Deck of many things is an Artefact an object of untold power, one of two exeptions to Anti-Magic Field, other being the Will of Gods. Moon and Void are horrible, but any other card can be dealt with. Balance is bad, but only because interpretation of how Alignment works. For me alignment is a personality, your goals should not change, a truly loyal person remains loyal. A Lawful Good Paladin who seeks justice will continue to seek justice, but they may be more ruthless then they used to. A Lawful Evil knight can be someone who will serve their master as long as their intentions are pure, like slaughtering people to stop the spread of disease or killing all life to end all suffering, but if they commit murder simply because they enjoy peoples suffering, then the knight would backstab their master.

Find a Dungeon #19 and look at The House of Cards for a cool dungeon using the cards of the DoMT.

What's the dated and offensive term? Since it was censored, my brain needs to know what it is. I can't find anything and I can't think of one that fits that starts with M. Ah, found it. Old term used for people with down syndrome. A bit of a barbaric term.

Oh man that's too good! xD

Wait, the deck can dissapear like that?

It's magic. You announce how many are drawn, and that is a magical obligation that forces you to "draw" that many cards (take that many effects). Other cards can cancel it or add to it. It's more odd to me that you can't stop drawing.

the deck of many things is awful and shouldn't be included in modern games, in a meaningless dungeon crawl with expendable characters the deck is irrelevant

@@XerrolAvengerII *-999 social credit* sorry but ur opinion is irrevelant

Yeah I guess I forgot to clarify that. Thanks!

Yep spot on. I still remember my first draw as a noob back in middle school, gained INT for my MU 1st draw, and my 2 hireling ftr guards turned on me on the 2nd pull. That was a shocker and kept me from getting TOO deep into the Deck! Good times

@@crunchbar7995 Nah, milestones is better than tracking xp.

@Crunch Bar that’s a bit harsh

@Crunch Bar "He's out of line... But he's right!"

Very smart advice!

I have been playing since 1981 and have also seen it in every edition. It’s risk/reward structure do not fit well into a 5e play style and much like Global Thermal Nuclear War, the only way to win is not to play. I find this especially true with less experienced DMs.

Yes, knowing the cards is super important or it can really throw off any balancing or directing you’ve done. Balancing. Who even does that? You’d need to know the characters and player styles super well to even start trying to balance combat.

The best advice I can give is to never ever allow this to be rolled randomly. If you want this in your campaign, make it the focal point of the campaign.

Yeah I used it in my campaign. I planned for it and it ended up working great. Also I limited the characters to a single card each.

Yep it's kind of a minefield haha

I think people get too attached to characters. So when something legitimately threatens the character that isn't the BBEG people sometimes get pissy. Its an adventurer sometimes you die. i do think if your DM is killing the party often, thats an issue.

@@MasterGhostf I'm on a two-year win streak of having my characters survive all their campaigns and one-shots. I want to keep it that way.

@Rogue Barbarian is it really a win streak though. I want to know my character can make a bad choice, roll unlucky, stand and fight and may not live to see the morrow. Or even sacrifice himself for an innocent he just met without the table trying to stop it.

@@MasterGhostf I mean, yeah. I get attached and see my characters and their party members as my babies. I love them.

Great take! :)

I've been working on something like this, because I went down a rabbit hole and made a custom Tarot for my world with relevant symbolism, and using that as a DoMT seemed like a reasonable followup project...

So many complaints about D&D items and mechanics can be solved by being more creative

Wow what happened for him to turn on the party and how did he gain power and a whole faction to do his evil bidding?

So wasn't he right about his destiny then? Why would that cause him to turn evil?

@@pinkliongaming8769 He wasn't evil. He was angry. You act like villains can't be layered.

I love that! haha

Wow, that's a crazy villain arc!

Yup

Thanks!

It's exactly what I'm playing right now. We were at a climax of the campaign (we were all level 15), the DoMT was a big part of that, my character drew the knight card and made him draw more cards. The knight leveled up to level 9 because of the Sun (he also has a strength of 24 now because he drew 2 Star cards), and now I'm playing such character on a quest to retrieve the soul of another PC who drew the Void while my main character is recovering from some long term injuries. Fun times. PS: we immediatly knew where the soul of our friend went thanks to another PC that drew the Vizier card. It's been pretty wild.

Dude I'm doing that right now except my character has self worth/abandonment issues due to the fact that the original cardholder was such a high level they didn't want them. They straight up told my character to sit on a park bench for a bit and then left. It's been pretty fun and interesting to RP as this kind of character.

Haha that might be the simplest use of the Deck of Many Things that I've ever heard!

That’s awesome, well earned Xp!

Haha oh man, yeah if a campaign can survive half the deck basically spilling out, it can survive anything.

The thing to remember with the deck is a DCC canard: *anything* is *possible* if the players want it enough. Donjon’d and unhappy with that? Welp... recovering that character is now your next set of adventures.

My party drew 10 in a flurry of trying to fix after the Half-Orc Barbarian became a Kobold (I edited some of the cards). I definitely would use the deck again, but player knowledge of it is such a double-edged sword.

@@russellee5216 That's why I think it's good to always customize the cards in the deck. The players might correctly guess the item, but if the cards are always different, the surprise and chaos of the item remains.

They drew the factorial of the factorial of the factorial of 9? Just say the number, I dont wanna do maths

Good point!

Dimensional Anchor.

I think the idea is, if you kill the devil, that ends the magic. It may return to life in the Nine Hells, but the magical enmity is broken. At least that's how I interpret it.

@@michaelcohen8259 I think that's a fair interpretation. I suppose it's up to the DM.

I think The Throne has improved with 5e, because it effectively gives the group free sessions

That's a fun twist. Leaning into the tarot theme is a great idea

How does that work, exactly? The first person to find the card activates it? Wouldn't that make individual cards super powerful since you can repeatedly use them since it's the only option and if the card is bad and you stumble upon it does it automatically screw you? The Deck of Many Things working is based on it being a deck, so I'm interested to know if you have accounted for this.

@@backonlazer791 it's something I made up for our campaign so it can work however you like haha. I wanted to have the cards be kind of like a consumable item, no matter how you found it once you reveal it you activate it (unless it's already activated, then it's just a card, but detect magic would tell you if it was active or not) The way I have it working in my game is that the triumvirate of hags has the deck of many things. When they need a particularly important task accomplished by one of their hunters they allow the hunter to take a card as payment. This of course may be good or bad (the hags care not which) and activates once the owner "turns it over" or looks at what card it is. This can be done as soon as the card is drawn, or in the case of a bounty hunter NPC kept a mystery until an opportune moment (this guy was planning on saving the card he got until he was on deaths door to use as a hail mary, or possibly never looking at it...) Once the card is looked at and the power activates though, it becomes nothing more than a mundane card. One of the PCs stole the card from this dude and looked at it, promptly revealing the RUIN card haha. So it goes

@@bryansmith844 Hmm, interesting take. So if they're consumable will they reappear in the world after being used? Can there there be multiple copies of the same card?

@@backonlazer791 I don’t think I would have multiples floating around because I still like the idea that this is a super rare/powerful/weird item and after the magic effect is consumed, maybe it has to be shuffled back into the deck to become active again

Bob is focusing on in game dynamics too much. Many of these cards affect the DM, the group balance, or throw off the track of the campaign and derail anything the players are enjoying.

I think your campaign relied heavily on certain growth strategies to keep you engaged. I think it would be appropriate to just strip all your current cash or something like that - a motivator to go treasure hunting rather than something to destroy your investment in the game. Rules As Written presumes you were playing the game as written. Building a personal investment portfolio isn’t what you expect people to play!

Ahhh that certainly changes things!

Ahh, I'm not sure either. I took it at face value

​@@BobWorldBuilder In older editions the saves were not tied to Ability Scores, but rather a class-dependent set of 6 saves with somewhat confusingly specific names.

Yep, they can be fun and engaging, but only in certain types of campaigns with certain groups. It requires buy-in from everyone at the table. I imagine a lot of people's reservations have to do with how they have no agency in deciding whether or not another player does something that could completely derail/alter a campaign.

Exactly

Thank you very much! :)

That part about the knight is awesome! xD

Action economy is the name of the game haha

Great point about the diamonds!

Only if they're accompanied by the deck's guardian, a lazy yet adorable spirit who fell asleep somewhere and picked up the local dialect. (I wish I had players who would let me do that)

Awww - that sounds awesome! Sorry your players didn’t take it up! What were some of the cards?

That's when you have it start flipping cards off the top of itself on its own.

That sounds fun! Definitely worth trying to bring back into your game--just assuring your players that it's not nearly as risky for them as *that other deck*

@@Stray7 Jumanji style

Glad it went well!

Awesome!

@@BobWorldBuilder Yeah it was awesome. He should have died like 10 times but luck prevailed

Yeah preparation is key, and that's a fun idea for how to implement the results of the cards!

Thanks very much! Yeah I think it's all a matter of taste--like just about everything in D&D haha

... but, the GM sets the scene & the players write the story; no?

Haha very nice

That's awesome! Thanks for sharing! :)

Listening in, but are games now very fixed? In my games, old school based, the DM balanced out the effects to allow the game to be playable. Someone dead, roll a up a new character, give him a few extra levels, off to the races again.

Bingo!

Losing all magic items was ruinous in older editions. There was a 3.5 Living Greyhawk mod that caused characters to be enslaved and lose ALMOST everything. So many characters ended up ruined that they had to change the poverty rules to allow characters a chance in hell of recovering from the losses... and you'd still end up behind your level curve due to the loss. A LOT of the cards disrupt the current adventure/flow, or kill a character/remove RP opportunities or add complexity, so it's more brutal than it seems from this "BUT MUH FIFTH EDITION AND MILESTONES AND TOO MUCH MONEYS!" video makes it out to be.

@@hariman7727 I'm guessing you had a difficult experience with this in the past, which is why it seems to personal. I'm sorry you had to go through that. However, a good DM will give characters ways to work themselves back up. A good party will support them in that and a good player will use this as a formative arc for their character. Yes, no doubt they'll be frustrated at first - that's understandable. Adverse situations develop a character a lot more than the easy ones though - the deck gives some options for that. If you aren't willing to take those risks then perhaps don't draw from the deck. The impression of the video is wildly inaccurate, Bob compares 5e because it's the most common version. It's also a very childish way to put a grievance across, are you sure you're old enough to have played 3.5e?

@@davidjennings2179 you know you whipsaw between kindly compassionate and utterly rude backhanded insults, you do realize that? In the living grayhawk campaign, which was dungeons & dragons 3.5, there was a mod called "Barbarous Coast", if I remember correctly, which had a final battle where the party was teleported into a citywide invasion to attempt to stop at least part of the invasion. If you lost that battle, you were enslaved and you lost everything, and you were given 200 gold to start the rest of your adventuring career over. Because of the specific ruling at the time of that mod's release, and because living grayhawk had to follow those specific rpga rules because it was official campaign mods that were played nationally, for the first couple months at minimum players could not claim having utter poverty because they had a couple hundred gold and were not allowed to drop that gold to meet the poverty requirements. So many characters became unplayable because a fighter at the levels for that mod would lose all of their equipment, and wizards would lose their spellbook, among other things. It is about the fourth worst written mod in the entirety of living greyhawk that I played, and the only reason I have the ability to say fourth worst written is because I played in the sheldomar valley/Keoland, which were notorious because one of the mod writers in the area literally could not read the rule book to make a decent encounter. So there was no room for the DMs to adapt to that or allow leeway so the character could be recoverable. As for the deck of many things, I don't like it because I find the chaos of it off-putting. I don't want to lose a character because of a magic item that is designed to tempt players on a meta scale, that also affects the player Dynamics and DM so directly. Yeah, other people can have fun with it, but I hope I never see it again. Also you don't realize how much of a jerk you're being, because I'm 40, and the only reason I'm being nasty here is KZfaq is where I tend to let my brakes off a little. So please think about insulting a person and comments questioning someone's age, because they only make you appear... Well, read your comment into a mirror and ask how you'd feel if someone slaps you in the face with an insult, then tell me what word you'd use. Tl:dr: yes, I've had a set of bad experiences with deck of many things and other random bullshit that really hurt characters of mine. Also, read your comment into a mirror to yourself and consider how you sound, because your most recent comment was pretty rude.

@@hariman7727 Compassion doesn't mean we don't call people out when they're out of order. Yes you've clearly had a difficult experience and I'm sorry you had to go through that. However, it doesn't give you a free pass not to be called out when you lash out at others. You accept that you're being nasty on KZfaq, perhaps take your own advice and consider how your comment would affect Bob - he puts effort into these videos, they're his livelihood.

Nice, yeah it sounds like your group's style fits well with the original design of the deck

Now that's a bold move! haha

Glad you enjoyed this video. It was fun to compare the past and present versions of this item, and I have a similar video coming up for one of the core classes! I'm the worst at picking favorites, but the first that comes to mind for either case would have to be Moon. Those wishes could be chaotic, but that's what I think the deck is for :)

@@BobWorldBuilder Love to see Moon in effect as well! My Favourite is when someone only wants to draw one card but picks the idiot! So Harsh and tense! And it's happened to me before It's so funny. Looking forward to the class breakdown history lesson too! Your content is always improving and I love watching the channel grow!

My Shadow-monk half-orc would embrace the Death card. Hell yeah.

That's actually a perfect combo haha

I hadn’t considered this - the minor death isn’t necessarily a major obstacle if you just gained levels and were given a Staff of the Magi or something to overcome it.

Glad to hear it!

Yep the more I read of Gygax's work, the more it seems like he would have been a pretty harsh DM lol

If you had a DM that was going against you then that was just a bad DM. Same thing can happen today in 5e. Edition does not makes a difference. The difference was the players were not superheroes at lower levels. They were not even superheroes at higher levels. The game was never about creating superheroes, it was about surviving. You had to learn to run when were wandering through the forest and stumbled on the ancient green dragon at level 3. The other important thing you learned was avoiding the fights all together if you could. Because it was more about exploring the world and finding the weird things in it than fighting. It was about finding the loot, because that was so valuable, that was how you leveled up. Not killing monsters. That is my big issue with milestone xp. There is no insistence to adventure. Everyone just plods along with the story. Every few sessions the GM hands out levels and even if your character missed a session you get a level. Because everyone has to be equal.

@@burgsrus I agree completely on the shift in mentality. I myself am running a 3.5e campaign in a custom setting with a metric buttload of homebrew. The characters defeated a werewolf lord, 4 wargs, and a random owlbear drawn by the noise, at level 3 (6 player party) so yeah, the challenging encounters they were supposed to ‘run from’ turned into ‘one level-up per session’

Yeah that's wild! If I used XP instead of milestone, I'd probably just divide the XP from Sun among the whole party or something

I like this. Gives a sense of nobility and purpose, like the first and third Indiana Jones movie. Yes you are happy go lucky but you are a good guy.

That’s amazing! I’m a permaDM, but this is a cool NPC idea as well.

There are basically two rooms in my apt. This is the other one lol--but thank you very much! We've filled it with D&D stuff to make it nice

My thoughts exactly. I was under the impression that alignment was used primarily for roleplay in 5e, like an easy box to generalize your character motivations. Changing alignment changes the whole character! They'd be better of having died so you could at least make a new character that fits the way you want to play.

@@boksman Yeah, exactly.

That would be a great reward!

Agreed, but I would then scale the death to be equal to players.

Sorry for your loss

You bring up a good point that just applying the affect to the whole party might help for some cards--as long as everyone agreed to use the deck I guess

Great point!

With the right group, it sounds like fun! :)

Hahah well said

Thank you! :)

I agree that it was/is more risky in old school games, and those stories were passed down, probably with embellishment too. Then today people are so afraid to use it that they don't know how it won't necessarily cause the major harm they've been "warned" about. I do think it can end a PC though!

Those are VERY lucky pulls!

@@BobWorldBuilder extremely!

Okay that's hilarious.

Yeah the wealth thing can vary a lot based on setting. For the knight card "You control this character." definitely refers to the player who pulled the card. It is essentially a henchman/sidekick, but if the party is only level 1-5, this knight is just a very powerful addition to the PC who gained it. Past those levels, it becomes less significant

@@BobWorldBuilder Fair points. I hadn't considered the lower level impact, based on my one time use it was higher level so I was skewed in my thinking. Also fair, I'd grant control in combat because you are right. I'd talk it over with the player to see what they wanted, but I'd be inclined to run them as an NPC outside of combat that follows the PC to the ends of earth. Or planes.

Glad to hear it! :)

Excellent points! I am definitely not well versed in the actual gameplay mechanics of these older editions!

As a few others have said, I think preparation is key, and keeping the deck in possession of an NPC helps a lot

You have excellent ears lol, I recorded this audio on an updated version of the same program I always use, and it seems to have some new automatic settings I didn't know about. Basically it had a super intense background noise cancelation that overcorrected in a couple spots. Overall I thought it still sounded okay, but it might also be that this was recorded in a different room than usual

Sounds about right lol

Maybe have a plot hook to find out what happened to last ower who drew them cards

That totally works too!

Glad to hear it!

I love that idea!

Or hey, make it even more spicy. You pull the one that summons an avatar of death but instead it summons an avatar of undeath.

Do you mean that the devil would give you powers? Why would it do so if its intention is to kill you?

That's a graet point!

And my players already have NPCS they run in combat, so if someone dies they have characters they can pick up and keep moving with.

I do highly recommend choosing a few cards and preparing potential results for them! But give it a shot! :)

@@BobWorldBuilder will do!

bruh

Thanks for watching and commenting! :)

@@BobWorldBuilder You're welcome. ❤️👍