D&D General Wishing Away The Adventure

[Mort]

Yeah, the balance issue really doesn't matter to me. If they wish for something crazy, the consequences are handled narratively, and the players know that going in. "All magic comes with a price".

I will say, I'm not a monkey's paw DM. If the players think of something cool and creative that totally fubars my adventure? more power to them.

Unless of course they're dealing with something like an efreet, a greater demon, etc. Thinking that type of entity will play fair? Well, you get what you get.

 

[The Soloist]

We had this Party rule that wishes (Ring of Three Wishes) were to only be used to instantly resurrect a dead character.

But once I used a wish to crumble down the wall of a fortified city so our troops, who were about to freeze to death because of winter, could enter it and take it back from the invaders. The DM's face turned white and he announced that I had just destroyed 3 months of preparation. He thought we would get captured by the Saladins and taken prisoner to their continent. Once there we were supposed to escape and have many adventures. We never played again in that campaign.

I wished away a whole chapter instead of just one adventure. He learned a hard lesson that day. Never over-prepare an RPG campaign.

 

[MarkB]

I'm probably not going to use something as tricky as a wish spell on it, but if I have a spell that's going to allow us to achieve our current goal without going through the extreme peril that's laid out between us and it, why not? No doubt there will be more life-threatening peril ahead, why go through extra for no particularly good reason?

 

[J.Quondam]

Why would players choose to avoid playing?

A wish is an in-game means to achieve an in-game end. That's not "avoiding play;" it's just playing in a way that might be inconvenient for an unprepared GM or in certain contexts (eg, limited convention game, maybe). Generally though, i don't really view it as a real problem, especially if it's a on-off. Just move on to the next thing and keep on playing.

 

[Shardstone]

In one article of The Wizards Three, from Dragon Magazine, they wisely comment something along the lines of:
"The first wish any wizard makes is immunity to wish."

...How am I just now realizing this?! Duh!

 

[Shardstone]

We had this Party rule that wishes (Ring of Three Wishes) were to only be used to instantly resurrect a dead character.

But once I used a wish to crumble down the wall of a fortified city so our troops, who were about to freeze to death because of winter, could enter it and take it back from the invaders. The DM's face turned white and he announced that I had just destroyed 3 months of preparation. He thought we would get captured by the Saladins and taken prisoner to their continent. Once there we were supposed to escape and have many adventures. We never played again in that campaign.

I wished away a whole chapter instead of just one adventure. He learned a hard lesson that day. Never over-prepare an RPG campaign.

Man if you guys had Wish IDK why he thought that you getting captured was ever going to work out.

 

[MarkB]

In one article of The Wizards Three, from Dragon Magazine, they wisely comment something along the lines of:
"The first wish any wizard makes is immunity to wish."

And the second wish they make fails because they're immune to any and all effects of any wish spell.

 

[The Soloist]

Man if you guys had Wish IDK why he thought that you getting captured was ever going to work out.

Because we always followed the rule of using wishes ONLY to resurrect characters for several years prior. He forgot my PC was chaotic good!

 

[Shardstone]

Because we always followed the rule of using wishes ONLY to resurrect characters for several years prior. He forgot my PC was chaotic good!

Nice, nice.

 

[the Jester]

I'm not really talking about the problem of players doing something unexpected. I am talking about this theoretical instance of players using wish (or other powerful magics0 to bypass the adventure while still attaining the goal. I can't say I have actually seen it occur, but people do seem concerned about it in other threads and on certain YouTube channels. That's why i asked if it was real first.

In my experience, if a party is high level enough to cast wish, one or both of two things is true: Either they have chosen the adventure that they're going on (and thus don't want to bypass it), and/or the adventure is not something that can be easily solved by a wish. Perhaps they don't know the full goal; maybe they're investigating something that magic can't discern; maybe the goal is to stop a complicated scheme with a lot of moving parts; maybe the effect required to bypass the adventure is beyond the power of a 9th level spell. Whatever the specific, the general case is- a wish is either not enough, or more likely the pcs don't know enough to make the right wish.