Daniel (@dungeondive) breaks from the Cymbaline Isle campaign for a closer look at Eric Bright’s Encounter Building Decks — four 60-card decks (Decisions, Locations, Traps, Combat) discovered via the Solo RPG Guy channel and currently on sale on DriveThruRPG. The bundled rules PDF gets warm marks for both clarity and humour (“Eric, don’t be stupid” is preserved as the deck’s anti-cheating doctrine).
The Decisions deck stacks a yes/no oracle (with no-way through for-sure odds calibrated at roughly 10/25/50/75/90 percent), randomness/loot/event triggers, ten flavour words, full die-roll stand-ins (using a doubled d4 to substitute the missing d8), and quest seeds onto each card. The Locations deck snaps together building rooms, small structures, caverns, or outdoor settings with stairs, exits, locks, and rare secret doors. The Traps deck — Daniel’s standout — gives each trap a description plus four stat icons (discover difficulty, disarm difficulty, avoid difficulty, damage), filling a gap in OSR trap tables that usually only list damage.
The Combat deck, expected to see least use, splits cards into setup details and combatant blocks, with twists (stones of silence, rotating front-line tactics) baked into encounters. Daniel’s preference for cards over tables — speed, tactility, no homemade-component fatigue — is the through-line.
Are card-based oracles like these a genuine upgrade over rolled tables for solo RPG play, or just a more expensive form of the same randomness?