Adding "hands" to the deck feature

Currently the deck feature only seems to let you draw one card at a time. Most RPGs that use cards (and card games) require each player to have a hand of cards to choose from. My suggestion is this: add a "Hand" in the form of a box that appears at the bottom of the screen. All drawn cards can be set to automatically go into your hand. Clicking cards in the hand enlarges them as normal, and players can press a button to the effect of "Use this card!" which will publicly invoke the card in the chat window.

Hands would be an great feature for the future. Currently, I give the cards to my players as handouts.

May be obvious, but I thought I'd add some other common features of card-based games. Each game system will likely require some subset of these features to be functional. My personal motivation is the miniatures game Malifaux that replaces die rolls with cards drawn from your own Fate Deck. You maintain a hand of cards, but also "duel" other players by making public flips from your deck, which can be augmented or supplemented with cards from your hands. Anyway, the complete list of card game features off the top of my head: (1) a discard pile (that may be private, top-card public, or publicly browsable in its entirety), (2) draw-to-hand vs flip for all players to see (needs to be a clear process so secret draws aren't mistakenly revealed, and supposedly public flips don't end up in your hand where it would be all to tempting to reveal a different card than what was drawn), (3) finite deck sizes (currently you can keep drawing cards and it silently recycles numbers back in), (4) secretly passing cards between players (the number of cards passed is usually public information), or openly passing cards between players (from your hand to their hand, with all players seeing the cards), (5) retrieving cards from your discard pile either randomly or by browsing and selection, (6) "stealing" cards from other players hands either randomly, or after privately viewing their hand, (7) a "reveal from hand" that doesn't cause the card to become "played", (8) putting cards into play where they remain in play vs playing a card which immediately goes to the top of the discard pile. This may take the form of the card becoming a player controlled token in roll20, allowing it to be positioned, rotated, or have markers and modifiers placed on it. It would also help to be able to send this "token" to one of the discard piles when required (9) searching the remaining deck for a specific card and drawing it into your hand, optionally revealing it to other players first, (10) shuffling only the remaining deck (often after the aforementioned "search") vs shuffling the discard pile back into the deck. (11) each player having their own instance of a deck, instead of a single public deck from which all players may draw cards into their hands (as I believe it's currently implemented) (12) a public discard pile from which players send cards from their hands, but that may be viewed and retrieved from later by other players Malifaux would require only (1), (2), (3), and (11), I believe, which would make me happy! I hope some of these other mechanics help other systems as well though. Thanks for all the hard work so far!

Item (7) ought to support revealing melds as in Rummy and also revealing your hand as when the dummy in Bridge. (4) ought to support the thing on Ricketty Kate and other Hearts games in which everyone passes a few cards to someone else, face down, and everyone has to commit to which cards they will pass before they see what cards they receive.

(13) Sort hand, either manually or automatically. When you have a large hand of cards (as for example in Whist or Bridge (thirteen) it can be easy to overlook cards when your hand has your cards in the order they were dealt. (14) Remove the current discard pile from play and converting it to a "trick taken". Some games allow only limited review of tricks played, so it has to be obvious when a trick is reviewed and which trick it was.

In Burning Wheel, players secretly script their character's combat actions (or their Duel of Wit actions--the social combat system) in advance, choosing three. (Mouse Guard has a similar system, being a stripped-down version of the game.) A card deck would -greatly- aid this process, allowing the players to each have a deck of cards, play three facedown, and then reveal them one at a time. Each card would give an action.

In Burning Wheel, players secretly script their character's combat actions (or their Duel of Wit actions--the social combat system) in advance, choosing three. (Mouse Guard has a similar system, being a stripped-down version of the game.) As I recall Castle Falkenstein had something like that too.

I've got a big interest in card handling as well. In The Trouble with Rose (<a href="http://www.tangent-zero.com/trouble.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.tangent-zero.com/trouble.htm</a>) you have two decks; a regular set of playing cards and a set of dominos (easily done as custom cards.) Every player has a hidden hand and they reveal one domino at a time and then the playing card that they were also dealt. The cards are simply laid out in front of the user, no special card tricks. But... (15) being able to place cards anywhere on the table and rotate them That would be extremely handy if people wanted to tap cards, play tile based games like Tsuro or Carcassonne, or simply play a game of dominos. (16) shuffle with rotation That really important to RPGs like Fortune's Fool which uses a tarot deck and card rotation at zero and 180 degrees is essential. The other game that I'd dearly like to be able to implement is Three-Dragon Ante (<a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ante/welcome" rel="nofollow">http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ante/welcome</a>). It only has one custom deck, but they'd need to be big like tarot cards because of the extra info. In 3DA you have drawing, an ante pile that players can pick from, a discard pile, and the cards in front. If cards can be placed freely on the table, that would solve a lot. But, there is a secret draw and simultaneous reveal phase. (17) flip cards in your hand or on the table Just making that a general action for individual cards would add a lot of flexibility. In the case of 3DA, you'd want to flip the card in your hand, place it on the table, and then everyone flips their card at the same time. Of course, Texas Hold'em Poker would benefit from that as well. Also, Fortune's Fool has a lot of card manipulation like deck searching and such, but I'd have to re-read it to catch all of them. Cards are a very flexible and colorful element to a lot of games, role playing and others. They are also a big barrier to playing games online. Roll20 can really help to break through that barrier. Looking forward to a robust card handling system. :-) -- TAZ

I have an interest in card handling, everything from Netrunner and MTG to Gamma World (new edition uses cards)... even considering adapting things like King of Tokyo etc. to roll20. It would be a great feature to include in the near future.

I'll add my voice to this thread. Card handling is a major issue for me currently. I'm trying to run a Deadlands TT RPG. It uses multiple decks; one for the player character's initiative, one for the NPC’s initiative, and then a deck per player character that has special abilities (like hucksters). I need players to be able to draw cards from a deck and hold them in a hand and be able to reveal them one at a time or all at once. I also want to be able to limit the player’s access to shuffling the deck, so they can shuffle their own ability deck but not the initiative decks. As a side note, I believe the current interface with drawing a card is terrible. Pulling the back card is very cumbersome. I want to be able to click on the deck and get a card per click that instantly pops up in my hand. I then can click on the card to play/reveal/discard it or fold to clear my hand. I’m spit-balling here but maybe left click draws the card privately into my hand and right click draws the card publicly and sets it immediately on the table.

In my homebrew system, social encounters are based on poker. Having a hand system where each player can build up a hand, i.e. draw extra cards for it, discard cards, etc., would be great.

I run Lace and Steel occasionally and being able to support the dueling and magic system (which require hands) would be great.

I'll just add, in case it were not as obvious as I think, and in case anyone has forgotten that I mentioned before, that for use in RPGs cards, chips, bennies and so forth have to stay with players or characters as they move from page/scene to page/scene. The great limitation of my FATE layout is that it can't be used if I move the players to another page to represent a scene. It will be a huge improvement when that changes.

I'd also like to add my vote for more card/tile functionality. Especially: 1) each player having a private hand (and being able to draw to their hand) 2) placing tiles from their hand to the board (perhaps with snapping to a grid) 3) rotating placed tiles (again, with rotational snaping) I could use this for letting players draw and place terrain tiles to create a tactical map before a table-top miniatures-style battle.

Comments I posted in another thread about cards: Creating Deck Functionality: Deck Name Max Hand Size Min Hand Size Deck Image Deck Playing Functionality: Draw from Top Draw from Bottom Draw at Random Shuffle Shuffle Discard into Deck View Cards in Deck (*Ability to choose cards when viewing) View Cards in Discard (*Ability to choose cards when viewing) Hand Playing Functionality: Play Card Tap Played Card Untap Played Card Discard to Discard Pile Discard to Trash Pile Place on Top of Deck Place on Bottom of Deck Place Randomly in Deck Give Card to Selected Player *Display Card to Selected Player(s) *Display Hand to Selected Player(s) (Ability to choose cards when viewing) My friend and I are actually building a php version with most of the functionality above, that is still in early stages but I assume if we can do it there then the guys at Roll20 could do something even better.

I would also like to echo my sentiments on giving my players a hand from the deck and a discard pile.

Consider me super exited about the nebulous future in which we have improved card support.

I'd like to add my support for adding cards to a hand. I really want to use Roll20 to play Torg (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torg</a>) But the drama deck is kinda vital! In addition to Dakcenturi's suggestion, I'd also throw in an 'invert card' option to flip a card upside down. As well as a mouseover zoom function would be spiffy.

One other thing that would be nice is if there was a way to create hands on the fly or take a card and lay it down on the board and then be able to assign a new hand of cards to that specific card. For an example, you have a deck of hero cards that you draw from and once you draw a hero that is your "character" so you put that down on the table then as you adventure or explore you draw cards from items, weapons and equipment decks and you can then give the character those cards for them to use.

Didn't realize this was posted already so put up a post guessing mine will be deleted here's what I posted. First off, thank you so much for putting playing cards into this site. For playing cards to be useful for gaming I think a few options need to be present. Decks need to have editable options. 1. Names display option. 2. Who can shuffle, view, draw or discard to/from the Deck. 3. If the Deck is; Stacked w/ Faces Hidden, Fanned out (options; distance between cards, who can view revealed faces) with Faces Revealed. 4. Ability to move and lock Deck positions. 5. Cards need to have ability to be assigned numerical values. I would suggest at least ###.### places and allow negative values (999.999 to -999.999). This could be in up to 3 Fields to complement the 3 fields already used in Tokens this would allow options such as attack and defense. Also allow an option to toggle the numerical values off and instead have these special cards placed to the side when cards are matched. 6. Ability to give similar numerical values to Card combinations in the deck. 7. The option to Define which numerical fields are used when comparing two cards (again attack and defense for example). 8. Allow the moving of both single cards and the entire deck of cards to a field. Card Fields need to be implemented where deck cards can be dealt. These Card Fields would have many options allowing them to act as temporary holding places for cards to dealt to and played from or to link them to playing fields so that any cards within the linked Card Field will count toward all linked Playing Fields. 1. Names display option. 2. Allow the moving of both single cards and the entire field of cards to another field. 3. Ability to link cards to Playing Fields (singular or the entire group), any card within a Card Field would be counted towards the linked Playing Fields on adjudication. 4. Ability to move and lock field positions. 5. Who can view, draw or discard to/from the field. Playing Fields need to be implemented where cards can be shifted from playing fields or dealt from decks, these fields would have many options. 1. Names display option. 2. The ability to link multiple playing fields. 3. An adjudicate button for all linked Playing Fields. This would when pressed calculate the cards numerical values against each other. 4. The option to designate a Playing Field as "Dealer," this would add a toggle able button that would switch the playing filed between normal and "dealer" modes. In "dealer" mode other playing fields would only be measured against the "dealer" to adjudicate the card outcome. 5. Ability to move and lock field positions. 6. Who can view, draw or discard to/from the field. If these options are added into your site I believe it should handle most card games which should allow those who use cards for RPG's for what ever reason the ability to do so easily.

I'm quite happy with Roll20 emulating a real tabletop.

But, no need to simulate uneven surfaces, stickiness, water rings, soda spills, or one table leg shorter than the other. :-) In general, I'm more in favor of free form card handling as well. Less effort up front and more flexibility in the long haul. Since it hasn't been mentioned, I'd love to see support for non-rectangular cards at some point. The board and wargamer in me would love to play with hexagonal cards that can be rotated. The mad scientist in me is shouting, "Shared multiplayer jig-saw puzzles!" (Probably best done with transparency rather than funky shapes.) -- TAZ

Another thing that will be very important is the ability to use images from links for cards so you don't have to upload images for every card in a custom deck.

But, no need to simulate uneven surfaces, stickiness, water rings, soda spills, or one table leg shorter than the other. :-) ;-)

But how are you supposed to have a water hazard if you can't simulate a spreading pool of Dr. Pepper?

Just adding my voice here to request a very tabletop simulator set of card tools. Hands (Hidden/Unhidden) Card Passing Card Manipulation on the table (as tokens + the zoom feature) A # of X card option in the Deck Builder Decks that "run out" after being completely drawn. That's about all I can think of needing to play most of the card-based games out there.

While there are a lot of great ideas already posted, I can say I'd be very excited to see Card Manipulation on the tabletop and the ability to "stack" cards (like in Blackjack) and to have face down / value visible to GM-only (as the "dealer"). Combined with things like a card hand, the tabletop can then be changed as a play mat depending on game requirements to fulfill a variety of needs.

Very excited to hear that some of these functions are underway. The only thing keeping me from running a campaign on roll20 is that I'm only running card-based games right now, in which every player has a privately-held hand. Also, I didn't see it mentioned above, but I'm wondering whether there will ever be an option to share decks between campaigns and even other users. I just spent awhile last night making a tarot deck using public-domain images (from Wikimedia Commons); I'd love to be able to not only share it between campaigns without copying them outright, but also to share it with other users so they don't have to build a 78-card deck by hand themselves.

Great idea! I can think of a number of custom decks that would be cool to create and share.

Could be a useful feature. Roll20 Poker Edition games, anybody?

I'm a little confused as to why we cant add stats to the cards? What if I hand out cards to players that increase different stats of theirs and instead of having to edit my images in paint i could just add some txt to an image. Or is there some kind of way to add notes to cards that I missed? I'm not looking for the program to do things automatically for me I just don't want players asking me what the card does all the time. 1. I would love for players to be able to put cards facedown from their hands onto the board. *edit just found out if i hold shift it does this! 2. Some sort of view where you are facing the person/people you are playing. 3. a way to rotate the cards on the board. edit* im stupid. 4. a discard pile/ ability to make multiple piles kind of like multiple hands.(this way we could make deck building games)

I can't get it to put cards facedown. I'm just spose to hold shift when dragging the card from my hand?

How is the deck feature coming along? I really enjoy playing Savage Worlds and I'd like an easy way to use the deck to handle initiative. Right now the interface still seems a bit clunky. Deleted cards seem to be returned back to the deck. The GM can't see player's hands. Other than that it's difficult to attach cards to tokens. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

I can't get it to put cards facedown. I'm just spose to hold shift when dragging the card from my hand? I can duplicate that problem as well.

I can put them face down by holding shift and dragging the card from my hand. But once played face down I can't flip it back over :) or return it to my hand. Only delete it, which returns it to the deck. Card features are enticingly close to usable, but I keep hitting little glitches that make them unworkable. Unlike other map/token issues that players can talk through and rebuild to a proper game state, a glitch in your deck of cards can really ruin a game... you can't really talk about what cards you had, or intended to put down, without revealing too much.

Greg, did you try right-clicking on a face-down card on the table? What happened? (I can't try it myself because I have a one-button mouse and control-click isn't working as right-click, so I don't know whether there is a "flip card" item in the context menu.)

Adding my thoughts: Card passing (public) would be a great option. The specific mechanic I'm looking at is drafting (I think it's called). Giving everyone five cards, keep 1, pass the remaining four to the left, and repeating until everyone has a fairly random five card hand. Great product though!

We need a feature to allow for a single card to be duplicated several times. If theres a deck that has multiples of the same card, I would rather not clog up my uploaded assets with 10 copies of the same picture, and it makes the decklist absurdly long. IE Uno, Magic the Gathering, any standard card game with jokers, and tons of other games. Perhaps a amount selector next to each card in the decklist.

I'd like to see an in-game interface for creating new cards, a la 1000 blank white cards. It's already possible by using tokens but it'd be nice to be able to "flip" tokens over, or group tokens together in a deck/add new cards from the field into an already existing deck. It's also not currently possible to edit existing cards in a deck directly, as far as I can tell. I've tried by adding a drawing and grouping them together and it glitched fantastically. So... I hope that'll be a feature for us niche gamers in the near future (certainly it'd have other uses). I mean, everyone loves 1000 bwc. And Dvorak. It'd be so much fun to make that a reality (:

The card decks work really well right now. It's nice having the ability to have multiple decks of cards out there. What's missing that I'd love to see is the ability to move a card from one deck into another. Also, when recalling cards to the deck, you can recall from a player's hand, or all from the table. But I'd like the ability to leave some on the table and move only some of them back into the deck. Perhaps adding Recall to the contextual menu of the card token on the table.

I want to throw in support for adding additional card based features.

Figure I'd add to this thread instead of creating another, though I get that any other deck functionality is probably low on the list of priorities, and I can understand why considering the focus is tabletop gaming. I was wondering, however, if there was any thought given to user-created card decks becoming available on the marketplace for other users/campaigns? Like if I had an idea for a Critical Hit deck, went and made all the text and graphics, and wanted to see if anyone else liked to use it in their game, could it be obtained as a deck, or would I just need to make the images available and everyone would have to build their own deck out of the image files?