Did Frank & K create The Wish and The Word?

[fectin]

Pun-Pun is obviously cheesier, depends much more on favorable rulings, and is much less playable. That actually does make him a better example for the "big numbers are the coolest!" side of min-maxing.

[zugschef]

Pun-Pun is obviously cheesier, depends much more on favorable rulings, and is much less playable.

He is based on wishful thinking and pulling stuff out of your ass because the rules don't explicitly say you can't, when they don't explicitly say that you can.

[DSMatticus]

Pun-Pun is based on an ability that is completely and utterly without specified limits. It is in fact impossible to resolve what goes in the set of things it can do and the set of things it cannot do using the ability's text (other than the handful of examples it explicitly endorses). Pun-Pun's legality (or illegality, whatever) cannot be resolved in any objective fashion.

In that sense, Pun-Pun is a lot like the open-ended "negotiate with the DM" clause of wish. You could wish to win D&D and have all the divine ranks, and your DM could partially fulfill your wish by only giving you one or the other, and then you would either win D&D or be a megadeity (and win D&D). But that's not going to happen, and when your DM says no and gives you neither of those things his refusal is exactly as consistent with the text as his agreement would be - unspecified limits are resolved arbitrarily. Meanwhile, the Wish and the Word are consistent with the limits of the text as described and have to be rule zero stealthnerfed in order to not work.

The Wish and the Word are legitimate, and illustrate a handful of specific problems (wish, thought bottle, savage species rituals, emaciated spawn, blasphemy, so on). Pun-Pun is equally legitimate and illegitimate, and illustrates the problem with writing abilities like "(ex): gain an ability" or "(ex): do a thing".

[Chamomile]

I'm of the opinion that Pun-Pun is automatically disqualified for anything past the arbitrarily large STR and CON trick. In a regular game the "(ex): Win D&D forever" interpretation is clearly not going to fly, and in a game where you're trying to weasel the most power out of the RAW like you were Saul Goodman getting a client off, Pun-Pun makes D&D crash to desktop as soon as he tries to get any extraordinary ability other than the examples offered.

[NineInchNall]

Well, to be fair, the ioun stone stacking is also dependent upon how one interprets the stacking of bonuses from the "same source". (The rest of the Word's build is pretty much inarguable. You only need go into basic English to show that the Ur-Priest works as required.)

Manipulate Form is bullshit, though.

[K]

Pun-Pun is obviously cheesier, depends much more on favorable rulings, and is much less playable.

He is based on wishful thinking and pulling stuff out of your ass because the rules don't explicitly say you can't, when they don't explicitly say that you can.

Pun Pun is based on the same logic as "I cast Limited Wish and turned myself into a god because the rules don't say that I can't."

It doesn't even qualify as cheese.

[Kaelik]

What do you mean by "the Caelic crowd".

There was (is?) this asshole on the WotC CharOP boards named Caelic. I hate him for a number of reasons, but primarily because people (used to) mistake him for me.

He wrote some shit about "practical guide to optimization" which is basically about how you are filthy munchkin if you want to make things that are even as remotely powerful as core Wizards who don't abuse the most obvious gaping holes in the rules. He also thinks you are a filthy munchkin if you point out a flaw in the rules exists because the DM would totally fix that.

So for example the Oberoni Fallacy was made primarily so that sane human beings could tell this asshole and his ilk to shut the hell up and let us talk.

He is largely responsible for advancing the idea of rules negative 1 and negative 2 on the CharOp Boards (as opposed to the actual naming of those rules and explanation that we use to mock them). Eventually his ideas stopped being all that popular, and this was a good thing in general because he is a horrible person who deserves to be ignored.

[PhoneLobster]

This reminded me.

So like the WOTC Min-Max boards which is the community where all that happened, like all the WOTC forums were rebooted in weird ways repeatedly, so good luck finding the orginal thread on that side of things.

But also then WOTC threw the Char-Op or Min-Max board or whatever they were called to the wolves as part of reconfiguring and charging their lasers for firing 4E out of their ass.

Then those guys went off and formed Brilliant Gameologists in a rebellous "You can't fire us, we fire YOU!" sort of huff. Which is a pretentious forum with a pretentious pod cast run by people who's apparent entire claim to fame was at least one being the former unpaid volunteer community manager from the WOTC forum.

I have a moderate unrelated personal grudge with the community from it's Brilliant Gameologists era over them being stupid assholes about d20modern, and making me follow e20 because they totally claimed all d20modern fans were now playing it instead about 3 years or more ago. Which is interesting what with it still not actually existing even now.

During the short lifespan of Brilliant Gameologists, a community with very high pretensions based incompetently on their amazing pun pun creating genius and celebrity sub forum community management. Their forums went through multiple restructures and reboots. And much lost/badly archived and hard to find stuff.

If you go to their main/pod cast page now you get a post from may 2012 where the pod cast was all about Porn and D&D. With a picture of a moon/ass and a guy in fury suit.

No really.

And if you click the link to the boards its broken and goes to a bullshit url squatter ad page.

If you search google and go through a deeper link to the forum you'll find it. But it's read only and they are soon to delete it and have NOW moved to the Min/Max Boards.

The Min/Max Boards start with a noob sub forum which seems to claim the rest is secret and invisible unless you join up and humiliate yourself with a bullshit introduction (screw you lurkers!... for some reason...).

Which is interesting because I haven't done anything like that and the rest APPEARS to be visible to me.

So yeah Those guys appear to be burrowing an ever increasingly deep hole in the internet for their increasingly weird and insane club house.

I say that despite being active on this forum. It's that bad.

[Koumei]

They need to hide, the government is out to get them!

I do recall "a post-Pun-Pun world", where people tried to find newer ways to do it. Sadly, it was mostly "The Pun-Pun trick is obviously how you win the game, how early can we do this?"

So it started as a Psionicist thing. Then it was an obscure (as in "published in an online article by someone at WotC so I guess it counts but seriously, what?") prestige class that arguably allowed it to qualify for Master of Many Forms (or the other Shapechanging specialist?) and then it could apparently be done at level one.

Then people pointed out that you can totally do it with Wishes, so all you need is for a level 1 Commoner to get enough ranks in various knowledges to know Sarrukh exist and have that ability, and to know how to summon Pazuzu (it's that easy!)

Then they tried to do it with characters that hadn't yet been born, by extrapolating from various things (IIRC there is a spell that curses a pregnant person so that their unborn baby is fiendish and fully intelligent and gets born as a fiendish creature that immediately wants to do evil).

Note that these are just using progressively more bullshit/refinements on the original bullshit.

There was one cute trick I saw using the old Verminlord PrCl (BoVD) - even though the general consensus was "Now that we have actual Swarms and they can just be given Intelligences, Hive Minds are not actually part of the rules any more, fuck you".
Basically it just involved "being a Verminlord" and then finding a way to get as many miniscule bugs within the are, so you can jack your Charisma Score (and free Sorcerer levels) up stupidly high. And then take Leadership, and your minions are more bugs, which boosts your Charisma and level, which boost your Leadership...

The idea was you make an infinite loop and the character then literally has infinite power, as opposed to "arbitrarily high".

It was up there with "Stab yourself in the foot for infinite damage, hit someone else for +infinity, then drown yourself back to health." as far as funny-yet-stupid went.

[TheFlatline]

I remember The Wish & The Word. Good stuff.

One of the things I came away with from this was not just that aspect X or Y was broken in 3.x, but moreso that there is a threshold that every RPG will reach where past that point you have enough options that completely broken builds and power loops and shit become inevitable.

Careful writing and good system design can raise this pretty high, and it seems like multiple authors and simple accumulation of options and rules brings the threshold down.

However, it is inevitable I think. How far past that threshold you can go is probably open to debate, but it's the sign that it's time to start thinking about tearing the old girl down and contemplating a new edition. In theory this new edition should make it more difficult to break the game and push the threshold farther back. In reality? Not so much.

Then there are games where sloppy rules design and multiple writers create broken builds in the core rulebook(s). That should be intolerable.

[Kaelik]

One of the things I came away with from this was not just that aspect X or Y was broken in 3.x, but moreso that there is a threshold that every RPG will reach where past that point you have enough options that completely broken builds and power loops and shit become inevitable.

That seems like a really fucking dumb conclusion to come away with from The Wish and The Word.

Since they are both approximately as powerful in the sort of infinitely arbitrary way and one of them is based on the ability to combine 15 classes, a weird item, a undead progression on a monster in another book and a badly designed spell.

And the other is a guy who walked up to a genie and said "Hey, can I have a Ring of Three Wishes" and then was given a Ring of Three Wishes because that is a totally valid use of a Wish, to Wish for more Wishes.

That is literally one guy showing how you can combine a bunch of shit, and the other guy showing you how there is one rule that on its own is so broken that it can measure up to literally anything else in the game.

And I mean, yeah wishing for contingent atonements is totally out there and requires an entire second source. But wishing for an item that grants a +N bonus to all your stats (and by extension to damage, to hit, AC, and saving throws) is super fucking easy and right away makes you more powerful than some gods and less powerful than others, which is a really bad place for "guy who ran into a genie once" to be in.

[NineInchNall]

It was up there with "Stab yourself in the foot for infinite damage, hit someone else for +infinity, then drown yourself back to health." as far as funny-yet-stupid went.

The omniscificer was actually cleverer than you let on, since it actually did take written rules and try to stop the (then) earliest pun-pun ascension without recourse to manipulate form. *shrug* At the very least it highlighted some of the glaring silliness in the rules; e.g., damage feedback loops fed into masochism.

My favorite late term discovery was the save game mechanic enabled by (IIRC) the Eberron psionic power forced dream, which, upon its end, restored everything in the whole multiverse to the way it was when it was cast. The trick was, of course, to make the power end when you wanted it to, rather than the short duration it comes packed with.

[OgreBattle]

It was up there with "Stab yourself in the foot for infinite damage, hit someone else for +infinity, then drown yourself back to health." as far as funny-yet-stupid went.

The omniscificer was actually cleverer than you let on, since it actually did take written rules and try to stop the (then) earliest pun-pun ascension without recourse to manipulate form. *shrug* At the very least it highlighted some of the glaring silliness in the rules; e.g., damage feedback loops fed into masochism.

My favorite late term discovery was the save game mechanic enabled by (IIRC) the Eberron psionic power forced dream, which, upon its end, restored everything in the whole multiverse to the way it was when it was cast. The trick was, of course, to make the power end when you wanted it to, rather than the short duration it comes packed with.

What if someone casts forced dream before your forced dream ends

[schpeelah]

What if someone casts forced dream before your forced dream ends

Then they can reset to that point until you reset, since your reset point is earlier. Seems pretty obvious.

[K]

That is literally one guy showing how you can combine a bunch of shit, and the other guy showing you how there is one rule that on its own is so broken that it can measure up to literally anything else in the game.

The trick was to show the dichotomy. Alone they could be disregarded, but together they showed that we could break the game in both easy and hard ways, maximizing our point.

Blame me for loving the narrative symmetry of it all.

[OgreBattle]

There should be an anime of how the Wish & Word attain their power. Narratively the idea of a guy making one ring to rule them all, and another guy going through death and rebirth and rebirth and rebirth are both very cool

...Or a show where WotC games are treated as seriously as Yu Gi Oh.

[Starmaker]

He wrote some shit about "practical guide to optimization" which is basically about how you are filthy munchkin if you want to make things that are even as remotely powerful as core Wizards who don't abuse the most obvious gaping holes in the rules. He also thinks you are a filthy munchkin if you point out a flaw in the rules exists because the DM would totally fix that.

To be completely fair, the "the rules don't say you can't doesn't mean you can" was also on the list. Seems the desire to have a CO-board born and raised :awesome: surrogate for the core-by-necessity rubes to marvel at was a higher priority than that.

There should be an anime of how the Wish & Word attain their power. Narratively the idea of a guy making one ring to rule them all, and another guy going through death and rebirth and rebirth and rebirth are both very cool

Yes.

[Korgan0]

So, I was looking at the Sublime Chord the other day, and it says that the SC's caster level is determined not by the sum of the arcane caster levels, but by the sublime chord's level plus one other arcane class' level, (CArc pg. 61) which appears to render the Word nonviable. I'm guessing I'm misreading things here, but I'm not sure how.

[Kaelik]

So, I was looking at the Sublime Chord the other day, and it says that the SC's caster level is determined not by the sum of the arcane caster levels, but by the sublime chord's level plus one other arcane class' level, (CArc pg. 61) which appears to render the Word nonviable. I'm guessing I'm misreading things here, but I'm not sure how.

Are you sure it doesn't set your caster level in arcane casting classes to that number?

The trick is not to get the CL really high on Sublime Chord, but to get it high on Ur-Priest. So for example, if you have 10 levels of Ur-Priest and 10 Arcane classes with an Arcane Caster level of 10 then you have an Ur-Priest CL of 60. And every single point you add to the the Sublime Chord CL adds one to each of the ten arcane CLs, so it actually adds 5 to the Ur-Priest CL. So a single Ioun Stone or Crafted Tattoo adds 6 to Ur-Priest CL if you have ten arcane casting classes, one of which is Sublime Chord.

[Korgan0]

Okay, I get it now. Sublime Chord sets all your CL's for all your clases to SC+the class in question, and you have an effective SC level of ten thanks to the nine levels of Mage of the Arcane Order, which is what I wasn't getting. This gives you a bunch of CL 11 classes, which the ioun stones make 28 per class, which then get turned into Ur-priest levels. I wasn't getting the MoAO bit, which is totally my fault.

[name_here]

Well, to be fair, the ioun stone stacking is also dependent upon how one interprets the stacking of bonuses from the "same source". (The rest of the Word's build is pretty much inarguable. You only need go into basic English to show that the Ur-Priest works as required.)

Manipulate Form is bullshit, though.

IIRC Ioun Stones are untyped and therefore stack with themselves by the canonical and intended rules for bonuses.

[NineInchNall]

(I just finished writing a rather long paper on definitions and the generation thereof, so you'll have to forgive my reluctance to go into great detail. I'm semantically burned out at the moment.)

The problem is "same source" is vague. Since the primary example is two iterations of a (non-modal) buff spell, it's eminently rational to conclude that two iterations of a (non-modal) magic item also do not stack. *shrug*

I mean, in my personal games ioun stones will not stack (if anyone ever bothers to buy them) but the actual text is seriously unclear, because it depends on how you have your identity function work.

Suppose there's a spell called broken buff spell, and it gives a +400 bonus to Wisdom for 24 hours. Now further suppose that I cast that on myself to get a 418 Wisdom. Then I cast it on myself again - or, if you're southern, one more 'gain. Question: do I have an 818 Wisdom?

Answer: It depends upon how "the same source" is interpreted. If two castings of the same spell don't count as the same source, there seems very little that could count. Two identical items that provide an unnamed bonus to Wisdom seem to fall into this category of "if we don't accept this, then wtf DO we call the same".

Personally I wouldn't let ioun stones stack. Why? Because (1) the Word shows what ioun stone stacking can do left unchecked, and (2) there's no compelling reason to allow it - casters win enough already.

[RadiantPhoenix]

IIRC Ioun Stones are untyped and therefore stack with themselves by the canonical and intended rules for bonuses.

According to my copy of the SRD, only the Orange Ioun Stone has no type.

[zugschef]

Suppose there's a spell called broken buff spell, and it gives a +400 bonus to Wisdom for 24 hours. Now further suppose that I cast that on myself to get a 418 Wisdom. Then I cast it on myself again - or, if you're southern, one more 'gain. Question: do I have an 818 Wisdom?

Bad example:

In most cases, modifiers to a given check or roll stack (combine for a cumulative effect) if they come from different sources and have different types (or no type at all), but do not stack if they have the same type or come from the same source (such as the same spell cast twice in succession).

[...You Lost Me]

I would argue that if two separate instances of the same kind of spell don't stack, then 18 instances of the same kind of ioun stone wouldn't stack.