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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8950177" data-attributes="member: 6790260">From what I can tell, it mostly arises from the extremely old-school notion of making every powerful choice suck at least a little bit, and to suck more in proportion to the amount of power. That is, most folks agree that gaining power should come at some kind of price, whatever it may be, but they differ on when that price should be paid, and how big it should be.In the old school way of doing things, you allow outright things that could break the game--but the cost is prohibitively steep in almost all cases. This means the only times it will be taken are by the unlearned (those who haven't yet learned better), the stupid (those who should have learned but didn't), the desperate (those who have learned, but see no other option), or the crazy (those who have learned and don't care.) The punitive angle is kind of the point; without a stick, there is no lesson.By comparison, the "new school" way of doing things is to not have any specific rules for this stuff, and make it purely a negotiation between player and DM if they wish to go off the rails. Essentially, it's saying, "There's no need to be punitive. Just don't bother having rules for it in the first place. If the whole point is to bend or break the rules, then just go outside the rules and come to a decision some other way."The former, more or less, assumes that players will always be striving to do the most stupidly broken, powerful thing they can do. That every player will push everything to infinity and beyond, without care, unless forced to care. It's a very Hobbesian worldview, where every player is a sort of chaos gremlin that has to be forced, on pain of (character) death, to behave. The latter assumes that players pursue stuff like this in good faith, and thus an inherently punitive bias is counterproductive or even destructive. Instead, it goes for a more neutral discussion-table approach, where the two sides make their cases and determine an appropriate outcome together.Under that old-school, Hobbesian worldview, a wish without a Jerkass Genie is effectively carte blanche for the players to destroy the game--and they are guaranteed to take it. Hence, there must be steep penalties; to lack steep penalties would be to invite outright disaster.</blockquote>

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