This topic is in response to a request by the original poster in this topic:
link to a message in this forum
(From message no. 19 in that thread...)
steelsmiter:
I'm not a mod, but I'd like to respectfully ask that the greater substance of the different varieties of cards in your post and the one you were referencing be opened in another thread. I do of course have a bias in that regard, so take of that what you will.
So... let's continue our discussions on methods and practices for simulating a tarot deck in the RPoL dice roller here, please, folks.
Copied below are relevant posts from the previously linked thread for continuity's sake:
{From message no. 18, by horus}
Re: Is there a way?
DarkLightHitomi:
How about just making a way to add our own decks?
That would allow ccgs to be played fairly easy, and allow any number of other card games such as Three Dragon Ante (whicn has two decks with a variety of ways to mix and match the "suits") or even Phase 10 and Uno.
The dice roll to support this is the easy part. Roll XdY where X is is the number of draws, Y is the number of cards, and set unique=yes. Easy peasy. (But in the case of Tarot, not Xd78 as one might think, but Xd156, to account for upright and reversed meanings.)
The hard part would be building the interface to make a symbol table, because not all card decks have the same suits, values, names, meanings, etc.
I could see a need for as many as seven columns in the symbol table:
Result: the value of the die roll which generates a given card.
Symbol: the value shown on the face of the card (1, 2, 3,... Page, Knight, Grand Imperial Poobah, etc.)
Suit/Color: Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Black, etc.
Hierarchy: Major/Minor Arcana, Trumps, Pips, Face Cards, etc.
Position: Normal, Upright, Crossing
Face Up/Face Down: (Basically private or not?)
Text: Any meanings, rules, or effects this card has, etc.
Of course, others may have different ideas. It is certainly possible some of these columns in the table for a deck might be dealt with in other ways by the dice roller.
Then again, I'm making presumptions I probably shouldn't about the best method for simulating a deck of cards.
Mods: would further discussion of methods and practices be welcome here?
Aside from practical considerations, there are also legal ones. Building a deck simulator for copyrighted cards (Yugi-Oh, Deck of Fate, etc.) might present ethical challenges...
{From message no. 22, by Skald}
Re: Is there a way?
That's what I like to see - sorted before I get here ! Thanks for that. <grins>
Yup, feature creep is one thing, but the custom cards suggestion is really another matter entirely. For what it's worth, my opinion is that the copyright problem will be a killer, but as we've said that's a discussion for another thread.
Very good point about the reversed option taking the Tarot deck out to XD156 - anything else that needs to be taken into account ... from a quick look at wikipedia, it seems the occult deck with major/minor arcana is the most commonly used, though there's also some Italian, Italian-Portuguese and French gaming decks.
Even with just the occult deck, wiki suggests there's some variation in naming the suits, specifically batons/wands/rods/staves and coins/pentacles/disks. Is there a more widely used/preferred term ?
{From message no. 23, by steelsmiter}
The reddit post that prompted me to ask about this uses cups, swords, wands and pentacles, though I happen to know coins are often used instead of pentacles so either of those works for my purposes.
{From message no. 24, by Utsukushi}
Re: Is there a way?
Reversals aren't that simple, though - it's not half and half. If anything, you kind of decided that when you shuffle. Also, it doesn't double the number of cards, because you're not going to have, say, The Moon, and The Moon Reversed, in the same draw, which could totally happen if you just double the size of the deck. So from the system's side of things, that has to be, "Draw a card, then decide if it's reversed or not."
Really, it sounds a little cold, but ideally there would be a space to fill in, like, "% Reversed" when you draw. Unfortunately, the open space that comes with different systems is already needed for "No of cards", so I don't know where you could put that.
If it needs to be just standard, I'd say maybe each card should have at most a 20% chance of being Reversed, but then again, that might just be the way I shuffle. I always feel like they should be rare, so I don't turn very many.
Maybe at the beginning of any Tarot draw, the system could randomly generate a number from 5-25 and that would be the percent chance of a card being reversed in this set?
I actually like Staves and Coins best -- but for annotation purposes, since Swords and Cups are pretty standard, Pentacles and Wands is more useful since they start with different letters.