D&D 5E Wish and the requirement removal

[Fanaelialae]

I mean, I know I can do anything in my campaign. Unless you're saying that you would've hunted me down and John Wick me and my players over my interpretation of Wish.

Seeing as how my wife is alive, and you haven't killed my dog (haven't even got a dog) or stolen my car, I think I can let it slide this time.

In all seriousness though, what I was saying is that I'm not trying to dictate how you run your game. I just don't think that this interpretation of wish is a good idea.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I will add: I've yet to find anything in this thread particularly too absurd. I mean, don't get me wrong—Sequestering the whole Abyss, Teleporting to the moon, having that moon come crashing down, all because of a vague rule—these all sound insane. And yet, I believe a setting should have these things taken to account. At tier 4, you can be fighting several demon lords at once depending on how you do about it. You're already exceptionally ridiculous. Pantheons should be closely monitoring your actions, demons should be offering you whole demiplane kingdoms for your allegiance, Fey should look to you for wisdom and lower level adventurers should be begging for your patronage.

The big issue here isn't that Wish can't do those things. Arguably it can. The issue you saying it can do those things without the usual penalty risk, because of what essentially a crude attempt to rules-lawyer the word "requirements". I mean, yes this is the fault of WotC that you can even try, but an earlier post in this thread neatly dissected what "requirements" actually are for a spell, and they're not "anything to do with the spell" as you seem to be interpreting it.

Those happening in a campaign would make sense for the full-on usage of Wish. For the no-risk version though? They obviously don't. The world would have been destroyed the first time someone got access to Wish if they could do that stuff 1/day with no risk to them. Either that or there'd be a whole branch of the celestial bureaucracy, with both devils and angels in it, dedicated to hunting down and murdering every caster capable of casting Wish who got above level 16. Which would be a fun plot for book but maybe not so much for a game.

To add, it's obviously not RAI, because they would have explained Wish quite differently if it was, and earlier-edition versions of Wish were worded in ways that didn't allow this peculiar rules-lawyering.

I mean, look at the 3E version: Wish :: d20srd.org

You can quite clearly see the 5E version's intent from that. It's an attempt to simplify, streamline, and make more elegant the 3E Wish's initial four options (and to make other usage both more dangerous and more significant, but that's out-of-scope for this discussion). But they didn't really nail it, so they ended up with a rules-lawyer-able wording.

 

[Oofta]

...
To add, it's obviously not RAI, because they would have explained Wish quite differently if it was, and earlier-edition versions of Wish were worded in ways that didn't allow this peculiar rules-lawyering.

I mean, look at the 3E version: Wish :: d20srd.org

You can quite clearly see the 5E version's intent from that. It's an attempt to simplify, streamline, and make more elegant the 3E Wish's initial four options (and to make other usage both more dangerous and more significant, but that's out-of-scope for this discussion). But they didn't really nail it, so they ended up with a rules-lawyer-able wording.

One of the lessons from 3.5 is that no matter what you do you can not stop rules lawyers from finding a system exploit. In 3.5 we had Pun-Pun and tons of errata and rules clarifications. In 4E they tried to fix it in a different way with detailed powers.

There will always be a need for a DM to make judgement calls for a game along the lines of 5E no matter what level of detail is provided or how many loopholes they try to close.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There will always be a need for a DM to make judgement calls for a game along the lines of 5E no matter what level of detail is provided or how many loopholes they try to close.

Agreed, though interesting 3E, 4E, and 5E show them kind of getting successively better at wording stuff to avoid these kind of problems. 3E first attempts this, but has a lot of careless language and not-considering-the-full-ramifications. 4E is far tighter and tends to limit the secondary fall-out of stuff, but fails to account for how many things in brought in (so you don't get Pun-Pun, but you do get some pretty hilarious DPRs), and they tried to solve the "whoops we didn't think of that" with errata, which hmmmm had mixed success (but avoided any disasters, I feel). 5E has tried, generally, to use extremely clear language, keep everything very simple, and prevent crunch growth to together minimize the need for interpretation and so on. Almost all the problems 5E has come from spells, I note, which seem to have been given a little less of a thorough checking than other stuff (though again, it's still pretty thorough!).

 

[Asisreo]

The big issue here isn't that Wish can't do those things. Arguably it can. The issue you saying it can do those things without the usual penalty risk, because of what essentially a crude attempt to rules-lawyer the word "requirements". I mean, yes this is the fault of WotC that you can even try, but an earlier post in this thread neatly dissected what "requirements" actually are for a spell, and they're not "anything to do with the spell" as you seem to be interpreting it.

Those happening in a campaign would make sense for the full-on usage of Wish. For the no-risk version though? They obviously don't. The world would have been destroyed the first time someone got access to Wish if they could do that stuff 1/day with no risk to them. Either that or there'd be a whole branch of the celestial bureaucracy, with both devils and angels in it, dedicated to hunting down and murdering every caster capable of casting Wish who got above level 16. Which would be a fun plot for book but maybe not so much for a game.

To add, it's obviously not RAI, because they would have explained Wish quite differently if it was, and earlier-edition versions of Wish were worded in ways that didn't allow this peculiar rules-lawyering.

I mean, look at the 3E version: Wish :: d20srd.org

You can quite clearly see the 5E version's intent from that. It's an attempt to simplify, streamline, and make more elegant the 3E Wish's initial four options (and to make other usage both more dangerous and more significant, but that's out-of-scope for this discussion). But they didn't really nail it, so they ended up with a rules-lawyer-able wording.

I actually am not interpreting it as "anything to do with the spell." I've already mentioned the 5 specific requirements I believe the spell cab bypass: Casting Time, Components, Concentration, Targeting, and Attack Rolls.

No Sequestering abyss or teleporting moons. No unlimited spirit guardians or polymorphing yourself into a tarrasque.

I can see an unspoken pact amongst celestials and devils to keep mortals from abusing the casting of Wish. Primus also technically deals with such abuse, not to mention a wizard still might accidentally TPK themselves by teleporting a moon or something dumb. Whether that's beyond the scope, sure, I'm not really saying it should be like that. I'm just saying that the five requirements seem to be the most logical RAW while still being reasonable, from the way I'm reading it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I actually am not interpreting it as "anything to do with the spell." I've already mentioned the 5 specific requirements I believe the spell cab bypass: Casting Time, Components, Concentration, Targeting, and Attack Rolls.

I don't think targeting, concentration or attack rolls are "requirements" in the same sense casting time, required class, and components are. I don't think it's RAW or RAI to understand Wish as allowing you to cast spells on things that aren't suitable targets for that spell in question - it's really prone to nonsensical results, like I don't think you can make Animate Objects work on people or not require Concentration (esp. as the duration is "Concentration, up to 1 minute", which means if you're not concentrating it's 0, so that's a nonsensical result, and there's no RAW interpretation to get around that - if you found a spell that had a duration and didn't specify it was dependent on Concentration, even though it mentioned requiring Concentration else where, you might be able to work that). Nor would in affect more objects than normal up-casting. Notice that re-rolling rolls is one of the other (dangerous) options for the spell, so getting to ignore attack rolls (or saves) seems out-of-line and into the "dangerous" version's territory, and I'm not seeing that as a "requirement" in the same sense at all - rather it's part of the spell.

You absolutely can turn people into marionettes and animate them with the dangerous version of the spell, of course (subject to the DM screwing you over and the normal drawbacks).

 

[shadowoflameth]

Rule whenever I've played or DM's the player must Wish in character. And suppose you want to duplicate 8th level spell x. It needs an hour to cast costs 1,000gp. and you have to do it at night. Now none of that is true. The effect happens instantaneously as if you met those requirements.

 

[FarBeyondC]

For the third one, concentration, it says "you don't need to meet any requirement in that spell." It doesn't say "you don't need to meet any requirement to cast the spell." In fact, the assessment that Wish only duplicates the effects isn't a solid argument, as Wish says it duplicates the spell, not the effects.

You're conflating a spell's resolution mechanics with its requirements. Concentration is a part of the duration portion of a spell's resolution mechanics, putting a second limitation on how long a spell lasts. It is not necessary that a spell or its effects last beyond the instant of its casting.

Targeting, we partially agree. That is, you can cast the spell without targeting, but under most circumstances the spell will just not do anything. For instance, you can target a vase with speak with dead. The spell takes effect, consuming the spellslot, but since the vase isn't a corpse, all effects that references a corpse does not activate.

Where's the partially? The spell happens, just to no effect. Which is a perfectly fine result for a spell (though I'm sure its caster would disagree); a spell is not required to be effective.

Attack rolls are weird. It basically is a requirement. If you want to cast Ray of Sickness without wish, you must target a creature and you must make an attack roll. You can't ignore the attack roll part of the spell in order for it to take effect. Even if you want it to miss, you have to target and attack something. That could be classified as a requirement.

Again, you're conflating a spell's resolution mechanics with requirements. As per the Unseen Attackers and Targets part of the Making an Attack rules, you can strike at a location, potentially hitting if a target is there (as determined by the result of your attack roll) or automatically missing if a target is not there. Whether Ray of Sickness actually affects anyone does not change the fact Ray of Sickness, when cast, has an effect- hit or miss, the ray of sickening green energy still lashes out.

 

[Asisreo]

You're conflating a spell's resolution mechanics with its requirements. Concentration is a part of the duration portion of a spell's resolution mechanics, putting a second limitation on how long a spell lasts. It is not necessary that a spell or its effects last beyond the instant of its casting.



Where's the partially? The spell happens, just to no effect. Which is a perfectly fine result for a spell (though I'm sure its caster would disagree); a spell is not required to be effective.



Again, you're conflating a spell's resolution mechanics with requirements. As per the Unseen Attackers and Targets part of the Making an Attack rules, you can strike at a location, potentially hitting if a target is there (as determined by the result of your attack roll) or automatically missing if a target is not there. Whether Ray of Sickness actually affects anyone does not change the fact Ray of Sickness, when cast, has an effect- hit or miss, the ray of sickening green energy still lashes out.

But spell resolution mechanic is a new term you're using to describe it. I believe what you're saying is that because you can cast true resurrection on an incompatible corpse, even though the corpse doesn't come back, the spell was cast with no perceptible effect.

The question now is, is this true? Can you cast, say fireball, without choosing a point? Can the player say "I want to cast fireball at nowhere, in order to waste my spellslot?" If they can, then targeting is not a requirement for the spell. If they can't, then you are required to choose a point for the spell to be cast.

Likewise, can a player say "I want to cast invisibility but I refuse to concentrate on it?"

Why would they care? Because it counts as "casting a spell" even if no effect happens. It can be targeted by counterspell and any effect they gain from using the "cast a spell" action is given to them. If a player asked to cast guidance but "refusing to concentrate on it." Do they keep concentration on a previous spell?

How about a player refusing to make an attack roll? Does the spell still take effect? Can he cast ray of enfeeblement with the purpose to have the spell do nothing or purposefully miss?

This is where your line of logic is taking spellcasting.

 

[FarBeyondC]

But spell resolution mechanic is a new term you're using to describe it. I believe what you're saying is that because you can cast true resurrection on an incompatible corpse, even though the corpse doesn't come back, the spell was cast with no perceptible effect.

No effect, period (perceptible or otherwise). Otherwise, yes.

The question now is, is this true? Can you cast, say fireball, without choosing a point? Can the player say "I want to cast fireball at nowhere, in order to waste my spellslot?" If they can, then targeting is not a requirement for the spell. If they can't, then you are required to choose a point for the spell to be cast.

You can cast fireball without choosing a point; it'll just go somewhere random in its range. If a player says "I want to cast fireball at nowhere, in order to waste my spellslot?" I'll ask them to show me where nowhere is.

Likewise, can a player say "I want to cast invisibility but I refuse to concentrate on it?"

Unlike the previous example, this is possible; unless something else is concentrating for them, they go invisible for an instant, then the spell ends (due to lack of concentration) and they become visible again.

If a player asked to cast guidance but "refusing to concentrate on it." Do they keep concentration on a previous spell?

No, because the act of casting a spell that requires concentration (whether you decide to concentrate on it or not) breaks concentration on previously cast spell.

How about a player refusing to make an attack roll? Does the spell still take effect? Can he cast ray of enfeeblement with the purpose to have the spell do nothing or purposefully miss?

The spell still takes effect.

- If the caster aims the spell at a location where nothing is, it misses.

- If the caster aims the spell at a location where something is, even if the caster isn't aware of that something being there, an attack roll will be made to see if the spell hits. If the player refuses to make the attack roll, the attack roll will be made on their behalf.

- If the caster refuses to aim the spell, the spell will be made to go in a random direction.

Purposefully missing with the spell is possible (spell goes where creatures aren't), but the spell always does something, even if that something is simply waste the spell slot and time used to cast it.