rangers have been removed or changed. Rangers are now referred to as woodsmen, more clearly referencing the ItL skill [and quite possibly cautiously avoiding the possible ire of the Tolkien estate). Some references to goblins have been changed to orcs, and others are just more generic.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

I'm really enjoying the card set; it is surprisingly dense with creative, gameable ideas. As a product, it feels similar in quality to the better class of 'random table' adventure seed products that have come out for the OSR (like the Dungeon Alphabet), but I prefer this format of a deck of cards. It is both easier and funner to draw a card (as opposed to paging through a book and rolling on a table, which is more time consuming and kind of takes you out of your 'flow' at the table). Perhaps this is already the plan, but I'm struck by the great potential for using this sort of format as a way to introduce to TFT something of the game play experience of Munchkin or other card based games. Such a hybrid would have a much zippier and free-wheeling feel than a conventional scripted table top roleplaying adventure, yet the schematic nature of the adventure seeds means a lot of GM creativity and decision making is still called for. It's just more akin to improv and less like narrating a TV episode.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

These days, I prefer decks to tables for a few reasons:

* You can remove a card from a deck once it has been used.
* You can shuffle new cards into an existing deck.

Card decks give them GM more control over the "random table."

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Good points. These are among the reasons why the 'value per card' of a deck feels like it grows with the size of the deck - a kind of exponential growth in how much you like your deck. This obviously raises the question of how much the range of related products will grow over time. Rumors and Treasures from DoD will contribute to this general sort of capability. But the description of these in the kickstarter campaign sounds like they will fill different roles from the wilderness cards. Might we see things that resemble wilderness cards but are for cities or dungeons?

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

Possibly. There have been some discussions about future decks, but nothing on the schedule at the moment.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

This is true when you want a linear result, where the chance of selecting any particular result is the same. In that case it doesn't matter whether you roll a 20-sided die or pull from a deck of 20 cards.

But what about cases where you want weighted results? For example, many encounter tables will sum 2 or 3 6-sided dice to determine the row. The results in the middle are most likely to occur and the one's on the edges are the least likely.

What are some ways to do something similar with cards? Obviously, multiple copies of some cards could do that, if you have access to them. Other ideas?

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

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.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

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.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

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.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

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.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

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.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

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.

Re: Outdoor adventure cards?
 

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...

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.