Here are four anecdotes that happened at our table during the last ten years of First Edition AD&D. I have written complete posts about some of these game sessions, but today I will only give short summaries. While you read this, it is important to keep in mind that the players involved are the very same players, with often the same characters.
It’s a wild ride.
The Deck of Nary a Thing (2024)
When we were fourteen years old, we would literally spend entire sessions drawing from the dreaded Deck of Many Things and dealing with the chaos of that “game within the game.”
Fast-forward forty years. The party is relaxing at the local inn, and out of the blue I give them a Deck of Many Things, for old times’ sake. But my friends are in their fifties now; they have wives, kids and fixed rate mortgages, and none of them will draw a single card from the infamous Deck. Not one.
They just sit there with their arms crossed, all five of them: that image is burned into my brain.
I purchased this beautiful deck of cards for nothing.
Three Against Fifty (2018)
Two magic-users and a cleric are stranded in a sub-level without the rest of the party, and that sub-level happens to be the lair of an evil cult. The cultists are aware of the arrival of the PCs, and they write a letter to the stranded trio. Basically, the letter says: “The corridor to the left will lead you to a Drow outpost. The corridor to the right takes you directly to the lair of two Beholders who happen to be our Lords and Masters. The central corridor leads to our main hall, and there are fifty of us waiting for you. We all have spells at the ready. Come if you want us to put you out of your misery, as we will deliver swift and certain death.”
The players’ reaction? “THOSE DAMN CULTISTS ARE TAUNTING US!!!!!!”
The two magic-users and the cleric march right down that central corridor and throw themselves headfirst into a HUGE melee. Three against fifty. That’s crazy.
Two of those three players are the same guys who won’t draw a single card from the Deck of Many Things just a few years later. That’s also crazy.
Where Do I Sign (2016)
A Devil offered a deal to one power-hungry magic-user: gain two levels of experience immediately, but you’re going to die in just a few years, and become a Lemur; your soul will belong to Hell for all eternity.
The player in question thought about it for a week (in real life), and accepted the offer. His puny level 4 magic-user sold his soul in order to become a fireball-slinging level 6 powerhouse.
That is one of the players who will categorically refuse to draw even one card from the Deck of Many Things, eight years later.
Get Out (2014)
A landslide occurs right next to the remote inn where the party is spending the night, and it reveals the entrance to a dungeon that nobody has seen in perhaps a hundred years or more. The player characters descend into this dungeon, fight one ghoul, grab one potion, and then one of the magic-users sends his familiar (a crow) flying through the whole dungeon until the exit is located — and they all fixate on that. The exit is their one and only goal now, and they skip all the rest.
Thirteen more rooms to explore? Untouched rooms, with treasure intact? Nah.
They just leave.
Mind you, three of those player characters are the same ones who will eventually charge into a mass of fifty cultists.
Go figure.
*
Players are handed way too much information before their characters take literally any action whatsoever. If a supernatural being gives one of the characters a magical deck of cards and says, “Every card you or your friends draw from this deck comes with a permanent effect, sometimes good, sometimes not so good,” that is all the info the players should get. They shouldn’t be allowed to read all twenty-two effects out loud and calculate the odds and discuss the whole thing between themselves beforehand. Their characters have no way of knowing any of that.
You’ve got a deck of magical cards, guys. What do you want to do?
Do you take it out of its box?
Do you look at the first card?
Boom.
Take Gloomhaven, for instance. The granularity is unreal. Every single round is chock-full of options. “If I pick initiative 18 and I do this and use that perk while you pick initiative 21 and move over here and then perform that attack combo, we might succeed.”
Yeah, but in a real frenzied battle against Spitting Drakes deep inside a dark cave, nobody has the time to judiciously plan and execute every single move; you just shriek in fear and hack away blindly and hope you actually hit the monsters and not your friends.
But nobody wants to play that.
It always seems to boil down to “controlled environment.”
How much intel should the players have about any hazardous or dangerous situation? And what degree of prepping and logistics should be allowed in a fantasy world where half of all adventurers are uneducated villagers? Is it good to always “maintain an omniscient view of what is transpiring,” like Rob Kuntz said? Is it even realistic?
The legendary slaying of Kerafyrn the Sleeper was so logistically heavy that no real-life ancient military unit could have pulled it off, not even the mighty Roman legions.
*
My point is that you can and will always assume things about your players, but you’ll be wrong most of the time. Your players are human beings; sometimes they feel lucky, sometimes they exude confidence and have football-sized cojones of solid platinum, and sometimes they are tired, mentally exhausted and hesitant. As a Dungeon Master, you cannot know in advance which players will show up — unless you also happen to be their therapist, which is, I guess, extremely rare.
Strange noises coming from the churchyard? Your level 12 party won’t volunteer to investigate. “It could be dangerous.”
Demogorgon shows up and destroys the town? Your level 3 party is already running towards the Demon Lord, weapons drawn and bellowing battle cries.
Maybe I’m just running the wrong game here. Being prudent, overanalyzing the situation, avoiding potentially dangerous encounters: that sounds like Call of Cthulhu, right? Perhaps that is the game I should run for my friends. Or good old Cyberpunk.
Can we all agree that getting a Deck of Many Things is the D&D equivalent of finding the Necronomicon in Call of Cthulhu? Your character could gain three or four great new spells, yes, but they can also lose permanent POW, lose up to 20 Sanity, and even attract Yog-Sothoth’s attention.
But then again, if I run Cthulhu, the guys will obviously charge into a mass of fifty ghouls and then read the Necronomicon several times and even have parts of that grimoire tattooed on their arms.
That’s the joy of tabletop role-playing games: even if you’ve known most of them since 1987, you never really know which players you’re gonna run your next game for. It is like drawing from a crazy unpredictable deck of cards at the start of every game session.
