The deck. Again.

I have had The Deck Of Many Things show up in a variety of my gaming campaigns over the years.  For those not familiar, The Deck is a powerful artifact with absurd abilities.  You draw a card, and then based on which card you draw, crazy stuff happens.  You could be instantly killed, get a wish, be granted treasure, have monster spawn to murder you, among other things.  Usually The Deck showing up ended with some characters destroyed and the campaign totally derailed.

People do love their random draws though!

This time it worked out fine.  We drew one card, got a huge pile of treasure, and then The Deck disappeared.  A good result, considering the total range of options.  Having a pile of money meant that our characters can now pursue some of their harder to reach goals like buying land or expensive spell components.

But the process of getting the deck was not well written.  We acquired it by clearing out Gardmore Abbey, a 4th edition adventure.  Scattered throughout the abbey were the 22 cards in The Deck, but until they were brought together they were much weaker and had their own separate abilities.  The way the cards worked is that when a combat begins, a single card chosen randomly from all cards present manifests.  It puts a thing on the ground in a random place, and anyone can stand on the thing and do something cool.  It works for *anyone* though, so having a card doesn't help you, because the enemies can use it themselves if they feel like it.

The NPCs all treat the cards as if they are powerful and exciting things.  My group pretty much laughed at them, because a random card spawning in a random place that benefits the enemies as much as us.... how is that a good thing?  Certainly once you have a single card getting lots more of them isn't any use, that actually makes them worse because you have no idea what will happen.

The trouble was that the cards actually were super powerful for the enemies.  They got to use the abilities without taking actions, and their cards always popped up and overwrote ours.  As soon as my group grabbed a card though, it instantly became crap and lost all of its good abilities.

I can totally understand writing in a singular enemy that has a powerful item that works for them but not for others.  That can be a fine thing once in a while.  But writing in an endless stream of enemies with powerful, dangerous items that promply and without any in game explanation nerf themselves once the players touch them is a wretched mechanic.  It just makes us bitter and destroys immersion.  How are we supposed to believe in the world when the writers of the module clearly decided that if the players had access to all this stuff it would be overpowered, so lets just write in 'this stuff doesn't work for the players' on everything?

The whole thing about finding the scattered cards is fine.  The card abilities are fine too.  They aren't particularly good, but they are neat and bizarre and chaotic and thematic, which is okay overall.  The problem is that the writers felt desperate to have the enemies use them, but then felt equally desperate to prevent the players doing the same.  If they had just accepted that the cards would do random, not particularly powerful stuff for everyone that would have been fine.  The bait and switch isn't fun though, especially when it happens over and over and over.

It is unfortunate because some of the stuff in Gardmore Abbey is actually a lot of fun.  Overall I quite enjoyed the module.  I liked exploring the grounds, I liked the variety of encounters and situations, and the history was interesting.  It was a good place to play.  The way various encounters linked together was amusing too, even when we did them in the wrong order and made things extra hard for ourselves. 

However, it had two major problems.  First, the cards as described above.  They were meant to tie the whole place together, and instead they became a running joke.  Second, there were way too many random and pointless fights.  There were a lot of monsters that had no narrative purpose or sense to them, and were just there to pad the experience totals.  Not interesting, that.

The finale to Gardmore convinced me that I need to retire my character.  Being a crossbow specialist is just unfair.  When the other single target dps characters can stand beside an enemy and swing they are worse then me, but not *that* much worse.  But I can do full damage to anyone within 120 feet of me, and they are melee, so they spend much of their time unable to do anything or taking weak actions to try to get into range.  It isn't right that I do as much damage as the other two combined, so crossbow man Wilbur needs to go.... and The Deck provides as good a reason to change things up as any.