OK, the 12/17 playtest has our first glimpse at 5e Wish, the tricky spell par excellence. The devs are clearly trying a new way through this thicket by introducing a new approach to disincentivizing its use by preventing further spell-casting and reducing strength while also leaving the open-ended DM consequences of yore. I think it is worth analyzing the new version to see how or if it alters some of the traditional issues people have had with the spell. In addition, I think there might be room to introduce true names into the spell in a way that bridges some of the different analyses from the perspective of players, PCs, world-building, and individual NPCs.
Before I go on, let me note that I recognize the variety of historical opinion on the spell, from believing it should not exist to letting casters get away with pretty much anything to eagerly hoisting casters on their own petard. More than any other spell, enjoyable use or avoidance of Wish depends on the table contract. Any version of Wish worthy of the name risks these divergences of opinion, so I don't think the goal shouldn't be to write the spell that operates in strictly one way, but rather one that lets the players and DMs work out that relationship more smoothly.
My opinion of the new version is that the "anyspell" usage is pretty much fine, but that for other effects the penalties of casting the spell are too strong in the short term (< week) and too weak in the long-term. The short term effects strongly incentivize casting wish to settings that are likely to be secure for a few days or truly desperate situations. The problem is that there are many moderate uses of wish that needn't effectively prevent adventuring for several days, and an important part of Wish is the risk-reward payoff which is much less meaningful when the player has almost no reason to cast the spell until the situation is so desperate that almost any risk will be worth the alternative anyway.
And in the long-term, the stated ability of Wish to create wealth as either mundane or magical objects means that, in situations that are very likely to be safe there is very little reason not to do so for NPCs or PCs. (Imagine, for example, a caster that sits in an extra-dimensional space in their already heavily protected sanctum, has a clone on standby, and so on.) The players and DM might have a gentleman's agreement, but the fact that the metagame incentives may differ so much from the setting ones introduces rather than relaxes tension. In 3e this entire setting vs. metagame exchange was addressed with XP costs, but those had their own unique dysfunctions and have been left behind for a host of good reasons. Even earlier Wish aged the caster but this can be of quite variable concern to the caster or player. Is there another way?
I've been wondering if the introduction of true names into the latest playtest might help serve this function. My basic premise is that Wish, as the limit of reality-bending mortal magic, is the kind of spell that both utilizes the caster's fundamental connection to reality (as represented via true name) and has the unfortunate tendency to advertise the same the more severe reality has been altered, the "cosmic fireworks" of the thread title. Now, this kind of trade-off already exists in the traditional free-from risk vs. reward of the wish spell, but that freeform risk is so arbitrary that it is almost impossible to estimate from either an in-setting or metagame standpoint without very careful communication. Moreover, those outcomes may be either short term or long term and may or may not materially affect the players or PCs in ways they actually care about, so any balancing costs with respect to PC abilities or resources (which usually fall clearly into the short-term or long-term categories) are likewise unfixed.
Suppose that powerful uses of Wish imposed a d% chance of "attracting attention" to the caster's true name (and thus also the caster) in a way that scaled with the overall strength of the wish. For common wishes this can be defined explicitly, and for free-form wishes the DM has a simple measure of risk they can choose to communicate to the player to whatever degree of vagueness desired. For example, one DM might choose to say that a given wish has a 36% chance of attracting attention to a true name, while another might simply ballpark that value. How the true name can be used for or against a caster has a lot of possibilities, but since it is a concept grounded in setting with some known (and plenty of potentially unknown) mechanical effects the incentives for players, DMs, PCs, NPCs, and the setting at large share a connection. Moreover, attention drawn to a true name will almost always be a long-term "campaign resource" for the DM, and so the risk can be set with that in mind. That being the case, one could loosen the currently strong short-term disincentives on casting Wish, allowing for a more meaningful risk vs. reward exchange in the short term while maintaining good long-term disincentives to powerful Wishes. Finally, this should both help to moderate the wide variety of DM responses to Wish while also granting them more latitude when it comes to determining interesting side-effects of wishes, and especially short-term side effects, since these no longer have to serve as the only major deterrent against powerful Wishes.
How might this look? Perhaps the short-term impact of casting wish is a stacking -1 to attacks, checks, saves, etc. that goes away by 1 per long rest, a bit like how Raise Dead works. The impact on the wealth creating uses of Wish might look something like this:
"For every 1000 gp of value in the object created there is a 1% chance of revealing information about your true name (minimum 1%)."
A caster that tried to create something worth 100,000 gp at once would definitely attract attention, but even a clever caster that created items worth 1999 gp per casting over 50 castings (i.e. a 1% chance/casting) would have roughly a 40% chance of being noticed at least once. If they cast it 100 times they have a roughly 64% chance of being noticed at least once. Eventually those odds will catch up, and powerful creatures will have to seriously weigh whether the benefit from the wish is worth the risk of someone gaining power over them via true name. Plenty of casters might be reckless or greedy (no doubt more than a few came to the attention of fiends in this manner) but the lich scheming in his inner sanctum for 2000 years will get his funds some other way. I think this represents a credible mechanical and setting answer to the question of why those who can cast Wish don't do so all the time while also leaving the spell in the game as a powerful option that avoids some of the issues of the past.
One rub with the current rules is that true names apparently evolve after use. The balance motivations to do so are obvious, but it does suggest a number of avenues for abuse where a creature induces its true name to constantly change so that "old true names" no longer hold any value. This point needs to be addressed anyway because such abuse would largely obviate the value of true names mechanically and in the game world. After all, with such a practice the true name of any fiend in a tome from last year, to say nothing of last epoch, is all but guaranteed not to be accurate.
Before I go on, let me note that I recognize the variety of historical opinion on the spell, from believing it should not exist to letting casters get away with pretty much anything to eagerly hoisting casters on their own petard. More than any other spell, enjoyable use or avoidance of Wish depends on the table contract. Any version of Wish worthy of the name risks these divergences of opinion, so I don't think the goal shouldn't be to write the spell that operates in strictly one way, but rather one that lets the players and DMs work out that relationship more smoothly.
My opinion of the new version is that the "anyspell" usage is pretty much fine, but that for other effects the penalties of casting the spell are too strong in the short term (< week) and too weak in the long-term. The short term effects strongly incentivize casting wish to settings that are likely to be secure for a few days or truly desperate situations. The problem is that there are many moderate uses of wish that needn't effectively prevent adventuring for several days, and an important part of Wish is the risk-reward payoff which is much less meaningful when the player has almost no reason to cast the spell until the situation is so desperate that almost any risk will be worth the alternative anyway.
And in the long-term, the stated ability of Wish to create wealth as either mundane or magical objects means that, in situations that are very likely to be safe there is very little reason not to do so for NPCs or PCs. (Imagine, for example, a caster that sits in an extra-dimensional space in their already heavily protected sanctum, has a clone on standby, and so on.) The players and DM might have a gentleman's agreement, but the fact that the metagame incentives may differ so much from the setting ones introduces rather than relaxes tension. In 3e this entire setting vs. metagame exchange was addressed with XP costs, but those had their own unique dysfunctions and have been left behind for a host of good reasons. Even earlier Wish aged the caster but this can be of quite variable concern to the caster or player. Is there another way?
I've been wondering if the introduction of true names into the latest playtest might help serve this function. My basic premise is that Wish, as the limit of reality-bending mortal magic, is the kind of spell that both utilizes the caster's fundamental connection to reality (as represented via true name) and has the unfortunate tendency to advertise the same the more severe reality has been altered, the "cosmic fireworks" of the thread title. Now, this kind of trade-off already exists in the traditional free-from risk vs. reward of the wish spell, but that freeform risk is so arbitrary that it is almost impossible to estimate from either an in-setting or metagame standpoint without very careful communication. Moreover, those outcomes may be either short term or long term and may or may not materially affect the players or PCs in ways they actually care about, so any balancing costs with respect to PC abilities or resources (which usually fall clearly into the short-term or long-term categories) are likewise unfixed.
Suppose that powerful uses of Wish imposed a d% chance of "attracting attention" to the caster's true name (and thus also the caster) in a way that scaled with the overall strength of the wish. For common wishes this can be defined explicitly, and for free-form wishes the DM has a simple measure of risk they can choose to communicate to the player to whatever degree of vagueness desired. For example, one DM might choose to say that a given wish has a 36% chance of attracting attention to a true name, while another might simply ballpark that value. How the true name can be used for or against a caster has a lot of possibilities, but since it is a concept grounded in setting with some known (and plenty of potentially unknown) mechanical effects the incentives for players, DMs, PCs, NPCs, and the setting at large share a connection. Moreover, attention drawn to a true name will almost always be a long-term "campaign resource" for the DM, and so the risk can be set with that in mind. That being the case, one could loosen the currently strong short-term disincentives on casting Wish, allowing for a more meaningful risk vs. reward exchange in the short term while maintaining good long-term disincentives to powerful Wishes. Finally, this should both help to moderate the wide variety of DM responses to Wish while also granting them more latitude when it comes to determining interesting side-effects of wishes, and especially short-term side effects, since these no longer have to serve as the only major deterrent against powerful Wishes.
How might this look? Perhaps the short-term impact of casting wish is a stacking -1 to attacks, checks, saves, etc. that goes away by 1 per long rest, a bit like how Raise Dead works. The impact on the wealth creating uses of Wish might look something like this:
"For every 1000 gp of value in the object created there is a 1% chance of revealing information about your true name (minimum 1%)."
A caster that tried to create something worth 100,000 gp at once would definitely attract attention, but even a clever caster that created items worth 1999 gp per casting over 50 castings (i.e. a 1% chance/casting) would have roughly a 40% chance of being noticed at least once. If they cast it 100 times they have a roughly 64% chance of being noticed at least once. Eventually those odds will catch up, and powerful creatures will have to seriously weigh whether the benefit from the wish is worth the risk of someone gaining power over them via true name. Plenty of casters might be reckless or greedy (no doubt more than a few came to the attention of fiends in this manner) but the lich scheming in his inner sanctum for 2000 years will get his funds some other way. I think this represents a credible mechanical and setting answer to the question of why those who can cast Wish don't do so all the time while also leaving the spell in the game as a powerful option that avoids some of the issues of the past.
One rub with the current rules is that true names apparently evolve after use. The balance motivations to do so are obvious, but it does suggest a number of avenues for abuse where a creature induces its true name to constantly change so that "old true names" no longer hold any value. This point needs to be addressed anyway because such abuse would largely obviate the value of true names mechanically and in the game world. After all, with such a practice the true name of any fiend in a tome from last year, to say nothing of last epoch, is all but guaranteed not to be accurate.
