Recovering Lost Equipment?

[StreamOfTheSky]

OP, yes, I would allow a wish or miracle to get back all of the stuff lost (just word it carefully, so you don't get...goop). It's not cheating the system to get way beyond your wealth by level, it's to get back what you had fairly acquired already. And loss of hundreds of thousands of gp of items is so incredibly crippling, not allowing something like this would just force the player to roll up a new character anyway.

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

I as the DM would not likely allow a Wish spell to instantly restore the gear, but I'd likely try to entice the player intoa quest for a new set of gear, some useful, powerful set of something or another buried in a tomb/trapped in a demiplane/under a dragon's horde... etc.

It'd be a scinario where I'd say "Yeah, wow, that sucked. But I feel for you, so lets make this interesting...."

 

[Vegepygmy]

Would you allow them to just Wish or Miracle all of their equipment back into existence provided they could pay the XP or had someone (if not a spellcaster) that could?

Wish explicitly states that it can "Create a magic item, or add to the powers of an existing magic item."

So I would allow the items to be recovered, at the rate of one item per wish.

I wouldn't make any special efforts to restore the character's lost magic items. It's a rough world out there, and stuff gets broken. Suck it up, buttercup.

 

[domino]

If you're going to do that, it's not really recovering the items, it's just making a new one. At that point, you might as well wish for better stuff than what you had.

I might not let them recover ALL the stuff, but maybe one wish per 2 items.

Or, make a bunch of non-magical replicas of the equipment the character lost. Then, use the Wish to, at the moment of death, swap the "lost" magical items for the real ones. As far as anyone knows, everything was lost as usual, but what "really" happened was that a bunch of powerless trinkets were incinerated, while the real gear was ripped through time into the future, and the waiting arms of whoever it was who got murdered.

 

[Grogg of the North]

Couldn't you also use Restore Soul's Treasure from Book of Exalted Deeds? It should be a cheaper and safer alternative than wish or miracle.

 

[the Jester]

Killing the character... and costing them 5k xp... and then rewarding them with a pile of molten goo is just kind of a prick thing to do.

If the dm is being a jerk and unfair, sure- say if he forced the party into a no-win battle that they had no way to avoid.

OTOH if the pc dies in a fight that the pcs chose, then no, the dm is just playing the game and applying the consequences of the pcs' choices

Wish explicitly states that it can "Create a magic item, or add to the powers of an existing magic item."

So I would allow the items to be recovered, at the rate of one item per wish.

I wouldn't make any special efforts to restore the character's lost magic items. It's a rough world out there, and stuff gets broken. Suck it up, buttercup.

I'm pretty much with Vegepygmy, although with the caveat that if the pcs used the wish very quickly after the "falling in the lava" event they could, with proper phrasing, avoid having the gear ever having fallen in in the first place.

Wait a day, though, and you've gone beyond the ability of the wish to rewrite time, at least in my campaign.

 

[frankthedm]

...the problem with this spell is no that its powerful... its the fact that players are allowed to have it so easily.

I'd say the problem with the spell is when people assume the Wish spell can do more than it is supposed to & the DM is unwilling to make use of Wish's built in balancing features. Wish has PLENTY of limitations, the caster uses one of the bullet list options or risks getting partial fulfillment or undesirable fulfillment if the request goes beyond the power of those listed options.

Wish :: d20srd.org

In previous editions Wish could do a lot more. A fine example is the Undo Misfortune option doesn't even actually undo the misfortune, it ONLY allows a single reroll to have a chance of undoing the misfortune.

 

[was]

I'd probably say no..unless there was like an artifact of great value to a pc..then I would have it survive somehow and make the pc quest to get it back.