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.