Fortune Cards Threads [Merged]

[blalien]

I'm so sick of Chuck Norris jokes. If you actually read about him you'll find out he's kind of a terrible person.

 

[Cyronax]

I'm so sick of Chuck Norris jokes. If you actually read about him you'll find out he's kind of a terrible person.

Oh chill out.

 

[SteveC]

Dear WotC,
Please make some more products I actually want to buy. It's been a while, but I still love your core product... you're just not making anything for it anymore.

In case you're wondering, this ain't it.

 

[Ryujin]

Any of you, who are familiar with the Torg roleplaying game, will be familiar with a similar concept of card use. Our gaming group played Torg for quite a long while to the point that our usual DM, who was a player during the Torg campaign years, became quite enamoured of the concept.

As a result he has tried to incorporate them into several other games. He used them in D20 Modern and, most recently, put a huge amount of work into adapting them to 4e. Rather than giving out Action Points, he gave out these cards.They seemed to work well enough but, given their highly variable nature of use, I opted to not continue their use in my own campaign when he stepped aside from running the game. I thought them to make it too hard, to balance encounters. They also added a mechanic that screws with the benefits of many Paragon Paths.

 

[renau1g]

It's not. However, with this product it is clear that the issue of what is good for the business is the primary motivation, and the question of what is good for the game is a much lesser consideration (if it is being considered at all).

D&D is (or was) a collaborative game. Game balance is about trying to ensuring that nobody is overshadowed by anybody else, because that's not fun (and wasn't eliminating the not-fun one of the key parts of the 4e rollout?).

The structure of this product means that the player who spends the most will have the best character, and probably not just slightly. They're sacrificing game balance for money, and that's why this is not a good thing.

Well... to be honest, in 2e/3e (maybe 1e?) a player who bought all the splat books to build his PC could likely build a more powerful foe than just a PHB using player. So it's got precedent that players with deeper pockets can have more options (usually more powerful ones as power creep sets in). 4e is great with the CB allowing access to all source materials so if someone can afford that then they're all on the same playing field...this brings that back unfortunately.

 

[Nytmare]

Well... to be honest, in 2e/3e (maybe 1e?) a player who bought all the splat books to build his PC could likely build a more powerful foe than just a PHB using player.

I don't think that I was ever part of a group where the books weren't a shared resource though. This product is basically set up so that each player has (I'm assuming) their own private stack of cards geared around their own character's schtick. Sure people can share/trade the cards that they aren't using, but sharing leftovers is an entirely different thing.

Pretend you have a 100 page splat book that you payed 20 bucks for. That's 5 cents a page. Let's pretend some more and say that you could maybe fit 10 powers on each page. That's half a cent per power, and you could share it with all your friends. Heck you could even have two characters in the same game using the same power at the same time.

If this ends up working for them, that's 50 cents for a 1/10th of a page of a book that no one else can use.

[EDIT]

God, the full weight of that is just hitting home. It's bordering on brilliant, I just wish they were saving it for a game I didn't want to play.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I think this could be optimizer heaven, but will have very little impact on the game

I know if I were to do them, I would have my own deck (as the DM) and hand them out occasionally, to be sued that session.

Unfortunately, it looks lik Amazon Japan is not selling htem.

 

[delericho]

Well... to be honest, in 2e/3e (maybe 1e?) a player who bought all the splat books to build his PC could likely build a more powerful foe than just a PHB using player.

Obviously, I don't know how it worked for you, but in all the games I have ever been involved in, the way it worked was that if a sourcebook was available for use at all, it was available for use by everyone.

(In fact, I would never have allowed a book to be used in my games unless I personally owned a copy, and could therefore vet it for balance. From there, of course, it's a short step to ensuring that everyone gets to access/use it.)

I simply would not have played in a game that allowed a player to bring in a sourcebook for his exclusive use (or one where the book was supposedly open for everyone, but the player 'forgot' to bring it to game sessions, so no-one else could actually check it).

 

[jbear]

Is the idea of random cards changing elements of an encounter attractive to me: Yes

Is the idea of these cards potentially placing the narration of the adventure temporarily in the PCs hands to a certain random degree as per the aforementioned Purple Plot Collaboration Cards interesting to me: Yes

To a limited degree I already use cards based on the Torg cards as a reward system.

Do I find the notion of random player power cards interesting ... less so, but I can imagine my players might enjoy it. But it is not something I would ever let be in the players control, as in 'wait, I'm going to pull something from my random deck!'

Where I disconnect is at the price. $4 for only 8 cards. I don't know how expensive cards are to produce but that seems expensive. When something like this becomes interesting is when you have a deck of 50-100 different, random interesting stuff that rarely ever repeats itself. If we were talking about a 60 card deck for 9 or 10$, and the cards were DM designed random 'more than just power-stuff' like encounter terrain, hazards, wandering monsters, plot cards, improvised challenge cards, negative or favourable change in conditions, and random powers mixed in together I'd be well interested.

The product as it stands does little more than inspire me to print out my Torg-based cards to make a proper random deck, MSEditor the Purple cards designed by Sabrecat and add my own ones.

All that said and done ... do we have an example of what one of these cards actually offers?

 

[Aberzanzorax]

All that said and done ... do we have an example of what one of these cards actually offers?

Yes. Read the link. There are two cards at the bottom of it that are examples.