D&D Fortune Cards

I am a fan of the Fortune Cards for D&D 4th Edition by Wizards of the Coast, but having trouble finding much information about them online. What I did find was quite a lot of posts about how DMs did not like them and did not want them in their games but felt like it was difficult to not allow them since they are official products. I want to present some house rules that make it a bit more fair to include in your home games and not just something extra the players have that the enemies don't. Also, we will look at all of the sets, 4 have been released so far, and go over them and determine if you should spend money on more packs or not.

House Rules


House Rules for using Fortune Cards

Official rules allow players to have as many copies of a card in their deck as long as the deck meets the rule of 3. A custom Fortune Card deck can contain any multiple of 10 cards (10, 20, 30, and so on). For every 10 cards in your deck, you must have at least 3 cards of each of the three categories (Attack, Defense, Tactics). http://wizards.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2152 This would allow a player to make a legal deck with only 3 different cards, just 4 copies of card A and 3 copies each of card B & C. This can make the fortune deck far too predictable in a battle and game breaking in my opinion. Also, they imply that these are for players only and not DMs. I have created some house rules that better level the playing field for those DMs who have players insisting on using fortune cards.

  1. No duplicate cards allowed per 10 cards in your deck. (10 card deck, no duplicates allowed. 20 card deck, 2 copies of the same card allowed in the deck, and so on.)
  2. DMs get to have 2 decks to use. DM decks cannot contain rare cards. DM Deck #1 is only for the enemy the DM declares as the "boss" enemy for that encounter. DM Deck #2 is to be used by all the rest of the enemies in the encounter. Rules for drawing and playing cards from deck #1 mirror player rules as if "boss" enemy was a player. DM Deck #2 may only use one card per round by any one non-boss enemy. At the start of each new initiative round, DM Deck #2 can do one of the following:
  • Discard the card in your hand and draw a new one.
  • Draw a new card if you don’t have one in your hand.
  • Keep the card that’s in your hand if you haven’t played it.
  1. Keep it fair, allow the table to vote if they want to play with fortune cards or not, but let them know that this will be in your arsenal as a DM if they want to play with fortune cards.

I feel the DM decks should not be allowed to use rares as some of them are quite powerful if you have a whole crew of enemies to work together to get the max benefit out of them.  On cards in the DM Deck, you may have to change the text to make sense as some cards benefit from having enemies around you, and in your case, enemies are now the PCs. DM Decks should probably use different color card protectors to help make sure they are kept separate.  

2 comments:

  1. I like your house rules. I think it's only right if the DM gets to use them as well. My problem is more that we forget to draw the card. We tried drawing at the end of your turn, but inevitably, we'd put the card down during the waiting and forget to pick it back up. I just find it a hard mechanic to incorporate when you aren't used to it. I also say that Fortune Cards are not something new DMs should mess with, they add to the complexity of things.

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  2. This is great! I've been recently looking back into 4e, and really wanted to embrace all the fun mechanics the edition offered, including Fortune Cards. I've been trying to collect them, but could only really find Fury of the Feywild at a local store. They are now sadly all out, so now I'm trying to see what I can find online.

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