Map Navigation/Out of Combat Play
Transgender Deathmatch Legend is played on hexcrawl. Players start on one hex and can move in any direction. Hexes correspond to a legend and might start fights, present challenges or other roleplaying scenes.
We'll include the rules for the default hexes from TDL here. You can use these to make a hexcrawl for TDL or your own Fight Card Game.
Ally Hexes
An ally is any character you meet who isn’t trying to beat you to a pulp. Ally hexes have some details about these characters and where you meet them. You can interpret the brief prompts for allies as you see fit or disregard them entirely. You can play out a short in-fiction scene as you go on your way.
Challenge
A challenge hex will present some sort of opportunity for the Protagonist. The Facilitator establishes the challenge and draws three cards from the top of the deck. The Protagonist must play a card from their hand that beats the highest numerical value of any of the Facilitator’s cards. If they pass this check they receive a benefit; this may be pre-setting a Trump Suit or re-drawing a number of cards.
Remember to draw back up after playing through a challenge.
Weapon Pick Up
A weapon pick up is a chance to grab some plunder. The Facilitator introduces the scene where a weapon can be claimed and draws a card from the top of the deck. The Protagonist can claim the weapon and exchange a card from their hand of a matching suit. When they play this card in a fight they can replace the standard flavour of it with the flavour of a weapon attack. Mechanically the card acts as normal.
Respawn Points
If the Protagonist is defeated in a fight they move directly to any Respawn Point. Depending on the key the Facilitator describes the scene where they come to and the Protagonist acts out how they get back on the brawling path.
You can invent new kinds of hexes. You could also do a different method of map navigation. You could create a point crawl (a series of locations/encounters linked by paths), some kind of grid system, or an open map. You could have a map generated by drawing cards that key to encounters. You could also try having a Fight Card Game work in a theatre of the mind fashion, with the Facilitator calling for fights when they see fit, like someone might call for a dice roll in other games.
Thoughts on Challenge Mechanics
We thought of other ways of resolving non-fight challenges. An earlier draft of TDL featured multiple kinds of challenges, in addition to a simple "beat the numerical value" challenge there were "match the colour" and "match the suit" challenges. These were dropped, for simplicity's sake, but if you wanted to vary difficulty you could do so like that. You could resolve a challenge using the trick taking game rules, but only playing a single trick.
Another alternative would be instead of having a persistent hand you could have the Protagonist draw from the deck, with the numerical value determining success. This would work essentially like a d13 check in more traditional ttrpgs and could open up adding stats into character creation. This does lose a degree of mechanical symmetry between combat and other scenes.
You could forgo involving the cards in challenges and have character creation involve creating reputation and item tags, then beating challenges involves arguing their relevance against the Facilitators judgement.
(In TDL Challenges include cutting a promo, working out and settling your nerves, but the substance can be changed to any sort of non combat action. Depending on what your fiction involves you may want different mechanical effects, the next section has some ideas on this.)
Any of these changes may render Weapon Pick Ups less mechanically relevant as a consequence, so you may choose to not include Weapons in your game, or implement them differently.
Thoughts on Challenge Effect
In TDL beating challenges allows the Protagonist to either pre-set the Trump Suit of certain fights (choosing a suit that their hand seems strong with) or to re-draw a certain number of cards (ideally replacing weaker cards in their hand).
We didn't want to allow too much influence over what happens when a fight starts, so we avoided automatic successes in certain tricks, ambient number boosts or increased hand size. You may feel you desire differently for your game.
You could also remove the idea of having Challenges affect fights at all. You could have challenges affect the map, beating them could open up new areas or shortcuts, or losing against them could block off certain routes or reveal new enemies. You could have the results of challenges only influence the fiction of the world.