Un-Wondrous
Today’s comic is near and dear to my heart. That’s because it ruined a trip to Disney World. Let me explain.
So no shit there they were down on the weird science level of the megadungeon. They’d discovered diseased mimics, sentient swarms, and enough “kill me” science experiments to deplete a flame thrower. Suffice it to say that the PCs had plenty of warning about the nature of this level. Enter “The Transformative Platform.”
The room in question was a natural conduit for chaos magic, and a metal platform at the center of the chamber was positively vibrating with transmutation magic. When the party monk declared that she meant to stand on the platform, I did my duty as a GM. And when she took 6d6 damage, stumbled off of the platform, and discovered her brand new kleptomaniac Son Goku tail, I figured that all mysteries were revealed. This platform was dangerous, and it could have unpredictable results.
“I want a tail!” shouts the irrepressible gnome alchemist. “I step on the platform!”
Now here’s the thing about this room. The tail was my one and only bit of original content. I was quite proud of it, and thought it was a decent “affects the PC both negatively and positively in approximately equal measure” kind of effect, just like the module wanted. Sure it stole random objects from party members, but it also acted as the prehensile tail ability that tieflings love to take. Thus, when my pal the gnomish alchemist declared that he was also hopping on the platform, my GM brain stalled out. I was out of content!
“What happens?” asked the gnome.
I rolled the aforementioned 6d6 damage slowly, trying to think. That’s when I noticed the two example transformations baked into the room description:
For example, the creature grows thick, ropy muscles that add a +2 inherent bonus to Strength but subtract a -2 inherent penalty to Dexterity. Or the character is struck permanently blind but gains blindsense out to 10 feet.
I elected to do the stat swap.
“But I throw bombs!” says the alchemist. “I need my Dexterity! I jump on the platform again!”
“I’m sorry, you what?”
“Did I stutter?”
And thus it was that my pal the bomb-throwing Dexterity alchemist gained permanent blindness, mitigated by blindsense out to 10 feet. For a squishy little half-caster with a ranged build, it was not the best combination of abilities. Unable to target critters farther away than two squares on the grid, he was doomed to retirement!
Of course, I knew that he could simply jump on the platform a few more times until he rolled a random “the creature is transformed to its original state” result on table. Or if he was really smart, he could hire a cleric to cast remove blindness/deafness, gaining access to blindsense without penalty!
Unfortunately, these solutions did not come up in conversation. Even more unfortunately, this was the night before my little cadre of gamers was scheduled to take its big trip to Disney World. And believe me, it was a deathly quiet carpool down to the airport, punctuated only by the occasional muttered “just wanted a friggin’ tail” or “completely neutered my character.” (Never fear, gang! The dude eventually got his eyesight back.)
That brings us to today’s question. Have you ever encountered a “random effect” that completely hosed your character? What about a supposedly beneficial ability that outright sucked? Let’s hear it in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
Just recently my necromancer got struck mute by mad monkey mist giving a random disorder in Tomb of Annihilation.
All her spells have verbal components and she was the party face.
Any coming back from that?
It’s a form of madness.
I believe a short term form. Lasts in hours. Long term form lasts in days. Both can be cured with Lesser restoration.
Indefinite madness is usually less mechanical and more a personality flaw you gain. Lasts until cured with a Greater restoration
DMG pgs. 258-260.
Yeah, it only lasted 1d10x10 hours…
I lucked out and was only useless for a couple days. She retired recently and put her massive Charisma to use building a business for the party anyway, so it worked out well.
It’s always nice when the retired character can continue to affect the game. My buddy the retired cleric still sells divine scrolls to the party form time to time. He’ll even perform a resurrection or two if the price is right.
I don’t know much about Tomb of Annihilation but now that I know it contains something called “mad monkey mist” I absolutely have to play it.
I have a friend that owns a copy; I’ll have to ask him if he’s heard about the mad monkey mist.
Not exactly an effect, but the first time I played a Solarian in Starfinder, I had a fun ability that basically turns me into a flaming ball of butt-whoop and shoots me at my enemies.
The DM had never seen a Solarian before, and had no idea what the range on my abilities were, but used random dice rolls to determine how far apart encounters started, which somehow, for EIGHT LEVELS, managed to start every single encounter with enemies exactly five feet too far away for me to charge them with my cool new ability.
As my power gained greater and greater range, the dice decreed that combats would start just slightly further back than they did last level. I never got to do an awesome first-round fireball-charge. 🙁
Did you ever tell the GM, or did you sit quietly and stew in your gamer rage?
I told him eventually, but not during the game itself.
It’s always tough to know whether saying “I’ve got this cool ability I’ve been hoping to try out” will result in more or fewer opportunities. That mess varies heavily depending on the GM. I sympathize with the decision to stay quiet and wait for your moment. Sucks that it never came though!
GM was definitely a believer in never deliberately tailoring encounters to give a PC their turn to shine.
I’m the opposite, I guess. If a new-ish player is excited about playing a sorcerer for the first time and casting their first-ever fireball, then I’m definitely going to arrange for there to be a perfect fireball moment somewhere in the adventure.
Weirdly, I think you’re both motivated by the same thing. You want to give your players a cool experience. But where you take a more direct approach, giving the player what they explicitly want, I’m guessing that other GM believes an internally consistent world offers a better sense of immersion for his players.
Speaking for myself, I think that players care about their characters first and the GM’s world a distant second. It’s definitely a matter of individual philosophy though!
I recently had a very similar situation in a one-shot solo I ran for a friend who wanted to try RPGs.
I created a dungeon that was literally the inside of the bones of a giant dead dragon-thing from Jupiter buried in a cliff face (based on “the marrow mines”). There were some gobliny things to fight, prisoners to rescue who were being forced to mine the bones while going mad, and a couple of items. The adventure started by finding one of the prisoners who had escaped but lost his mind, from which there were clues back to the entrance.
There was also an insanity mechanic.
The idea was that the creature was unimaginably malevolent and that in certain places the prisoners or gobliny things had made strange carvings. Interact with the carvings, and there was a 1d10 roll for effect, with +1 added each time. This ran from no vision, minor glimpse, major vision, feeling sucked through a wormhole and hitting the mountainside, and finally, at a 1d10 roll of 20, being found wandering mad in the woods, with no recollection of what you were doing.
So my friend gets so into the vision descriptions that he just keeps interacting with them because, “this is so cool!” We’re both Lovecraft fans.
He keeps interacting, while I try to keep a poker face, until I realise that the next roll will be +10 and he rolls… 10.
I give the madness spiel and say “well it looks like this adventure may be over.” He took a moment to parse what had happened and got that priceless reaction of, “this game is intense. I was so sure you would run out of visions, but didn’t think that would happen! How do I make a new character, I have got to play this again?”
Dude sounds like a born gamer. Way to give him a cool experience!
“I created a dungeon that was literally the inside of the bones of a giant dead dragon-thing from Jupiter buried in a cliff face.”
Awesome!
I have something similar in my megadungeon, it’s the bones of a dhole (basically a massive worm, see Dune Worm but Lovecraft it up for those of you that aren’t Mythos fans), that stretches for miles and miles and miles… no insanity innately, but as it breaches many boundaries of space/time the other Mythos horrors do bring the madness with them.
I have always been interested by the lines that “the earth is gnawed by gigantic dholes” (or bholes, I’m sure I’ve seen that spelling too), and then of course we (kind of) see one in “through the gates of the Silver Key”. Especially when set alongside the line from Lord of the Rings that “the bones of the world are gnawed by nameless things: Sauron knows them not, for they are older than he”.
Point of order. Weren’t most of the characters in Lovecraft’s novels merely assumed insane because their stories were so fantastic and/or because they were possessed by otherworldly beings
There are definitely some who seem to be insane. The protagonist of “the rats in the walls” is at the end. I would argue that so is the protagonist of “Herbert West, Reanimator”, because he is unsure what he has seen. Characters from “Call of Cthulhu”, “Dagon”, or “The Hound” I think are also meant to be actually mad.
I think most fall into the “who really knows” camp, such as the friend from “At the Mountains of Madness”, or the ones in “Dreams in the Witch-House”.
Then there are the ones who are still sane (ish) but deeply shocked or changed. “Out of the Aeons”, “Pickman’s Model”, and “The Lurking Fear” all qualify.
Finally, there is “The Curious Case of Charles Dexter Ward” where the protagonist seems to be left with a new and interesting knowledge, despite the horrors he has seen.
I can’t claim to have read the entire Lovecraft back catalog, but there are definitely at least some stories where the protagonist suffers psychological effects from being exposed to the madness. And,of course, plenty more where characters not critical to the narration break down from seeing the unseeable.
As far as the anecdote above is concerned, you did your duty as a DM. Make it clearly obvious that this is bad, and if a player is angry at the literal tides of chaos not turning in his favor, there’s not much you can do.
Yeah… The problem is that the “literal tides of chaos” are personified by the literal guy behind the screen. I think my buddy the alchemist would have been happier with an actually-random table. Because of the “make up an effect” way the module was written, I could have made up anything. Instead I used the example effects that happened to be especially deleterious to the alchemist. I suppose I could have handled it better and invented some custom-tailored effects. But then again, when you jump on a chaos portal, but things might happen. Comes with the territory.
I haven’t ever had one completely destroy a character, but I LOVE random effects like that! I once had a male human character turn into a female half-dragon elf, which took a while to get used to, but eventually, she decided that being a scaly poison-spewing badass was totally worth the back problems.
Back problems, eh? I gather that this character wound up with a couple of huge *ahem* Charisma boosts?
He turned into a she dragon… so I expect they were draggin…
I’ll see myself out.
Also on the subject of random transformation effects, I’ve been making a homebrew game sort of based around random transformations. Starting characters are super weak, but basically all the transformations come with stat boosts (and penalties, but characters have racial mins and maxs that they can’t go beyond), so they very quickly come up to a good power level, and sometimes quickly overshoot it if they have good rolls. One of my players, one square out from the starting village, got turned into an ogre by the first random bit of junk they picked up.
“One square out?” Is this an RPG or a board game?
RPG, but I use a simple square grid map I made in paint.
Oh gotcha. We’re talking about hexploration and such. I grok!
Out of curiosity, what other transformations have you got planned?
It’s not so much as transformations I have planned, as it is a random table designed for maximum randomness.
1-Species Change
2-Height Change (Shorter) +1 CON
3-Hair Change (Color) +1 DEX
4-Eye Color (Natural Color) +1 INT
5-Angelic Type Monster Change
6-Beastman Type Monster Change
7-Skin (Type) +1 ARM
8-Magic Material Type Monster Change
9-1d3 Ranks Monster Transformation: Continuation
10-1 Rank Monster Transformation: Random
11-1 Rank Monster Transformation: Continuation
12-1d3 Ranks Monster Transformation: Random
13-Golem Type Monster Change
14-Skin (Color) +1 ARM
15-Fairy Type Monster Change
16-Demonic Type Monster Change
17-Eye Color (Unnatural Color) +1 WIS
18-Hair Change (Length) +1 STR
19-Height Change (Taller) +1 SPD
20-Gender Swapped (+1 to any 1 stat)
I also came up with a system of ‘ranks’ of transformation, to represent gradual changes, which are what the middle numbers are about. What the table leaves out is how the monsters actually get picked, which is sort of flexible. The way I do it is by having a huge folder of monster art, and just setting it on shuffle and having the player roll a couple of dice to see how many images go by before stopping, then that’s the monster they get.
So that wild magic I talked about in a previous comic was my Kobold Sniper…
The character who threatens everyone that asked if he wants to try it finally caved just to shut them up.
So I rolled a d1000… nothing looks out of the ordinary… the Gnome Tinkerer starts snickering and points at his shadow. He looks and nothing is wrong. He looks back confused, and she busts out laughing.
It turns out that whenever he isn’t looking, it is CONSTANTLY making obscene and rude gestures. This is hilarious to everyone else…
It was even funnier to me out of character when one of her next points made me invisible to her specifically… her character was a bit sad at that.
This all was funny and amusing until one moment.
My lil kobold slayer with a musket (with house-ruled exploding dice), almost full sneak attack dice, and an unnatural affinity to crit on a 20×4 weapon got charmed…
GM: ok the rest of your party is now your enemy.
Me whispering to DM: so I just attack at random right? I’m not comepletely myself still?
GM: no you are totally fine. You just see them as your enemy…
Me: so he’s completely functional and there’s an enemy in front of him that is perpetually flat-footed to him…
Thankfully someone else managed to dispel it before my turn came around…
I still feel like it would have been on the nose to attack the barbarian first, but I also didn’t want to murder another character…
Getting mind-controlled might be the deadliest thing in the game. Especially if the resident damage-dealer happens to be heavily optimized!
Was there ever a fix for the living shadow silliness, or did you just learn to live with it?
At first it was just a source of in-the-moment humor at his expense.
Me: “Skraa stands victoriously over the dead thing he just crit.”
Someone: “His shadow pelvic-thrusts with the rifle on the wall behind him!”
Everyone laughs
Eventually we figured out brute forcing Remove Curse would fix it. They did make a point to say that he wouldn’t actually be able to tell if it was gone, since it didn’t do anything when he was looking at it to begin with…
But I quickly pointed out that the Gnome Tinkerer, who’s machines are litterally powered by her laughter, (and had just had her selective imperceptiveness towards me cured too) would not be able to keep a straight face.
It was a fun anecdote.
That was just me personally though.
The single most game-altering and destructive thing that wild magic has ever done, was truly amazing though…
A boss was about to fly away at critically low health.
The Bard: “I use a Hero Point!”
GM: “Okay, what do you do?”
Bard: “I use a harrow point to roll wild magic. I target the boss.”
rolls d1000 GM checks a LOT of things
GM: “Um… wow… so the boss falls from the air, looks up in sheer horror and gasps ‘What did you do!?'”
After we kill him we discover that ALL MAGIC is gone. Even our wonderous items (including Handy Haver-Sacks) are inoperable…
We had to leave, but it took almost an hour before magic started working again.
The end result was a permanent HIGH level anti-magic zone a few miles wide, centered on a corpse.
The NPCs solution (Remove Curse couldn’t be cast on it) while we were gone?
They put it on a boat and pushed it out to sea. Not their problem now.
We all like to think that somewhere out there is a shark with a permanent anti-magic zone attached to it, hunting would-be mages that enter its domain.
Goddamn I love it when NPCs do things. That’s amazing.
I also love that game mechanics and random charts can produce effects that would occur to exactly 0% of humans. Anti-magic shark is a great bit of emergent behavior.
Other assorted effects in this same game (DM Here!):
Black-hole fingernails.
All coinage within 100ft took on the face of the tengu inquisitor.
Crystalline eyeballs (enchanted with eyes of the eagle).
The Tinker could not willingly take off her own boots.
The Tinker regenerates fire and acid damage dealt to her.
The Barbarian can extend his eyes on 12″ stalks.
The Barbarian can retract his head like a turtle (and then extend his eyestalks out of that. . . shudder).
The Bard who prides himself in the uniqueness of his voice had the displeasure of literally everyone sounding like him to him.
The Bard’s cohort is not effected by gravity when her eyes are closed.
There are a few others that they haven’t figured out, but since my players read this I can’t exactly share those. 😛
At least there weren’t any tarrasques bound in a nearby town.
Ooh, yeah. Heck, she wasn’t even that optimized, but I’ve mind-controlled a Kineticist in Pathfinder and terrified the party.
There were screams of “Grab her! Hold her down” and PCs rushing to dog-pile onto a girl who was literally on fire and had made a point of building to punish anyone who thought it’d be a good idea to grapple her.
…And they rushed to grapple her anyways, because they all knew that if she spent as much burn as she could all at once and went Nova on them with maximized fire blasts, there would be deaths.
Kineticists. Low optimization ceiling (or so I’ve heard, anyways), but a dangerously high floor.
I miss Alchemist’s body horror.
noted
Does the sign behind his speech bubble say “You break it -> You drink it”?
Now that’s what I call a threat.
It does indeed!
Credit where it’s due: That’s all Laurel with the shop signs. I’ve always dug her bonus sight gags. 🙂
If it makes you feel any better, that’s just one of his clones.
So… not exactly the same thing, sort o’ the opposite actually… but we still continually ended up being “downgraded”… and it was deliberate on our part…
A Human-centric LE* campaign. Party consists of NE Ranger‡ (me), LE Rogue, LN Monk, NE Bard, NE Wizard/Druid, and LE Cleric (party leader). We start the campaign (and spend several levels) fighting Orcs†. The Cleric takes an ability that lets him use Divine Channeling as a charm/rebuke on Evil Humanoids, I pick up Favored Enemy Orcs, and the Rogue picks up some obscure Feat that makes his Backstab better against Humanoids…
We get exactly one more big fight against the invading Orcs, break their leadership and cause them to begin fleeing towards the border… then the campaign shifts and we spend the next several levels fighting Undead†…
I take Favored Enemy Undead, the Rogue picks up a Feat that lets him Backstab Undead, the Cleric increases his Divine Channel specifically versus Undead (and let take a Minion from among those Rebuked)… and the campaign shifts focus again.
We spend the next several levels fighting Constructs†… I take Favored Enemy Constructs, the Rogue picks up a Feat that lets him Backstab Constructs, the Cleric takes a Feat that lets him Turn/Destroy Constructs… and the campaign shifts focus again.
We spend the next several levels fighting Elemental†… I take Favored Enemy Elementals, the Rogue picks up a Feat that lets him Backstab Elemental, the Cleric takes a Feat that lets him Turn/Rebuke Elementals… and the campaign shifts focus again.
We spend the next few levels fighting Abominations†…
You can see where this is going right? 😉 The campaign petered out just before all three of us managed to ‘power up’ versus Abominations, but we knew what would happen. Every time we gained abilities to make a specific common foe more easily defeated, we’d never see it //again//. No really†.
It’s not that the DM was out to neuter us, he was literally buying those little pamphlet adventures that were geared for our current levels and then weaving them into the overarching backdrop of the metaplot. It’s just that the level appropriate majority of our foes keep scaling every time we’d ‘get gud’ at fighting one foe, it’s switch out. And I can’t even blame it on one specific adventure writer as there were a bunch…
I think the DM took our jests about “No no, don’t worry about it, we’re just taking Feats that mean we never have to see those foes ever again” a lot more seriously than we were intending.
Had to be within one alignment step of Lawful Evil. We were all about the “Imperium of Man”, so expected (rightly so) to be fighting the enemies of the Empire for the majority of the campaign and dealing politically (and carefully) with the citizens Empire which hewed more “Neutral”. So our Cleric was basically a corrupt member of the Inquisition, and we were his bond-slaves/servants.
† We fought other things as well as those ‘primary’ foes, but those specific foes were the most often encountered or the most dangerous. And once we ‘Feated Up” against that specific foe, poof, it would never show up again unless the GM specifically trotted one out so we could annihilate it.
‡ It was a homebrew Ranger that dropped spells for double the number of Favored Enemies and some extra Feats as a Fighter (I think every odd level gave the choice of a Favored Enemy or a Feat).
In case you missed it, there’s a comic for that:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/less-favored-terrain
This is why I tend to take general-purpose feats. They’re less flavorful, but I want my abilities to actually do things for me, ya know?
The first time I played a kobold barbarian was not by choice. As oft happens during an adventure, I the party half-orc Vatican was slain in battle. As we had no clerics in the party it looked like I was going to need to roll up a new character, but the DM did give us an option; there was an old Druid who lived in the forest nearby who may be able to cast reincarnation, assuming we can provide the materials and payment. I was willing to gamble on the chart and was willing to part with my share of the payment in order to come back to life.
Long story short I became a kobold. As the frontline sole tank who punches and grapples the bad guys, that playstyle was suddenly far less effective for me. On the bright side by ability to support and tank was improved a little, thanks to my extra dex. I would later retire that character however.
Was the retirement related to the mechanical nerf of becoming a kobold, or was it for unrelated reasons?
Once in a dungeon our party meet the boss of that level, it was a vampire with the power to generate sunlight. We made him dust 😉
Speaking of useless things. Where is Abercrombie? Is in a errand, we will know at last what kind of Tumor Familiar is she?
The tumor is in remission. It’s very tragic.
What? NO, Abercrombie!!! Quickly, Alchemist needs something that cause sentient tumors. Somebody has a vegan burger at hand?!?!?! 🙂
lol
Deck of Many Freaking Things. Two consecutive players drew the Void card. Need I say more?
Well then. There’s your quest right there.
The exact opposite happens to my players. They’ve drawn from it so many times, ending up with six castles, four knights, 5 wishes from knights drawing, 8 wishes from a PC drawing, 4 wishes from two luck blades, tonnes of jewellery and magic items, persuasion bonuses greater than 20, and XP from the the remove-the-void side quest.
At least, that’s what happened to two of my players. The third is convinced that someone could die from just touching the deck and has never drawn from it.
Yo… How’s that campaign going? I imagine that your notes are wadded up in the bin!
The player really should have foreseen that infusing oneself with essence of chaos was not going to have a predictable or even net gain outcome. That’s what chaos is. He’s lucky he didn’t get turned into a ooze or something.
As a GM, I stay away from random effects for that exact reason. Never know when a player will decide “I stick my head in the randomizer 6000” is a good way to upgrade. The closest I get is Confusion effects in Pathfinder/D&D, which I am semi fond of as the most dangerous area of effect in the game due to my party of optimizers.
As a player, I generally avoid random for the thing of its just too much of a risk. i generally have bad luck with that kind of thing. Yet, once I played a Wilder prestiged Anarchic Initiate in old 3.5 D&D. That was a Psychic prone to going into manic fits that augmented her powers who had also linked her mind to Limbo. She had a random chance to Weaken, manifest normally, Empower or Maximize effects she Wild Surged on. In my defense, I was told to build a 16th level character loaded for fighting multiple dragons. So when the GM decided to have an Ancient Red pop it’s massive head around the corner, I banked on good luck and manifested an Empowered Mind Thrust with Anarchic Surge. Lucked out and rolled the Maximize effect, which meant mister Dragon had to make a DC 32 Will save or take 270 untyped telepathic damage. Since I was not the first person to hit the dragon, the GM decided his head exploded when he failed the save. We didn’t play any of that game past that session. I think I intimidated him…
lol. Way to Scanners the dragon!
“I killed it so hard that the campaign died from splash damage.”
I’ve always wanted to run a full-on random sorcerer, rolling to decide what spells I learned. It has the potential to build and unplayable mess, but it could be fun to work around a built-in handicap.
While not a sorceror exactly, you might want to check out the Amnesiac Psychic Archetype in Pathfinder. It’s actually built on having random and different spells known, but it changes every day so if you are unplayable, it’s only for a little while. The only problem is you would have the Psychic Spell List, which is not the greatest. But you could also go Rebirth Discipline to add a particular spell from another class’s list if you liked it (like fireball).
So far I have avoided such unfortunate situations, though there have been a few close calls where it could have occurred.
In your position I actually would have stopped and admitted I needed time to think up more interesting options. Especially if facing this conundrum close enough to the end of a session that it was possible it wouldn’t get resolved before the start of the next one.
And if I’d been clever I would have asked if they were going to just keep going until they got a tail. If the answer was no, I would have just shrugged and figured out something tail specific because… yeah. If you’ve painted yourself into a corner in regards to that item being infinite use, there’s no point wasting creative energy on fifty things until a tail option finally comes up on RNG again and ruining someone’s character by mutating them beyond all recognition just because they wanted basically a specific piece of flavor.
I know that’s not everyone’s style. Myself I’m more of a “if it doesn’t hurt anything to give this person what they want, why shouldn’t I?” kind of person.
I think that random effects tables are for GMs more than players. Imagining all the possibilities of “oh wow, wouldn’t it be crazy if we actually rolled XYZ?” tends to be fare more entertaining than actually rolling XYZ.
Yeah. The ideal is more like a table that’s meant to be presented as random but actually chosen with intent. Then the players get the thrill of “what will happen!?” without the bemoaning something they didn’t like happening and the GM can freely imagine all the “what if?” scenarios they like.
Of course that only works if the players don’t know that’s how it is. shrug
In retrospect, I probably should have lied to my player. If the curtain had stayed up, the poor guy would have felt less targeted. The problem was he knew I could have chosen anything at all (I made the mistake of explaining the mechanic), and instead chose to give him -1 to all ranged attacks and a range of 10 ft. Of course, that wasn’t my intent. I wasn’t really considering his build, but simply scrambling for appropriate effects on short notice. It just turned out to look suspiciously like I was trying to ruin his character.
In that sense, I think that a list of “some example effects” might be the ideal: maybe eight or ten choices. That way it’s enough to give GMs a bit of a menu to choose from, offers enough context to create similar effects, and can still serve as a random table if you really do want to roll and let fate decide.
I now see why you refer to players as “chaos elementals”… never have I heard of a party as incautious as that? And to be salty about it afterwards? I mean, what did the player think was going to happen? Did he really think he would get a tail as well? I just don’t understand the rationale.
There’s being overcautious, and then there’s actually drawing a card from the Deck of Many Things.
Like John Cleese said, he got better.