Today I’m taking a digression into the land of roleplaying games (RPGs). You don’t necessarily have to be a fan; I think that the moral, which is that too much arbitrariness can be a Bad Thing, transcends game genre.

For a long time the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide has given the rules for a powerful artifact, the Deck of Many Things. The way it works is this: if you want to draw from the deck, you have to commit to a certain number of draws; you draw that many cards, receive that many effects (depending on the cards you draw), and then the deck vanishes, to be found by some other hapless fool.

The cards are about half good and half bad. One problem is that the bad effects, in general, outweigh the good ones. Consider this sample (translated from D&D terms into rough modern equivalents) and tell me whether you would roll on this table:

1. You win $250,000.
2. You gain the services of a bodyguard, who will serve you (for free) for your life.
3. A demon appears and starts attacking you. If anyone tries to help you, another demon appears and attacks them.
4. One of your best friends develops hatred toward you, keeping it secret until the time is right for the most devastating betrayal.

The benefits just don’t stack up to the risks. The benefits are nice, but the bad cards are devastating; any one could easily spell your death. One relatively harmless one “just” takes away all of your property and possessions, which is especially harmful for a D&D character, who tend to live and die by their stuff.

But there’s more. In most RPGs, the Game Master (GM) tries to have an idea of where the story is going. S/he takes into account the players’ interests and the characters’ abilities, and creates appropriate challenges. But with the Deck of Many Things, the GM has no idea what’s going to happen. The party might suddenly have an unexpected, powerful magic weapon, or might suddenly find itself lacking a key party member and suddenly more interested in rescuing that person than on whatever else might have been planned for that session.

Thus, there are plenty of funny and humorously tragic stories that involve the Deck. GMs are seduced by the sheer variety of nifty effects; players and characters are seduced by the opportunity for a quick gain. However, nobody starts an interesting story “Two sessions after we found the Deck…” because if someone starts drawing, it’s going to take over the game.

Next time I’ll tie this back into board games.

Back in high school—this is many years ago—I did a selection of standard geeky activities: Science Olympiad, Science Bowl, Academic Bowl, and so on. The best part of these activities was traveling to a competition with the team. These were usually held at a nearby college. In the downtime in between rounds, we’d play cards. These were people who I didn’t often get to play cards with, and the games were a lot of fun, so these sessions are a vivid memory for me. As far as I can remember, the games we played included: BS, Egyptian Rat-Screw, Hearts, President/Asshole, Euchre, Crazy Eights, Spoons (played with watches). I’ve heard stories of other, similar groups playing these games (and watched some of them myself) so I know this wasn’t just us. Anyway, while reminiscing, I was thinking about what makes a game suitable for this kind of play…

• Little concentration required. The participants are excited 15-year-olds, and distractions are all around. Everybody wants to play, so it should fit the lowest common denominator.

• Light. The game can’t require a serious commitment of time, because you might get called to another round, or you might just get distracted.

• Played with an ordinary deck of cards, because that’s what you happen to have around.

• Variable in number of players. This rule is flexible, because Euchre doesn’t work with any number other than 4, but otherwise, the games can accommodate as many people as want to play. ERS, President, and Spoons are particularly good in this regard, because people can come and go from those games pretty much at will.

• Games that get rowdy or require reflexes (ERS, Spoons) are probably better played in this atmosphere than any other.

• Any particular skill requirement is strictly optional. Hearts and Euchre both require some skill and thought, but BS and Crazy Eights don’t.

As a final note, yeah, I was on the Chess Club too, and we traveled a lot. We played Chess instead of cards, of course. Even though the materials were different, the spirit of the games was the same. We played a lot of blitz (Chess with 5 minutes per side) and Bughouse, a wild four-player variant. Compared to ordinary chess, these games can be played without much investment of time or concentration, and everybody gets to play as the opponents shuffle around from game to game.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Gother Than Thou the other day. No, I didn’t get to play it. The owner, and everyone around who had played it, assured me that it really wasn’t very good at all, but that I should definitely look through the deck. True enough, the mechanics were minimal and uninteresting, but the cards were hysterical. Eyeliner gains you Gothliness (gain enough of it to win the game), but too much loses it instead. Most cards grant Gothliness at the cost of money (Big Tin Ankh, Boots!!!, Wardrobe Sale), while a Visit From Mom does just the opposite, fattening your wallet at the cost of the precious darkness in your soul. A Disturbing German Accent is worth Gothliness free of charge, while a Disturbing Southern Accent penalizes it. Genital Piercings are good too, but get too many and you’ll fall over. No, I’m not making that up.

There are other games that fit this mold, although Gother Than Thou is probably the most extreme. To the best of my knowledge, Chez Geek started the trend. Players took the roles of early-twenties roommates (not much of a stretch), each striving to attain, through possessions and activities, enough Slack to outweigh the drudgery of the mortal coil plus the added insult of employment. The game lacked depth, but the cards (illustrated by John Kovalic) oozed humor through their nature, interaction, illustrations, and flavor quotes. Having the Übergeek in your room cost you Slack, but you could kick him out with the power of the Busy Signal. There was no particular strategy to this—certainly he was not enough of a threat to waste space in your hand on a Busy Signal—but when you happened to draw one at the right time, it was certainly funny. Having a Live In S.O  around not only grants Slack in itself, but improves the benefit you get from Backrub cards and makes it so you always get the same, nice amount of Slack from the otherwise-chaotic Nookie cards. Chez Geek spawned a number of sequels and variants (Chez Goth, Chez Grunt, Chez Greek…). None added anything great rules-wise; the fun was in cards themselves and the lampooning of the people and lifestyles they described.

Getting close to the serious-game end of the spectrum, players in Munchkin (also wonderfully illustrated by Kovalic) take the role of characters in a tabletop RPG. The cards include parodies of D&D and stock-fantasy monsters and items, as well as the strategies players use to game the system (“Convenient Addition Error,” “Bribe the GM With Food,” etc.) Unlike the other games I’ve mentioned, Munchkin is deep enough to be interesting to play. Unfortunately, it tends to be damned unfair; the rich get richer all the time, and an unlucky monster card can set you right back to the beginning of the game, especially if your fellow players are actively working against you as well. This is all very much in the spirit of the game, which is good, because the game is deliberately evoking and lampooning the cutthroat, dubiously-ethical feel of lousy D&D games. No other game could get away with that set of rules. It’s not a game to play every day, but it does its job well, and if the game happens to proceed briskly, playing it can be almost as fun as looking at the cards.

Because I like giving things titles, I’ll give the title of a “Just Read the Cards” game to any game whose primary payoff is in looking at the materials, rather than playing the game. I don’t mean to sound derogatory, because it can be a big payoff and Chez Geek, in particular, is worth the price of admission.