Tarot cards and skills

[Raven Hare]

Need explanation on how tarot cards and skills work.

Every time you pick a line with one of your skills you gain a point for that skill, right?
And when you got enough points in a skill you can choose to level up the skill or get a tarot card?
I thought the skill checks were based on your skill level but you just draw a random tarot card instead?
Checked the tarot card page but that made no sense either.

For feedback, my gpu was going crazy when walking around the starter area, even on low settings.
And some of the explanation text in menus are way too small to read.

Besides that, a very interesting game, good job.

[Isaac (Crimson Herring)]

Thanks for your feedback.

Yes, we're definitely looking at how to tutorialize the skill checks and tarot cards better. Yes your base stat determines how easy or hard the skill check is (basically stat + card value = score) and then that score is compared to the difficulty of the check to determine success or failure. The major tarot act as modifiers to that deck.

Thanks for the GPU feedback too, working on some significant changes that will make things much more performant. Our initial tests look really good on that front.

[Raven Hare]

Better explanation/tutorial in game would be neat.
Looking forward to see the full game.

[tford1956]

Originally posted by Battlebrick:

Better explanation/tutorial in game would be neat.
Looking forward to see the full game.

Yes. I like it though.

[a531]

I'm taking the left hand path.

[Takkik]

Don't understand how the major tarot work. One they are written in french(when everything else is in english) and even as a french they didn't make any sens. The UI give you the impression each skill get 1 major tarot but look like all effect apply.

Would be more interesting to put 3-4 cards on each skill so you can customize each deck individually ?

[Many-Named]

Originally posted by a531:

I'm taking the left hand path.

93

[dairy farmer]

I see some confusion about the tarot system and I wonder if it's because people generally might not be familiar with what tarot cards actually are?

Mechanically, it's not much different from typical D&D-style skill checks used in pretty much every RPG: You have a base skill level, and you roll dice (or draw a card) to add an additional value to see if you pass. In this case, you draw a card instead.

I guess one significant difference is the introduction of Major Arcana cards, and based on the demo, it seems you can "bind" them to certain types of skill checks, for special effects. For example, we seem to be given The World by default, and it seems to give +100 (instant success) on any skill check. I also remember having the option to bind a Major Arcana to always reveal one card in my hand, or something like that. I don't know if "binding" a card like that removes the possibility of using it for other skill checks though.


I assume the tarot will play a significant role in each character's story, so I wonder if there's a clever way to introduce this system to players at the beginning, kinda like the old Ultima games where you talked to a fortune teller to kinda determine your "virtues" and such.

Or maybe it could be as simple as a tutorial page showing the players the entire deck of tarot, especially the Major Arcana. Like you could click on a Major Arcana and it could show a quick preview of how that card would affect your card draws.

[r-cane]

I dont know if there were significant changes since op's post, but I find it to be quiet easy to understand. As most say instead of rolling a die in most other rpgs you draw a card from a deck and add its value. What I dont get is two things.
1. What's the point in getting to pick a card if you cant see what those cards are (in all cases unless you got 1 of 2 specific major tarot card that either reveals 1 card or just show you in a red outline the lowest card among them). Since those two abilities wont work if you couldn't pick, this at least makes sense from a game mechanics standpoint. Just the illusion of choice is what bugs me here. Picking blindly is like drawing randomly.
2. What's the point of a major arcana that increases or decreases the "choices" you have by one. As already mentioned, a blind "choice" is not a choice, it's just completly random from the viewers perspective.

That being said, what the game also needs is a list of what values are in a tarot deck. Because most people, me included, have zero experience with stuff like that.

And while that has nothing to do with the topic of the post I want to end this with a positiv feedback. I love that failing a check is not always the negativ outcome and succeding a check the positiv. It turns more focus on role playing and less to roll playing, or in this case card playing.

[Isaac (Crimson Herring)]

Originally posted by Takkik:

Don't understand how the major tarot work. One they are written in french(when everything else is in english) and even as a french they didn't make any sens. The UI give you the impression each skill get 1 major tarot but look like all effect apply.

Would be more interesting to put 3-4 cards on each skill so you can customize each deck individually ?

I'm not sure how you got the descriptions in French? We haven't localized the game yet, could that be a local setting of some sort or an additional overlay you're running?

[Isaac (Crimson Herring)]

Originally posted by r-cane:

I dont know if there were significant changes since op's post, but I find it to be quiet easy to understand. As most say instead of rolling a die in most other rpgs you draw a card from a deck and add its value. What I dont get is two things.
1. What's the point in getting to pick a card if you cant see what those cards are (in all cases unless you got 1 of 2 specific major tarot card that either reveals 1 card or just show you in a red outline the lowest card among them). Since those two abilities wont work if you couldn't pick, this at least makes sense from a game mechanics standpoint. Just the illusion of choice is what bugs me here. Picking blindly is like drawing randomly.
2. What's the point of a major arcana that increases or decreases the "choices" you have by one. As already mentioned, a blind "choice" is not a choice, it's just completly random from the viewers perspective.

That being said, what the game also needs is a list of what values are in a tarot deck. Because most people, me included, have zero experience with stuff like that.

And while that has nothing to do with the topic of the post I want to end this with a positiv feedback. I love that failing a check is not always the negativ outcome and succeding a check the positiv. It turns more focus on role playing and less to roll playing, or in this case card playing.

Thanks for the feedback, we did improve the tarot systems tutorial quite a bit before we took the game to PAX East, so hopefully folks can understand it a bit easier now.

increasing and decreasing the cards you draw has to do with the speed of drawing down the deck and reshuffling. If you're drawing more cards the deck gets shuffled faster (once there are no cards left or you draw specific cards that cause a reshuffle.)

But yes we're still working on some UI touches we think will help with this, things like seeing cards get discounted and making "card counting" easier so you can understand where your deck is at and what cards remain.

[r-cane]

Originally posted by Isaac (Crimson Herring):

increasing and decreasing the cards you draw has to do with the speed of drawing down the deck and reshuffling. If you're drawing more cards the deck gets shuffled faster (once there are no cards left or you draw specific cards that cause a reshuffle.)

I thought it could be that. But it's a relativly minor improvement from a statistics standpoint. Normally you haven't just drawn all bad cards the last couple draws, so decreasing the cards drawn to make sure you get as much as possible out of all the remaining good cards is not that much of an improvement. The same goes the other way around. Normally you haven't drawn just all the good cards either, so increasing the drawsice to get through all the remaining bad cards is of limited value.
And that also means something else from a gameplay standpoint. It's not increasing this problem, but it also means the high arcana will get extremly micromanagy. You would have to shove the high arcana around to the deck with the best/worst cards in the discard pile after basicly every draw to get the most out of it. Why did I say it's not increasing the problem then? Well, because you already do this because you can just put the best major arcana to the deck your about to draw from right before every skill draw.
So here is my two cent on how to improve on this.
1.) Let the characters only switch their major arcana a limited number of times per x. x could be every ingame day, or every leveling or even every reshuffle.
2.) Rebalance the major arcana, so they feel more equal in power. Right now the "mark the lowest card" and the "show one card" are just WAYYY superior to the drawincrease, since they mean you get an automatic or at least verry likely increase/decrease of the value you get for the skillcheck.