What are some uncommon or rarely explored gimmicks/devices for RPGs? Physical things on the table that are used in the game and make it unique.
>playing cards
>timers
>jenga tower
>water bottles and cups
>poker chips
>other game pieces
>alcohol
Things like that. Ideas for their incorporation and mechanics also welcomed.
Deckbuilding would be interesting. You start with a deck of meh cards representing your untrained adventurer, then every so often you can add a new card or retire an existing card, until you have a kickass adventurer. You'd need to drastically slow the typical deckbuilder escalation if you want to make it campaign-worthy, though.
>a laptop
not only is it useful for looking stuff up, it can also be used as a game peripheral in some way. Maybe one can hook it up to a tv via hdmi and put a big and interactive map or something on.
>>47019749
>Playing cards
In sleeves with item pictures.
Tarot card style baby.
Going target shooting with pals and giving the guy who made the most bull's-eyes a permanent +2 to ranged attacks for his current character.
>>47019787
There's a videogame, Hand of Fate, that does this.
It's pretty interesting.
>>47019953
I know there's probably a game that already does this, but how would you use tarot cards in a game?
>>47020023
There's a diceless game called Everway which uses its own tarot-inspired deck to determine results. What happens depends on the card you draw, and whether it's upright or reversed.
>>47019749
Dominoes. D100ball.
>>47020023
The original Ravenloft module began with a fantasy tarot card style reading that determined the villain's goals, the location of certain objects, etc.
It used a regular deck of playing cards, but for the new module they actually produced a deck of the cards in the adventure. Pretty cool.
>>47020001
Hand of Fate is great, though it's a shame that because it cuts to a ripoff of Batman combat at times you can't port it to tabletop easily. I would say it veers away from what he was thinking of though, as there's not much focus on the equipment deck, as opposed to the encounter deck and gameplay.
>>47019749
Here are one's Ive both seen and enjoyed:
>Using dominoes or triominoes for action resolution.
>A system which lets you keep some failed dice to use against enemies actions.
>The Slap Phase
>Debuffs causing players to take the modulus of a multi-die roll, or allowing success on modulus values in strange ways.
Thats about it.
>>47020346
>% on dice
Never thought of that, that's pretty interesting actually.
>>47020390
Im not sure what you're talking about, I only mentioned modulo operations.
Giving every player character a theme song, setting the music playlist to shuffle, and granting a PC a bonus turn when their song comes up.
>>47020346
Could you please briefly explain these?
I honestly don't know what you mean and all four seem like interesting options.
>>47021410
Sure. Briefly...
For the dominoes one you can only have a success if you can place a domino in the preexisting matrix with the other ones, and there are higher critical and supercritical levels of success based on how many other dominoes your resolution-dominoe touches. Different games let you keep a set "hand" with different numbers of dominoes, and some even let you remove some from the resolution space or trade with other players.
>>47020346
As for games which allow you to keep failed dice to use in other ways; Age of the Empire does this, though it uses special dice. Essentially, if you fail an action you'll get a number of 'points' based on what your dice look like that you can use for minor negs on opponents or minor buffs to friends, as long as you can explain it. Like if you miss a shot you can use points to say that your fire only missed because you pushed the target out of cover, or something like that.
The Slap Phase comes straight out of Time Wizards, which I suggest you read yourself.
As for the modulo debuffing, its just a quick way to turn tons of dice into one die.
>>47022387
>>47022453
Thanks, the first two seem like interesting ideas
