Wish Bound
It was the Sunday night Pathfinder game, and the BBEG had just assassinated our favorite NPC.
“Reincarnate!” we shouted at the top of our lungs.
“No dice,” said our GM. “Your adorable comic relief goblin is beyond such paltry magics. After a bit of arcane sleuthing, you determine that his soul is sealed away in a pocket dimension. You’ll either have to go there to bust it loose, or you’ll have to find a wish spell.”
As you might have guessed from today’s comic, we opted for the wish. We’d just done a level skip you see, and had broken through to 15th level. That gave us access to planar binding, which gave us access to efreeti, which gave us access to “1/day—grant up to 3 wishes (to non-genies only).” I won’t go into the way things broke down, but suffice it to say that we’ve yet to restore our comic relief goblin to the land of the living.
It’s the planar binding and the wishes that I wanted to talk about though. That’s because I was taken aback by my own reaction to the strategy. Speaking for myself, I’d always settled the question of power gaming by abstaining from it. If you trawl through forums and hunt long enough through the spell lists, high-level characters are capable of some truly ridiculous stunts. We’ve all heard of Pun-Pun and the songbird of doom and the locate city nuke. For me, these were always examples of goofy theorycrafting run amok: fun to think about but never intended for actual use. To see an “infinite wishes” strategy show up in-game was something I’d never experienced. I could feel the cold sneer of disdain begin to curl my lip. Munchkinry? At my table? Get thee behind me!
Let me be fair to that game’s arcanist: binding a genie isn’t exactly Pun-Pun levels of shenanigans. Homemage was only messing about with the strategy in the first place because we found ourselves in need of a wish for a specific purpose. He wasn’t actually trying to go for the infinite wishes thing. Yet despite the fact that so much can go wrong with this trick (e.g. losing control of the outsider; gaining the enmity of the City of Brass; getting monkey pawed), I still found myself overwhelmed by the sense that the whole thing was somehow dirty pool.
Don’t go roasting me yet guys. I’m self-aware enough to know that this is only an opinion. The GM didn’t have a problem with it, the other players didn’t have a problem with it, and (from my own internet researches) the rules don’t seem to have a problem with it. At worst, opinions on coercing wishes out of bound outsiders seem mixed. In other words, we’re getting our beloved goblin back one way or another, and I’m not going to clutch my pearls and object when we do.
That brings me to my question of the day. What is your personal tolerance level for power gaming? Do you ban such strats as they arise? Do you rule them on a case-by-case basis, relying on a gentlemen’s agreement to keep things in check? Or are you the kind of gamer that likes to dive face-first into the waters of crazy-pants super magic? Let’s hear it in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
As a DM, I don’t mind a little power gaming, but I do make sure to have an agreement with my players that they don’t go overboard. For instance, our halfling paladin has ended up with an AC of 22 (24 with shield of faith spell), which is quite a bit higher than the AC 17 and 18 of the other two characters. However, I’m fine with it. However, when he took the level in sorcerer, we agreed that he was not allowed to take the shield spell. (+5 to AC fro one round, reaction casting time, for non-5e players).
As a player, I enjoy coming up with over-powered HYPOTHETICAL builds, like the 56-second free stabbing and the infinite lightning bolt, but I never put them into practise.*
*Except when fighting Tiamat. When fighting Tiamat, all cards are on the table.
So… What did you guys do against Tiamat?
Died, mostly. I couldn’t actually do the 56-second free stabbing, as it requires a banishment spell (which Tiamat is immune to), nor could I do the infinite lightning bolt (as Tiamat is immune to lightning, so I simply played an optimised fighter/paladin. Most of the party was killed, but fortunately the resurrection team survived.
For anyone interested in the free stabbing and infinite lightning bolt:
The free stabbing: level 13 minimum. First, cast banishment on the enemy. Then, plane shift to the demiplane that they were banished to. Since they are incapacitated while on the demiplane, you can stab them until the spell runs out. (Although it will leave you stranded in the demiplane until you can recast plane shift)
The infinite lightning bolt: halfling evoker wizard 13, fighter 2. Move into enemies space and cast arcane gate, with one gate on either side of the enemy. Then, action surge and lightning bolt (shaped to avoid your self). The lightning bolt passes through the enemy, then goes to the arcane gate and hit the enemy again, then passes through the arcane gate again and again and again. As such, you can strike down your foes with dozens of lightning bolts for the cost of one!*
*It’s_A_Trap does not officially endorse these tactics. Unless, of course, you find a way to make them work against Tiamat. In that case, I suggest you slay her and take her place as a deity, becoming the deity of munchkinry.
How did you get a tuning fork to the demiplane?
As a bit of a power gamer myself, i usually think that as long as a player is not so strong as to make others conparably not very relevant, its not too bad. If there is a game breaker trick for easy wishes or something, my policy would likely be you can maybe do it once without hard negative consequenses, but at any sign that you might again abuse that or similar strategies, bad stuff is likely to happen unless theres a really good reason.
I’m a fan of the “I’ll allow it once” shtick. That tends to be the way I run Exalted when the players want to blow up Gem yet again.
On the subject of wishing, I do get annoyed when DMs see wishing not as reshaping reality, but a test to see just how much they can pervert the player’s wording. While I understand that an overpowered wish (e.g. immortality) and a wish from someone who wants to pervert it (e.g. a captured efreeti), I still want to be able to utilise the almighty power of a wish spell without majoring in grammar.
As such, I’ve vowed to, in my campaign, take time to determine whether a players wish is broken before I attempt to break the player.
That’s interesting. You’re making an in-game judgment call based explicitly on out-of-game balance considerations. Basically it becomes, “I’ll allow this to work if I think it’s cool and doesn’t break my game.” In a sense, this is true of EVERY ruling by a GM.
How to get multiple wishes out of a single wish: Write down everything you want. “I wish that all the criteria specified on this page were true.”
How to make it meddling Genie proof: “I wish that the criteria specified in this document were true, and occur exactly as I intend.”
If you’re going to write a contract, I’m pretty sure that the clause “exactly as I intend” will get thrown out in both a court of law and a court of Evil Efreeti Pashas.
In a world of magic, intentions are material.
https://media4.giphy.com/media/OMZRxGyZZ6fGo/giphy.gif
Perhaps not, but it is how the Wish spell works if you include it in the therms of the wish.
Well, it depends a bit on the powergaming for me. I’m generally pretty cool with rampant optimization among my martial characters, and my main objection is to spells like polymorph and conjure animals that are not only broken, but ruin the mood and “feel” of the game by turning “anti-hero murderhobos vs the world” into “slapstick fights between giant animals”. Thus, I ban these spells (and also usually the Druid class) to prevent them from sucking the mood and my enjoyment right out of the game.
Can I get an example of the unfun interactions you’re trying to avoid by making these cuts? How exactly does wildshaping ruin the moment?
Generally wildshaping is not nearly as egregious as polymorph and conjure animals, since it’s a normal and somewhat classic part of the druid’s toolkit, and is restricted to animals that they actually see in the game, thereby excluding dinosaurs from the repotoire of the arctic tundra wandering Druid.
Of course, what ruins the mood, theme, and moment is always subjective, but the party members getting turned into giant apes and T. Rexes turns a battle between the forces of murderhoboism and evil into a conflict between giant animals and the flabbergasted and suddenly totally outmatched bad guys. Because these spells are also just so incredibly strong at both mood and enemy wrecking, they get pulled out in most difficult encounters, which turns said fights into a game of trying to break the druid’s concentration before the enemies are all mashed to death by a King Kong wannabe.
Now, I can’t explain why it feels wrong to me any more than I could explain why orange and purple go poorly together, or why I don’t like the taste of Swiss chard. It’s an almost entirely arbitrary line and subjective distinction, but that nonetheless doesn’t make it wrong or false.
My real problem with them is the amount of rules the player needs to know to make ’em effective. I just had a bard ask whether she should take polymorph or greater invis. Of course polymorph is the correct call if you’re going for power. She isn’t a fan of crunch though, and “OK here’s a new ball of stats” is about the crunchiest you can get.
My tolerance for munchkinry is low, but I love creativity spells like Wish, Geas, Zone of Truth, Command, Suggestion, etc. (My last campaign was ruined by an intolerable munchkin and a lax GM who didn’t really wanna police him)
That said, I’m not one for Illusions because I don’t really have any hucksterism in my nature.
Any good suggestion suggestions?
I’m partial to “x is planning you, kill them before they get the chance.”
The funny thing aboot Suggestion is the “Be phrased to sound reasonable” caveat makes it more effective at making baddies betray each other than it would be for the bad guys to make you betray each other.
If in the above example x is a LG Dwarven Devotion Paladin, it wouldn’t be reasonable that they’re planning to betray you. If x is an evil overlord, I’d totally believe they’re planning to betray you.
Well, there’s the time the powerful anti-hero wizard character designed some 40 different rituals and epic spells all of which were potentially world breaking but they were with in the bounds has set so they were allowed. Thus his small kingdom of undead literally grew by a million in one night and nuked the incoming armies who specialized in fighting undead.
Plus there was the point where the same player went and broke into a magic god’s library to steal a spell to counter a contract with another god, of law. That didn’t go has planned for him.
What was your opinion of these high-power shenanigans? Was it fun or was it a bit much?
I like power gaming, myself. I find it fun to dive into the various ressources to find ways to make my character do stupidly powerful stuff.
I’m aware of the fact that this can get old for most people, so I usually give myself restrictions to tone it down – or, in the case of particularly overpowered stuff, I’ll tell my GM what I found to make him panic a bit, then do something else.
As a GM, I don’t have a problem with power gaming either, for two reasons : the first is that, aside from one, all of my players aren’t even remotely power gamer. The other is that I use a rule that I made all my players aware of before the campaign : “If you abuse something, then I’ll use it too – and remember, I’m better at abusing stuff than you are.” It’s worked well so far.
The way I see it, powergaming is just a playstyle – and just like every other playstyle, it may or may not mesh well with the rest of the group. If it doesn’t, then the adult thing to do is either to find a compromise, or another group.
So what’s your go-to “stupidly powerful stuff?” Have you pulled off any especially interesting tricks in an actual game?
I had an archer character in a 3.5 campaign, who could move and do a full attack for 10 attacks, each hitting for 7D6+14 (IIRC), with a 80ft move speed, at level 15. She also was one level away from having permanent fire immunity.
It was fun.
I haven’t played around much with spellcasters yet. My Witch in a PF campaign had a way to blind ennemies by hitting either Fortitude, Reflex or Will, depending on what would work best, but that’s about it. Still pretty damn effective.
Had the campaign lasted long enough, she would have been to use quicken hex on misfortune (makes the enemy reroll and take the worst result on every rolls for a couple of rounds, no save) and thus follow with an almost guaranteed to work slumber hex. All on the first turn since she had good initiative and usually went first.
Good on ya for prioritizing Initiative. It’s so critical to get that big battlefield control spell down before the melee charges into your firing arc.
It largely depends upon the group I’m playing with; I try to “pace” the other PCs in build strength. If I’m playing with a group that thinks the Spiked Chain Fighter locking down 10 ft of battlefield is the height of optimization, I know to either tone it down or play a support character so as to not outshine the other players. If I’m playing with a group that likes Batman wizards and CoDzilla, I know I need to bring my A-game to the table.
The only time I get stuck is in groups with varying op levels, and then I usually play support characters, so as to be able to provide assistance where I deem necessary.
“Optimize a support character” is the advice I gave to my system mastery buddy in my ongoing mega dungeon game. The rest of the group seems not to mind gaining a new suite of super powers.
A support character i really want to play, is the know everything oracle. It’s a lore oracle with bard vmc, giving them insane knowledge checks, great support from bardic performance, and then still being a full caster with great defences, int, and so on. Takes a while to truly come online though, so its better in games that start at middle or late levels.
I’d far rather break the game through fast talking the DM than munchkinery (case in point: http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0009.html). It’s more fun for me to pull off, and the DM doesn’t feel the urge to crawl through the rules to make sure every aspect of the game is munchkin-proof, (which is a Sisyphean task anyways).
When I DM, I try to go with the “I’ll allow it once” rule. When building plots and the like, I try to make sure the plot can survive the loss of anything up to an entire city getting vaporized by PC action, cause it will almost certainly happen eventually.
After all, it makes for a much better story if the final members of the Dwarven Clan have to make their final stand in smoking ruins as bits of their ancestral halls rain down around them because their lore keeper decided to read up on and reenact the Benxihu Colliery explosion.
Well then. There’s the interesting Google of the morning. I’d never heard of the Benxihu Colliery explosion. That sounds like a rock-solid session idea for a dwarf-heavy campaign.
I’ll never forget the time my players blew up a city. It was Exalted 2e, and they were in the final battle of the final session. Everyone was running low on Essence, and I wanted to remind them that they could recharge their magical abilities with the “essence batter” they’d stolen from Hell.
“You mean we still have that?”
“You sure do.”
“Can we drop it on the BBEG’s palace? Will it explode?”
“I… What? Why would it explode?”
“You said it’s full to bursting with all this infernal essence. If that’s released all at once…”
“I hate you guys so much.”
Hehehe… Anything is a bomb if you approach it with the right frame of mind.
Well, i am not DM, i have ruled over some games, but i think that case-by-case is a form of adressing the problem, “I allow it only once” is another. The thing is each game has its power-levels. I mean D&D XE even in epic levels is different of… lets say exalted, nobilis or godbound. If you turn your 17 level necromancer into the equivalent of a abyssal exalted, the rogue into a sideral and the warrior into a solar exalted power-level PC, then you are playing the game the wrong way. Not because you play in a way you should’t, but because you are not playing D&D at all, that is exalted d20 homebrew-version player’s cut. If someone wants to play a game he should play that game, not another one and adapt it to his wishes. That is a wish that is a really bad idea.
In my current party we discussed this, and we consider Wish to be a sort of nuclear option: the GM is very upfront to us about how Wish typically twists both the will and intent of the request, if it’ll work at all. Careful wording needs to be used for us to use it if we get to use it. It came up in a hypothetical and most of us baring two knew it was too good to be true. One was under the assumption Wish would occur perfectly, the other simply figured if were in a situation where we can get a Wish, we should use it.
for me Powergaming starts with the feat Selective Spell which I forbid at my table. Also Sage bloodline for Sorcerer and other archetypes that swap primary stats are a no go.
I’m pretty unfond of power-gaming to a certain extent. But I’m also the kind of person who feels compelled to optimize a character to at least the minimal levels. Like I’ll never make a gnome barbarian for example unless I can get the GM to let me switch the stat bonuses for gnomes to be the appropriate stats for barbarians. But on the other hand if I found some way of making a gnome barbarian that had an AC of 100, 10 attacks per turn, and resistance to absolutely everything I would deliberately not take it and try and convince anyone else in the group to also not do so.
So I’m by no means a munchkin, but I’m certainly wading at least in the shallow end of minmaxing.
As I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before, I knew the guys who made the Wish & the Word IRL. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, it’s a two man team that’s in the same scope of Pun-Pun and requires a bit less in the way of your GM allowing crazy stuff to make happen (though still a fair bit).
The effect of knowing these people was that I came to understand that D&D 3.5 was fundamentally broken in such a way in that it is not a question of whether to power-game or not. The question becomes how far do you personally feel like being under or above the intended power curve. Because if you know the system well enough and have access to enough books, you’re basically able to just choose. And I mean really choose whatever you want. You could make characters completely incapable of functioning in any way at all or…. well things half way to Pun-Pun that your GM can’t stop you from making without just taking options you’d typically expect to be available off the table. And for me that’s just…. no good.
While I’m sure many systems (especially older ones from the same era) suffer a similar problem, 3.5 was the worst in this manner because of the wealth of supplemental material making the issue larger. And of course, I didn’t happen to get a tutorial from experts on how fundamentally broken other systems are, so I could remain blissfully unaware.
All this is to say I was real happy when 5e came out and a lot of the 3.5 enthusiasts switched over instead of refusing to play the latest edition. Because it was a system I could love because it was a LOT better balanced and they could love because the designers put in the effort to give it the “classic D&D” feel.
And thankfully 5e genies only can cast Wish if the GM decides they can, not by default. Nor is there a spell that simply lets you conjure up a genie at will. The closest you can get is to cast Plane Shift and then sit around for an hour in an outstandingly powerful genie’s face on its home plane trying to cast Planar Binding on it. While I won’t say “if you can get infinite wishes out of that scenario, you deserve it”… well you’d certainly have done more to deserve it than in the old days. So while it’s still technically possible to do, it’s moved from the very unsettling “everyone who knows the system at all knows exactly how to get infinite wishes and only the GM say NO to otherwise perfectly acceptable mechanics can stop you” to “this only happens because the GM decided to let it happen”. Which is where it should be. And then there’s still the safeguard that as the way Wish is written in 5e if you try to get infinite wishes the period of time Planar Binding lasts, you’re probably not going to get more than a few before the genie loses its ability to cast Wish.
It actually depresses me as a player. I was planning how my Investigator would handle himself at lvl20/Mythic10, and I found out that he had 48 AC, +52 attack with 4 attacks doing 6d6+36 damage.
Easily 200 damage a round. Easily destroying non-Mythic enemies of my level in one or two rounds.
To what end? Now that I’ve climbed to the summit of the DPS mountain, what is my prize? I’m now looking for ways to bring his damage down, so I can do more fun stuff like disarming or tripping in combat.
I used to try to make powerful characters, but reaching the very top is nauseating, it’s just too rich for me.
For example, my lvl20/Mythic10 Investigator can reach 48 AC, making four attacks at +52 doing 6d6+36. I can probably solo any nonmythic cr20 monsters I meet.
But what price do I pay for climbing the DPS mountain? What satisfaction is there in reaching the peak? Could I make a less deadly but more fun character? I hope I do.
Here how to not fall for the wish trap in pathfinder.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/traits/regional-traits/thoughtful-wish-maker-plane-of-fire/
no idea what they was thinking.
I’ve always worked with the same general level of optimization as the rest of the group is using. That goes for both sides of the screen, so things can get really crazy with some groups.
I will also take time to help people tune their characters if they need help with it.
I’m not sure what the mechanics behind it are (I’ve literally read through the whole binding outsiders ruleset half a dozen times but I just can’t remember), but binding a Genie to ask for an important wish seems like a very narrative-friendly plan.
It’s kinda putting extra work on the GM who has to find a way to balance it, but… it’s certainly fun to see how it’ll work out!
I enjoy munchkin builds myself, but I get that there is a limit to what my party is willing to tolerate. I tend to look for others areas than combat to munchkin it up. As an example, I’m currently working on implementing some of the tricks from the summon bollywood build on r/Pathfinder_RPG. I’ve learned that when I roll enough damage to delete a boss, my GM is disappointed and party is wondering why they’re even there. When roll a ridiculously high skill check, my GM has fun thinking up ways to describe the situation and it doesn’t invalidate the rest of the party.
Props for finding a way to release your inner munchkin without annoying and invalidating us non-munchkins!
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with binding an efreet and demanding that it grant you a wish. It’s not a “munchkin” move, in that it’s not doing anything that’s against the spirit or intent of the rules. The planar binding spells are supposed to make outsiders do stuff for you, and there’s an outsider that can give you wishes. It’s not some weird corner case of rule interactions. It’s like noticing that a fighter can use a bastard sword and a heavy shield to be good at fighting.
In any event, planar binding is not without its risks. A single basic efreet may not be much of a threat to a level 15 party, but it might be able to organise retaliation from more powerful efreeti. Also, wishes are great, but they aren’t instant win buttons. They have their limits.
Gaining access to Wish six levels early and not paying any diamond dust for it seems a bit strong. If you go in knowing that you’re about to set off a monkey’s paw scenario in which your bound efreet twists your wish, organizes revenge, or otherwise enacts the old “power at a cost” scenario then you’re golden. If you go in expecting to give each party member +30 worth of inherent ability score bonuses “for free,” you might be in for disappointment.
Agreed. I don’t hold with twisting the intent of the Wish spell when it’s being performed at Recommended Retail Price (i.e. cast by a PC for the usual XP or gold cost, or cast by an NPC in exchange for appropriate gold or services). I wouldn’t apply the same level of scrutiny and uncertainty to a Meteor Swarm spell, after all.
But if it’s coming from a bound efreet? All bets are off. You’ll take your monkey’s paw and you’ll like it.
Does anyone like a monkey’s paw?
Power gaming… Been there, ranted at that…
Power gaming only works if the whole party is in on it, and the DM scales up the combat challenge in step with it.
The short of it is that it’s incompatible with my own style of play, and in deference to those (the majority) of my players who don’t power game, I’m pretty strict against it when DMing.
My 5e wish loop is simulacrum djini.
So what you do is you get a single wish spell (or a djini hair and a simulacrum spell) and you make your djini simulacrum. You are now able to gain 3 more wishes from one spell, and then you use the last wish spell from that djini to cast simulacrum as though the material component was from a djini that could grant you 3 wishes, looping the wishes to be infinite. 2 wishes, then you reset.
The best part is that you are immune from the monkey’s paw, because the djini controls the effects, but actively wants to help you because he is a simulacrum following your orders, so it just works.
Personally, I break this by saying that someone previously used a wish spell to wish this to not work in the setting backstory, therefore breaking this for all who might attempt it,
I have 2 rules at my table:
1. No wishes, ever.
2. No Deck of Many Things.
Everything else is a fair play.
But how else are you going to arbitrarily derail your campaigns?
Continue…..
No no no… You can just hit the “next” button or use right arrow to advance to the next slide. No need for command line prompts. 😛