Custom Cards and a Modular Ruleset?

[Paul DuPont]

I am new to these forums, please advise if I placed this in the wrong section.

I developed my own role playing system and am about to release it under a creative commons liscence. I wanted to create a ruleset for it, but was not sure if Fantasy Grounds would support it. It uses dice mainly but makes extensive use of a customizable deck of cards.

Basically, there is a ready made deck which is split up into sections the GM may wish to include or not. These are drawn by the players as a result of dice (and a few other things), if the GM can manually allow players to draw x number of cards, that would work fine. All cards go back in the deck as soon as they are drawn, so I don't need the program to keep track of them, just randomly show the card images to the players. I would also like to have the option for GM's to add their cards for the deck.

Also, the game is designed in a modular fashion where the rules of the game change depending on the genre and play styles desired. I suppose this could be done with multiple rulesets, but given the number of possible combinations, I would rather have selection options available to the GM/users.

Can Fantasy Grounds support this?

[VenomousFiligree]

Not at the moment unfortunately.

This thread (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11241&highlight=Cards) was the last time cards were discussed.

[Ikael]

I believe this sounds doable. Savage Worlds already has card deck implementation and doing one's own is not absurd. Modular fashion is also doable using options or extensions, but of course it depends on what level of modularity are you talking about. I have had strong urge on implementing custom deck for the Unicore ruleset as Unisystem games can also be played using cards (regular cards and zen cards in cospiracy). So in my opinion I would say yes, Fantasy Grounds supports these kind of things, but you need to implement them yourself into your ruleset.

[Paul DuPont]

So basically, it can be done but it won't be easy? With regards to the cards, I can wait for the community to come up with it first. Sounds like they are trying to create something much more complex than I need though, so making it myself may be much quicker.

As for the modularity, the game is aimed at a more narrative approach, so in most cases the rules are really not that different. However, the 'tactical' game style option involves much more complex variance, maybe that one should be separate.

[tdewitt274]

The basics of the other thread is to design just a card game (shuffling, dealing, etc). Unfortunately, nothing has come out of it but planning. I'd still like to see it happen, but we'll have to see what develops.

There are a few others that have made their own decks. There were a couple of 3 Dragon Ante games, but I don't remember who did them.

[Zeus]

I did one of the 4E Dragon Ante implementations. It hasn't been abandoned, just placed at the bottom of the priority list for a few reasons.

Whilst it is possible to do, the Savage World Ruleset and my 4E Dragon Ante Prototype being examples, I found that FGII's APIs made it quite cumbersome to pull off Cards generically. My 4E Dragon Ante prototype whilst functional was really kludged in nature and not very elegant making extending it to other game types quite difficult.

moon and Doug addressed a couple of the API issues in 2.7.2 however I haven't had time to really explore the update to understand what could now be achieved. I'm sure things have been made easier though.

I'd be happy to contribute to a community led project to introduce cards and card game mechanics but it would be nice to see the FGII API extended to handle cards as a new object type, complete with methods for managing, distributing and collecting. I think the latter is likely to be the only way to get a truly ruleset/game agnostic solution moving forward.

[Paul DuPont]

...but it would be nice to see the FGII API extended to handle cards as a new object type, complete with methods for managing, distributing and collecting. I think the latter is likely to be the only way to get a truly ruleset/game agnostic solution moving forward.

Definitely!

[tdewitt274]

As stated in the other thread, I'm on board as well :)