D&D 5E Wish & Simulacrum

[Fanaelialae]

The problem is that it adds a new pacing issue that is unique to longer lasting spells like simulacrum and contingency. With the 6-8 encounter thing...you don't actually need to do 6-8 encounters every single day. You can have days that are busy in terms of combat, and then days of travel or investigating in a city or trying to get something political done. You can have your attrition-based survival happen every so often, and if they're back to back or a week apart.

But simulacrum breaks that dynamic.

Not in my experience. If you're traveling or investigating, you aren't spending 12 hours casting a spell. If you're spending 12 hours casting a spell, you aren't doing much of anything else that day.

Prior to wish, you really only get one Simulacrum per adventure unless the DM builds in time for you to make a new one. Once you do have wish, the player still has to risk not having wish that day if they want to replace the Simulacrum. Unless you're telling them outright, "Today's just an investigation day so you're not going to need that wish. Go ahead and use it", they don't know for sure what's going to happen. The investigation or travel could lead to one or more dangerous encounters.

And so the DM became scared about letting the characters have any free time or finding too much gold. Bob the warrior's dreams of rebuilding a ruined castle to use as a base were shattered because it would mean Tim the wizard would get too much use of one of his spells.

No, the DM doesn't. See, the great thing about Simulacrum is that you only get one. I could give Bob a billion gold and 10 years to build his castle. How many simulacrums does Tim get to make in preparation for the next adventure? Assuming the next adventure picks up after the castle has been built, one Simulacrum. That's it.

Yes, simulacrum has weaknesses, but it's still an insanely good spell, and one of the reasons why is you can cast it on a day you have nothing else to do and retain the benefits until you need them. Just because a glass cannon has the weakness of being a glass cannon doesn't mean it can't be too strong of an option.

It's a good spell. It's not just a glass cannon though. A wizard is a glass cannon. It's a wet cardboard cannon which is twice as delicate.

Also nothing says a simulacrum can't take rests and regain abilities...actually let's not get into how badly worded this spell is.

The spell literally says exactly that. Twisting the intent of an ability using creative interpretation of text is something no DM should tolerate. I certainly don't.

Yeah, and...? Having the simulacrum is still an insane advantage in any dangerous fight.

It's an advantage, but not an insane one. It is nice while it lasts but it's far from a guarantee that you'll have it for the duration of an adventure.

See, depending on the situation, it's something that could easily be very reasonable without the DM realizing they were setting themselves up. Powerful wizard wants to help you defeat the evil warlock, but is busy holding a demonic portal closed with a spell that he can't move away from! Party asks if this is so important to him and he's not going anywhere, why not let them copy him? Not like he's going anywhere.

It just sets up a lot of situations where the DM has to be ready to justify a no. Or they could just not justify it and leave the players rolling their eyes. It's an annoying lesser of two evils, shutting down a good idea that makes sense rather then breaking things mechanically or forcing you to rebalance everything.

That's a very specific scenario. Do all of your campaigns and all of your adventures feature a powerful wizard stuck holding shut a demon door? Or is that maybe a rare outlier?

Even then, the wizard needs to trust the PCs sufficiently to entrust them with essentially himself. What if they are actually agents of the demons, and they want to use the copy to slay the wizard and release the demons (because they're presumably not strong enough to do so without this high powered Simulacrum).

Look man, if it works well in your games, I'm honestly happy it does. But see, I'm not the kind of person that looks at a potential problem and decides "You know what? In 80% of these cases, this doesn't cause a noticeable issue and is kind of cool", I look at what bad cases there are, and what prevents a user from reaching them. And if it doesn't put those cases in hard-to-reach-and/or-dubious-practicality-at-that-point (such as taking 3 levels of sorc so you can twin simulacrum), then I see it as a problem.

Maybe I'm just a pessimist.

I'm afb but I'm fairly certain you can't twin simulacrum.

I don't think it's just 80% of cases. I think it's basically 100% that if you're having issues with Simulacrum it's just indicative of a more general problem that you would still have even if you banned Simulacrum. It might be a good indicator that you have problems, but it's always better to address the root of an issue rather than running around treating the symptoms.

You're welcome to your own opinion, and I doubt at this point that I'm going to change yours. The best advice I can give you is to try it in actual play and see whether it actually breaks anything.

How do they know it can be dispelled so easily? Does every spellcaster in the world necessarily know what simulacrum even is? Do they even know it isn't real, given that it appears the same as the original? Maybe they'd end up dispelling the real one by accident? Or think it's simply a brother or something? Or you could have it wear different equipment to disguise itself as just another party member.

If you came into combat with two creatures, would your first reaction be to try and dispel one of them? For the DM they know it's a simulacrum, but for creatures in the world there's a leap in logic to be making and one not usually worth taking in the middle of dangerous combat.

A simple detect magic spell would reveal that this is a "person" radiating illusion magic. Truesight would work as well.

Apart from that, you could just look at which "clone" is giving orders and which one is following them. At the levels where you are seeing Simulacrum, many of the spellcasting opponents will be familiar with the spell themselves.

 

[Li Shenron]

There is obviously something wrong in a spell that can be used to effectively generate more spell slots of the same and even higher level than the one required to cast it, even if it costs some gp. You can try to enforce the components requirements to prevent abuse, but then you are openly acting against a single spell, unless you also start rationing other spells' costly materials, so as a DM you'll be seen as actively trying to hamper a specific player's option by using different measures on the same mechanic. But at least it's an option, together with strictly enforcing the 12-hours casting time... it's not that huge of a limitation TBH, but it could be argued that it leaves too little time to do anything useful for the adventure for the rest of the day (24 hours minus 12 for casting, minus 8 for sleeping, minus eating, minus travelling...) so it can be effectively considered a spell you can only cast during a day off.

Treating the clone as another (N)PC who takes her share of XP is an interesting idea, and I like it better than increasing all encounters difficulties which is an artificial alteration of the story.

 

[Maxperson]

I would let the player decide from these two options.

1) It doesn't work.
2) It does work, but as wizards have been around for many thousands of years before you were born, the one who figured it out first and got infinite wishes, including several designed to detect upstarts who start using this method, will be coming for you very shortly.

 

[jasper]

Frozenstep has some good points and points I disagree with. Simulacrum bends some the pacing dynamic but so do pets, companions, some summoning minions spells etc. The best way for me to deal with the pacing issue is to consider the silly simulacrum a suddenly surprise dropped in player who you must let play or mom is not bring the cookies to the game table. Ok. Just simulacrum and some other type spells as another pc in the party. However, please Simulacrum players have your stuff read 3 initiatives before your own.

Totally disagree with Frozenstep on …..How do they know it can be dispelled so easily? Does every spellcaster in the world necessarily know what simulacrum even is?.. chain of thought. Are you saying depending on the school system your spell caster grew up in, they may not have access to Simulacrum? My default if the PHB spells are common core type.

Li Shreron “Try to enforce material component costs to prevent abuse?” It costs 1,500 GP and 100 GP to repair it. The component cost is one of the way to prevent abuse.

General knowledge drop. For material components cost for all the books is 87,442 gp 1 sp 2 cp.

 

[Li Shenron]

Li Shreron “Try to enforce material component costs to prevent abuse?” It costs 1,500 GP and 100 GP to repair it. The component cost is one of the way to prevent abuse.

It doesn't. By the time you can cast Simulacrum (13th level) you're fighting monsters in the CR11-16 range, each of which drops an average treasure of almost 1000gp. You will have enough money to cast Simulacrum every day.

What I meant by enforcing the material component (probably not at all clear from my previous post) is to require the specific component itself for each casting, in this case a ruby. You can then have all the money in the world, but it still doesn't mean you can have all the 1500gp rubies in the world. This is the way spells like Resurrection have been often restricted since past editions, when for instance requiring 5000gp worth of diamonds. It's risky business however to enforce specific materials, it often feels too arbitrary and many players hate that.

 

[Frozenstep]

Not in my experience. If you're traveling or investigating, you aren't spending 12 hours casting a spell. If you're spending 12 hours casting a spell, you aren't doing much of anything else that day.

Prior to wish, you really only get one Simulacrum per adventure unless the DM builds in time for you to make a new one. Once you do have wish, the player still has to risk not having wish that day if they want to replace the Simulacrum. Unless you're telling them outright, "Today's just an investigation day so you're not going to need that wish. Go ahead and use it", they don't know for sure what's going to happen. The investigation or travel could lead to one or more dangerous encounters.

You never have days where the party is just on a boat travelling somewhere? Or in a city, doing little while other party members try to get political things done or gathering information? If you don't have that in your campaign...well I'm sorry but other people do, and it puts DMs who run those scenarios in an awkward position of either constantly enabling simulacrum, or having to take specific steps to stop it.

Surprise encounters happen, but it's unlikely a single encounter when the party is full on resources will die to a single encounter, and after that single encounter they can likely regroup with the wizard and either barricade themselves in or abandon simulacrum. Or I guess you could throw an encounter at the wizard, who has hopefully taken some precaution. If your story can justify someone coming after them in the middle of the day in a random room in the city (or possibly in a palace, if you're guests of a king or something), or if the party leaves a party member as a guard.

The point is, the DM can write what is a reasonable scenario (you are guests of the king, but you suspect one of his advisers is a demon, try to figure out which) and then suddenly find themselves having to justify ways to block simulacrum from being cast. That's not a cool situation to be in.

No, the DM doesn't. See, the great thing about Simulacrum is that you only get one. I could give Bob a billion gold and 10 years to build his castle. How many simulacrums does Tim get to make in preparation for the next adventure? Assuming the next adventure picks up after the castle has been built, one Simulacrum. That's it.

Again, it really depends on the pace, and you're ignoring some campaigns are paced differently and simulacrum screws those campaigns over. Bob gets his gold, and hires some builders to start working on the castle. Tim makes a simulacrum as Bob negotiates prices and works through blueprint stuff. Then they hear rumors of people vanishing in a nearby village and go to investigate, leaving the workers to continue. After a crazy day of investigating and fighting evil fey they return to find the workers missing. Bob spends time investigating, giving Tim time to make another simulacrum.

Is that unreasonable? Can you not have an adventure like that? Is that illegal? But then simulacrum becomes way stronger in those scenarios. Again, I am a pessimist. If it breaks the game in a scenario that is entirely reasonable, then it doesn't matter if it's cool for 80% of people, it's still not ok.

It's a good spell. It's not just a glass cannon though. A wizard is a glass cannon. It's a wet cardboard cannon which is twice as delicate.

The spell literally says exactly that. Twisting the intent of an ability using creative interpretation of text is something no DM should tolerate. I certainly don't.

A glass cannon is a glass cannon. If you could summon a creature that had 1 health but did 500d10 damage when it hit, it wouldn't be good for game health despite being literally the most delicate thing ever.

You have to realize when you give something strengths and weaknesses, at some point you can give something so much strength that it unbalances the game no matter what kind of weaknesses you add. The spell is either too good despite all the problems, or it's straight up useless as you've had to load on so many weaknesses the spell is not practical. You cannot find a point of good balance because you've basically created such a dangerous tipping point that it simply will not ever work. The better design would be to cut down on the strength a little, so the tipping point becomes wider and more forgiving and thus you can find a point of balance.

It's an advantage, but not an insane one. It is nice while it lasts but it's far from a guarantee that you'll have it for the duration of an adventure.

That's a very specific scenario. Do all of your campaigns and all of your adventures feature a powerful wizard stuck holding shut a demon door? Or is that maybe a rare outlier?

Even then, the wizard needs to trust the PCs sufficiently to entrust them with essentially himself. What if they are actually agents of the demons, and they want to use the copy to slay the wizard and release the demons (because they're presumably not strong enough to do so without this high powered Simulacrum).

Again, I am a pessimist. We can go through more examples, but the point is this spell creates lots of corner cases where suddenly a simulacrum is a great idea, and the DM needs to justify a shut down of the idea in advance.

I'm afb but I'm fairly certain you can't twin simulacrum.

I don't think it's just 80% of cases. I think it's basically 100% that if you're having issues with Simulacrum it's just indicative of a more general problem that you would still have even if you banned Simulacrum. It might be a good indicator that you have problems, but it's always better to address the root of an issue rather than running around treating the symptoms.

Stackoverflow says yes to twin simulacrum, but I seriously don't even care about that.

What's the root of the issue of a campaign where you're not fighting every single day, and have days that you can guess are reasonably safe (staying in a city)?

You're welcome to your own opinion, and I doubt at this point that I'm going to change yours. The best advice I can give you is to try it in actual play and see whether it actually breaks anything.

If you can't see that people run their campaigns and stories differently, and they can be just as valid ways to run the game and they have different strengths and weaknesses, and simulacrum can be a problem in some of them, yeah, I don't think I'll be able to change yours either. I think in the end any further discussion between us would just devolve to that, I think there are legitimate ways to run the game that are perfectly fine except that they enable simulacrum, and I see simulacrum as too good of a reward for the wizard getting some free time.

A simple detect magic spell would reveal that this is a "person" radiating illusion magic. Truesight would work as well.

Apart from that, you could just look at which "clone" is giving orders and which one is following them. At the levels where you are seeing Simulacrum, many of the spellcasting opponents will be familiar with the spell themselves.

Two cases which aren't always going to be true, even when fighting spellcasters. Also, if you're that high level of a wizard, you could have gotten Rary's Telepathic Bond.

Might depend on the spellcaster, maybe not everyone studies what wizards do. Clerics/druids/sorcerers don't particularly need to know every wizard spell. But it's not as big of a deal honestly, DM can always throw in that they knew a wizard or something from their past.

 

[Frozenstep]

Frozenstep has some good points and points I disagree with. Simulacrum bends some the pacing dynamic but so do pets, companions, some summoning minions spells etc. The best way for me to deal with the pacing issue is to consider the silly simulacrum a suddenly surprise dropped in player who you must let play or mom is not bring the cookies to the game table. Ok. Just simulacrum and some other type spells as another pc in the party. However, please Simulacrum players have your stuff read 3 initiatives before your own.

I don't think you and I are talking about pacing issues in the same manner. I'm talking about characters getting downtime where they're not fighting, and how that comes up plenty of times in a campaign and so simulacrum isn't going to be a one-off thing.

Totally disagree with Frozenstep on …..How do they know it can be dispelled so easily? Does every spellcaster in the world necessarily know what simulacrum even is?.. chain of thought. Are you saying depending on the school system your spell caster grew up in, they may not have access to Simulacrum? My default if the PHB spells are common core type.

Uh...yes? Clerics (except arcana), druids, sorcerers, warlocks, paladins, rangers, artificers, and 4 element monks do not have access to simulacrum. Does a druid who lives in the forest and is one with nature somehow know what a simulacrum is and how it works even if they've never met a wizard in their life?

It's more likely they've heard of undead tbh, and undead can't be dispelled.

 

[Maestrino]

You never have days where the party is just on a boat travelling somewhere? Or in a city, doing little while other party members try to get political things done or gathering information?


...

Bob spends time investigating, giving Tim time to make another simulacrum.

...

Again, I am a pessimist. We can go through more examples, but the point is this spell creates lots of corner cases where suddenly a simulacrum is a great idea, and the DM needs to justify a shut down of the idea in advance.

...

Stackoverflow says yes to twin simulacrum, but I seriously don't even care about that.

A few things...

Sure, the party might be traveling on a boat for days. Where do they get the snow, and how do they keep it from melting in the 12 hours it takes to cast the spell?

Tim can't make a 2nd simulacrum. Doing so destroys the first simulacrum. You can't have more than one.

Why would I shut my players down from using their awesome epic abilities that they've earned. I'll just design harder challenges for them to think their way through.

And theoretically a sorcerer could twin simulacrum, but sorcerers don't have access to simulacrum. There's no feat that lets a sorcerer learn a 7th level spell from a different list. They'd have to get a wish-granting item and burn a wish to learn simulacrum before they could even cast it.

 

[Frozenstep]

A few things...

Sure, the party might be traveling on a boat for days. Where do they get the snow, and how do they keep it from melting in the 12 hours it takes to cast the spell?

Tim can't make a 2nd simulacrum. Doing so destroys the first simulacrum. You can't have more than one.

Why would I shut my players down from using their awesome epic abilities that they've earned. I'll just design harder challenges for them to think their way through.

And theoretically a sorcerer could twin simulacrum, but sorcerers don't have access to simulacrum. There's no feat that lets a sorcerer learn a 7th level spell from a different list. They'd have to get a wish-granting item and burn a wish to learn simulacrum before they could even cast it.

1: Shape water. Either by you or a party member. If you rule this doesn't work, now we're getting into "this spell is limited by annoyance" and it's not a fun position to be in from a DM side.

2: The idea was that if the simulacrum died/used up all spells or abilities it had, Tim has a chance to recreate it, which was an argument against the idea you'd only ever have a single simulacrum in any campaign.

3: Now we're really getting to repeated points. If you look back, I said this could result in the wizard making the adventure more difficult for the party if they can't get as much value out of the spell as you were balancing for. There's just something wrong with a spell potentially putting you in this position.

4: I was talking about a wizard multi-classing over to grab 3 levels of sorcerer to grab meta-magic. I dismissed the idea as kind of a silly corner case.

 

[DM-Rocco]

A few things...

Sure, the party might be traveling on a boat for days. Where do they get the snow, and how do they keep it from melting in the 12 hours it takes to cast the spell?

Tim can't make a 2nd simulacrum. Doing so destroys the first simulacrum. You can't have more than one.

Why would I shut my players down from using their awesome epic abilities that they've earned. I'll just design harder challenges for them to think their way through.

And theoretically a sorcerer could twin simulacrum, but sorcerers don't have access to simulacrum. There's no feat that lets a sorcerer learn a 7th level spell from a different list. They'd have to get a wish-granting item and burn a wish to learn simulacrum before they could even cast it.

A sorcerer could twin the Wish spell, but yes, if they wanted it on there list, they would have to do something like you suggest.