Important thing people tend to forget about the Deck of Many things. It's not a deck of cards. Every time you draw a card you randomly determine it's effect from all of the possible effects. Just because you have a card in your hand doesn't mean you can't draw it again. Artifacts aren't subject to your petty "physics" and "logic".
If you opt to believe that Augury can predict the behavior of an artifact (which a a bullet point worthy of it's own debate), then the odds remain against you. There's also the simple question of what is a "good" result and what's a "bad" one. (Skull seems bad, but if you can defeat a Dread Wraith in single combat then it's probably a decent chunk of XP, which is good.) There is only one correct answer to a Deck of Many things. I'm going to freely quote another message board to explain what it is.
Let me explain to you the difference or why your GM is a comic book villain.
They have to monologue.
It works like this. As a PC, you're in it for the loot, the progression, the story, and the conflict. These things are all encompassing. The xp and the loot are the carrots, but the conflict and the villains are the stick. You want to achieve ultimate power for two reasons. The first is that we're all corrupt as hell, and the second is that if you don't, the bad guys burn your house down/destroy the world/win the Pokemon championship or what have you.
GMs have half of that. They have infinite power and loot, and as such it's meaningless. If you've ever had a GM drop a lvl 15 dragon on a group of lvl 2 adventurers, you get this. It isn't plot or conflict; it's just instant death or running away. There's no fun in that. So the GM only has one set of carrots, and those are plot and conflict.
Gremlin, you're talking about hitting a newbie group of PCs with a DoMT. That isn't conflict. That's the lvl 15 dragon. But the thing is, it doesn't matter yet. It's just a riddle. Can they come up with a scheme or wish that's better than yours? If so, cool. If not, boo. But no one's really going to care. It's just a riddle, and the only investment is the character creation time.
Zudz' GM, now, that's a different story. That GM has put time into this. He's got schemes and plots. He's built NPCs you like, hate, and laugh at. He's milking the PCs for all the emotion that he can, like a writer, and that's crack to a GM. His game is progressing. If he drops a horror on them that's too extreme, he ruins his own game. He ruins his master plan, and every GM can tell you how much thought and energy goes into that master plan. He ruins the subplots he thought up in a moment of insomnia, he ruins the character development he's been amused to watch the PCs go through, and he ruins every bit of scheming, manipulation, and cool ideas he's had going on in the background.
Like a comic book villain, he needs the PCs to discover his master plan. Because he's doing this to elicit awe, appreciation, laughter, or what have you. That's the carrot of GMing. And the DoMT is too powerful. If he uses it to anywhere near its full potential, his ongoing plot is shot. His Big Bad and henchmen are lost. He doesn't get to monologue the PCs through the great reveal, and then no one appreciates things.
In short, all his work is ruined for no payoff, and his game disappears like a TV show cancelled too early. And that's why he won't do it. He doesn't have the balls. Because if he wasn't invested in getting that payoff, he wouldn't be running the game.
Now Gremlin, you're talking about bringing a group of PCs together and hitting them with the horror. That's fine. You see, you haven't done any work yet. You'll do it. You'll pull that nightmarish sh*t out of nowhere and Cthulhu it up.
Zudz' GM won't, and that's where the power shifts back to the PCs. If the game is afoot and interesting, he won't shoot you any more quickly than you'll shoot him. And so, as a PC, it is your gift, your moment, nay, your FSM-given duty to f*ck with him. You need to make that bastard pay in agony for all the glorious ruin he wants to rain down upon you and can at any moment....if he abandons all his work up until that moment.
But it has to be bad. Zudz needs to ratchet up the stakes so high, that any retaliation at all is nuclear. If he wishes for waffles and gets face checked with a tennis racket, that's doable. That doesn't burn things. The PCs need to pull the pins out of the grenades, sit on top of a pile of nitro, and start talking mad-bear sh*t. He needs to hold the plot hostage right back.
That's why the Joker explains things to Batman instead of just shooting him. That's why Batman and the PCs always win. Give him hell, Zudz.
Okay, did you suffer through that? It's really quite clever. Here's the answer to a Deck of Many Things. Draw all the cards. A Deck theoretically contains 22 cards. but (as noted previously) physics doesn't apply. So depending on your GM you either say "I will draw 22 cards." or you say "I will draw all of the cards." (Though there's no reason you couldn't draw ten thousand cards, most GMs will balk at this.)
(Hats off to the Gamerswithjobs.com forums for providing me with this fantastic post.)
