A possible Wish fix.

[User3]

How about this: Make the person determining the Wish's effect pay the 5K XP to get the effect of the Wish, regardless of how that Wish is cast (spell-like, supernatural, scroll, staff, wand, etc).

Thus, Wish's effect has to be changed to "turns 5K or more XP into an effect," rather than "has a 5K XP cost that you can weasel out of if you are smart and immoral."

Races that cast Wishes can only use that ability for someone else by casting Wish on them and letting them spend the 5K XP to determine the effect.

Also, that means that Efreet, Angels, and Demons also can "grant" a Wish to someone with XP, but they need to gain XP to use their Wish powers for themselves (which they can and might need to do in-game as major PC villains or allies if you don't want to mess with monster XP/levels).

[Username17]

How about this: Make the person determining the Wish's effect pay the 5K XP to get the effect of the Wish, regardless of how that Wish is cast (spell-like, supernatural, scroll, staff, wand, etc).

How about it? XP costs are inherently not balanced for a number of reasons laid out elsewhere. You can work it out in some funky way that ensures that people don't get wishes for free, but it's still never ever going to be balanced - it'll just be unbalanced in a different way.

The whole rubric of "break holy shit out of the game and we'll try to break your legs with a baseball bat afterwards" just isn't ever going to be balanced. Ever. There is absolutely no way to make that a senseable and workable game mechanic in any way. You might as well just remove it from the spell list entirely and have it be an artifact effect not granted by any copiously available monster.

As long as it has mechanics which are essentially a cleverness fight between the DM and the Players, it's never ever going to work. Period.

Your suggestion goes a long way, but you can still round up a bunch of dwarven children and dominate them into asking your bound efreet for you to have more strength. There's just nothing you can do. At all.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

The best wish fix IMO is simply to say you can't be forced to cast it with magical influence, whether domination, charm, binding or whatever. If someone asks you to do it, you can twist the wish to your hearts content. This prevents all the infinite wish loops and stuff. I mean go ahead, bind an efreet, charm it and all... but when it uses its wish it isn't hindered by all those spells one bit and can twist as much as it wants.

As for other uses of wish I don't find it broken really... the spell is pretty limited in 3rd edition, so I don't worry about it that much.

[Username17]

RC, that is the most retardarific suggestion yet. The Gygaxian notion that somehow Wish can be balanced by the DM being a total prick is false on the face of it. Both because it requires one of the people that the table to be a total prick in a cooperative storytelling game, and also because "do the meanest thing you can think of" is a command which is by definition going to not going to have a constant effect.

So if the twistiest thing you can come up with one day happens to balance the effect, then the next day when you come up with something even twistier the effect is unbalanced (too weak), and when you hadn't come up with something quite that twisty the day before it was unbalanced (too strong).

And of course, one of the driving forces behind the Efreet Wish Loop is that they can give you wishes but can't give wishes to themselves. So you can still offer the Efreet such bargains as "one for me, two for you, so long as none of them are intended to harm or even annoy me in their execution". There are, in short, ways and means built right into the game to make it quite likely that an Efreet be willingly helping you in all sincerity to have your wishes come true (and not just the Efreet Bottle which can end up with an Efreet serving you faithfully of its own free will for a year).

Allowing the creature to twist the wishes in any way that is simultaneously story appropriate and within the legal skills of the DM balances nothing and can't.

-Username17

[User3]

Your suggestion goes a long way, but you can still round up a bunch of dwarven children and dominate them into asking your bound efreet for you to have more strength.

Based on magic logic rules, that wouldn't work. As the person deciding the effect of the Wish, even through proxies, you'd have to pay the costs.

Actual logic tries to make magic into a tool that can be manipulated, but magic logic actually cares about intent(which is why people who get raised now have a choice in the matter, preventing evil priests from chain raising thier enemies to burn off all their levels. If they only had a rule like getting detailed info like "you are being raised by a good priest being controlled by an evil priest," the rules would perfectly duplicate solid magic logic.

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I've never had a problem with Wish in terms of power, as long as it had a big cost and never duplicated anything that wasn't roughly a 0-8th level effect. With the thousands of spells that I have read, I can find a roughly balanced effect to meet even the strangest Wish.

[User3]

Me above.

[Username17]

If your answer is "Make a wish, then have the DM ad hoc some kind of balanced effect and balanced drawback based on the effect generated" - then yes, that's balanced. But it's also a frickin pipe dream, because there's no way in hell that you're going to find two DMs who happen to adjudicate wishes the same way.

You've basically just slipped in a mini-game of "try to get one past your DM and hope he doesn't overcompensate and wreck your character". Why anyone would think that was a good idea is beyond me.

"Cast Wish: DM ignores all rules and does some stuff, move on with the game." Is actually a more cogent, and essentially identical, version of the wish "rules" you are attempting to outline.

-Username17

[User3]

If you limit a Wish to known spell effects (the ones you know from the books you own), how is it more gamebreaking than the Mage of Arcane Order's Spell Pool ability?

I mean, it does involve a knowledge of a lot of effects. As a natural spellcaster player, I have knowledge of a lot of effects. Only the most creative effects can't be done with the PHB spells.

The player makes his Wish, the DM picks the most suitable effect. Sometime the most suitable effect capblw with the PHB will be kind of twisted (like Wishing to "live forever" might Create Greater Undead you into a vampire, or PAO you into an Ooze). Wishes are fun because they are kind of dangerous.

As the most suitable effect, it won't often be the same effect twice. An "I wish that phase spider would stop" might cast a Dimensional Anchor and a Major Creation of an adamantine cage on it, while the another wish cast on a Dragon without teleporation magic might only be a Maze.

Players can suggest spells, and the DM makes a call.

[RandomCasualty]

1094152608[/unixtime]]If your answer is "Make a wish, then have the DM ad hoc some kind of balanced effect and balanced drawback based on the effect generated" - then yes, that's balanced. But it's also a frickin pipe dream, because there's no way in hell that you're going to find two DMs who happen to adjudicate wishes the same way.

So what? So long as it's remotely balanced, it's fine. It's 5000 XP a pop. So if it's a bit too powerful, big deal. It's not happening all the time.

You've basically just slipped in a mini-game of "try to get one past your DM and hope he doesn't overcompensate and wreck your character". Why anyone would think that was a good idea is beyond me.

This is already the case with trying to get in broken PrCs or spells like spikes. The only difference is that stuff like spikes doesn't cost you 5000 XP per cast, and once it's in you can use it however you want.

Calling wish dangerous when true gamebreaking crap like spikes and the hulking hurler are out there seems like an overstatement.

And what's even mroe dangerous is that these PrCs and spells don't have any particular apparent need for DM adjudication which leads a DM to believe he can just let people play them without intense supervision. That's far far worse than wish could ever be.

"Cast Wish: DM ignores all rules and does some stuff, move on with the game." Is actually a more cogent, and essentially identical, version of the wish "rules" you are attempting to outline.

Hardly ignore the rules, you use the rules as guidelines as well as your own judgment.

I honestly don't think human judgment is that bad. If the DM has gotten you this far in the campaign and it hasn't sucked, I really don't think he's going to go bat shit nuts when you hit wish. He's probably already adjudicated polymorph any object and astral projection/gate without the game collapsing so what's another spell?

Seriously, I just don't see the problem with wish... aside from trying to get free wishes from creatures, the spell itself just isn't that great anymore and there isn't a heck of alot you can do to abuse it so long as your DM is doing his job.

Freeform spells are always going to require DM supervision. Now you can get rid of freeform spells, but I don't really think there's a need to. Good DMs can handle them properly enough that they don't collapse the game.

[Username17]

The player makes his Wish, the DM picks the most suitable effect. Sometime the most suitable effect capblw with the PHB will be kind of twisted (like Wishing to "live forever" might Create Greater Undead you into a vampire, or PAO you into an Ooze). Wishes are fun because they are kind of dangerous.

There just plain can't be a meeting of the minds here. If neither the PC nor the DM know in advance what the effects of the spell are going to be (even in terms of what dice are to be rolled to determine that), then it's not balanced. Definitionally, it has broken the game.

Quite probably not by overpowering it, but the game is broken. As in, you aren't playing the same game you were just before you started casting your spell. When the DM twiddles his thumbs and decides if he wants to melt your character that's not a spell effect. The DM can do that at any time for no reason.

If you think that spending XP so that you can try to fast talk your DM into letting you do crazy crap and not kill your character over it, then we can't have this fvcking conversation. That's what "unbalanced and retarded rules" means. It means things working like that even the tiniest little bit.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1094178999[/unixtime]]
Quite probably not by overpowering it, but the game is broken. As in, you aren't playing the same game you were just before you started casting your spell. When the DM twiddles his thumbs and decides if he wants to melt your character that's not a spell effect. The DM can do that at any time for no reason.

Well, anything is potentially a spell effect. It's just a spell effect based on flavor text as opposed to based on strictly defined code. And when you're writing spells like wish, it's absolutely essential. Any spell with the slightest bit of versatility, whether it's polymorph, shapechange, shades or gate, has to be written at least in part using flavor text rules. Because you just can't codify something that complex, and you'll have worse loopholes trying to codify it than you will just saying "Present guidelines and let the DM handle it". In fact, the codified spells are the ones that cause the biggest problems. Spells like wish rarely ever cause a problem because they're entirely limited by the DM and that's why people will rarely try to abuse them. Basically wish only breaks the game if you let it, and you do that by not following the guidelines. Can you blatantly ignore the guidelines? Yeah... you can also ignore the item pricing guidelines and allow someone to create an item that casts an epic spell for 200 gp.

Wish is a direct test of a DM's ability to adjudicate stuff. And I don't think it's necessarily bad. If you're running a game that high in level you should have the ability to reasonably adjudicate wishes. They really aren't that difficult to deal with.

Now I think you could make a case that it doesn't belong in D&D as a spell, and should just be a pure plot device (like an efreet or a genie), since that's what it is in literature. But balance wise I don't see how the spell is bad.

Simply having a spell balanaced by flavor text instead of codified rules isn't necessarily a disadvantage. As I stated before sometimes flavor text is the ONLY balancing method that will work.