The Gaming Den

Why haven't the genies taken over everything already? With unlimited wishes, it's not like anyone can really put up a reasonable defense against them. And it's not like there's really anything holding them back from doing so.

There is the fact that they can only grant wishes to non-genies, but really that just presents an easily cowed middle-man

[beware, cartoon cock in the spoiler]

Wiseman wrote:Why haven't the genies taken over everything already? With unlimited wishes, it's not like anyone can really put up a reasonable defense against them. And it's not like there's really anything holding them back from doing so.

Why would they want to? They're almost always depicted enjoying their harems. Since they can get anything that they want, what would they get by enslaving other races? Not that they're necessarily opposed to having slaves... But if they have everything they want, why would they bother doing anything?

I've heard people talk about how the invention of Star Trek style holo-decks would mean the end of human civilization and possibly the extinction of our species. Genies are living in that kind of post-scarcity world.

Basically, I agree with deaddmwalking.

But from another perspective, messing around with the material plane on a large scale means decent chances of getting entangled in tedious wars with the angels or demons who turn souls into furniture and new recruits. They have a vested interest in the plane and genies don't.

Further, while genies have lots of wishes, they don't have unlimited wishes OR a monopoly on wishes. The demons have Glabrezu, for instance.

phenomenal cosmic power, in an itty bitty living space, is why.

genies are prisoners bound by rules. now fjinn on the other hand is a different story, and they jsut dont get a damn about ruling, they prefer their local hedonistic life styles rather than having the work of ruling over EVERYONE. also they would have to deal with fighting other djinn, so they keep to their area and reduce the number of fights.

this question is like asking ?what happens when the unstoppable forces runs into the immovable object?", or "can god make a rock he cannot lift?"

If you replace Wish with Miracle everything is fine because you must petition the nebulous attitudes of the gods rather than some autonomous force of the passive universe.

Regardless, if the rules say "nongenies only", they are for nongenies only.

sigma999 wrote:Regardless, if the rules say "nongenies only", they are for nongenies only.

But that's easily solved by having slaves whose job it is to wish for things that the genie wants. Remember, an unbound genie has no obligation to grant any wish it hears, so for the uppity slave who wishes to be free? "That's-a whippin', boy."

Three wishes a day is what, 1500 pounds of gold? Who gives a fuck? That would take 664 solid genie-years just to equal the amount of gold that we Earthlings have. That's a lot of gold, but it's also a lot of time. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Earth really wouldn't be conquered by someone showing up with the same amount of gold that we have.

So really, what we have is the idea that an Efreet can spend about a thousand years putting together enough wishes for various crap to have a serious shot at conquering a planet - or at least to carve out a big empire on one. If the Efreet has to split wishes with the middle men or takes some time off to wish for a bunch of blow jobs it could take two thousand, three thousand, or even more years.

So basically... maybe the Efreets are building up to that sort of thing. A thousand years is a long, long time in fantasy worlds. A lot of dark lords come and go every century, it really wouldn't seem weird if there was an Ascendancy of Fire period at some point.

-Username17

Wiseman wrote:

sigma999 wrote:Regardless, if the rules say "nongenies only", they are for nongenies only.

But that's easily solved by having slaves whose job it is to wish for things that the genie wants. Remember, an unbound genie has no obligation to grant any wish it hears, so for the uppity slave who wishes to be free? "That's-a whippin', boy."

I already posted the comic relevant to this.

FrankTrollman wrote:Three wishes a day is what, 1500 pounds of gold? Who gives a fuck? That would take 664 solid genie-years just to equal the amount of gold that we Earthlings have. That's a lot of gold, but it's also a lot of time. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Earth really wouldn't be conquered by someone showing up with the same amount of gold that we have.

So really, what we have is the idea that an Efreet can spend about a thousand years putting together enough wishes for various crap to have a serious shot at conquering a planet - or at least to carve out a big empire on one. If the Efreet has to split wishes with the middle men or takes some time off to wish for a bunch of blow jobs it could take two thousand, three thousand, or even more years.

So basically... maybe the Efreets are building up to that sort of thing. A thousand years is a long, long time in fantasy worlds. A lot of dark lords come and go every century, it really wouldn't seem weird if there was an Ascendancy of Fire period at some point.

-Username17

However, those numbers are for a single efreet. An army of efreet could launch an invasion in a year or less. Also, can they wish up constructs?

An Efreet can, if they use all of their wishing to produce gold, be almost as productive as the top five gold mines in the world combined. That's a lot. But... so what? That's almost 10 billion dollars a year, or almost exactly the nominal GDP of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It's slightly outproduced by Madagascar, Armenia, or Mongolia. If and only if, they manage to get full value for all of their wishes.

An Efreet is a huge power player. Especially when you compare it to bullshit medieval fantasy planets. But it would take nearly six hundred to generate as much wealth as Japan. There's no reason to believe that there even are that many noble Efreets.

They have a better and more obvious world conquest strategy than most. But three wishes a day just isn't all that much compared to planets full of workers or dimensions full of demons.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Three wishes a day is what, 1500 pounds of gold? Who gives a fuck? That would take 664 solid genie-years just to equal the amount of gold that we Earthlings have. That's a lot of gold, but it's also a lot of time. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Earth really wouldn't be conquered by someone showing up with the same amount of gold that we have.

So really, what we have is the idea that an Efreet can spend about a thousand years putting together enough wishes for various crap to have a serious shot at conquering a planet - or at least to carve out a big empire on one. If the Efreet has to split wishes with the middle men or takes some time off to wish for a bunch of blow jobs it could take two thousand, three thousand, or even more years.

So basically... maybe the Efreets are building up to that sort of thing. A thousand years is a long, long time in fantasy worlds. A lot of dark lords come and go every century, it really wouldn't seem weird if there was an Ascendancy of Fire period at some point.

-Username17

After playing Spec Ops The Line my friend had the bizzaro idea of a game setting where some particularly dickishly opulent real world place like Dubai ended up the end portal to, or started to merge with the City of Brass and set up the Efreet Free Zone.

His idea was to run a weird spin on Cthulhu/Delta Green/spec ops modern day shit where you infiltrate the city and each tower is like an Efreet's personal little domain he carves into his own idea of what reality totally should be like. At it's simplest form it's a dungeon crawl and there's an overarching mission that takes you from one efreet-crafted dungeon to another.

He also loved the mental image of an Abrams trying to lay waste to the City of Brass.

FrankTrollman wrote:An Efreet can, if they use all of their wishing to produce gold, be almost as productive as the top five gold mines in the world combined. That's a lot. But... so what? That's almost 10 billion dollars a year, or almost exactly the nominal GDP of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It's slightly outproduced by Madagascar, Armenia, or Mongolia. If and only if, they manage to get full value for all of their wishes.

An Efreet is a huge power player. Especially when you compare it to bullshit medieval fantasy planets. But it would take nearly six hundred to generate as much wealth as Japan. There's no reason to believe that there even are that many noble Efreets.

They have a better and more obvious world conquest strategy than most. But three wishes a day just isn't all that much compared to planets full of workers or dimensions full of demons.

-Username17

Every single Efreet has wish, not just the nobles.

Yeh, it's difficult to imagine efreet wanting to do anything.

Attacking stuff means you risk death and get essentially nothing in return. It's far better to fill a need for lands and servants by building a little demi-plane and filling it with simulacrum slaves who will be perfectly obedient rather than risk rebellions and usurpers. Both land and people are things that can be created and cease to have any unique economic function.

It's not like you need goods or trade routes to fill any personal luxury needs. At a genie's power, his only reason to go to war is because he wants something crazy like a castle made of gold and he can't wait the few hundred years to do it himself.

Ah thanks. I got it.

It's not clear how many Efreet there are. But there is essentially a cap at about 400,000. There are half a million non-slave residents of the City of Brass, a minority of the non-slave residents of the City of Brass are Efreeti, and a majority of the Efreeti in the multiverse live in the City of Brass. Most likely, there are considerably less than that, because you could satisfy everything claimed about the Efreet as easily with about two hundred Efreeti in the multiverse as you could with the maximum value of four hundred thousand.

It's not clear how much Efreeti production actually is. The theoretical maximum is if we assume that they get to use all of their wishes for themselves, that they put all their wishes towards production, that they maximize all their wishes, and that the gold value cap is as valuable in their world as it is in ours. But none of those things are actually true. If an Efreet turns their wishes towards magic items, the value cap is reduced by 40%. We know that the D&D gold piece has less buying power than 2% of a pound of gold has in our world. And it's simply implausible that Efreets get all their wishes into production when there are so many services and one-time magical effects they can wish for.

There's a lot of unknowns in the calculation. But the question is whether all Efreeti in the multiverse combined have a larger GDP than the Earth or not. When you compare it to the endless gears of Mechanus, there's obviously no comparison.

-Username17

Isn't the plane the efreet luv in infinite? And aren't there 3 other kinds of wish granting genies too?

OgreBattle wrote:Isn't the plane the efreet luv in infinite? And aren't there 3 other kinds of wish granting genies too?

The number line is infinite. How many even primes are there?

Something being infinite doesn't mean there are an infinite number of any particular thing in them. The City of Brass is finite, and a majority of Efreet live there. There are not only a finite number of Efreet, there is a very small number of Efreet. We only care about them at all because each Efreet is ricockulously wealthy and powerful, being comparable to tiny bullshit nations rather than individuals. But there really aren't that many of them. You could specifically fit every one of them into a single city. And it wouldn't have to be a big city, and when choosing the next Sultan and stuff, they literally do that.

-Username17

And is creating gold the most efficient use for a wish? If they want to accomplish any long term goal, ideally they should start wishing for Capital. For example, if the objective is "riches", wish for bound earth elementals and order them to harvest gold from the metal portions of their plane. Even if at first you get less gold using this method, it should eventually snowball over the "wishing directly for gold" method.

In my games, Noble Dijiin and Efreeti are both infinite and cancel out because they are at actual alignment war with one another. If I recall correctly, Dao earth genies al also infinite, but only get limited wish; this makes them a linchpin in the genie war because they can turn those limited wishes into planer binding which has chance of expending an actual side's wishes for the other (or wasting them on someone else).

AND THIS is why bound genies are so pissed off; they want to get home to save their stuff/family and not waste their time and power on the summoner that trapped them.

-----Does anybody know the spell like abilities of Marids, the water genies?

According to the 3E MotP, Marids get limited wish 1/year. So this, on top of the chaotic neutral alignment means they're not even participating in this war.

Depending on the source they get either wish or alter reality once a year.

EDIT:
Referring to the OP, because Ethergaunts.

I can accept why genies don't rule the world, the thing that doesn't make sense to me is why they're not better equipped. Limitless wealth isn't an automatic gamewinner in D&D, but at the very least the genies should be decked out in full +5 gear and orbited by an ioun cloud.

Cyberzombie wrote:I can accept why genies don't rule the world, the thing that doesn't make sense to me is why they're not better equipped. Limitless wealth isn't an automatic gamewinner in D&D, but at the very least the genies should be decked out in full +5 gear and orbited by an ioun cloud.

They are only vulnerable to summoning while in the bathroom.

K wrote:They are only vulnerable to summoning while in the bathroom.

Remind me to wash my hands next time I use a genie's lamp.