Drawing from a Tarot Deck as a Conflict Resolution System in a TTRPG

I saw a great comment on Reddit about a guy trying to make some sort of RPG system using a Tarot deck. I think he was trying to have each draw set a character or motivation for a player, but of course I'd like to narrow the focus to a mere dice replacement. How would that work? This will be a thought experiment.

As you probably know, a basic Tarot has four suits of number 2 through 10 of each suit, then an Ace, Page, Knight, Queen and King of each suit. Obviously this could make for a random 1 through 14 draw, with slightly less randomness for each card drawn. Not bad. Any given system within the game - percentage chance of success in an action, health, damage, etc - can fit within the number system of the available spread of numbers given to us. Your target number for any chance of a 50/50 success would be 8 or higher. Moving the success number would mirror a change in difficulty. Each card draw is a dice roll.

So what about the Major Arcana? My first thought was that any drawn Major Arcana could be a complication or bonus, but with almost 1/3 of all draws (28%) being a complication, this would make for a LOT more randomness and a lot less dependence on character level or power. I'm not sure if that is best for a a system where we try to maximize fun, but it could be. It would certainly be a boon for game masters who like to throw wrinkles into combat.

As I remember the meanings (or at least one interpretation) of the Tarot cards, I tried to imagine what sort of complications could occur from such interpretations, or even a more literal reading of them. (For example, what if you drew the Tower, and you made some sort of terrain-based fumble? If some structure is rickety, including where you are standing, it falls?) There seems to be two directions I can go, a literal-meaning effect or a fortune telling interpretation effect, which I will call metaphorical.

So, here's a stab at some of the Major Arcana (I might add more in later), and what they might do as an effect. Note that some effects I might make a bit humorous!

	Possible Effect
0, The Fool	(Automatic) fail plus a comical catastrophic effect
1, The Magician	Success, but you are now "the protagonist" of this fight. (aggro)
2, The High Priestess	Success, and you are moved to the front of the initiative order.
3, The Empress
4, The Emperor
5, The Heirophant
6, The Lovers
7, The Chariot	Success, but your next action of the same type will fail.
8, Strength	You receive a +1 to [applicable will score] for the scene.
9, The Hermit
10, The Wheel of Fortune	50/50 chance (Flip the card in the air, maybe?)
11, Justice	If a character is good, success. If a character is evil, fail.
12, The Hanged Man
13, Death	Success, delivering instant incapacitation if an attack.
14, Temperance
15, The Devil	If a character is good, fail. If a character is evil, success.
16, The Tower	Fail, and whatever tool used breaks. Swords break, Thieves Tools snap, a voice goes hoarse.
17, The Star	Success, and temporarily lose any exhaustion penalty for the scene.
18, The Moon	Success at night, failure during the day
19, The Sun	Success during the day, failure at night
20, Judgement
21, The World

Soft Roleplaying

The art of "soft" roleplaying (RP) has always been a strange, unspoken mirror image to "hard" RP like that found in roleplaying games (RPGs) like Dungeons and Dragons. It is a variation that has settled organically between playing pretend and solving conflicts with some random number generator like dice.

Let's start with a summary of each of these types of RP.

Playing pretend: This is the basis of all RP, and by no means just for children! It is acting, it is lying, it is story telling. However, it is the most unstructured form of it. It's obvious to see that, as soon as a conflict arises where one person wants to pretend one thing, and another wants to pretend something different, there is no real way to choose. Conflict resolution gets in the way of the story.

Hard RP: This is the wonderful world of RPGs, started off by the granddaddy of them all, Dungeons and Dragons. In an RPG, guided by a Dungeon Master, each person in the game can announce that they do an action, then roll a die to see whether they succeeded. Conflicts are settled easily and conclusively, though their outcomes are sometimes not what the players wish for.

Soft RP: Soft RP is playing pretend with an eye toward conflicts, using some rules of thumb to determine the outcome of conflicts in a way that does not rely on randomness.

The rules of thumb in a Soft RP that need to be followed in order for it to work are:

1. You cannot dictate another person's actions or things that effect them. You cannot say, "I swing my sword and hit you in the arm" or "You are dazzled by my beauty". This is sometimes called "powergaming" or "god-moding".

2. The victim of the potentially bad action gets to determine whether or not the action affects them, and how much. The person who the sword is being swung at gets to describe dodging it, or having it nick them, or having it deal a fatal blow.

That's it. There are variations and rules created for specific scenarios, but those two rules are the basis of all soft RP. But! you might think. This is no better than playing pretend! How does anyone get anything done? Soft RP can evoke questions of how anyone can have a powerful or dangerous character in the face of an inability to do anything.

 If that's the type of RP you want to do, then you are in a competitive mindset; there's nothing wrong with that! Soft RP takes cooperation, between those in conflict and everyone in the game altogether. You - all of you - are writing a story together. So you have to collaborate with other people, even beforehand if you wish.

What are you (and the other people in the scene) trying to get out of this scene? If it's just 'to win', then you're not thinking of the whole story. You're not thinking like a writer. In a story-driven game with multiple people, why does your character have to win (or lose)? What story-related goal are you trying to fulfill with this character's actions?

Obviously, there are exception to these rules. If one character in a roleplay is surrounded by everyone else, ready to kill the one person, he or she unable to escape, it is reasonable to expect a little powergaming in order to keep the scene realistic. People can still die in Soft RP, but it is usually an obvious situation.

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Anyone who wishes to link to this essay to help explain soft roleplaying to people is welcome to do so! If you wish to use this text in some other way, please credit me. Thanks.

What am I trying to do when designing an RP campaign

What do I try to do when designing an RP campaign in my home-brewed world? Obviously, to make the players have fun. However, the ways that can be done are infinite, so most of these things are just for myself.

First, I design with the gods in mind, top down. If I try to think like a god, and I try to think what I'd want to do with these mortals whose souls are in my hand, then I can come up with motivations that can drive years of gaming. It also helps that trying to think like a god helps me in my own spirituality...really! When I design a god that loves its 'children', how would I design that in such a way where the cause and effect world could still exist? In a similar way, how do I get over Epicurus' "Problem of Evil"? Envisioning ways that a loving D&D god could allow the world to exist in such a fashion helps me realize how it is so in this world.

Second, I take a page from Tolkien's book, in that I tend to treat my D&D homebrew world as a mythical world, whose heroes' great deeds are "just-so" stories for the world to shape its culture (especially language) around. Just as Gandalf described how the Old Took created the game of golf by lopping off a goblin head to have it fall down a gopher hole, so do adventures in my games answer the question, "Why is your world the way it is?" Each campaign I run in this world informs the next campaign. Just like great Greek heroes become constellations of stars, my D&D heroes become ascended gods themselves, and knowledge of these mortals who became representations of aspects of reality shapes the world's cultures.

An example: In this campaign, one of the major players is a powerful wizard called Hubrin. He will be where the word 'hubris' comes from, in this world. Common is an already established language in this world, but Common is not necessarily real world English, nor vice versa. Who is to say that the word for 'excessive self-pride' was even coined before this moment? There are a thousand arguments that could poke holes in this setup, so I leave the timeline vague. Myths do not have to line up perfectly. (See also: Comic Book Time.)

Lastly, more common sense: I try to make as many interconnections as possible. What ties two cities together? What happens when the hobgoblin cave next to town is cleared out? I try to create wide-spread consequences. These often point the way towards a new adventure very easily. They are also used to show the players how their actions have results, which adds to their sense of accomplishment.

I may add more aspects here later, but these are the main points I wanted to spell out.

Ok, fine, my abortion beliefs spelled out.

Abortion debate is hitting social media hard as Alabama bans the procedure. I've already talked too much about my views in piecemeal on Twitter, so I guess I should just spell them out here and point people to it. Note that I am not trying to insult anyone by simply stating my views.

In general:

- I take a moderate stance on abortion. I call myself "pro-choice", but this is in response to the complete bans that pro-lifers are trying to pass.
- Some cases of abortion are necessary, and some are not. Some cases should be always be allowed, and some should always be banned.
- Abortions for medical issues (such as ectopic pregnancies) should always be allowed.
- There's always a point in a pregnancy where it is so early that terminating a pregnancy should present no issue. A cluster of cells that cannot be seen with the naked eye is only a blueprint, not a person. This should be plainly obvious.
- There's always a point in a pregnancy where it's too late to have an abortion. The day before giving birth? Five minutes? I don't have an exact timeline, but a point of no return exists. This should also be plainly obvious.

The main argument from pro-life Christians is that one has a soul from the moment of conception, and so life should not be ended from that point on. (I've heard there are non-religious arguments against abortion, but there aren't many people with that view, so it's not anything I wish to cover.) "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." (Jeremiah 1:5) Of course, I could be pedantic and say that the verse says before you were in the womb, so this means that birth control is against God's will as well and should never be used, right? I know there are some anti-abortionists (Catholics) that think this way. But for the most part, birth control does not come up in these conversations. SO my question to the Jeremiah-quoting anti-abortionists is: why do you not protest against birth control just as fervently?

There is a difference between the timeline of imbuing of a soul of the unborn in Jewish Law (at birth) and right wing Christianity (at conception). As someone said on Twitter, there's no mention of unborn children in the New Testament, so Old Testament views are pretty much all we have. I'm no biblical scholar, but it seems that the biblical case for the unborn is not cut and dried. Of course, there are Americans whose views are non-biblical. Secular people and people of many and varying faiths exist in America, and they all have a say in the debate. Some do not believe in souls of any sort. Some believe that contraceptives thwart God's will and that your "quiver should be full". In the end, these are all positions from various sects of religious faith, and they have been at each other's throats for at least centuries. You think it is clear that your particular opinion of this issue is the right one? Because this is not a religion vs. secularism fight. Not by a long shot.

Scientifically, it's a lot easier. It seems pretty fair to say that there can be a pretty set point as to when an abortion would start to cause suffering for the fetus: when the nervous system is developed. When it starts to feel pain. Science doesn't really say that that should be the point at which abortions should end, because science is not a morality system. But it seems as fair of a place as any, from a scientific standpoint, to state the facts and let your personal sense of morality start making decisions. Depending on who is measuring, this occurs at about 5 to 6 months into the pregnancy.

So what about late term abortions of normal pregnancies? At this point, the baby can feel pain, there are no extenuating circumstances, the woman just wants to not be pregnant. I feel as if these types of abortions should be actively discouraged. The one issue with this, coincidentally brought up by my 100% pro-choice wife, is that if a woman doesn't know she's pregnant yet, there should be a time of grace. This discussion came up during a talk when we were discussing Heartbeat Bills. Like the Wikipedia article says, Heartbeat Bills are "a de facto blanket ban on abortions in the majority of cases". I agree that Heartbeat Bills should not be law, but like I mentioned above, there should be a set time during a non-problematic pregnancy where abortions should no longer be allowed. I believe that this statement, as non-committal as it is, is something everyone could agree on, even if the length of time mentioned is five minutes, 24 hours, one week perhaps? I can't commit to where that point in time would be, but perhaps there is a cogent argument that could slide the timeline forward or backward.

Note that I haven't said anything about other issues: rape, poverty, inheritable conditions. This is because I feel that the positions I have about the age of the unborn supersedes the importance of these conditions. It seems counter-intuitive. Of course a woman should have the right to abort a pregnancy caused by rape, right? With my hypothetical timeline, it would be assured before the unborn would suffer for it. When it is too late to have an abortion (whenever that is), it is too late for every case (except for the cases where it is always justified, as I mentioned earlier). In any of these cases, there has been plenty of time for the woman to discover she is pregnant and get an abortion. I know this dodges the issue somewhat. Whether these issues alone are sufficient to justify abortion are not fully formed in my mind. Rape? Mostly yes. Poverty? Mostly no. But there are caveats to everything.
Let's face it, abortion is a difficult decision to make. No one should traipse into an abortion clinic and do a little happy dance that she gets to scrape her womb like its some sort of business as usual. The whole point of the joke of that one Bojack Horseman song is that the act is portrayed to be so crass and unthinking. But the people fighting this battle are not monsters. Each side vilifies the other. Each side hyperbolizes the issue. And yes, there are probably some sociopathic women who would get abortion without any thought of the unborn, but laws about abortion should be well-reasoned and explained with empathy. I've come at this view with much thought and prayer. If only our citizens and politicians would do the same!

My thoughts on My body, my choice: it's a catchy slogan, but the basis of the pro-life side is that it's also the body of the unborn as well, and that the seeming loss of autonomy of her body is because of the growing autonomy of the unborn's body. The whole debate hinges upon this question: when on the pregnancy timeline does the unborn start to matter? This is the question that 100% pro-choicers need to answer. The slogan of "my body, my choice" implies that it never matters up until the moment of birth. I don't agree with that implication, but it makes for a great catchphrase against those wish to ban abortion outright. I don't really take issue to the slogan or the 100 per cent types, if only to consolidate against the position that I find more wrong: complete anti-abortion.

My thoughts on No uterus, no opinion: There's a point in there about the misogyny of the existing institutions, but I feel that it is a bit of mixed causes combining together. The Alabama law was signed by sexist white men. They made the wrong choice. This institutionalized sexism needs to be fixed, true. However, a man can, in theory, govern over women's issues assuming he is well-informed, listens to the will of the people, and his decisions are not shaped by sexism. To not allow this is to ban all male politicians! The pendulum would swing too far in the other direction. Remember, Alabama's governor is a woman. Governor Kay Ivey signed the anti-abortion bill into law, so this is obvious not a case of women always being right and men always being wrong.

My thoughts on female oppression: I know there's an undercurrent of sentiment in the greater culture about a woman's autonomy. Abortion is linked to that. But I also feel that unlike suffrage, birth control, #MeToo, etc, abortion deals with other "people". Sooner or later, the unborn's rights come into conflict with the woman's rights. This doesn't happen in any other women's rights issue.

My thoughts on "slippery slopes": Late term abortion bans can lead to full bans. State bans can lead to federal bans. This is the truth. It's very difficult for me to advocate these positions, since the political opponents use one bill to raise support for the next. Of course this is not a perfect world. I think I would side with the pro-choice side in this case, due to the bait and switch nature of right wing politics nowadays.