Anyone want to help adjudicate a Wish spell?

[Three_Haligonians]

Ah, the joys of high-level play!

Here is the situation I am looking at:

My players just finished up a rather tough battle with a half-iron golem. During the battle the group was exposed to its breath weapon and everyone made their initial save. They continued to fight the villain for the next ten rounds, complete with chasing it down as it tried to flee (over a cliff and into the ocean no less..) and ended up destroying it. Yay for them.

However, once the second Fort save came into play, 3 of them failed. Since it was Iron Golem poison, they died. So the sorceress opts to cast Wish once and bring them all back. We all considered this to be beyond the scope of the "safe" wish list described in the spell and now I, the DM need to figure out the consequences.

Here is the wish:

"I wish that [Character A], [Character B], and [Character C] had resisted the poison that just killed them."

Now, I'm not looking to be a RBDM, or to screw them up royally, or even a "Monkey's Paw" scenario (to an extent...as I will explain). Those kinds of wished I believe come from forcing greater entities (like Efreet or Archfiends) into fullfilling wishes for you.

Instead, as I have said before, the way I see it is when a character casts wish for themselves, the great cosmos conforms to their demand but it would follow "the path of least resistance" which is to say it will do the least amount of work necessary to get the job done. Of course said system will often have unintended consequences since it would be impossible for a character to predict what that path would be. That goes for myself the DM as well, which is why I've come to the collective power of ENworld.

What would you do?

J from Three Haligonians

 

[Vlos]

I believe, if they made their first save, they shouldn't have had to make their second save? Or am I mistaken?

As for the wish, you may being somewhat evil, state they drowned instead thus they restisted the poison because they had drowned before it took effect, but probably not what you were looking for.

One method would be to turn them to stone, thus they would sink to the bottom of the ocean. Being stone, they would not be effected by the poison, but the PC would have to some how retrieve their bodies from the bottom, which could be an adventure.

 

[sjmiller]

What would I do? I would grant the wish. It's a good, clean, simple wish. It's a selfless act of the sorceress, and I feel a good use of a spell that is often abused both by players and, more often, by DMs. Let the character's come back and be done with it. Simple, really.

 

[dshai527]

What the caster is wishing for seems easy when you frist look at it, but when you take a closer look it is really quite complicated. The caster is not wishing them back to life he/she is wishing for an even to be undone or time travel and then a changed event. This leaves a lot of room to play with and have it be fun. (I like wish spells that don't always go as intended). You might have the spell pluck them from an alternate reality where they did make the save, or transport the user to a world where they made it, but he didn't or the BBEG is still alive. Be creative..maybe by undoing the act the god of death feels slighted and takes 3 other souls to even his count and the players learn of this later. Or the god demands a meeting to see why the would do this outside of the normal channels. Just have fun and let us know what happens.

 

[ARandomGod]

Ah, the joys of high-level play!
However, once the second Fort save came into play, 3 of them failed. Since it was Iron Golem poison, they died. So the sorceress opts to cast Wish once and bring them all back. We all considered this to be beyond the scope of the "safe" wish list described in the spell and now I, the DM need to figure out the consequences.

Here is the wish:

"I wish that [Character A], [Character B], and [Character C] had resisted the poison that just killed them."

I'd say that is within the 'safe list'... in that it's "undoing an unfortunate event" that just occured.

Well... undoing ONE unfortunate event might be the extent of the safe wish, and that could be argued as three unfortunate events. Or three ressurections. Which is clearly outside of the scope of the spell.

With that in mind, I'd still let them live as if they hadn't died... but at -9 HP (and stable). They somehow resisted the death of the poison.

Alternatively, I think that it would be in the power of the spell to simply say that they had resisted it ... but they had done so because it had been slowed, and have them all reamake their saves.

 

[Talmun]

Might I suggest something? Marut.

Have the wish bring them back just fine, but their use of magic to avoid death attracts the attention of a Marut Inevitable (3.5MM p.159), who hounds them and demands that they correct the balance of life and death - by dying.

I would craft it so that they don't necessarily have to fight him, maybe running a quest for him (killing a lich or some other undead would also balance the scales, for instance).

 

[werk]

I'd probably allow it to work as intended, but only partially.
(The wish may pervert your intent into a literal but undesirable fulfillment or only a partial fulfillment.)

Wish will normally allow a reroll or a resurrection. A reroll doesn't guarantee success, which is clearly the intent of the caster, so I would just do a strait-forward rez on one of the characters with the associated level loss and leave the other two dead.

 

[Three_Haligonians]

The wish safe list includes this one:

Remove injuries and afflictions. A single wishcan aid one creature per caster level, and all subjects are cured of the same kind of affliction. For example, you could heal all the damage you and your companions have taken, or remove all poison effects from everyone in the party but not do both with the same wish...

Is death by poison a "poison effect" and therefore reversable this way? Or is it too late since the poison has "come and gone"? I'm inclined to follow the former since, if it was a different poison, one that did.. Con Drain for example, even if it had come and gone.. the wish spell would reverse that.. right?

J from Three Haligonians

 

[Nareau]

Well, I know you don't want to be a RBDM...but if I were you, I'd just blink at them and say, "OK. They already did save against that poison. Your spell has no effect."

Alternately, you could take the word "resisted" to bring them back with some kind of ability damage.

I'm a little put-off by the wish because it seems too "meta-gamey" to me. The poison rules in D&D are an extremly poor abstraction of how real poison works, IMHO. If some kid survived after drinking a bottle of bleach, would you say he "resisted" the poison? If you were bitten by a rattlesnake and managed to survive, did you "resist" the poison? No, not really.

The all-or-nothing nature of poison saving throws is an oversimplification. It's a part of the rules that can't easily be translated into an in-game reality.

I would prefer the wish be worded like, "I wish my friends had all survived that battle." Or, "I wish that terrible poison hadn't killed my friends."

Ultimately, I think I would (as the DM) randomly select one of the 3 PC's, and have him come back to life. The other 2 would immediately change into battered, bloody corpses. See, the poison didn't kill your friends...but 2 of them still managed to die during the battle. This is in keeping with the RAW:

Revive the dead. A Wish can bring a dead creature back to life by duplicating a resurrection spell. A Wish can revive a dead creature whose body has been destroyed, but the task takes two wishes, one to recreate the body and another to infuse the body with life again. A Wish cannot prevent a character who was brought back to life from losing an experience level.

and

Undo misfortune. A Wish can undo a single recent event. The Wish forces a reroll of any roll made within the last round (including your last turn). Reality reshapes itself to accommodate the new result. For example, a Wish could undo an opponent's successful save, a foe's successful critical hit (either the attack roll or the critical roll), a friend's failed save, and so on. The reroll, however, may be as bad as or worse than the original roll. An unwilling target gets a Will save to negate the effect, and spell resistance (if any) applies.

Bringing multiple people back from the dead is beyond the scope of a Wish.

Spider

 

[werk]

Is death by poison a "poison effect" and therefore reversable this way? Or is it too late since the poison has "come and gone"?

I believe it is too late. If she would have wished to remove the poison before they failed/died, or to reverse the effect if they had not died, that would have been doable.