#Ok - it is not any of the trihorns - the game is about being a dinosaur cowboy not a dinosaur to be wrangled by cowboys

[emptymanuscript]

So, I'm obsessively thinking about Tripoke mechanics again.

I'm trying to figure out how I can do what I was doing before with the dice (which I admit may have been too much) but with something close to a poker mechanic - it is weird west with Dinosaurs instead of horses and cows after all, a card game does make slightly more sense than polyhedral dice progression.

The problem was that I was doing a LOT with those dice. (again, possibly too much). The dice could function as a, ranking, oracle (Extreme Yes, Yes And, Yes, Yes But, Neutral, No But, No, No And, Extreme No), dramatic ammo counter, comparative results, damage given, damage avoided, adrenaline, health, injury, injury conditions, moral temptation, and moral degradation/advancement.

The cost of that was careful tracking of the dice you were rolling. That was the main problem of the dice, you had to switch what you were rolling and how many dice you were rolling often. And there wasn't even a mark off and reset since health, injury, and injury conditions were accomplished by actually losing dice. No health score or health track. You literally just got worse in play because you could permanently lose a die when things went sideways. The compensation for being able to lose a die is that you could also get better dice or even more dice from Adrenaline and/or your Devil. The bad was that the dice would just flux from turn to turn. And I admit that might be too much.

However, there isn't as easy a marker in a poker-like endeavor to match you have "set" XdY and both X and Y change in known ways depending on known factors.

I figure I can do maybe half-ish of the same thing with some kind of betting mechanic instead of a card mechanic. Basically a character's sheet determines their chips and the chips they walk away with determines their sheet. The problem is that that really can't alter things round to round because in a betting pot situation you could get too many or too few chips to keep the conflict dramatically interesting. One bad hand could essentially kill the character while the next could make them a demi-god and it just wouldn't work as well for damage, health, injury conditions, or adrenaline.

What I really need for that is something reflected in the cards that you can play (or how you can play them) that you can gain or lose as the fight goes on, that isn't, please hunt through your cards and dispose of all your 9's and 10's or something like that. That's doable with a small handfull of dice. It's not doable with a deck of cards.

Although... I was going to have each player play with their own deck... I could instead have a communal deck and have something like the Dealer Deck (community's cards that the Dealer deals a certain number of cards out of), Player Library (what the Dealer deals into), a Player Pool (what a player can draw from their library in a turn), and a Hand Size (How many cards a player can use to make any given hand). I could make a gain or loss effect any set in that chain.

If I made the scoring more detailed (not hard) I could even make some fairly detailed results.

Hmmmm.....

The easiest effect to create seems like it would be that Hand Size. You simply couldn't make as powerful a Flush or Straight with less cards available to your hand than you could with more. If the max size of your hand is 3 cards from a pool of 5, while your opponent has 5 cards out of a pool of 7, your opponent is capable of scoring higher than you. ...EXCEPT, you would require less cards to be Flush or Straight, so you would actually be likely to win more often even if you couldn't win by as much.

So :/ that wouldn't work...

Hmmmm....

(this is me obssessing yet more over mechanics)