I love RPG mechanics so much, I should do a bunch of posts about them.

I don't mean so much how they work with calculations, but about how to make different mechanics work in different games.

For example, using playing cards for subsystems like initiative, magic items, or random monster encounters. (On the last one, the main reason is that you won't get something duplicated too many times.)

    The original post is from March, but I thought about how it would convert to The Black Hack.

Beat the Monster Rating, you go before the monster. Otherwise, you go after.

If you draw the same rank as the monster rating, Red suits go before the monster, black suits go after.

Drawing a joker means you roll with advantage and the damage goes up one die step.

Since TBH is player facing, no monsters or GMs draw cards. (Although a certain GM may draw from his/her own deck of cards for random encounters.)

    <img class="alignnone" src="https://www.sycarion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MSHRanks.png" alt="" />

vsM Superhero thoughts

If you eliminate Shift 0, there are 13 ranks from Feeble to Shift Z in the original MSH game. I thought of matching challenges with ranks for playing cards.

Feeble is 2, Poor is 3, up to Shift Z is Ace. If you really wanted to be advanced, Shift 1000 is Black Aces, and Shift 3000 is the Ace of Spades. If you really want Shift 5000, add a joker to the deck. It changes the probabilities slightly, but not enough to redo all the calculations.

Cosmic level was fun for me, but I'd probably stick to just 2 through Ace.

Still, anything below 6 is pretty much automatic for the rules as written. So, maybe we look at changing the stats to range from 1 to 4 instead of 2 to 6. This makes checks for anything 4 and above worthwhile.

So with these two changes, could I make a vsSupervillians?