Deck of Many Things: Your experiences and advice?

[Huw]

The only time I've used one was when the whole campaign was undergoing a big shift. One character drew donjon, so part of the new campaign was to rescue him. Another player got flames, so that gave us the villain. The party got about 6 wishes out of it and few other good things.

As other posters have pointed out, this will change your campaign if you use it. So don't use it if you don't want your campaign to change!

 

[Mark Hope]

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...

 

[schporto]

I've used it once. 6 people, 5 drew. And they actually all drew according to role playing (which was quite odd I thought). Three drew the Sun card (and really I did shuffle - honest). Suddenly half the party was (1 exp shy of) 2 levels higher then the rest. The really biting thing was two characters had managed not to get killed through the campaign, and they hadn't gotten this sudden boost. They were suddenly the bottom of the power ladder. It made for some unhappy campers. It didn't ruin the campaign, but there needed to be some readjustment later.
-cpd

 

[Li Shenron]

Many of the effects of the DMG Deck of Many things (don't know about the Green Ronin version) equal death. Some of them equal irrecoverable death.

If losing your PC is terrible for you, just don't draw cards!
I usually don't like losing my PC, so I have never drawn any card when a DM has decided to drop one Deck into the game.

But death is not the end of the game! Sometimes your PC dies... so what? Sad to lose a character you love, but it's just part of the game -> roll another PC and restart the fun!


Other negative effects
- change alignment: some players even like doing this on purpose, without any compulsion, just to develop a dramatic history of their PC
- permanent Int drain: you could have just rolled low Int since the start, this is only a threat for Wizard characters (in the worst case, retire the character and it's as bad as death)
- permanent ST penalty: -1 is not a big deal really
- lose 10000 xp: if you allow this to drain more than 1 level at once, it could make the PC useless, and IMO you can consider retiring it (if the DM doesn't allow retiring it, wait 1 more battle and he will be dead anyway if it's really unplayable); but at high levels this is at worst 1 level loss, and at very low levels this means death, so the real problem is IMO between levels 4-8
- lose equipment: this is possibly worse than death, especially at high level; either the party is going to help you buy new gear, or you may die next encounter
- enmity of an NPC/outsider: this just means more adventures


So the worst thing that could happen are:
(a) you need to make a new character... doesn't this happen also for natural causes?
(b) you've lost important gear: either the DM adjusts the adventure to compensate or the game gets more difficult; I hardly think that it gets impossible and in that case the DM should really step in and do something


Positive effects include
- gain a level: what's the problem if a PC is higher level than the others? it happens all the time to us, that our PCs are 1-2 levels apart for many reasons [it's debatable whether the deck can give you more than 1 level: I think there's a rule that says you can't level up more than a level at once from the same encounter, and the excess XP is wasted, so it depends whether you consider this an encounter or not]
- gain 50000gp: at low level it could really be a huge boost, but I don't think it's going to be easily gamebreaking
- gain 1d4 wishes (use within MINUTES): at low level this could be gamebreaking only if you use it to gain magic items or cast permanent spells, but it could be argue that you're still required to spend xp for those (not the 5000xp for wish itself)


So overall I don't think it's unbalancing enough to "ruin a game", although it could become too much if every PC draws several cards (which may also cause a TPK).

Eventually it's much less problematic the higher the party level (except for the equipment loss). If the Deck was not an artifact, it would have a price and characters below a certain level would simply not be an issue at all, but alas as a priceless items some DM may just think it's fine at level 1...

 

[shilsen]

While it can be a little more random then dice, we have countless stories on these boards of characters and games that were ruined by dice.

Sure, but I think it's fair to say that the Deck is astronomically more random than dice. Dice are usually modified by your character's abilities, by the opposition's abilities, by tactical and strategic choices the characters have made, etc. The Deck is purely random luck.

Of course, like all things in the game, I understand that it works fine for some people and I totally encourage them to use it. For me, I've never used it as a DM and would hate to see it used as a player.

 

[Twowolves]

I was thinking of limiting the xp gain/loss to a maximum of 1 level gain/loss. I was also thinking of having the "Defeat your next opponent solo" card pulling the character drawing the card into an extraplanar/extratemporal arena and, with full hp/spells/uses of limited per day use abilitites combat a CR equivalent critter. Has anyone else done anything like this, other than just using non-standard decks?

Also, lots of people call them campaign wreckers, but not why or how. So how about it? Why were they campaign wreckers?

 

[XO]

Bad!

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.

Define "pretty awful". Unless the character had specific reason to use his Wish that way, he wouldn't. And other PCs would not necessarily "know" he'd drawn a wish. Why would they moan and complain about their faithful directions? They would have been happy and blissful.

It all depends on wording too! Worship of this "roll 'em" deity did not necessarily mean they no longer worshipped their former deity. It is not necessarily mutually exclusive.

You never should have left the other players pressure anyone. And their alignment should have instantaneously become evil when they assassinated their ally. The dragon would likely have slain them where they stood.

There is another thread where a DM asked about "negative XP awards" (aka XP loss) and I disagreed, but you've just hit on a sour note where I would have penalized them harshly for using foreknowledge they would no longer have: if the dragon's hoard was not found and the dragon was not defeated, they do not have that knowledge.... Period.

 

[Nathan P. Mahney]

The deck rocks. The one time I've encountered it in a campaign I drew all four cards. Gained a lot of XP, got a stronghold and a Charisma boosted to 18, got the card that says you gain a level after defeating your next foe, then got that foe delivered right to me in the form of the card that makes you fight Death. It was sweet, especially seeing that I got a Girdle of Giant Strength in the same encounter.

 

[XO]

Let Them Fall Where They May

I was also thinking of having the "Defeat your next opponent solo" card pulling the character drawing the card into an extraplanar/extratemporal arena and, with full hp/spells/uses of limited per day use abilitites combat a CR equivalent critter.

If the 10th level character meets a lonely kobold, that's it! If it's a demonic critter, same thing!

You "can" seek a CR equivalent fight, but I always ran it as a standard encounter, with other characters stepping in if things go awry (forfeiting the bonus if it happens).

I always awarded XP equivalent to the next level to even out the process: that way, if you're missing 200XP for your next level, you don't feel robbed...

 

[tx7321]

"The Deck of Many Things" its what the game was meant to be all about (the ordinary meet the extraordinary). But keep in mind, this could stop the show (as others have pointed out).

PS This item is very "old school" in the random sort of way, it works great for 1E/OD&D with its endless underground dungeons bordering on plotless (well stealing treasure from monsters basically, possibly to recover something), I don't know if it would be the best fit for 3E campaigns with serious plots and balance is important (assuming the latest deck is identical to the original from AD&D1).

Does anyone remember if the DOMT ever made it into a module?