Did Frank & K create The Wish and The Word?

Miryafa · Post by **Miryafa** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 5:26 am

If you aren't familiar, the build is here: http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/The_Wish_a ... r_Build%29

I just realized this would be a good place to ask the question. I've read it might've been Frank here, but no one was sure about it.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 5:41 am

Yes, they did.

The Contest Thread

It's an old thread, though, and all concerned have mellowed out some. I think.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 6:58 am

Man, I remember reading The Wish & The Word back in 2008, about 3 months or so after a friend introduced me to the hobby of TTRPGs. I didn't understand half of what was written there, but it made me curious and gave me a whole new perspective on the low-level FR game I was playing in at the time (as a bard, mind you).

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 7:13 am

It'd be neat to create a D&D setting where broken builds like these are the Gods. So the Wish & Word have some kind of agenda and will intervene to stop others from becoming like them.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 7:23 am

Is there any way to access the original contest on the old Wizards forum? I used some of the links from the thread Maxus provided above, but WayBackMachine seems to have nothing archived...

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 7:59 am

OgreBattle wrote:It'd be neat to create a D&D setting where broken builds like these are the Gods. So the Wish & Word have some kind of agenda and will intervene to stop others from becoming like them.

Y'know it's funny, I was just thinking the same thing.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 8:13 am

Chamomile wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:It'd be neat to create a D&D setting where broken builds like these are the Gods. So the Wish & Word have some kind of agenda and will intervene to stop others from becoming like them.
Y'know it's funny, I was just thinking the same thing.

I'm sure everyone has a nutso build they like. I have Saint Iratus. Why not list them all out and try to get a power structure going?

So you'd have the Gods/god-slayer-level power, then the major players, then the minor players...

K · Post by K » Tue Dec 17, 2013 8:18 am

Not our proudest moment, but hilarious.

We won the contest, were disqualified, and given Honorable Mention. All in all, getting all the three possible results was like winning in three different ways.

Since the contest was for a personalized title or something, I think we should have been given the title of Lords of Chaos.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 8:43 am

OgreBattle wrote:It'd be neat to create a D&D setting where broken builds like these are the Gods. So the Wish & Word have some kind of agenda and will intervene to stop others from becoming like them.

I started making a text adventure set in such a world. Basically, people who discover and make use of broken builds pledge noninterference in mortal matters ("win D&D"), and after someone uses a build, the laws of nature make it unusable for everyone else ("MC says nope"). The PC is The Wish ripoff's proxy, whose effective immortality is ensured by "I wish we never went on this adventure" (the Undo button), entrusted with killing other gods so that The Wish may wish freely. The Pun Pun expy was killed by a regular adventurer who's also into god-slaying, and The Word doesn't exist. The end villain is a guy powered by miracles.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 9:52 am

To this day I don't understand the argument for disqualifying our entry. The contest was to make the most broken things possible, and we did that. The bawwing and butthurt on the charop forum was hilarious and pathetic.

The best part was when later on they attempted to have Pun Pun fight the Wish and the Word. And Pun Pun got smashed.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 10:52 am

K wrote:Since the contest was for a personalized title or something, I think we should have been given the title of Lords of Chaos.

I think [BANNED USER] is a pretty cool personalised title. I know it wasn't because of that, but it ended up happening, didn't it?

Or did you manage to escape the Banhammer? It's hard to remember exactly who here was and was not banned.

rasmuswagner · Post by **rasmuswagner** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 12:16 pm

The Word is a masterpiece. The Wish is inelegant and can be replaced by adding .001% to the estimated value of the magic item he's carrying to make it intelligent.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 12:20 pm

rasmuswagner wrote:The Word is a masterpiece. The Wish is inelegant and can be replaced by adding .001% to the estimated value of the magic item he's carrying to make it intelligent.

Y'know, it was mentioned in the thread that the Word has the capability to make the Wish's ring for him if he really needs to. I kind of like the idea of the Word just making the Wish ring intelligent, and the ring is the Wish.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 12:56 pm

The Wish and The Word were made to highlight different glitches in the system. Since we were basically trolling the charop board with how much better at this shit than them we were, it was about maximum coverage. The Wish uses glaring holes in how wishes were defined and spell costs were calculated in 3.5, which really doesn't require any specific class abilities at all. Certainly, we considered the option of making The Wish simply be a 20th level Commoner with cross class ranks in use magic device - running absolutely everything off a scroll of Gate or a candle of invocation.

K ultimately determined that doing that would be too flippant, too obviously disrespectful, and chose instead to make the underlying character be a modest conventionally powerful caster. That in short, if people read the class description and saw that he was a Commoner, they would think it was a "joke build" and not read the contents. There are lots of ways to make The Wish simpler, but it was a better, deeper "fuck you" to have him be more complicated. We could have duplicated The Word's trick of having all the alignment subtypes and thus counting as every alignment, but it was more insulting to use contingent atonements instead - thus demonstrating that we had two methods of surviving the word of ending that instantly slays the gods themselves.

There's a little bit of minor cheese to be juiced out of Initiate of the Seven Fold Veil and Warlock item interaction, but fundamentally The Wish has more moving parts because we didn't think people would read it if it had less moving parts.

-Username17

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 3:56 pm

What was, ostensibly, the argument for disqualification?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 4:24 pm

Ikeren wrote:What was, ostensibly, the argument for disqualification?

There were a couple of extremely weak arguments that either The Wish or The Word didn't work - most of which were based on obvious failures to grasp important rules. Several people rallied around the idea that you couldn't wish for an item that powerful, or that if you did it would cost so much XP that you'd explode. Of course, the entire point is that an item of infinite wishes is within the limits set by the 3.5 version of Wish and you don't have to pay the XP cost of a wish using the method employed. Several people rallied around the idea that The Word can't gain more than one level at a time, because XP gain is capped at 1 less than you need for the level after this one. Of course, that blatantly misses the point that the Thought Bottle can be repeated for credit and you can just keep licking it 14 times in a row at one level each time. And so on.

The really hilarious one was the large number of people who angrily denounced an entry in an optimization contest on the grounds that rules be damned, no DM would possibly allow such a monstrosity. And that is the argument that actually caused Meg to ban our entry. Because it was, quite simply, too powerful to be allowed.

Essentially, the CharOp forum couldn't stand the thought of being utterly crushed by outsiders at character optimization and whined until their fearless leader declared their defeat null and void. The takeaway is that I don't actually have very much respect for Meg or the other "brilliant gameologists."

-Username17

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 4:36 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The really hilarious one was the large number of people who angrily denounced an entry in an optimization contest on the grounds that rules be damned, no DM would possibly allow such a monstrosity. And that is the argument that actually caused Meg to ban our entry. Because it was, quite simply, too powerful to be allowed.

That part confused me, because it's not like they don't freakin' worship Pun-Pun.

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 5:13 pm

Maxus wrote:Yes, they did.

The Contest Thread

It's an old thread, though, and all concerned have mellowed out some. I think.

Reading this thread I found the whole tangent with the layering PAO/Shapechange character much more interesting than the Wish/Word, even if the latter two are much more powerful.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 5:13 pm

The link to the WotC thread seems to be dead.

K · Post by K » Tue Dec 17, 2013 5:45 pm

Koumei wrote:
K wrote:Since the contest was for a personalized title or something, I think we should have been given the title of Lords of Chaos.
I think [BANNED USER] is a pretty cool personalised title. I know it wasn't because of that, but it ended up happening, didn't it?

Or did you manage to escape the Banhammer? It's hard to remember exactly who here was and was not banned.

I was never banned. I think Frank was using my account to answer our thread posts at that point because he had left that forum.

I think they wanted to ban me, but the fact that I didn't do anything actually against the CoC, didn't assert any rights as the fair winner, and also explained to them the face-saving option of an Honorable Mention seemed to placate them. The mod was so obviously unprepared for dealing with anything beyond ruling over a tiny community of worshipers that they seemed grateful for an adult in the room even with our bad behavior.

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 6:02 pm

virgil wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The really hilarious one was the large number of people who angrily denounced an entry in an optimization contest on the grounds that rules be damned, no DM would possibly allow such a monstrosity. And that is the argument that actually caused Meg to ban our entry. Because it was, quite simply, too powerful to be allowed.
That part confused me, because it's not like they don't freakin' worship Pun-Pun.

Well, after the contest, people started doing more and more broken things on the CO boards, as though the Wish & Word had broken through some sort of mental block. Before then, people were pretty much cowed by the Caelic crowd, and they'd internalized it to a great degree. Afterward, you saw all sorts of infinite loops and true game breakers being posted. Pun-pun comes from that later period.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 6:28 pm

It's interesting, because they reference Pun Pun in their podcast and say that CO of that sort is purely thought experimentation, and not meant to be used, because no DM would possibly allow such a monstrosity. It's still talked about in the kind of admiring, praising way one would talk about, say, a Rube Goldberg machine, the kind of "It does what it set out to do, but it is so completely impractical that it's practically a art piece rather than a functional tool."

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 9:05 pm

virgil wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The really hilarious one was the large number of people who angrily denounced an entry in an optimization contest on the grounds that rules be damned, no DM would possibly allow such a monstrosity. And that is the argument that actually caused Meg to ban our entry. Because it was, quite simply, too powerful to be allowed.
That part confused me, because it's not like they don't freakin' worship Pun-Pun.

Part of it may be that Frank was sort of a cult of personality that people would either strongly side with, or against. I don't think KhanTheDestroyer really had that going against him.

NineInchNall wrote: Well, after the contest, people started doing more and more broken things on the CO boards, as though the Wish & Word had broken through some sort of mental block. Before then, people were pretty much cowed by the Caelic crowd, and they'd internalized it to a great degree. Afterward, you saw all sorts of infinite loops and true game breakers being posted. Pun-pun comes from that later period.

This could be, too.

What do you mean by "the Caelic crowd".

zugschef · Post by **zugschef** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 9:46 pm

What's funny, though, is that Pun-Pun doesn't work, the Wish and the Word do (and wipe the floor with the kobold), but people always use Pun-Pun as the epitome of min-maxxing.

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Tue Dec 17, 2013 10:00 pm

zugschef wrote:What's funny, though, is that Pun-Pun doesn't work, the Wish and the Word do (and wipe the floor with the kobold), but people always use Pun-Pun as the epitome of min-maxxing.

Pun-pun is used by default but by the time I started lurking at BG people had started name dropping the Wish and Word, too. (Not in a malevolent way)