When you shuffle a 52-card deck, you arrange it in one of 8x10^67 ways. That's 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000(Eighty Unvigintillion) completely unique configurations. The odds of matching someone else's shuffle are so infinitesimal as to not exist. Apply that to a 78-card deck, and you get some truly improbable numbers.
This is Playing the Magician, part one of a series on tarot in roleplaying games.
Why would you choose to integrate a tarot deck into your game? Well, maybe you're seeking to lend an arcane aesthetic; maybe you're interested in the interwoven matrix of meaning that a given deck holds in its iconography and hierarchy; maybe you want a piece of that infinitely random action; maybe you want the continually self-limiting palette of probability that comes with a decreasing deck. Maybe you want the social weight a tarot deck holds, and want to relish in the tension of drawing and flipping a card.
The kinesthetic feeling of drawing a card is different from rolling dice or choosing an option off a picklist. With dice, it’s possible to get two of the same result, either at the same time from two different dice or twice in a row from the same die. Not so with a given card deck, unless you shuffle two decks together or shuffle a card back into a deck especially poorly. Consider the experiential difference between choosing from a set of rolled dice, choosing from a spread of shuffled cards, or choosing from a prewritten picklist. Each has its strengths and drawbacks, and it’s just about deploying them in the context of your choice to convey a mechanical feeling.
But I’m not here to talk about dice or picklists. Let’s get into the anatomy of a tarot card.
Front and back
This seems obvious, of course there’s a front and a back, what’s the value in that? But cards have the ability to give you a random, hidden result, and stay hidden, like a GM rolling dice behind a screen. Cards can face the player and be only known to one person; or they can face the table and be unknown to the player holding them. They can stay face down on the table until the time is right to reveal their secret. Because it has two opposite sides, a card can be used as a binary toggle or token to indicate whether a given mechanic is activated or deactivated, red or blue, whatever two states you need to track.
Paper
Anything you can do with paper, you can do with a card. Mark them up, cut them, lace them together, fold them, punch holes in them, dog ear them, put stickers on them, use them as bookmarks, throw them, lick them and stick them to your forehead. These options might seem disrespectful, and many of them are irreversible, but at the end of the day, a deck is just paper, and game sessions that create artifacts of play are fun and cool. There’s also a sense of transgression when you modify or damage a card, especially a tarot card, that is very potent. A card is stiffer than printer paper, and it’s got an edge it can stand on if it’s held or leaning against something else. This is a delicate state, but sometimes you have a delicate mechanic to convey.
Vertical orientation
An average tarot card has a clear upright and an inverse. That is to say, it is pointing in one clear direction, like an arrow; so you can use it to orient or indicate a direction up or down, right or left, tapped or untapped. The direction a card is facing can indicate the meaning of it, like in tarot reading; it can also indicate whose turn it is, or stage positioning like a mini figure might. You could string cards together to indicate a path across a map.
the number
I’ll use this to talk about two different things, since the word is ambiguous enough for me to get away with it. There’s the numeral written on the card, from 0 to 21 in the Major Arcana, and from Ace to King in the Minor. There’s a clear hierarchy in both Arcana you can take advantage of, and a spread of different results you can measure and quantify against each other. You can add them, subtract them, multiply or divide them, any kinda math thing you wanna do, you can do it, more or less. There’s also the quantity of cards available: you have 78 cards in a standard tarot deck, which is divided into one set of 22 and four sets of 14. You can use all 78, shuffle them back into the deck for reuse, divvy them up however you wish, use stacks or hands as counters to limit moves or track time, all kinds of stuff.
The deck
A deck contains a near-infinitely random sequence whose presentation can radically change the experience of interacting with it. Consider how it feels to choose a card from a fan of cards, versus drawing from the top of the deck, versus choosing from a spread on the table. All are effectively the same random result, but the feeling can be very different. Choosing from the top of the deck has a feeling of spontaneity akin to rolling a die, but flipping a card that’s been placed on the table feels more predetermined. And of course choosing from a fan of cards has an element of showmanship to it.
the suit
Tarot has five suits: coins/pentacles, wands/staves, swords, cups, and major arcana. The Major Arcana traditionally trump the other four suits but they don’t have to. You have four themed categories to sort and define and do with as you wish.
the imagery
This will vary wildly from deck to deck. There are sometimes throughlines but you can’t count on it. If you want to call on specific iconography, you’ll have to qualify what deck you want the player to use, which you can do, especially if it’s widely like the Smith-Waite deck is. Or you can design and provide your own deck, which I obviously encourage. You can mine the imagery of a card literally, like, this queen has a sword therefore so do I, or you can interpret it however you want, like, she’s not dressed for combat but she’s holding a sword so I can infer that my character is new to violence as a solution. Or something like that.
That’s what an individual card has to offer. A tarot deck features both a 22 card Major Arcana and a Minor Arcana of 4 suits of 14 cards each. Each has their pros and cons in design and in use at the table. Let’s start with the Major Arcana:
Pros:
systems of meaning
As a scientist, I would be completely fixated on whether or not something is applicable to reality. With that in mind, tarot, astrology, numerology, ehhh; I believe in our ability to find and construct patterns more than I believe the patterns are really there. As a game designer, I am much less interested in whether a system of meaning is true to reality and much more interested in whether it is coherent, self-perpetuating, and outputs a decipherable result. I'm also interested in where it has friction, and how it breaks--because all systems designed by people can be broken.
That said, the tarot, as designed by A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, comes out of the syncretic tradition of the Golden Dawn, an occult society they were both in. That means that you get a lot of syncretic synthesis of different systems from astrology and numerology to hermeticism and kaballah. I’m more likely to play with astrology and numerology than hermeticism or kaballah because hermeticism is syncretism at its core, pulling from a whole slew of different traditions and calling them the same thing, which I don’t care for, and kaballah is Jewish mysticism and I am not Jewish. Well, my mother is, kind of, on her father’s side–listen, my heritage may be ambiguous, but I was raised Christian and I don’t want to repeat the crimes of my forefathers if I can help it.
Anyway, the Major Arcana has in it the symbols of astrology, which is a self referential system; by that I mean each symbol has a relationship to the other symbols, neighbors and opposites and foils and deuteragonists and so on and so forth. So if you have two cards, you can chart the relationship between them the same way you would chart two people’s astrological signs. Numerology is similar; things add up to numbers, things subtract leaving numbers, things contain other numbers, things are divisible by other numbers, and because numbers are attached to specific images in the Major Arcana you can retrieve a meaning for any number that resolves into 0-21.
Contains story arcs
There are a fair number of stories told with the Major Arcana, depending on who you ask, but one in particular that would make for an interesting story at the table is the growth cycle of a human psyche. I’ll get into this in detail in a later video, but the gist of it is, we set 0: the Fool aside, as he represents the willingness to engage, which is the essential buy-in you need to tell the story in the first place. Then, we go from 1: the magician, to 7: the chariot, as growing up through the structure of a society to the first victorious display of mastery. 8: strength to 14: temperance is seeking understanding of the self, and 15: the devil to 21: the world is seeking spiritual understanding of both the self and the world the self is a part of. Split that into character creation, individualized personal quests, and a united world quest, and you’ve got a campaign laid out. That’s a clumsy analog but I bet it would still work. It might be kind of a heady philosophical time, but there are definitely tables that are hungry for that.
Cons: very few “bad” cards
You can make the argument that the inverse of any given card is worse than the upright, but most of the Major Arcana are expressing neutral or positive concepts. The big exceptions are Death, the Devil, the Tower, the Hanged Man, and let’s say the Moon and Judgement. (and yes, I know you can interpret any card as a positive thing, I mean that these, on their face, can be read as negative.) That’s 6 cards out of 22, so you have a 27% chance of getting a negative result from the Major Arcana. Compare that with rolling a d20, you have a 50% chance of rolling 10 or below, or rolling 2d6 in a powered by the apocalypse game, where 6 and below is usually judged a failure and 7-9 is a partial success, giving you a 42% chance of getting a negative result. The Major Arcana was not designed to be a fair arbiter of success or failure, so it isn’t one.
Then, of course, there’s the Minor Arcana:
pros: pretty playing card deck
Each of the four suits has ace-10, a page, a knight, a queen, and a king. So you can do anything you can do with a standard playing card deck, but prettier. You can play any card game with it. You don’t have to use any of the divinatory elements at all if you don’t want to, but you can also use the card games as an elaborate, ever changing spread to build meaning. That is, if you know all the meanings.
Specific and banal
Where the Major Arcana are all big life events and revelations, the minor arcana are all petty, personal, everyday problems and triumphs. I once read a guide that assigned a minor arcana card the meaning: “go check the oil in your car.” This is a great way to characterize a given scenario, whether that’s scene setting, flavor on a success or failure, or an action a character is taking.
cons: there’s a ton of cards
goodness, but there’s a lot of meanings to learn. Some decks are more helpful with their narratives than others. You can certainly streamline it by declaring for yourself what each suit means, and using the numbers as a grade of intensity or success or whatever you want, but that’s technically not tarot as written by Smith and Waite. But, honestly, who cares. Get silly with it! Why not! Smith and Waite are dead! It’s your deck now!
An aspect of a deck of cards that is not present in dice is the need to reset, shuffle, sort, and handle the deck consistently through the game. This I think is neither a pro nor a con but just an aspect of playing with cards that is worth thinking about. There’s a declaration of intention, a display of care, almost a ritualistic component to the time it takes to reset and shuffle a deck that dice simply do not require.
This is of course not an exhaustive catalog of mechanical potential; I am but one designer and my experience is limited by time and space. If you know of an aspect I missed, or have ideas about potentials not covered by this video, weigh in down in the comments! I would love to hear about it, and I’m sure others would too.