Mark Hope
Hero
I just bought Green Ronin's deck. Very nice product. From the last thread on this topic, here are some of my tales of weal and woe and somewhat iffy DMing 
:
I put a Deck in every campaign that I run, usually at around level 7 or thereabout. As a player I've only run across one and I did very well out of it (used wishes to get Str 18/00, another card gave me Con 18, another gave me Cha 18 and a small keep and I also recall getting the service of a couple of 4th-level fighters).
One group years ago found one and the party's barbarian pulled the card that steals your soul while leaving you a dim-witted automaton. The player was teased mercilessly about this for ages afterward, on account of nobody being able to tell the difference. Every now and then he would try to convince the party to help him go and find his soul, but to no avail.
My favourite appearance of the Deck was some 14 years back, during the Egg of the Phoenix adventure, where I placed one as treasure in the lair of Lampblakk the shadow dragon. The PCs had just defeated him after a particularly gruelling battle and were pretty pleased to run across such a choice item. It was a large group (8 players, iirc), one of whom was playing D&D for only the first or second time. The group also had a couple of priests in it, and a few other characters for whom religion and personal allegiance was very important...
One of the priests worshipped a version of Tymora, with his faith drawn directly from the Diceman novel (namely, that you make all major decisions on the roll of a die). He was the second or third person to draw. I don't remember what all of his cards were, but one of them was a wish. He immediately wished for all other members of the party to become worshippers of the dice goddess. The room erupted into shouts of outrage and fury, with the other priests seeing their characters go up in flames, allegiances withering on the vine. I had a moment of genuine DM panic, realising that a number of vital plots and adventures I had lined up for further down the line were disintegrating before my eyes. Most significant, of course, was the fact that all the other characters would now be rolling dice to see how many cards they would have to draw from the deck.
Several of the more veteran players demanded that I intervene (my gf points out that most of the players were so furious that several were almost unwilling to carry on playing at all). I almost agreed, but kept my best poker face and sat back to see what happened. In the back of my mind was the realisation that, with 6 more players still to draw, the odds were very good that someone else would draw a wish or that card that allows you to avoid any situation once. I pretended that it was all fine, trying not to smile too nervously and waited it out.
Well, the draws were pretty awful. The campaign basically fell apart over the course of the next few minutes. Then the newbie player drew the next wish. All the other players in the room (er, apart from the dice guy of course) rounded on him and basically browbeat and bullied the poor fellow into wishing that they had never found the dragon's treasure in the first place. He looked to me for advice and I just shrugged and let the mob have its way. A bit crappy of me, I suppose, but them's the breaks . He duly submitted to the overwhelming peer pressure and made the wish and all was undone immediately.
Time rolled back and the party found itself back outside the shadow dragon's cave. Uncharacteristically, the party dusted themselves off and prepared to leave. The dice guy piped up again: "Hey, shouldn't we look for the dragon's treasure? There's bound to be some hereabouts..." A resounding "No!" was the answer from the rest of the group. He was determined, however (having rolled dice to decide his actions), to find the treasure. The party was being accompanied by a badly injured silver dragon (Falx), who suddenly announced (in a moment of still-panicky DMing) that there were "perturbations in the folds of time" and that hunting for the treasure "would have grave consequences for the search for the Egg of the Phoenix". Completely hokey and utterly transparent (and rather dodgy DMing too, to be honest, lol) but the entire party was more than happy to accept his pantemporal analysis... apart, of course from the dice-guy.
The dice-guy (whose name was Sheshet, by the way, a thousand curses be upon him) was having none of it. He tried to push past Falx to get into the shadow dragon's lair. Falx tried to stop him. He rolled some dice. He drew his weapons and attacked Falx. 5 seconds later, Sheshet was dead, slain by a sword of sharpness to the head, three magic missiles to the back, a pair of shuriken in the eye and a call lightning from above - all delivered by his former companions. The party left his body where it lay and hurried off, happy to be away from the tempting wonder that is the Deck of Many Things.
Campaign wrecker? Not at all. All good, friendly, violent fun...
:I put a Deck in every campaign that I run, usually at around level 7 or thereabout. As a player I've only run across one and I did very well out of it (used wishes to get Str 18/00, another card gave me Con 18, another gave me Cha 18 and a small keep and I also recall getting the service of a couple of 4th-level fighters).
One group years ago found one and the party's barbarian pulled the card that steals your soul while leaving you a dim-witted automaton. The player was teased mercilessly about this for ages afterward, on account of nobody being able to tell the difference. Every now and then he would try to convince the party to help him go and find his soul, but to no avail.
My favourite appearance of the Deck was some 14 years back, during the Egg of the Phoenix adventure, where I placed one as treasure in the lair of Lampblakk the shadow dragon. The PCs had just defeated him after a particularly gruelling battle and were pretty pleased to run across such a choice item. It was a large group (8 players, iirc), one of whom was playing D&D for only the first or second time. The group also had a couple of priests in it, and a few other characters for whom religion and personal allegiance was very important...
One of the priests worshipped a version of Tymora, with his faith drawn directly from the Diceman novel (namely, that you make all major decisions on the roll of a die). He was the second or third person to draw. I don't remember what all of his cards were, but one of them was a wish. He immediately wished for all other members of the party to become worshippers of the dice goddess. The room erupted into shouts of outrage and fury, with the other priests seeing their characters go up in flames, allegiances withering on the vine. I had a moment of genuine DM panic, realising that a number of vital plots and adventures I had lined up for further down the line were disintegrating before my eyes. Most significant, of course, was the fact that all the other characters would now be rolling dice to see how many cards they would have to draw from the deck.
Several of the more veteran players demanded that I intervene (my gf points out that most of the players were so furious that several were almost unwilling to carry on playing at all). I almost agreed, but kept my best poker face and sat back to see what happened. In the back of my mind was the realisation that, with 6 more players still to draw, the odds were very good that someone else would draw a wish or that card that allows you to avoid any situation once. I pretended that it was all fine, trying not to smile too nervously and waited it out.
Well, the draws were pretty awful. The campaign basically fell apart over the course of the next few minutes. Then the newbie player drew the next wish. All the other players in the room (er, apart from the dice guy of course) rounded on him and basically browbeat and bullied the poor fellow into wishing that they had never found the dragon's treasure in the first place. He looked to me for advice and I just shrugged and let the mob have its way. A bit crappy of me, I suppose, but them's the breaks . He duly submitted to the overwhelming peer pressure and made the wish and all was undone immediately.
Time rolled back and the party found itself back outside the shadow dragon's cave. Uncharacteristically, the party dusted themselves off and prepared to leave. The dice guy piped up again: "Hey, shouldn't we look for the dragon's treasure? There's bound to be some hereabouts..." A resounding "No!" was the answer from the rest of the group. He was determined, however (having rolled dice to decide his actions), to find the treasure. The party was being accompanied by a badly injured silver dragon (Falx), who suddenly announced (in a moment of still-panicky DMing) that there were "perturbations in the folds of time" and that hunting for the treasure "would have grave consequences for the search for the Egg of the Phoenix". Completely hokey and utterly transparent (and rather dodgy DMing too, to be honest, lol) but the entire party was more than happy to accept his pantemporal analysis... apart, of course from the dice-guy.
The dice-guy (whose name was Sheshet, by the way, a thousand curses be upon him) was having none of it. He tried to push past Falx to get into the shadow dragon's lair. Falx tried to stop him. He rolled some dice. He drew his weapons and attacked Falx. 5 seconds later, Sheshet was dead, slain by a sword of sharpness to the head, three magic missiles to the back, a pair of shuriken in the eye and a call lightning from above - all delivered by his former companions. The party left his body where it lay and hurried off, happy to be away from the tempting wonder that is the Deck of Many Things.
Campaign wrecker? Not at all. All good, friendly, violent fun...
