Ever since my first time playing Burning Wheel in college, I’ve loved metacurrencies in tabletop RPGs.1 Whether you call them Fudge points, Fate points, Plot Points, Inspiration, Artha, Bennies, or what-have-you, I love the effect that these can bring to a story-focused game.2 Since I’m apparently on a multi-month tarot obsession bender3, it felt natural to explore a way to use tarot cards as a form of metacurrency, and I think I’ve hit on a way to use them that’s evocative (getting them feels like having your fortune told), unique (rank and suit both factor in, so you can’t just replace them with a simple point counter), and fast (necessary for gameplay).
Assumptions
For the rest of this post, I’ll be making a few assumptions about the rules of the game this is being added to. This is mostly (okay, entirely) because I was thinking about this in the context of a specific game that I’m working on at the moment, and that game just happened to have had some design decisions that make mapping onto tarot cards easy.
Die rolls will generally be in the range of 2-12
This one came about because the game I’m noodling on uses 2d6 as the primary resolution mechanism for rolls, but it’s an incredibly useful property to have here because the die range almost exactly matches the card ranks. This allows for direct usage of the ranks.
There will be four ability scores
The game I’m working on has four ability scores: strength, dexterity, wits, and aura. If the game you’re bringing this to has more or fewer, try to set up four “kinds” of rolls. This allows for direct usage of the suits (the tarot suit is, of course, wild).
In the little solo RPG system I’m playing right now, I’m using the following suits:
| Ability score | Suit |
|---|---|
| Strength | Wands/clubs/staves4 |
| Dexterity | Swords/spades |
| Wits | Pentacles/coins/diamonds |
| Aura | Cups/hearts |
How it works
Gaining fortunes
Each character has a Fortune stat, completely analagous to Refresh in Fate. Rather than just being a pool of points, you instead start each session with a hand of tarot cards (referred to for the rest of the post as lowercase-f “fortunes”) equal to your Fortune, which you can also gain more of in all the usual ways for metacurrencies (good roleplaying, doing something really cool, doing the recap or taking notes, using a trait against yourself, walking the GM’s dog, etc).
GMs, feel free to get fun with it when you hand out fortunes! Each player’s hand is public, so it can be fun to comment on the specific cards as you hand them out.5
Spending fortunes
You can spend fortune in one of two ways: to resist all damage from a single source, or to gain a bonus on rolls.
When you get hit, you may discard a fortune to completely resist all damage from a single attack or source.
When making a roll, you may discard a fortune to gain a bonus:
- Discarding a fortune with a rank lower than the natural number you rolled adds a stacking +2 bonus to the roll. Unlike other bonuses, this does apply when considering whether further discarded fortunes are higher or lower than the number rolled.
- Discarding a fortune with a rank higher than the natural number you rolled allows you to reroll your dice, but you must reroll all of them.
- Discarding a fortune with a rank exactly equal to the natural number you rolled, or whose suit matches the action you were rolling for, allows you to choose either above effect.
- The tarot suit is wild.
- You may discard multiple fortunes on a single roll, but you must fully resolve one before discarding another.
So yeah, basically just slightly more restrictive Fate points.
Combining with tarot-based initiative
A while back I wrote a post on a tarot-based initiative system. The metacurrency I’m working on here should match up pretty cleanly with the initiative one, while also providing a great way to get rid of cards you don’t want, and it also means that battles stand a good chance of clearing out your fortunes, which makes them a big inflection point where the thread of destiny after the battle can be completely different than it was before. I think that’s neat.
If you want to combine the systems, instead of drawing tarot cards equal to some speed/noticing-related stat at the start of the fight then drawing one after you play your card each round, just draw one then play one at the beginning of every combat round.
Conclusion
So yeah, lemme know what you think on Mastodon or Bluesky! This is definitely a v0.1 system, and I’ll probably only use it in my solo RPG games moving forward until I’ve ironed out all of the kinks, but hopefully reading it can help you unlock some neat ideas.
Footnotes
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My first introduction to them was actually in Dark Heresy 1e’s Fate Points, but metacurrency didn’t really click with me until artha in BW. ↩
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Not to say I put them in every game I make. They’re replaced by an extra effort mechanic in Ikaros, although even that one used metacurrency-style regeneration based on a per-session refresh cadence instead of per-day. I also generally keep them out of comedy games (failure is funny) and OSR-type games (failure should always be on the table). ↩
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I’ve even added a new tarot tag to this blog, since apparently that’s all I post about now 🤷♀️ ↩
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I know “wands” sounds magical, but come on. These wands are giant sticks that a lot of the Rider-Waite card art shows people using for fights. ↩
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Maybe don’t do an accent though. ↩