Wish

[Dandu]

Wishing for more wishes is bad.

Wishing for a Cancel of Invocation, on the other hand...

 

[Greenfield]

sheesh i wouldnt have thought of any of all that. well what about my druid/nymph question. its really more for my own knowledge.

"Cast spells as a Druid of" any level isn't the same as being a Druid of that level. Druids get Animal Empathy, Wind Shape, Animal Companion etc that the Nymph doesn't have. So I'd bite the bullet and double stack the spells, rather than the levels.

As for the Level check: That one's a toss up. The UMD level check, in the pure form (DC 37) v the "Wizard using a scroll above their level" level check, which doesn't use UMD at all, but is a straight 5% failure per level you're short.

Since the character doesn't actually have an Arcane caster level, I'd make them go the pure UMD route, but that's just me.

And good catch on the Intelligence score check.

The player's solution will probably be to hire someone else to read it for him, since he can't.

That's when the person hired decides to steal that very valuable scroll and off the PC to cover his tracks.

As for three scrolls of Limited Wish: Check the total value of said scrolls , and see if they're within the price range of magic item the Wish can create.

Alternately, have them be three used Wish scrolls, which are worth essentially nothing.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Wishing for another level: laser, or bubble?

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Call bull-poopie.

Wishing for more wishes should be completely out. There is no way that a single spell should have the power to make six more of the same spell. Especially a spell with an EXP cost of 5000xp. Not how the Wish spell should work by any stretch of the imagination.

The Wish spell says it has a minimum xp cost of 5000xp, or whatever the xp cost for the spell it is duplicating. Since you're duplicating a 5,000xp spell, it's definitely 5,000xp per the Wishes in the ring, plus the three Wish scrolls.

Even if you permitted this, you'd need to drain this PC of 30,000 xp for the creation of 6 Wish spell effects.

[EDIT- Depending upon what version of Gate spell, that's another 1,000xp]

A level 4 character could potentially have between 6,000~9,999xp. This would knock him to at the very least -20,001xp and make him super dead. Like, raise as a Wight dead or something.

The line in the Wish spell, "You may try to use a wish to produce greater effects than these, but doing so is dangerous." is very literally true here. Since there isn't enough xp to drain for the creation of these items, such some xp from the rest of the party, After you kill this PC and turn him into a Wight. If they're level 4 also (and closer to 6,000xp than 9,999) you might end up killing 3 more.

@Herobizkit and @Greenfield are absolutely correct on how difficult it should be for a level 4 Scout to cast a level 9 Arcane scroll. The mechanics for pulling this off should be out the the range of possibility for such a character, unless serious skill buffs. If the rest of the party supports the skill buffs to accomplish this, then most definitely drain xp from all those involved.

He clearly has a very specific goal in mind for how to use all of these, and has not told you want it is, but you can guess it'll be over the top. This is what's called taking advantage of someone. It's mean when a DM does it, it's mean when a player does it to a DM.

The above references are pure game, mechanical implications of what your player is asking. feel free to have this conversation about the side effects beforehand, and then possibly throw cheetos at this person and tell them to quit their shenanigans because next time they try to pull a stunt like this, you'll let them feel the effects WITHOUT a warning ahead of time.

Or just not warn them, let them try, and let them see what happens.

 

[TKDB]

The Wish spell says it has a minimum xp cost of 5000xp, or whatever the xp cost for the spell it is duplicating. Since you're duplicating a 5,000xp spell, it's definitely 5,000xp per the Wishes in the ring, plus the three Wish scrolls.

Even if you permitted this, you'd need to drain this PC of 30,000 xp for the creation of 6 Wish spell effects.

[EDIT- Depending upon what version of Gate spell, that's another 1,000xp]

Technically speaking, any XP and costly material components/foci of a spell are already accounted for with a scroll. If he were casting the spell himself then that would definitely apply, but in the case of a scroll (assuming it's a standard scroll of Wish from the SRD) he has an automatic credit of 5000 XP to apply to requisite costs.
However, this is certainly not sufficient to conjure a Ring of Three Wishes, nor another scroll of Wish (since scribing a scroll of Wish costs you 5000 XP plus the usual XP costs for scroll creation). Wishing for more Wishes in any form is flatly beyond the capablities of the spell unless you gave him a scroll with vastly more XP invested in it than normal.

 

[nijineko]

it is the duty of a dm to twist wishes as much as possible whenever a character oversteps the bounds of the limits of the wish spell.

+1 for the nymph = insect idea. it would be most amusing if you had him turn into a cocoon at some later point, and pop out after a week with the insectoid template from savage species.... and also a nice pat on the back after destroying his intentions with the monkey's paw to this wishes.

 

[pemerton]

A classic slap down is called for when somebody tries to pull this kind of stuff on an inexperienced DM. Lay down the law now and you'll save yourself a mountain of grief later.

it is the duty of a dm to twist wishes as much as possible whenever a character oversteps the bounds of the limits of the wish spell.

I don't know that I agree with this.

Presumably you can all read the wish spell description together, right, and so work out how a wish might fit within its parameters. That should make it fairly clear that what he's planning on asking for falls outside the standard parameters (though there may be some unclarity as to how many XP the creator of the scroll invested into the original wish).

So then the question is, why is he doing it? What is he hoping to achieve for his PC?

yea it seems over the top but most of the other pcs are playing half dragon or half celestials. he willingly let the rest of us play an uber pc and he took a normal halfing scout.

When this happened did he know that he might get access to the wish scroll? Is the player's real motivation to try to bring his PC up to par with the rest of the party? In that case, maybe just suggest that he use the wish scroll to get the powers of a nymph (or some subset of those powers that you think is roughly balanced with the other PCs' templates - I'm not a 3E expert, but the 1x/day Dimension Door, the Unearthly Grace and the swim speed look like they might be roughly balanced with some over-the-top templates).

If you're just learning to GM I would be very cautious about starting with an adversarial approach - I've played under adversarial GMs and they suck! Better to find out what's really going on - in the case of your game, it sounds like it might be issues of intra-party balance - and see what can be done to accomodate them.

If it turns out that the player is doing crazy wishes precisely because he wants to see how you handle them, then that's a different matter - if he (and the other players) want wild and wacky, then by all means give it to them!

 

[Lanefan]

Before reading any further down the thread, what's being tried in the OP sounds like a textbook place to haul out the DM smackdown hammer and start whaling away with it.

That said, if he's just trying to catch up with the over-powered rest of the party then let at least that much go through.

Be careful - be VERY careful - with what happens next, however; as for his Wish 3 from the ring he's asking for three more Wish scrolls, which leads directly to a lather-rinse-repeat situation bouncing from Ring-wishes to Scroll-wishes and back until he's wished the game into oblivion.

Wishing for (a) level(s) in character is trivially easy: find someone in the game world who has roughly the same attributes as you do but is more experienced, then wish to be as proficient a [insert class name here] as [insert name here]; as in "I wish I was as proficient a Wizard as Pearl" or "I wish I was as proficient a Fighter as Lanefan", etc.

Lan-"Pearl is my wife's number one character, MU-10 when last seen"-efan

 

[robotech_elder]

wow u guys are so much better at all this analysis of it. I have alot t learn. I was always a player and never a dm so yea. I was thinking of letting him have the nymph stuff but not the other stuff and jsut say it is over the power limit of the wish spell. Just so I am clear.

3 PC are playing a half-dragon templates that are all hatch-mates (Cleric, Cleric, Knight).

1 is playing a half celestial searching for his celestial mother (Rogue/Wizard w/goals to be a slayer of domiel)

1 scout(lvl 4) CN so far wants nymph abilitities.

I am playing an NPC Druid.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions you guys gave me lots to ponder about.

 

[TKDB]

it is the duty of a dm to twist wishes as much as possible whenever a character oversteps the bounds of the limits of the wish spell.

+1 for the nymph = insect idea. it would be most amusing if you had him turn into a cocoon at some later point, and pop out after a week with the insectoid template from savage species.... and also a nice pat on the back after destroying his intentions with the monkey's paw to this wishes.

But nymphs don't pupate...