Card Mages and the Aspect system

Card Mages were an idea I had on a train-ride that involved creating a sort of meta-game for casting spells. Like many of my ideas, after toying with it for a while, I took it to /tg/, kicked it around a bit further, then shelved it for later, after my frigid bitch of a muse decided it had enough of my shit, and left. I eventually ran a quest with the idea that seemed pretty well received, even if it was a very slow moving affair. I've been meaning to pick that up again, but the time it took to run just one thread was more than I'm comfortable spending on a single thing.

Card Mages and Card Magic are one of my more complete and usable projects. After reading through the threads and my notes, one of the players in my Fantasy Craft campaign was actually eager to try and transplant it into our current game, but I didn't want him killing off his current character just to playtest it.


Before I can get into explaining the way this whole thing works, it would probably be best for me to explain this Aspect system thing mentioned in the title. In short, it's a system for Skills and special abilities that allows for nonlinear character development and specialization. Sounds fancier than it actually is.

Under the Aspect system, common skills are grouped together under one umbrella term. As a group they are considered a Skillset and each part of a Skillset is considered an Aspect. For instance, Movement could be a skill with Run, Climb, and Jump as its Aspects. Each Skillset has 10 total ranks, lets say, and each time an additional rank is added the player is given a few points to divvy up amongst the relevant Aspects. Each point in an Aspect would offer specific bonuses that are relevant to that Aspect. Adding points into Jump would allow your character to mitigate fall damage from a certain distance automatically or jump a minimum distance, as an example.

In addition to the specified bonuses, it covers the idea of skill synergy by improving all of the Aspects when their Skillset goes up in rank. A character can still focus in one ability and reap the benefits, but by having a higher Skillset rank overall, means that they have a slightly easier time performing those related tasks, though they would lack the benefits.

The way this leads into Card Mages involves another part of this whole Aspect mess. In addition to common skillsets, there are also Special Skillsets. These are supposed to be unique fighting styles, combat abilities, magic, and supernatural talents. Instead of having a small collection of related actions, Special Skillets have Aspects that relate to the use and effectiveness of the Skill itself. In this case, using Card Magic to cast spells and hurt your enemies.

And now, for a little bit of an explanation... You see, Card Mages create specially inscribed cards that contain different elemental forces and powers. They play a sort of game within a game by shuffling and drawing a hand of cards, then they play these cards in different combinations to create different effects. In addition to combining cards, a Card Mage can play cards with different Styles to achieve additional effects. However, all of these things are restricted by a Card Mage's actual Ranks for the different Aspects.


For Card Magic, those Aspects are Cards, Styles, and Tricks. To the left, you'll see a crude stat block that I created for the Quest thread I ran several months ago. As you can see, you have your Special Skill (Card Magic) which is set to Rank 3 in this example. At Rank 3, the player has a total of 7 points to distribute amongst the Aspects Cards, Styles, and Tricks. They have 7 because they get 1 point at the Rank 1 (Not sure if I'll keep that rule), and 3 additional points for every rank after that (1+3+3).

By putting ranks in Cards a player character increases their total deck size by 4 and learns 2 additional Card Types. A larger deck and a wider variety of cards allows a character more options in combat.

Ranks in Styles only offer one additional style per rank. Not too flashy, but styles can be very potent on their own.

Ranks in Tricks simply allow a player to pick out special abilities that bend and adjust the rules. Some Tricks just outright increase hand or Combo limit, while others allow a player to construct their deck differently, by allowing additional copies of a card (there's normally a limit of only 4 of a single card type)

There may be some adjustment required to reign things in, but you can sort of get the general idea by looking over this example. I was going for a controlled, but personalized type of character growth. For Card Mages, in particular, two players could roll up two drastically different characters with the same set of options. The sorts of choices in playstyle and approach make all the difference.

If you still feel like this is really vague and doesn't do a good enough job of outlining the idea, I encourage you to take a look at the archived Quest Thread to get a better idea of what sort of mechanics and concepts I had in mind.

I feel like the concept offers an interesting way for players to make unique and specialized characters without overloading the players and causing a paralysis of choice that you might get in other games. With these basic concepts and barebones mechanics in place, I've already envisioned a few different applications for this model. Surprisingly, the initial inspiration for this idea was creating a system that could be used to emulate elemental Bending from Avatar while still giving weapon and fighting styles equal effectiveness.

However, the idea is still really rough, and the game to encapsulate the Aspect System is still in the "hardly existent" stage of development, but I'm confident that the ideas I have will do it justice.

Til then, I'll keep you posted as this develops alongside other projects and ideas.