Wishes & Perversions - Post Yours

[Aaron L]

That's a cool idea, Beckett.

 

[Larry Fitz]

Slightly different than the +5 sword...

I make characters word their wishes "in character" as I'm sure most GM's do, so wjen a player wished for a suit of +5 Plate Mail he got a suit of armor that when donned projected the symbols "+5" in thirty foot high characters above his head, visible for miles around, especially at night... not being too cruel I gave it the magcal propertiy he had hoped fror as well... after all it's better if he has a reason to actually wear the suit.....

 

[Sammael99]

Two years ago I was witness to one of THE most genius wishes in the history of gaming.

Our mid level party was travelling across a wilderness area to a town when the DM rolled a random encounter. Deciding to do a little fore shadowing of the coming (and much higher level) plot, we ran across a small caravan with some heavily armed mounted looking Knights and locked (from the inside) strong box style wagon. They were along the side of the road trying to fix a broken wheel.

Innocent enough, but the party cleric whispers to my Lawful Good (and budding megalo-do-right) fighter, that he senses evil. My Captain 9 Wisdom fighter decides to interject and verbally prosecute with moral authority these obviously evil progenators.

Of course they start to decorate the landscape with our small collection of hitpoints and body parts. It becomes obvious very quickly that we have stepped in something we should have acknowledged but by-passed.

That is when our OTHER party cleric steps in.

Two sessions before we had freed an Efreet from a very long imprisonment and in reward he gave an amulet of fire protection to this priest. The amulet also had a single wish.

Our DM had over the years done an extensive amount of research and thought on the Wish spell. At the beginning of the campaign gave everyone a copy of his 4 page "alter reality" spell primer. Essentially how the wish spell worked in his campaign. Very detailed and smacked of things quantum.

The player of the cleric quickly nodded off after sentence two and never bothered with it again.

He was also the sort of player you had to explain a lot of his own character's abilities too. Fun player but not the most astute.

So here we are with our feet in the proverbial quisanart and the only guy close to the off switch is Bobo the Monkey-boy nervously grasping the Wish amulet.

DM: "Ok Brooks, I want you to think VERY carefully about WHAT you wish for and HOW you word it. I'll give you 5 minutes of free time to think about it. Everyone else shut up."

pauses for about a minute and blirts out...

Brooks: "I wish the wagon wheel never broke."

We were all floored.

To this day I have never seen anyone come that close to pure genius.

Great story !

I don't suppose you could get that DM to post the 4 page metaphysical thing on wishes ?

 

[WayneLigon]

My Character, holding a ring that he suspects contains powerful magic: "Man, I wish I could detect magic."

POOF!

DM: "You see this swirling magic aura fade away from the Ring of One Wish in your hand..."

On the plus side, the character had the permanent ability to Detect Magic after that...

 

[nharwell]

This thread illustrates why I, as a player, always refuse any wishes offered to me unless I really trust the DM. This always shocks the other players and DM ("What do you wish for?" -- "No thanks. I don't want the wish"), but I see no need to waste time playing semantics with the DM only to have him screw me anyway.

 

[BluWolf]

This is why I am thinking of making a change to both the Wish and Miracle spells.

I'm thinking of adding a proviso that you cannot wish for your self. In otherwords if you want to use a wish or a miracle for your character someone else has to cast it.

Any thoughts on this approach??

 

[Marius Delphus]

The problem with 3e is that a DM will still try and screw you if you cast a Wish, but will seldom do so if you cast a Miracle.

I would posit an alternative hypothesis:

A typical problem with DMs is that they are too eager to screw you if you cast wish. Miracle, lacking precedent, escapes the attention of the wish-screw-happy DM.

One seminal piece of advice I read regarding wish (I believe it came out of an old Dragon Magazine, but I'm by no means certain) ran essentially as follows:

Wish is only a ninth-level spell.

That means it can't slay the entire population of a campaign world. That means it can't drain attribute points from a huge number of the campaign world's inhabitants. That means it can't bring an entire party back to life, unharmed, after a disastrous encounter.

It can rewind time (the wagon wheel is a perfect example), permitting a "do-over" of said disastrous encounter. It can duplicate a lower-level spell with possibly a little "boost." It can do many things, but as a ninth-level spell, even its unintended consequences are subject to severe limitations that keep it well below the power of epic-level or godly magic.

IMC, the wish (or miracle) fulfills the first sentence or clause spoken by the character (no page-long wish-lawyering) to the best of its ability. Of course there are sometimes unintended consequences. Of course the wish is sometimes fulfilled incompletely. Of course the wish sometimes fails to produce any results whatsoever. "No Can Do!"

IMHO. YMMV. HAND.

 

[seasong]

Technically this wasn't a wish (the spell), but it was a Beseechment of Strange Powers to fulfill Particular Desires, laced with Hidden Consequences.

I once ran a game in which a recurring NPC was a 6" tall fey with spikey red hair, sharp yellow teeth, red eyes, a french accent and no clothes who called himself the "Eeeevil unseelie faireee!"

He wasn't the most powerful creature in the world, but he had nasty claws and was a right vicious little thing. He was also hopelessly in love with one of the female characters, in that creepy, fairy love kind of way.

Anyway, the female character was being bothered by a rather boorish knight, and the Evil Unseelie Fairee happened to be nearby, so she asked him if he could get rid of the knight for her. She was thinking, "distract & lead away". The Evil Unseelie Fairee asked only for one of her lovely, long strands of black, black hair in return (I believe that was his exact wording).

She complied, he enchanted it to the strength of steel, and the very next morning, at breakfast, used it as a garotte on the knight. That is to say, the next morning, as the knight was attempting to woo her with his crude language, his head rolled off his shoulders and onto the table.

Ah, what a ruckus that was!

 

[Hikaru]

I would posit an alternative hypothesis:

A typical problem with DMs is that they are too eager to screw you if you cast wish. Miracle, lacking precedent, escapes the attention of the wish-screw-happy DM.

I think there may be something about the god granting the miracle knowing what you mean, so following the spirit of the wish rather than its letter (if you don't ask for too much). I can imagine Olidammara playing a prank at one of his own worshippers, if it will not kill such a valuable tool, but I can hardly imagine that from Mr. Pelor.

 

[seasong]

Another Beseechment of Strange Powers to fulfill Particular Desires, laced with Hidden Consequences, while I'm thinking of it.

The party had acquired the services of an efreet, purchased 'second hand' from an arab foreigner who had acquired it himself (or so he said) as a reward from a caliph for rescuing the caliph's daughter.

It was a quiet, small, iron flask with a chained stopper and impressive looking arabic written in cribbed writing, and they got it translated long before they ever tried to use it: basically, "big mojo, powerful efreet, but get a lawyer" .

They dragged that thing around for probably a year before finally deciding they needed it (to defeat a necromancer), and when they did finally pull it out, they forgot the lawyer.

The conversation ran roughly thus:

"Thank you, O my young lords, for allowing me to discharge my obligation to he with whom I contracted, may his loins find no ease from a thousand diseases."

"So, uh, what kinds of wishes can you grant?"

"Wishes, O My Masters? I grant but one! As for it, anything within my power is yours to command, and my power extends over the earth and heavens alike. Declare an enemy, and he shall burn in a thousand fiery hells. Declare an object, no matter where, and I shall acquire it for you between heartbeats. Declare ambition, and I shall head an invincible legion for a year and a day to establish your place."

"So, for example, and this isn't necessarily what we are wishing for yet, if we asked you to slay the necromancer in that tower over there, you could do that?"

The efreet takes a long, careful look at the tower, apparently gauging the effort.

"O My Masters, know this. If you wished me to, I would burn the very stones of that tower to fine ash. I would rain fiery meteors from the sky upon the ash, leaving naught but a craterous ruin. The very earth would weep tears of fire, and nothing that was in or around the tower would survive your wrath."

"So... what does 'around the tower' mean?"

"O My Masters, I mean only the small area of land immediately surrounding it. Ah, but I see you want specifics, so perhaps 100 yards would be good."

The PCs made sure they were more than 100 yards away, then...

"Okay, do that!"

The efreet flexes his mighty hands. The very stones of the tower burn. Then meteors fall from heaven. Then magma bubbles up from beneath, and consumes the land itself. One lone fire elemental bound to the necromancer's forge survives, and the efreet makes a great show of squashing it between his mighty toes. Nothing beyond the 100 yard radius is touched.

Everyone is very impressed, and the efreet disappears, leaving only the ancient flask.

Unfortunately, the necromancer wasn't in the tower at the time. And if you look carefully, the efreet never actually answered their second question (after all, they said they weren't necessarily wishing for that).