Just curious ; do you think wishes are really useful ?
I mean, i've had this problem since the first Wish spell i saw during a session of the old D&D basic. A badly wounded lvl 9 or so cleric had used up all his spells, and since the GM was in the "let's give away wish-granting rings for free" period,he said he'd use a wish to cure himself. I panicked, than the GM asked "how do you spell the wish ?" and the guy "i want to have my starting HP"
Resulting in a lvl 9 cleric with the hit pnts of a lvl 1 cleric.
Since then i tried to avoid Wishes like a plague, and the situation even got worse with 3 and 3,5 in which Wishes can only be used to duplicate lesser lvl spells, but use up a 9th lvl spell slot ( yes i know the saving DC is also that of a lvl 9 spell, but don't think that is worth the effort ).
Definitively , do you need to hire a lawyer to tell you how to correctly pronounce a Wish spell if you want to use it i other ways , or you simply duplicate lesser spells ( effectively wasting the wish ) ?
Or maybe i was unlucky and got the wrong GM ?
If you use the Wish for any of the listed effects, there is no need to hire a lawyer.
If you use the Wish for any unlisted effect, then "the wish may pervert your intent into a literal but undesirable fulfillment or only a partial fulfillment, at the GM's discretion" as the book says. A lawyer may be useful here, depending on your GM :)
Be very wary if you get a Wish granted to you by an Efreet..
For me personally, if the player makes at least some effort towards wording the wish properly, I'll grant it in a beneficial fashion. If he just blurts something out without thinking, that's when the undesirable fulfillment might kick in :)
Anyway, the GM in your case probably liked to deliberately cause wishes to backfire. And that's probably why he gave away wish-granting rings to 9th level characters in the first place.
my guess is you had a very strict DM that was looking for a way to mess with the players.
I had a DM that let my cleric get away with useing limit wish to save the party from a TPK.
I was a cleric of mystra in the Forgotten Realms setting and we had no wizard so I was doing double duty as healer and blaster caster.
Useing the magic and spell domain I had limited wish on my domain list and then I took Initiate of Mystra as a feat to add it to my regular spell compliment.
I was burning down 500xp per wish but I brought back 3 party members at various times, undid curses, and destroyed the item that needed to be destroyed even thogh we had missed the clue and the item that was the correct way of doing it.
As far as I know wish is the ONLY way of makeing the various stat tomes and manuals as well as a few other magic items. Wish is basiclly the UNTIMATE expression of magic in the D&D universe. Not so much with damage but with simply being able to bend reality to your will because YOU wish it.
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Glad someone mentioned Efreet...
My opinion is that perverted wishes are the province of pacts with Lawful Evil outsiders or the result of wishes that are beyond the rules set out in the spell.
In the "starting hit points" situation your GM was being harsh. A Heal spell would be well within the perameters of Wish.
Plus a 20th level caster (given enough money) can pop +4 or +5 permenantly onto all their ability scores. OK that will cost a total of 600,000-750,000gps but frankly that is worth it. Hell, 125,000gps to add +5 to your Intelligence/Charisma? Awesome...
Plus it counts as a universal get out of jail free card. Rest of the party is hit by insanity? Wish. Need to get anywhere on any plane? Wish. Big bad killed your party with one fluke roll? Wish...
Stick within the boudaries of the spell and it's the most powerful spell in the game.
As far as I know wish is the ONLY way of makeing the various stat tomes and manuals as well as a few other magic items. Wish is basiclly the UNTIMATE expression of magic in the D&D universe. Not so much with damage but with simply being able to bend reality to your will because YOU wish it.
Check again. Miracle also works. But I otherwise agree with you.
If you can lay your hands on a copy of Dragon 250 from December 2006, there is an editorial by Erik Mona detailing the end and climax of a gaming session with Monte Cook as GM Erik was involved in, telling about using wish in a most awesome way. Maybe Erik could repeat this story here.
I did an article on wishes for Dragon ages ago (meaning 1st edition) but most of the concepts are pretty relevant and easily portable into Pathfinder.
Basically you need to figure out the source of your wish and its power limit. An efreet may always try to mess with a wish, but there's mess with and really mess with.
Had some fun with wishes in my current campaign. One problem was due to player misuse: the player found a luck blade, which of course grants wishes, but only when someone grasps it and says "I wish" followed by the actual wish. The problem? The character didn't want to wait for someone to identify the magic sword so just tried "use magic device" to "activate blindly" to see what it did. This broke it so that it now triggered whenever he said "I w---," meaning "I want" and "I was" and "I would" were all more than sufficient to have the rest of the sentences that came after trigger as wishes.
Another "I want" wish occurred when the traumatized dryad bribed the party with three wishes to not tell anyone what had just occurred, because in typical wood nymph fashion she'd attempted to spirit off the handsome men in the group, and after failing with one then the other, finally succeeded in stealing away the rogue who was conspiring to become a trusted royal vizier and had consequently been made a eunuch.
Generally speaking it's not possible to scandalize the fey, but the dryad's shock when she got the rogue to drop trou? Priceless. And since the fey do gossip--and the last thing a dryad could ever live down is spiriting away a eunuch--she offered the three wishes as hush money.
Of course, the first one was used inadvertently when the eunuch wanted his clothes and gear back (still inside the dryad's tree) and his phrasing was "I want my stuff back! It may not have been much but it was mine, and I want it back now! All of it!"
*POOF* He had all of his stuff back. All of it. And he was no longer a eunuch.
Now, admittedly, he had not said "I wish" but all the players were laughing and could understand the shell-shocked dryad making the mistake, especially since it served her purpose of not having anyone find out.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that if it's some third party who grants a wish, it's up to that third party to interpret the wording, or even misinterpret it as the case may be.
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My own gaming group has had years to get to know each other, and we don't play the game to dick each other over, but when gaming with new people or at a con or something, I avoid stuff like wishes like the plague.
I've heard too many people describe how they would twist a wish to screw the wisher, even when it's a gift from one's own diety as a reward for something, just because the DM thinks it's 'funny.'
With less 'screw-the-player' minded DMs, the best two wishes I've seen have tranferred the enchantment from a magic sword found as treasure to a PCs glaive (a weapon that he would *never* be reasonably expected to find as random treasure) and one cast by a 2e wizard to collate the dozen spellbooks she'd acquired as treasure into a smaller set of tomes, with duplicate spells being lost, so that she could squeeze all of the non-duplicate spells into just three books, and not have to carry around a library of books filled with repeats of magic missile, invisibility and fireball...
These are the kinds of things that a Wish spell is great for, dealing with situations that the game doesn't provide other solutions for.
For genie 'wishes,' barring from the actual lords of those races, I limit Djinn, Efreet, etc. to being able to use lasting versions of Major Creation, etc. They can conjure up all sorts of neat stuff, or deliver you to distant locations, or locate and procure some glamorous things, but they don't cast the Wish spell (and certainly not 3/day with no costs), because that's a wholly inappropriate SLA for a CR 8-ish critter.
An admonition to 'twist the wish' and screw the players is not, IMO, sufficient 'balance' on this ability, it's just taking a crazybad mechanical decision and reinforcing it with appallingly bad DMing advice.
"This CR 8 monster has a random Artifact for treasure. But if the players get their hands on it, feel free to punch them in the nose... That'll fix any balance concerns!"
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I remember running the 2nd ed. Planescape mod "Into the Abyss" during which the PC's rescued an Efreeti from a ravenous pack of Varrangoins. In gratitude the Efreeti granted them a Wish. They were pretty beat up from the fight so they wished "to be in the same condition they were before the fight."
The wish wisked them back in Time but it landed them in place of the efreeti where he encountered the Varrangoin. Needless to say they fought the beasts again but without the help of the no longer battered Efreeti.
Oh did they hate me for that! But they were in the Abyss! And I warned them.
--Vrock the Casbah!
Just curious ; do you think wishes are really useful ?
I mean, i've had this problem since the first Wish spell i saw during a session of the old D&D basic. A badly wounded lvl 9 or so cleric had used up all his spells, and since the GM was in the "let's give away wish-granting rings for free" period,he said he'd use a wish to cure himself. I panicked, than the GM asked "how do you spell the wish ?" and the guy "i want to have my starting HP"
Resulting in a lvl 9 cleric with the hit pnts of a lvl 1 cleric.
Since then i tried to avoid Wishes like a plague, and the situation even got worse with 3 and 3,5 in which Wishes can only be used to duplicate lesser lvl spells, but use up a 9th lvl spell slot ( yes i know the saving DC is also that of a lvl 9 spell, but don't think that is worth the effort ).
Definitively , do you need to hire a lawyer to tell you how to correctly pronounce a Wish spell if you want to use it i other ways , or you simply duplicate lesser spells ( effectively wasting the wish ) ?
Or maybe i was unlucky and got the wrong GM ?
It depends on the DM. I don't give players a hard time unless they ask for something outside the intended use of the spell. I have never had to do this, but if it came up I would have them make a wisdom check, most likely, in order to word it correctly or realize the possible ways I can use it against them. This assumes they don't intentionally misuse the spell of course. If they try to abuse it, they might get what they want, and they might not.
I did an article on wishes for Dragon ages ago (meaning 1st edition) but most of the concepts are pretty relevant and easily portable into Pathfinder.
I've been using that article since I got that issue many moons ago when it first came out. I still use it today. It's a perfect way to handle wishes. There are very few articles I still reference after 30 years of DMing. This is one of them.
I did an article on wishes for Dragon ages ago (meaning 1st edition) but most of the concepts are pretty relevant and easily portable into Pathfinder.I've been using that article since I got that issue many moons ago when it first came out. I still use it today. It's a perfect way to handle wishes. There are very few articles I still reference after 30 years of DMing. This is one of them.
Very glad to hear it and glad it's still useful.
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When I was young, dumb, and full of maliciousness (hey, what did you think I was going to say?), I lacked the wisdom to think for myself. I had parents to guide me, teachers to guide me, sensei to guide me, etc. I just memorized stuff in school and regurgitated it on tests.
And I played D&D.
There, I had other DMs to serve as role-models for when I became a DM myself. And all those guys came from the Screw-The-Player school of wish fulfillment. Or unfulfullment.
So that's what I learned, and that's how I DMed wishes.
Until I learned to think for myself.
Once that happened, I swiftly came to the conclusion that magic is a kind of energy. And like all other energy known to man, it follows a few immutable rules. Here's one such rule:
In 1837, Karl Friedrich Mohr gave one of the earliest general statements of the doctrine of the conservation of energy in the words: "besides the 54 known chemical elements there is in the physical world one agent only, and this is called Kraft [energy or work]. It may appear, according to circumstances, as motion, chemical affinity, cohesion, electricity, light and magnetism; and from any one of these forms it can be transformed into any of the others."
Beutiful, isn't it?
If Herr Mohr had been kind enough to add "and magic" in that second sentence, right before the semicolon, he could have been describing D&D. Well, maybe he could have.
So I put those words there, and began treating magic like any other energy. Herr Mohr would have been so proud; I think if he had been alive 150 years after he wrote those words, he most probably would have liked D&D and my interpretation of his Kraft.
Since magic behaves this way, that means wishes behave this way (if you've read this far, you might have wondered whether I forgot that this thread was about wishes).
Which means that wishes themselves do not go out of their way to waste extra energy just to screw over the wisher. Therefore, when you make your own wish, the wish is fulfilled in the simplest way that I (the DM) can imagine.
I take that rule to heart. You make the wish, I think about it for a moment and ask myself how the magical energy of magic can fulfill this wish while obeying the doctrine of Conservation of Energy. It must expend enough magical energy to fulfill the wish, but no more.
If you wish for a million gold pieces, it won't create the gold our of thin air; it will simply move it. And it won't move it from a dragon hoard half way around the world if there is a closer source; greater distance requires greater energy. And it won't (probably) take it from multiple sources because that is likely to result in energy flowing in different, and in many cases, opposite directions, which is very much against conservation of energy; so if there is a single source of a million gold pieces it will take that, even if there are multiple smaller sources that are closer. And it won't place it all over your head and let it fall on you to crush you (yes, I met a DM who bragged of doing that very thing to a player) because then it will have to lift that 20,000 pounds of gold into the air against the force of gravity; wasting energy rather than conserving it. Etc.
Yes, someone who used to own that million gold might come looking for it, but that is beyond the purview of the wish (unless the wisher had explicitly stated otherwise).
On the other hand, if you are offered a wish by a cruel and malicious sentient being, and you merely state your intent and that being actually casts the Wish spell, it's entirely possible that such a being might alter the wording in such a way as to screw you over. If you're crazy enough to take that risk, then you get what you deserve.
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When I was young, dumb, and full of maliciousness (hey, what did you think I was going to say?), I lacked the wisdom to think for myself. I had parents to guide me, teachers to guide me, sensei to guide me, etc. I just memorized stuff in school and regurgitated it on tests.
And I played D&D.
There, I had other DMs to serve as role-models for when I became a DM myself. And all those guys came from the Screw-The-Player school of wish fulfillment. Or unfulfullment.
So that's what I learned, and that's how I DMed wishes.
Until I learned to think for myself.
Once that happened, I swiftly came to the conclusion that magic is a kind of energy. And like all other energy known to man, it follows a few immutable rules. Here's one such rule:
In 1837, Karl Friedrich Mohr gave one of the earliest general statements of the doctrine of the conservation of energy in the words: "besides the 54 known chemical elements there is in the physical world one agent only, and this is called Kraft [energy or work]. It may appear, according to circumstances, as motion, chemical affinity, cohesion, electricity, light and magnetism; and from any one of these forms it can be transformed into any of the others."
Beutiful, isn't it?
If Herr Mohr had been kind enough to add "and magic" in that second sentence, right before the semicolon, he could have been describing D&D. Well, maybe he could have.
So I put those words there, and began treating magic like any other energy. Herr Mohr would have been so proud; I think if he had been alive 150 years after he wrote those words, he most probably would have liked D&D and my interpretation of his Kraft.
Since magic behaves this way, that means wishes behave this way (if you've read this far, you might have wondered whether I forgot that this thread was about wishes).
Which means that wishes themselves do not go out of their way to waste extra energy just to screw over the wisher. Therefore, when you make your own wish, the wish is fulfilled in the simplest way...
DM_Blake..... that was beautiful. It really was. I'm copying and saving that text for future reference. Thank you.
DM_Blake..... that was beautiful. It really was. I'm copying and saving that text for future reference. Thank you.
Thanks for the high praise.
And thanks for spelling 'beautiful' correctly even though I seem to have failed miserably at that endeavor. In my defense, it really is a typo, though since I chose to typo on one of the most misspelled words in the English language, ('misspelled', ironically, is also one of the most misspelled), it's doubtful that my claim of typo will be accorded due credibility.
Just curious ; do you think wishes are really useful ?
I mean, i've had this problem since the first Wish spell i saw during a session of the old D&D basic. A badly wounded lvl 9 or so cleric had used up all his spells, and since the GM was in the "let's give away wish-granting rings for free" period,he said he'd use a wish to cure himself. I panicked, than the GM asked "how do you spell the wish ?" and the guy "i want to have my starting HP"
Resulting in a lvl 9 cleric with the hit pnts of a lvl 1 cleric.
Since then i tried to avoid Wishes like a plague, and the situation even got worse with 3 and 3,5 in which Wishes can only be used to duplicate lesser lvl spells, but use up a 9th lvl spell slot ( yes i know the saving DC is also that of a lvl 9 spell, but don't think that is worth the effort ).
Definitively , do you need to hire a lawyer to tell you how to correctly pronounce a Wish spell if you want to use it i other ways , or you simply duplicate lesser spells ( effectively wasting the wish ) ?
Or maybe i was unlucky and got the wrong GM ?
While I love twisting wishes as much as the next guy the Wish is supposed to not have a problem fulfilling a function covered by an actual spell. Using Wish to cast Heal should be perfectly fine. I would consider it much more difficult for a wish to alter maximum HP permanently than mimic a cure spell.
DMs are only supposed to have fun screwing you when you wish for treasure, immortality etc.
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The best version of "I want a million gold pieces" I heard was a wish that was cast in a game I was in. The player cast his wish and nothing happened...
...as far as he was concerned anyway. We found out much later that what actually happened was the spell altered the writing on a title deed of a bank vault containing 1 million gold pieces somewhere in the planes.
After all he hadn't actually specified that he was to be told where these million gold pieces actually were...
Remembering echoes about wishes unfulfilment, I always tack "here and now" at the end of each. Because, you never know...
It's been a very long time since I've plaeyed in a game where a wish occured, but years ago, when I were DM'ing I usually made the wish seem to screw the player over, but generally actually giving them what they wanted (unless they became too greedy - then I ususally screwed them over).
For example, at one time a player wished the whole party out of a very dire situation - which resulted in a gigantic demon crashing its arm through the wall, scooping the players up in its hand, teleporting to the players wanted location and depositing them there, before it again disappeared. The players get a few moments of fright, and then they smile with a "cool, that worked". It was kind of a "friendly" reminder that they should be careful about how they word their wishes.
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Wishes are a quintessential "wonder" of D&D. While magic is generally limited in form to a wand, a spell with a particular effect, a wish unlocks all possibilities: anything you want. But as it is with numerous moral lessons from literature, selfish wishes always seem to come back to bite the wisher.
I've never seen another item, spell, piece of gear or such ever treated by my players so carefully as a Wish. I've never been a fan of the 'new' lengthy "rules" as to what a Wish can do (takes some of the magic away from mystery magic), but when one has a DM who perverts every wish based on ambiguous wording, I suppose there has to be guidance.
Blake, like your take. Simple and most direct approach. I've always enforced the first actionable "clause" to a wish and ignored every word attached thereafter and every conditional. I've also never attempted to screw my players over, unless there's good cause like accepting a wish from a demon.
I don't consider myself of the "Wish is a means for the DM to screw with the player" school of thinking, but I'm not lenient with it either. It hasn't come up in our Pathfinder games yet (though it will sometime) but if it did, how I'd handle it would depend on the origin of the wish.
A wish originated from a mage will generally follow his personality, so wishes from oneself will mostly work in ones best interest. On the other hand take the Luck Blade. If enchanted by an evil or twisted magician the sword will mostly turn and twist the wish just enough so that you get what you wished for, but with a bitter aftertaste (which would really make it a cursed blade). On the other end, a Luck Blade enchanted by a good meaning magician, granted wishes will be beneficial. (like the broken Luck Blade idea btw)
Wishes granted by efreets will, of course, become twisted and perverted.
The result of wishes (or rather miracles) granted by deities depends on the deity itself. If the wish comes from a devout follower (rarely doesn't though) it will be beneficial.
A general consensus in our gaming circle is that if you make a wish with game terms (i,e, XP, attack bonus, Hp and the like) the ingame wish granter will not understand the exact meaning of the wish and if you wish for say "I want more HP" (note: not "I want to be healed") you will probably get more horrible people in your life, or some other random/stupid/funny combination of words that begin with 'h' and 'p'.
In my view though, personal wishes would not do this, since the PC obviously (well, at least hopefully) know himself pretty well and know what he wants. But asking an efreet (or anything really) for just "more experience" might not be wise.