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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5420446" data-attributes="member: 55271">Real world example of wizards "ruining everything":The PCs need a wish spell in order to get past a magically sealed door. They ask their patrons in the Imperial Church to procure one for them. After much wrangling, they get a message from their contact that he's secured a ring of two wishes.Two of the PCs go to pick it up.But their contact in the Imperial Church is actually a traitor working for a rival group that also wants to get through the doors. So the GM has concocted a plan by which the traitor will mark the ring so that it can be magically retrieved. As soon as the PCs leave his office with the ring he telepathically contacts a spellcaster who casts scry on the ring and then teleports a strike force of trolls, ogres, and goblins to "steal" the ring".The plan is simple: There'll be a minor melee in which the goblins will grapple the ring-carrier and then they'll all teleport away. They don't actually have to pickpocket the ring, because in reality the traitor will have magically retrieved it during the chaos.PC wizard screwjob #1: Seeing the ambush arrive, he immediately grabs his partner and casts dimension door to escape the ambush. The result is a race of short-range teleports across the length of the city as the two groups try to engage each other. The PCs eventually succeed in getting back to the inn where the other PCs were waiting.The result is a battle royale / siege: The inn was a gathering point for other wandering adventurers, and they recruited several on-the-fly to help them defend the inn. They end up killing several bad guys, but the bad guys still succeed in stealing the ring (since it was pretty much a foolproof spell they were using to do it).PCs are furious. They race for the magically sealed door. When they arrive, they find it hasn't been opened yet.PC Wizard screwjob #2: A scrying spell. The ring itself has been placed in a shielded location, so they instead scry one of the goblins that was part of the ambush. They luck out: The goblin isn't under the aegis of the scry-shield.But he's also in a completely nondescript room. So they poke him with a whispering wind spell to freak him out and send him running for his boss. This works: He runs to his boss... who is talking to another character in front of an altar decked in Imperial Church symbology. The other character is a spellcaster who detects and dispels the scrying, but the PCs have their lead.They spend the next session tracking down the specific Imperial Church (there were 12 options within the city), laying a siege, and (eventually) retrieving the ring.Holy crap! They completely wrecked the game!Not really. Why? Because while the GM may have put together a clever scheme for his NPCs to attempt, he didn't invest himself into any particular outcome from that scheme. It's impossible to ruin the GM's intentions if the GM was never wedded to them in the first place.But what about all the other PCs? Weren't they terribly bored to just be sitting around watching the spellcasters having all the fun?Are you crazy? The rogue had a great time; she was tossed over the wizard's shoulder and carried through dimension doors while firing arrows behind them at the flying ogre that was pursuing them. All of them had a blast at the siege/battle royale. The urban druid and religious knight were the ones who investigated all the different Imperial Churches in town. And so forth.The magic didn't "ruin" anything or "steal" other people's fun. It empowered the group and created the fun.</blockquote>

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