#CardinalbyCreativeCauldron

[creative-cauldron]

Cardinal Pt. 2

So the magic of Cardinal, the promise that I’m going to try and keep after so long. How does it work. The idea is to let it fall on a line between abstract and mechanical. The magic needs to have importance in the game and grounded in a set of rules because the means of attaining success are so open ended. Otherwise it would be to easy for certain players to attain an unfair advantage. Let’s face it open ended games are hard because players want to win, and sometimes if there is an advantage it can be hard not to take said advantage.

So ultimately the magic breaks down into two halves, the powers and the fail saves. The powers are perhaps the easiest to explain as they quite simply magical powers that can be used whenever you wish. Each Sin has a number of powers some of which are pretty open ended and self explanatory such as Fire, Invisibility, and Teleportation. Everyone knows what invisibility is that doesn’t need any mechanical explanation. Fire might just need to be specified as the ability to control fire. Other’s like the Pride power of Shrug Off have a bit more of a mechanical implication, although the complete list of powers still needs work so I’m not ready to explain out every power yet. Shrug Off though will allow the player to ignore physical damage and instead take mental damage.

Each power has a rank though, currently floating between 1-4 (numbers will definitely needed to be tuned). At character creation each player will have a number of points, let’s say 7 for now, to spend on buying these powers with the cost equal to the rank. Additionally, to have a power you need to the corresponding Sin Value to be greater than or equal to the total ranks in of Sin Powers for that Sin. So you can only have multiple powers for say Greed such as Metal (rank 2) and Duplicate (rank 3) if your Greed is high enough. In this case your Greed needs to be 5 or higher. A list of every power will hopefully be finished eventually.

Now onto the other half, the fail safe, otherwise known as the Sin Rush. In Cardinal you have Wounds, physical damage, and Stress, mental damage. you can take up to 3 of each before your in danger of dying. However, unlike in D&D, you don’t fall unconscious when you are in danger of dying. Instead you enter a Sin Rush, a sort of super powered state. At character creation you choose which Sin is tied to your Wounds and which is tied to your Stress, and that Sin is the one that gets the major power boost when you’re in danger. So if it is Wrath, you are really going to hulk out. So what happens during the Rush?

First of all, the chosen Sin, automatically gets double favor while the Rush is active. Just a fun, boost in your chances of success when using a specific Sin. Influence to behave and act a certain way. Secondly each Sin has a special bonus that activates for it. Once again I don’t have every special bonus for each Sin but I’ll give you a couple as an example. During a Greed Rush for example you gain the ability to use any Greed Power for the duration of the Rush. A Pride Rush meanwhile will give you a +1 to the result of the dice roll for any Sin until the Rush Ends. 

As for the Rush ending well their are two ways to end it. The first is death. If you take a fourth Wound or Stress you die. It is a fail safe, a last ditch effort in the face of great obstacles, even if that obstacle is a particularly furious debate. Maybe, it isn’t death exactly but more like Dread, where your character is just written out, maybe they’re dead, maybe they’re just crazy. The other way to end is when the “Scene” ends. Whether that means you are no longer fighting or whatever, the point is getting to the catharsis. The natural end of the scene for when your character can take a breath and either realize that they have achieved what their immediate goal was or realized that it is not attainable. 

These bonuses and the powers are fun to design, still not done with them but fun regardless. They are the perfect culmination in my interest, designing mechanics that generate specific narrative feelings. Each Power has to relate to the Sin and that relation needs to make sense. Powers like invisibility would definitely not be Pride, while I could see it being Sloth, I found it fit Envy the best. Fading into the background and observing others. Each set of Powers sort of focuses on themes that are derived from the narrative representation of each Sin. Similarly each Sin Rush must feel mechanically greedy or prideful. It is such a weird and fun problem, although admittedly I never thought I’d be trying to design lustful mechanics. 

[creative-cauldron]

Cardinal Pt. 1

So I meant for this to originally post this with the last post, but I rambled in that. Then I meant to post it earlier but I got busy and the idea still isn’t technically finished but I’m going to talk about a TTRPG System I’ve been thinking up called Cardinal. Note that it is Part 1 because like I said the system is not finished.  The basic idea in Cardinal is that everything is themed around the Seven Deadly Sins, otherwise known as the Cardinal Sins (hence the name). So you don’t have stats like Strenght, Dexterity, or Intelligence. Instead your stats are the Seven Sins, Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, and Pride. Then each sin has a value from 1-7 because well why not keep the narrative theme going.

To check success of your actions you first choose the sin that is motivating it. The thing is, the same action could be motivated by different sins.  For example, if you are stealing something you’d probably think you would have to choose Greed, but maybe you decide Gluttony works here or perhaps Lust. The question is why are you taking this action, what is the emotional state of your character in this moment? Am I stealing because I want riches, or perhaps I’m stealing because the object belongs to someone I idolize so then I could use Envy.

Once you have decided what Sin to use you roll a d8 and you succeed if you roll equal to or lower than the value of that sin. This way there is always a chance for failure since no Sin every reaches a value of 8. However if you ever roll a 1 on the d8 you can increase the Sin used to a maximum of 7. Consequently at any point when the GM believes you are acting particularly virtuous they can tell you to decrease a particular Sin but only by 1 at a time. 

As for varying difficulty of different challenges, the GM can decide to give a player Favor or Disdain, which if you are familiar with Advantage and Disadvantage in D&D 5e it is basically the same. Basically if you have either Favor or Disdain you have to roll multiple dice and take either the highest roll (if you have Favor) or lowest (if you have Disdain). Unlike the Advantage/Disadvantage of D&D the GM is allowed to give a number Favor or Disdain and the two cancel out. So say they give you 2 Favor, you’d roll 3d8 and take the highest roll, but what if you also gain 1 Disdain from some other factor than you’d only roll 2d8. 

The Favor and Disdain was the part when I first ran into a problem with this game and while there will be multiple parts. It is intended to be a narrative heavy rules set but I don’t have a strong sense of what the world is. I want the GM to act as a God like character much like how in Paranoia they are The Computer. I want to create a thematic religious setting without making it too Christian. It makes me wonder if I should play with the Sins that I am using. Further it would lead into what would be Part 2, the magic of the Sins in Cardinal.