This community is for meaningful discussions of tabletop/pen & paper RPGs
Rules (wip):
Nobody talked about Castle Falkenstein which used playing cards instead of dices.
An interesting stuff is that you know your hand, and choose which card to play. So let's say you have an Easy success, A success if you have a good-skill and a guaranteed failure for the scene. How do you manage-it ? It has interesting game-play consequence both tactically and narratively but it stayed pretty uncommon
"His majesty the worm" uses a deck of tarot cards, minor arcana for players and major arcana for the GM. Combat plays as a sort of "poker game"
One of my favorites is Dread, a free horror based TTRPG that uses a jenga tower. It’s a great way to traumatize your friends and I would highly recommend it
Wyrd Games's Through the Breech uses a deck of standard playing cards with modified suits. You can use normal playing cards with their suit cheat sheet.
It is based on their table top skirmish game Malifaux. Set in a magical world connected to our own through the Breech. It is a Victorian Steampunk horror setting.
The Quiet Year uses a deck of cards. The goal of the game is to rebuild a community after collapse. 1 campaign takes place over 1 year in game.
Weave was a game where you used an app and special tarot cards to build your characters and run the game, but I think the servers have gone offline, which is a shame. There was little balance to the character building but it was a lot of fun.
Amber is a classic example that comes up in these discussions.
Intrepid uses playing cards instead of dice to resolve scenes and combat. For scenes, two people each narrate an outcome, and players vote on the version they prefer using red or black playing cards. A card is then selected and that outcome becomes the truth, so there is still an element of randomness.
In combat, each suit has a specific meaning for the ebb and flow of the battle, jokers change the scene, and the first person to draw the 4th ace wins the fight.
Most of Ben Robbins' don't have a random element at all and conflicts are resolved through procedure. Follow uses two coloured stones/poker chips/tokenswhich are drawn from a bag, similar to Intrepid. He also provides a "finger dice" system for getting dice-like results without using dice. On a signal, every player throws from 0 to 5 fingers, and groups of 5 fingers are eliminated. The remainder is roughly equivalent to a d6 roll.
Amber Diceless which compares stats with GM fiet based on the situation.
Everway which also compares stats but if things are close has the GM interpret a picture card.
DramaSystem which is designed for PvP play and trades tokens for conceding a scene (and multiple tokens can be spent to force another player to conced).
Fiasco which does use dice, but not (as random number generators) to determine outcomes. A player, on their turn, can choose to establish a scene or hand that responsibility off to the rest of the group. Whoever doesn't do that picks if the outcome of the scene is good or bad for that player's character (subject to the availability of good or bad tokens in the pool). Second editor ditches the dice entirely and adds cards instead, I haven't played that version.
For the Queen isn't a traditional RPG. It provides a card deck that asks questions about characters. Figuring out the answers lets everyone learn about all the characters (including their own).