Dandu
First Post
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SuPz3u1kOQ[/ame]
Wish
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SuPz3u1kOQ[/ame]
Isaac Chalk
Explorer
My personal rules for stuff along these lines is:
1) Don't be boring,
2) Don't be ruinous.
If you kill him, or make him unplayable, then neither he nor the group gets to deal with the aftereffects, positive and negative, of his actions, and what's more boring than that? Players don't need reminders that the GM can kill them at any time; that's implicit in a game like D&D, which hands so much power over to one player at the table. Any GM can kill a character or ruin them forever. It takes no skill to do this.
What does take skill is making a wish, and its aftereffects, interesting and a natural precursor to future adventures. Ask yourself where you want the game to go and how these wishes will help the game get there. Ask the player what the character wants and also, what the player wants (these are not always the same thing - the best players want some conflict and struggle for their characters to overcome.) There's no law against a GM and a player talking about this stuff outside the game, and in fact I think more games should encourage this.
For example, a character I had in a game was in the "wishing for more wishes" situation, and wound up a genie. This changed her class over to a more magically inclined one, and the GM and I decided that this meant that a) her epic destiny of Planeshaper would be set in stone, so that eventually after the game was over she'd control her own universe where all her wishes would come true, granting the wish in a way that wouldn't ruin the game but that wouldn't leave it unaffected, either, b) that her magical abilities would have some interesting side effects,aand that being a genie involved her in millennia-old genie feuds she barely understood c) that anyone possessing the ring she was bound to could compel her service, which led to some interesting interactions (nothing tests a friendship like knowing someone has absolute power over you - or that you have absolute power over them.) None of this would have happened had we not discussed it out of character first, and if he hadn't run with my ideas and if I hadn't run with his. As a result, we had a grand ol' time.
I'm glad my GM spent his time thinking up stuff like that instead of treating a wish spell like a Screw The Player Sideways card.
1) Don't be boring,
2) Don't be ruinous.
If you kill him, or make him unplayable, then neither he nor the group gets to deal with the aftereffects, positive and negative, of his actions, and what's more boring than that? Players don't need reminders that the GM can kill them at any time; that's implicit in a game like D&D, which hands so much power over to one player at the table. Any GM can kill a character or ruin them forever. It takes no skill to do this.
What does take skill is making a wish, and its aftereffects, interesting and a natural precursor to future adventures. Ask yourself where you want the game to go and how these wishes will help the game get there. Ask the player what the character wants and also, what the player wants (these are not always the same thing - the best players want some conflict and struggle for their characters to overcome.) There's no law against a GM and a player talking about this stuff outside the game, and in fact I think more games should encourage this.
For example, a character I had in a game was in the "wishing for more wishes" situation, and wound up a genie. This changed her class over to a more magically inclined one, and the GM and I decided that this meant that a) her epic destiny of Planeshaper would be set in stone, so that eventually after the game was over she'd control her own universe where all her wishes would come true, granting the wish in a way that wouldn't ruin the game but that wouldn't leave it unaffected, either, b) that her magical abilities would have some interesting side effects,aand that being a genie involved her in millennia-old genie feuds she barely understood c) that anyone possessing the ring she was bound to could compel her service, which led to some interesting interactions (nothing tests a friendship like knowing someone has absolute power over you - or that you have absolute power over them.) None of this would have happened had we not discussed it out of character first, and if he hadn't run with my ideas and if I hadn't run with his. As a result, we had a grand ol' time.
I'm glad my GM spent his time thinking up stuff like that instead of treating a wish spell like a Screw The Player Sideways card.
Similar Threads
