Fate in Flux Part 0: A Rather Silly Premise

The premise

Against our better judgement, we allowed Gustav to run another game. I was rather grumpy about Veil of Whispers when he ran it. He’d promised a serious adventure, but it quickly devolved into ridiculousness. This time, however, we were told to expect silliness from the start. And this time, I was on board with it. Perhaps a bit too much.

We rolled up characters completely randomly. The DM had prepared a 23-page document with random tables. Not just for race, class, and background—there were tables for names, build, height, attractiveness, horns, skin color, personality, attitude, goals, flaws, quirks, disabilities, secrets, contacts, superstitions, relationships with the other characters, the party’s pet, and several tables related to something called fate.

Fate was a metacurrency gained by roleplaying well. Good roleplaying by Gustav’s standards meant wreaking havoc and being generally chaotic. At the end of every session, we’d answer some questions about what we’d accomplished during the game, and were awarded fate tokens based on our answers. Similar to how XP is handled in Powered by the Apocalypse games, Dragonbane, and some others. The questions were as follows:

• Did you act true to your character?
• Did acting true to your character put the party in danger?
• Did your flaw/disability put the party in danger?
• Did you progress your personal quest?
• Did you progress the party’s overarching quest?
• Were you on two failed death saving throws?
• Did you unleash randomness, chaos, or something else that might not have been the best thing to do?

You’d get one fate token for answering yes to two questions, two tokens for answering yes to four, and three tokens for five or more. The fate tokens took the form of little duck figurines.

The tokens could be spent on things like rerolling the weather (oh right, the 23 pages of tables I mentioned earlier? Those were just for character creation. The DM had way, way more of them behind the screen), replacing character traits, or getting advantage on a roll. For a few ducks more, you could also get things like potions, cantrips, ability score increases, and random loot.

Why do I mention all of this? Because, being something of an optimizer and with this being a silly, anything-goes adventure, I quickly found a way to break it. With the DM’s consent, of course. But more on that later.

Another fun thing was the randomly rolled “secret mission” every session, or, as I like to call it, Wrong Answer of the Game. There was a hidden thing you could do to earn a duck. Some of the possibilities were the following:

• Greet someone royally
• Flirt
• Speaking in the wrong character voice
• Saying “wouldn’t it be fun if X”, which would then be immediately followed by X happening
• Making a yo mama joke (this one didn’t give you a duck, it made your character take psychic damage.)

I rolled up a white bugbear wizard who was a compulsive eater and an optimistic “moral opportunist”. His name had to start with a G and end with an R-sound, so I named him Gore¹. Last name Verbinski, in my continued efforts to introduce characters and NPCs named after real people into Gustav’s adventures without him noticing. Danny Elfman the elf also appeared in this adventure. Gore was essentially a yeti. He wore purple robes and a bowler hat, and had an hourglass as an arcane focus. His wizardry was all about time magic. I had picked the spells and features that would get me as many rerolls as possible, and flavored it as rewinding time. His personal quest was to find a scandalous letter, and his secret was that he had killed a royalty. This fit pretty well, since he was an outcast noble himself.

Joining Gore on the randomly rolled quest to start a circus were Pilskki Numilainen, an obese and abnormally short human drag queen sorcerer; Yellowspotted “Lee” Leazu, a lizardfolk druid; Pololoz, a half-orc ranger; and Äör, a half-orc monk. We rolled 1d20 for every stat, and Pololoz ended up with a frightfully low intelligence. As a wizard, Gore was lucky to get an 18.

We decided, based on our characters’ randomly rolled relationships, that they had all been part of a mercenary group in another city. They had somehow ended up disgraced and moved/fled to a place called Pinecoast City, where the adventure would begin. Here, they were trying to start a circus. They called themselves Slayer, because I was the only one with a name suggestion and I like Slayer. We also rolled up a starting scenario, and the different districts of the city. We didn’t have time to start playing. All the character creation and random tables took up the entire four-hour session. That’s definitely a new record.

An Army of Ducks

Intending to get the most out of the fate system—or duck system, as we called it—I immediately made it my mission to get as many ducks as possible. This meant I had to become the best, or at least the most chaotic, roleplayer at the table. I acted true to my character and his flaws by being morally flexible, always trying to find food—especially when doing so would cause trouble—and remaining optimistic in the face of danger. I wrote down the list of questions in my notebook. At the start of every scenario, I thought about what I could do to check off as many as possible right then and there. It went so far that I got nervous about the idea of not getting all three ducks every session. But in the end, I did it. I got every single duck. All nine sessions. That’s twenty-seven ducks, plus a few extra that I got from Wrong Answer of the Game.

Why did I want the ducks? Short answer, they were overpowered. I quickly discovered that you could spend two ducks to roll on a table of feats. It was supposed to be for rerolling your starting feat, but that’s not what it said. The way it was written, it would give you another feat instead of replacing the old one. I pointed this out to the DM, who realized his mistake, but stood by what he’d written because he thought it would be funny.

But what I wanted to do with the ducks was something else. There was a treasure table that we could roll on for the steep cost of ten ducks. There were some okay items and some excellent ones. Rolling on it was quite a risk, but I found a loophole: there was a rule saying we could spend one duck to reroll any die. ANY die. This was intended for in-game rolls, but since it said any die, I figured we could also reroll anything we’d rolled on a table. This made it significantly cheaper to reroll things like treasure and character traits—if you weren’t happy with the result, you could simply reroll for a single duck. But my eyes were on the treasure table, specifically on one item:

The Deck of Many Things.

Known as one of the most chaotic items in D&D, the deck of cards has a bunch of random effects ranging from permanently crippling your character to granting several wish spells. It was a perfect engine of chaos for the zaniest adventure we’d ever played. A match made in heaven. And I was going to get it. Not just to cause randomness, oh no. In the latest edition of D&D, the card you draw from the deck is determined by a die roll. A die roll that can be rerolled for the low price of one duck. My plan was to use this to make Gore Verbinski game-breakingly powerful, and then use his powers to become an unstoppable force of pure chaos. Gustav’s randomness would finally meet its match.