Wishes & Skills

[pawsplay]

My guidelines has always been, "You cannot change the nature of the thing." However lasting the effects, wish magic cannot exceed the limits of mortal magic. Being more versatile, it should be less, not more, powerful than other 9th level effects.

Conjuring a big pile of gold coins, sure. Conjuring a big pile of ever-replenishing gold, no. There is no kind of gold that behaves like that, and no spell of 8th level or less that has a similar effect.

Gaining a skill bonus, sure. Gaining a new class skill, iffy. Helping a character, on their own, learn a new ability, is probably reasonable, although as a DM it makes me a little nervous.

Gaining a new Feat, no. Permanently implanting a new ability falls outside my guideline. Likewise, changing a BAB or save bonus changes the nature of the class, and allows free increases without any further effort. Wishing for Wizard to have 1d10 Hit Dice is basically wishing there existed a class that had such hit dice, which falls under the category of changing the game world.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Wishing for Wizard to have 1d10 Hit Dice is basically wishing there existed a class that had such hit dice, which falls under the category of changing the game world.

Interesting. You seem to have made the meta-game concept of classes into an in-game cosmic truth. Myself, I don't see the classes as anything more (or less) than a way to model a PCs growing knowledge and expertise. I don't mind minor changes to classes, so long as it isn't too unbalancing.

 

[Gwarok]

My solution is simply to remove Wish from the realm of PC castable spells. In my campaign a wish is just that, a la Aladdin style. The only way you get it is from a ring of three wishes(treated as a major artifact for frequency) or getting on the good side of a higher power.

I do keep limited wish as a more mortal version of the spell.

 

[MerakSpielman]

I think that Wish is an inaccurate name for the spell. It implies that you can just state anything and *poof!* it will happen. The spell just doesn't work that way. I'm wondering if it should be split into two spells - one for duplicating spell effects and one for adding inherent bonuses to ability scores. They could have the exciting and inspiring names Duplicate Spell and Increase Ability.

 

[Xagunder MacFaileas]

Hey, Hand.

In our campaign, we have decided that wish cannot grant feats. However, if your character (I assume we're talking your epic druid/shifter, right?) were to take a racial level of human (from Monte Cook's site) he'd get the Adaptive Learning ability which would alow him to keep one particular skill as a class skill for all future levels, regardless of what classes he took.

 

[ciaran00]

probably the easiest way to get cross-class skills in 3.5, is to take a class which has that skill as aclass skill. Doing so makes that skill permanently a class skill. This may seem silly, but record keeping is now SOOOOOO much easier when skills come around. Though everyone now has an incentive to start all characters as rogues, which cna be silly.

My particular system:

Class skill if: #levels-class + 1 >= #levels-cross-class
Cross-class if: Otherwise.

ciaran

 

[Hecateus]

It occurs to me that it should be possible, if risky, to change an existing normally gained feat into a different feat. A PC realizes that she does not have the optimal feat to proceed along a character path and needs to change to something else. Without a wish, she unable to change it.

Or perhaps a professional trainer can do this; I dunno.

 

[MerakSpielman]

Of course, another 4 levels could do it, too...

I don't think that's too unreasonable for a Wish though.