What game are you talking about again?
Magicians: Urban Fantasy is a tabletop rpg about rival gangs of magician criminals in a modern-day city where magic is real but hidden from the public. The core resolution mechanic is card-based rather than dice-based, drawing heavily on Blackjack and other card games. A link to the current google doc draft can be found here: (link)- The core trait check system works! Fiancee even said playing with the cards was fun! The biggest success by far 😁
- Unfortunately, it does kind of break if I make NPCs do trait checks because the MC sets the difficulty AND plays cards for the NPC. Similarly, having NPCs make trait checks against each other doesn't really work either for the same reason.
- In the Battle minigame, the MCs action economy is severely limited by their hand size, and again it kind of breaks if there are both NPC allies as well as enemies...
- I need to clarify how exactly the side effects of an Apothecary's tinctures work - if it's a negative effect, obviously you'd want to resist the whole thing, but if it's a positive effect maybe I should allow you to resist the side effects while gaining the main effect...
- I think I should maybe ditch the Infiltration minigame. I think it's a lot more fun to do a break-in with more freeform roleplay and trait checks
- I don't have a skill for lockpicking! Weird. Maybe I'll combine Check and Research into like "Investigate" or something so I can add something like "Finesse" (which would apply to opening a locked door or digging a bullet out of a wound)
- Much to think about! I'm gonna have to make some revisions before the next playtest, but this was a great session, super valuable info. So happy that Magicians is somewhat playable after it's been like 10 months since the first draft of the trait check mechanic