Playing Cards

When playing with cards you can either use the custom DCA cards or cards from a regular poker deck. You’tll only need the cards numbered one through six and one of the jokers. Please set aside the rest of cards.

It is recommended to have one deck per player (including the GM) and never mix cards with each other’s decks, which will give everyone at the table even odds.

If you don’t have enough decks for that, you can shuffle as many decks as you’ve got and construct a common deck for everybody; or use one deck for the GM and another for the players (the deck for the players should be composed of as many decks as half the number of players).

## The Suits

The cards have four suits: Conflict, Exploration, Social, and Divine. DCA custom cards have unique symbols for these four suits, but if you are playing with regular poker cards you can use the following correlation: Conflict is Spades, Exploration is Clubs, Social is Hearts, and Divine is Diamonds.

* **Conflict**: This suit relates to fights, chases, duels, etc.
* **Exploration**: This suit relates to inves-tigating, finding clues, climbing, swim-ming, following tracks, stepping into the unknown, etc.
* **Social**: This suit relates to talking, con-vincing, commanding, diplomacy, lying, etc.
* **Divine**: This suit relates to using magic, or communicating with the supernatural

## The Hand of Cards

In DCA, all players except the GM have a hand of cards. Nobody can have more than seven cards in their hands at any time, and if somehow someone draws more than seven cards, they must discard down to seven.

Players can only play cards from their hands, unless specifically stated otherwise—and whenever a player plays a card from their hand, they can choose which card to use.

Players cannot look into the deck or the discard pile, nor shuffle or mix previously used cards into the deck. Whenever a cardis used, it is placed in the discard pile, usually set up next to the deck, face up. When the last card of the deck is drawn, the discard pile must be shuffled to set up a fresh deck.

Players cannot look at other players’ hand of cards, nor can they tell each other the values of the cards in their hands. They are however free to discuss how they feel about their luck based on their hand of cards with-out mentioning specific values.

> *E.g. “I am feeling lucky today”, “I can keep doing this all day long”, “I don’t think I can survive another encoun-ter”, or “I feel like I should crawl to a corner and make myself into a tiny, tiny ball until danger has passed”.*
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Players must always follow the rules to play, discard, and draw cards during confrontations.

## Using Cards

### Play

Cards are “played” to resolve actions during con-frontations. When a PC plays a card, it must come from their hand of cards. Whenever an NPC or TSE plays a card it will come from the top of the deck.

### Discard

When a card is discarded, it is moved directly to the discard pile without being used. Why, when, and how many cards are discarded is something determined by the ability or rule that instructed to discard cards.

Certain abilities specify whether the cards discarded must come from the PC’s hand or the top of the deck. If this is not specified, the cards must be discarded from the PC’s hand.

When discarding from their hands, PCs can choose which card to discard unless instructed otherwise.

A TSE never discards cards. If an NPC has to discard cards, instead he suffers as many disadvantages to-wards his next confrontation as cards he had to discard.

## Jokers

Jokers are drawn as normal cards, but they can only be played under specific circumstances.

After declaring the outcome of a confrontation in which they have taken part, players may play a Joker to increase their level of success by one or decrease the level of success of their oppo-nent by one. Remove one negative consequence or add one positive consequence to an action in-volved in that confrontation.

Jokers do not count towards the number of cards that can be played per action, and play-ers may play as many jokers per confrontation as they want.

If a Joker is randomly played from the top of the deck at any point, the character who played that card gains the effects of the Joker for the action he was performing (as determined by the GM in the case of NPCs, hidden checks, or TSEs), discards it, and then plays another card.

If the last card in your hand is a Joker, you won’t be able to play it until the end of a con-frontation, before its outcome is determined.