Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
I've stayed away from the card-based thing because of the weirdness of 'intentionally burning cards' to trigger a refresh.
I think people overestimate both the ease and impact of doing so. Consider: just like in a dice-based game, not every action requires a roll, a game master in a card-based game can just pass and fail trivial actions without allowing spending and refreshing of cards. This means only impactful actions are left for "burning", at minimum costing time on the game clock.

For example, if a player is left with seven worst cards and wants to get a full hand for the next big event, now they have to plot seven moves in a limited time period where failing on purpose won't by itself screw them over. It shouldn't be assumed to be trivial.

For a similar reason, I think gbaji is prematurely and pointlessly playing a scare schord about perfect play. Yes, perfect information and deterministic rules mean perfect play is possible. We have great many deterministic perfect information games exemplifying how actually playing perfectly can be hard task for a trained mathematician, and utterly impossible for a layman to do on the fly. Since players can have more than one possible move to use a card on at any given point, the complexity space for open cards roleplaying game is open-ended. For example, if each decision point has two mutually exclusive forks, and a player has 20 cards, optimally using all those cards requires the player to think 20 moves ahead and identifying desireable paths from over a million (2^20) options.

In other words, cards make a roleplaying game trivial only if the rest of it is already trivial. But it sells everyone short to weigh the merit of a concept based on a trivial implementation. It's equal to weighing Chess based on Tic Tac Toe.