Oh, I'd swear I wrote this somewhere...

The system I use for The Pacific War (and used for Mile Higher Club) is not canon In Nomine, but is an outgrowth of me tooling around with it and of me shedding WoD baggage. There's also the fact that back in the day I was a tarot reader -ahem- spiritual counselor with cards, and I have a couple of decks I like to play with. (By the way, if anyone knows where to get another copy of the Dessuart desert-themed deck, please point me at it. Mine is buried in storage.)

Someone asked me what system I used and I pointed her to my drafts of Red Queen, a LARP system I put together in all that above. It's unfinished and exists primarily as a set of notes, but testing it pointed me at what I do and do not like in a system.

Certainty: hate it. No action should be without risk, minus the very basic stuff that shouldn't be rolled at all. If you have to randomize, you should be able to succeed or fail, no matter how gloriously twinked your character is.

Wow, I haven't used “twink” as a verb in years.

Once I got my head around the check digit concept—considerable effort actually—I loved it. It separated whether one succeeded from how much, adding even more uncertainty.

So uncertainty and color are important to me, and color is why I reach for cards more often than dice, despite the mathematical hassles.

Let's take the fours in my trusty Thoth deck. Each four, in the check digit position, is a CD 2. --yawn-- But look at the titles: Completion. Truce. Power. Luxury. Talk about four wildly different concepts! I interpret those concepts within the context of the scene—are the characters powerful folks trying to make peace? Truce, a recognition that we've all got swords here, fits nicely. If I got Power in that scene though, the winner is seen as someone not to be messed with—sure, with a low CD the NPC's will be plotting his demise, but for now they fear him. Luxury the NPC's are just too damned lazy to mess with him, and Completion...maybe the poor sucker fits an NPC prophecy and that's why they're cooperating.

I've the sneaking suspicion this makes me creatively lazy. No matter. I have the Thoth for general purposes, the Vertigo for when I want things dark, and a Black Butler (anime) poker card deck that curiously gives me face cards a lot of the time. My favorite—which belongs to a friend of mine and is impossible to get AFAIK—is a Sin City deck that was only offered to the owners of comic book shops. The trade deck has characters on the face cards, this deck had one or two frames of the book on each and every card. Another one that, if you see it for sale, I beg you to point me at it.

So nuts and bolts:

Character vs Environment: I'm mostly on canon.

Determine a difficulty aka Target Numnber.

Draw two cards.

The first is a simple draw-under, halved if it's a Major Arcana.

The second card is the check digit, and Minors are halved and Majors quartered, rounding up as a rule. “As a rule” because if I had difficulty assigning the target number in the first place I'll keep that in mind.

Characters vs characters

Determine which stat is relevant—sometimes I leave that up to the player.

Draw two cards for each combatant.

The first card is added to the relevant stat, then the total compared to the other combatant's total. Higher number wins.

The second card is the check digit, and is halved or quartered to get it into In Nomine's CD scale.

A Queen is a victory no matter what else. God vs. mouse and if the mouse gets the Queen that god is on the run.

Characters vs multiple characters

Each combatant gets only one draw of two cards, with rare exceptions. The player then must allocate how much focus/power/whatever he's going to direct at which combatant.

Example: Dunderhead the Brave provokes four big scary guys, Mr. Red, Mr. Blue, Mr. Yellow and Mr. Pink. Now Dunderhead is strong, and if it was just he and Mr. Yellow it'd be no contest. However, he has to decide whether to use all his 9 Strength to wring Mr. Red's neck and hope Blue, Yellow, and Pink all get low check digits...or he could divide it 3, 3 and 3, figuring they're all wussies, and only Mr. Pink would get a free shot, since so far Pink can't hit the broadside of a barn.