Deck of Many Mehs

...or why Deck of Many Things is not game breaking

Today I’d like to talk about a fairly famous DnD artifact - the deck of many things. Occasionally you see statements online to the effect that it is “campaign destroying”, and, frankly, I do not understand why.

As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary, and if you are looking for other posts, check out the blog map.

Let’s start by explaining what is a Deck of Many Things. It is a magical deck of 22 cards. Each of the cards has a certain magical effect when drawn from the deck, and these effects stay fairly constant from one edition of DnD to another. When a character decides to draw cards from the deck, they first have to decide how many cards to draw. After that, they must draw that amount, even if they change their mind halfway through. Magical effects of the cards happen as soon as they are drawn, and cards are returned back into the deck after each draw.

So far so good. The pickle comes from the effects of the cards. Let’s go through them.

The bad:

Balance: Potentially pretty big change in how the character is roleplayed, or a permanent debuff.

Euryale, Fool & Idiot: Permanently make your character weaker! What a deal. 

Flames & Rogue: Roleplaying effect - you get an enemy!

Ruin & Talons: Lose all magic items you have! This will certainly make a high-level character quite a bit weaker.

Donjon, Skull, The Void: Basically kills the character - fighting a dread wraith alone is a hairy prospect, unless you are quite high level.

The good:

The Fates: This is potentially a great effect. A single use get-out-of-jail free card.

Moon: 1d4 wishes! Unfortunately, there is a problem. Wish, despite the folklore about what it does in RPG circles, is actually not that great of a spell. It has a certain limited list of effects it can perform explicitly - most notably copying other spells and transporting people. The juiciest effect, however - arbitrary wishing power as if from an arabian genie - has a trick to it. It has to go through the GM. This means that it can only do things GM explicitly allows you to do, unlike normal spells that have their effect spelled out. This makes the desirability of a wish change drastically depending on which GM you have.

The Mediocre:

Comet: Decent XP bonus. However...here is the thing. What is the expected outcome of continuing to play DnD? Your character will likely grow in power, specifically in XP. All this does is make you go through that process faster: it is certainly a benefit on purely mechanical terms, but at the end of the day this changes your weight class instead of changing where you stand within that class. Depending on the philosophy game master uses to design their campaign - we will talk about this in the future - this might actually not give you much benefit at all.

Furthermore: this is just a single level. It won’t change the weather for you.

Sun: You gain a magic item! In the Sun case, you also get a decent chunk of XP, especially at early levels. However…a single magic item won’t change the weather for you, and XP amount isn’t ridiculously high at high levels. 50k XP will bring you from level 1 to level 8, or from level 8 to level 10. This is just a way to skip the low levels, not a way to actually go much beyond that.

Jester: XP reward….of 10k XP. This is enough to bring you from level 1 to level 4, or from level 4 to...level 5. At very early levels this may seem decent: but at those levels, anything seems decent.

Vizier: A decent divination effect, though not amazing.

The Absolute Meh:

Key: Major magic weapon! This is equivalent to maybe 50 thousand gold, if that. Magic weapons in DnD are, in my personal opinion, highly overpriced for the benefit they actually provide.

Gem: Mediocre gold reward.

Knight: a level 4 fighter. This is, quite possibly, the worst reward on the list - at least gold can be used to buy something useful, while a fighter is just bad at everything¹ .

Star: Minor stat boost. 

Throne: Gain... a castle and a bonus to diplomacy. If you have ever played in an even medium level DnD game, you will know that owning a castle is really not that impressive. In fact, owning property is well known to be a so-called wealth sink: something that allows the GM to give a lot of wealth to the players without simultaneously increasing their power by a huge amount.

Here is the thing: in the real world, being able to delegate tasks to, for example, 100 people, is an amazing benefit that can boost your personal political power by a lot. But in DnD, this is not the case: there is no practical amount of level 1 NPCs that will make you a match for a level 10 threat. Main source of power is personal power, mostly magical in nature, and magic items. This means that a castle that costs 1 000 000 gold is actually worth maybe a hundredth of that to a player character. In comparison, a properly-picked magic item collection can cost 30 000 on paper, but be worth arbitrarily more because it patches up a huge weakness that a player character has.

This, in turn, means that GM can pad out treasure they give out with property or other things that can’t be converted into actual power without making it harder for themselves to design future challenges for the players. And this means this card isn’t that great.

So what do we have? 11 effects either kill, cripple or otherwise hinder you. Half of those are bad enough I would scrap the character on the spot. Two effects that are actually decent for an artifact. Four effects that are beneficial, but won’t turn any eyes. And the rest is things I’d walk past without stopping. So you have 1 in 11 odds of a decent effect (below 10%), and 25% odds of needing to scrap the character. Another 25% that you will permanently cripple them in ways you can’t recover from, and the rest are things you can gain easily, would gain by default, or that aren’t worth anything.

As a character, why would you draw from this deck? This is a strictly negative-sum proposition for you, unless you are in a sufficient pickle that your actual best bet for immediate survival is hoping you will pull out those 2 actually good cards, because you are otherwise completely out of options.

As a player, likewise, what is the appeal here? It is negative-sum on power fantasy grounds, does not carry significant story connotations, and might completely wreck your beloved character. The only appeal I can see is on grounds of wanting to see something funny and random happen: but even then, it is not amazing.

But we aren’t here to talk about the character. We are here to talk about how this deck is supposedly “campaign-wrecking”. Let’s go through the cards again: what effects here can have a significant effect on a campaign?

Well, obviously, the first effect is that one of the player characters dies or worse. This is very easy to recover from: player will get a new character, and on you go with the game. If characters dying was “game breaking”, then every single combat in DnD would be “game breaking” because every combat carries some likelihood of death.

Second effect is that player might pull out that 50k xp card in a low-level campaign, and become stronger than anything around them. While true... it is 1 in 22 chance. Furthermore, level 8 is hardly omnipotent: they will be very threatening, yes, but it isn’t even enough to start throwing the truly campaign-breaking spells around as a wizard. With some clever planning, you can even keep challenging them in regular combat encounters. Furthermore, if it is an actual threat to the campaign, that probably means they will not increase past 8th level because they will never get enough XP from the enemies to do so!

What else do we have? A fortress might be a problem, but not a major one: it’s just a house. A house that can’t move around, even. Scarcely any campaign will be broken by this. Next are magic items, but their entire statistics are completely under GM control.

The last two effects are the actually good ones from the deck: a get-out-of-jail free card and some wishes. But as I said before: the nature of wishes is such that GM has an unavoidable guiding hand in their execution! This is not some spell that says “all your enemies fall dead on the spot, no save”, where GM would have to go against the literal reading of the spell text to intervene. Wish itself says GM is free to intervene in the interpretation!

If your players get a wish, and you have some kind of plot prepared that you do not want bypassed, then in my opinion your job as a GM is to immediately explain this to your players. Come out and say that you have not prepared for this, in as many words, and you were really looking forward to showing them all this plot (there is no need to go into details), so it’d be great if the players would avoid making a wish that would be aimed at bypassing it directly. From a consistency standpoint, this can be fluffed as their characters not wanting to risk “evil genie“ effects from the wish: this is not a metagaming problem, as adverse effects are mentioned in the spell itself, and this possibility would be known to the characters. If you were really looking forward to all that plot you have written, mention that, and maybe how much work you have spent on it.

If your players hear you out, understand the problem, and decide to go for it anyways then do not stop them. Your players are, collectively, making a decision about their fun by exercising active control over the story: they prefer for the wish effect to happen more than they prefer to hear whatever it is you had prepared. Strangle your pride in the crib: your players are adults and can make their own decisions. If this is what they want to happen, then this is what they want to happen. Yes, even if you were really looking forward to all that plot. There is no realistic outcome here where you will get to show it. You will either let the players skip it, or you will blatantly override their control over the story. If you do the latter, players will not forget this, and they will sour your enjoyment of actually showing them the plot you had prepared. You either convince them to, of their own volition, choose not to use the wish in this manner, or you have to let it happen.

And this is why you have to tell your concerns to the players immediately, before they start thinking what to do with the wish and certainly before even a single one of them opens their mouth and says “I wonder if we should...”. If you do not, you will come off as attempting exactly the kind of manipulation I described above: of trying to override their control over the story, for much the same effects. Best to mention this as soon as the deck appears, in fact, or better yet - in session zero by discussing the types of fun everyone is into.

This is all to say: wish is not “campaign breaking” unless you make it so by ignoring your players. If your players, despite you mentioning all the great writing you did, decide to “break” your campaign, then they have not broken it: they have simply chosen an alternative exit. At the end of the day, fun for you and your players is the only thing that matters, and so any outcome that leads to fun can not be described as broken. And I guarantee you: the experience of “breaking” the “plot” of a campaign in half will be incredibly memorable for the players, much more so than any traditional fantasy based on all the usual culprits you had written up. Basically no media presents stories where heroes simply Win through an exploit halfway through the story -  this experience is almost entirely unique to PNP RPGs. Players will remember this as their personal achievement, not a predictable outcome of tropes and story beats.

This applies in much the same way to the get-out-of-jail free card: effects of the card are highly variable and up to the consensus of the GM and the players. 

To conclude our analysis: 

• Vast majority of the effects from the deck have little to no effect on any reasonable campaign, or effects that are comparable to normal progression of events: death, increase in levels, and monetary fortune.

• Some have an effect, but it is minor and easily avoidable.

• Two cards have, potentially, fairly strong effects. However, if the players elect to use the deck for them, and succeed in drawing them, then they are also likely to remember the resulting campaign for ages.

• Overall balance of cost and benefit will make the vast majority of the players and characters elect to not use the deck at all.

Hardly “campaign-breaking”, now is it.

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1. At least, in editions of DnD I have played. Because of the total lack of in-class magic options, Fighter is considered to be a very weak class. They are tolerable at low levels (1-5) but scale terribly at higher levels, and become completely useless. I believe this effect is lesser in 5th edition due to lower magic level overall, but it is still present.