Another Card-Based Method for Wrapping Up a Campaign

TTRPGs provide a lot of assistance for beginning a game and a lot less for ending one. I’ve written before about using cards to wrap up a game. Late last year, we wrapped another game with cards. The situation was as follows.

• We were wrapping a multi-year game, and the PCs had finished everything that we wanted to address through conventional, moment-to-moment play.
• We wanted to "zoom out" from a typical session's focus and resolve some big questions without rolling the dice. 
• The PCs had two goals that were in tension with each other.
• We wanted to break the action into separate stages to define gradients of success and failure.
• We wanted danger, risk, or conflict embedded both in the individual stages, but didn't want any particular resolution to be too time-consuming.

For brevity’s sake, I’ll skip the in-fiction details and focus just on the mechanics of the process.

The PCs needed to get through 14 “phases” to achieve their two goals. To ensure we could complete the finale in one session, I used a timer, with the PCs compelled to move forward to the next phase. Each phase began with two face-down playing cards, which the PCs revealed when they began the phase. I had the 14 phases laid out on the table, and the two cards were placed in columns on either side of each phase.

In addition to the face value of numbered cards, jacks were worth 11, queens 12, kings 13, and aces were wild cards, worth either 1 or 14, at the players’ discretion. The gap between the numbers on the two cards indicated the danger of the current phase. A difference of 0-2 indicated minimal danger; 3-5 signified moderate danger; and 6 or higher suggests extreme danger. I had concepts planned for how danger might manifest in each phase, as well as some general danger-escalation tools that could be used at any stage.

To determine how well their efforts to deal with a dangerous situation were going, they could draw a card from the top of the deck and add it to either side. So if a 3 and a 9 were revealed for either side of the phase, creating a danger score of 6, and a player drew an additional card and revealed a 5, they could add it to the side with the 3 to bring that side up to 8 and the stage's overall danger margin down to 1. The six characters in play had three chances each to add a card in this manner, for a total of 18 among the group. To use one of these draws, the PC had to “flash forward” to one of three epilogue moments – one day later, one month later, and one year later.

Here’s the catch. In addition to resolving the danger of the present stage, the running totals of each column will determine if they players achieved one, both, or neither of their overall goals (separate from the danger in each phase). 

So the players needed to balance the phase-by-phase spread against the running totals for their two goals. These two incentives could easily conflict, where they needed to "make up" a difference in the overall goal totals by leaning into danger in some of the stages. The players in my game were actually forced to make the last stage much more dangerous for themselves in order to get their goal numbers to where they wanted them to be.

We handled all of this narratively, using NPCs, abilities, resources, and the flash-forward epilogue moments to interpret the results of the revealed cards. No dice were rolled during this session. But there’s no reason (besides time) that something like this couldn’t be used as a “progress clock”-style overlay on regular game action.

Difficulty 

I decided that a final difference of 4 or less would indicate both goals has been completed successfully, while 5 or more would involve compromising or partially failing at least one of the two goals. I didn't go too deep into calculating the odds here, but I think I was lucky that the cards provided some tension that forced them to act, as there is a non-trivial chance that the numbers on the cards could balance themselves too easily and let the players move forward passively.

Fortunately, it is easier to make this harder in one of several ways:

• Decrease the margin for success on both goals; for example, say that a margin of 2 or less is required to succeed on both goals, with 3-5 succeeding on the higher-value goal only, and a difference of 6 or more indicating that both goals fail.
• Set Aces to 14 only, rather than allowing them to be wild cards. 
• Remove the 2s, 3s, and even the 4s from the deck. The game will become swingier without the low cards, with more phases showing high levels of danger. 
• Allow for fewer interventions to add cards to balance out danger.
• Instead of measuring the success of both goals by the final margin, give the two goals separate (and conflicting) success states. For example, one column could succeed on a high score, while the other could succeed on a low score. This would essentially force the players to choose one over the other, partially influenced by the randomness of the cards. 

But Why Tho?

To some degree this is just a different way of getting to what is really just a progress clock or skill challenge. Dice could simulate this in a way that is closer to the conventional game action. 

But I think there is something for switching systems entirely to frame an epilogue. After spending an entire campaign rolling dice to resolve moment-to-moment action, the cards signposted that the resolution system here was going to be different. 

The cards also provided a good visual centerpiece for the session. When I run games in person, I'm mostly happy to do it with few maps and props. But I have noticed that players benefit from having a shared visual thing to look at, particularly when the session has a very specific shared objective like this.