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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8039825" data-attributes="member: 177">So, this happened at the table in my youth...The PCs were going through the original 1e Ravenloft... and got their butts kicked.  Badly.  We were down to the party Magic User (mine) and the Deep Gnome illusionist played by a friend of mine, who were mostly spelled-out, and with enemies closing in.We had been hording a scroll of Wish.  It seemed pretty obvious that it was use it or have a TPK.The GM was... not unreasonable.  We had two characters with Intelligence of 17+, so he gave us 5 minutes to discuss the wording of the wish before he'd have us roll initiative for the oncoming encounter...We went with... I am not sure I am remembering the wording exactly a lifetime later... words to the effect of, "I wish my compatriots and I were alive and well in the village of <name of innocuous village a significant distance from Ravenloft>."In 1e, raising the dead and transporting to safety were the bog standard basic operation of Wish you could depend upon, but we were stretching it to cover raising most of the party.  In our discussion we expressly decided to not try to hand riders about equipment on it or actively try to avoid protecting ourselves from misreading of the Wish - we decided the more we tried to twist around to protect ourselves, the more likely we were to create an ugly loophole.The GM again, was not unreasonable.  We were exercising the most basic function of wish, just stretching it a bit.  But still, it was a Wish, and he felt it a moral obligation to have it work... oddly.The result hung on which one of us had read the scroll - my character had the slightly higher Intelligence, so we had him read it.  The character had been around for the entire campaign, and the GM decided the most interestign course was to read the word "compatriots" broadly.  Like, every character the MU had ever adventured with.  There were... 31 characters who showed up in the village.  Several of them were... well, mortal enemies and had left the campaign in a pine box because we were young and still working out the whole PvP and "but stealing from the party is what my character would do" things....Anyone who had to be raised from the dead (most of them, honestly) showed up buck naked.  Those who were alive at the time of the reading showed up with what they'd had on them at the time.  So, the MU and Illusionist (who showed up at the edge of town for effect), hobbled in to a huge brawl of confused, naked adventurers spread through the tavern, the general store, and most of the village square with cowering scared inhabitants everywhere trying to figure out what the blue blazes had just happened to their sleepy hamlet.It took a long time to work thorugh that fight, as the one monk was the only one who did substantial damage without weapons...</blockquote>

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