Why called pit fiend expected have unused wish?

[With a box]

If I have a wish/year, I'd use it ASAP and think about where to use next year's wish.

[Extra Anchovies]

Well, there's probably a few pit fiends who think "I'm going to save my Wish to tempt some important mortal with it." And then they save their Wish, and are summoned by a Wizard who out-lawyers them and gets away with the Wish and their immortal soul.

[sideswipe]

its the same reason you do not get a pit fiend who has just been fighting and has 3hp left and a tonne of debuffs.

i like to think the spell spends a moment searching the multi verse looking for a perfect specimen. and when originally woven and perfected the designer of the spell pre thought it and designed it to find a perfect one.

[Jack_Simth]

Well, there's probably a few pit fiends who think "I'm going to save my Wish to tempt some important mortal with it." And then they save their Wish, and are summoned by a Wizard who out-lawyers them and gets away with the Wish and their immortal soul.
Or, you know, doesn't out-lawyer the Pit Fiend.

Really, though, what strategy is 'best' depends on the specific recharge mechanics.

If the Pit Fiend has it's Wish renewed on some specific date & time every year regardless of when it was used, then the 'best' strategy is to use it immediately before the renewal time - that way, if it's needed in a pinch, it's available, and you still gets the full use out of it.

If the reason the Pit Fiend can only use it once a year is because the Pit Fiend is expending some resource on it that's hand-waved away mechanically, then it won't want to use it at all.

If it has a 365 day cooldown time (it recharges one year after it's used, and using it always means you're without for a year), then you either use it immediately as it becomes available, or always save it to get out of a jam.

[eggynack]

Why're you using a pit fiend? Just make it an efreeti instead. It has wish 3/day and can only give it to non-genies, so the threat of one not having a wish is quite low. It's also capable of being called with planar binding instead of the greater version, has a lower charisma score and is thus easier to convince, and it's significantly less powerful so any theoretical vengeance it may take is not all that threatening. So, you could probably come up with some argument for a pit fiend to work, but I can't see a reason why you'd want to.

[Emperor Tippy]

Why're you using a pit fiend? Just make it an efreeti instead. It has wish 3/day and can only give it to non-genies, so the threat of one not having a wish is quite low. It's also capable of being called with planar binding instead of the greater version, has a lower charisma score and is thus easier to convince, and it's significantly less powerful so any theoretical vengeance it may take is not all that threatening. So, you could probably come up with some argument for a pit fiend to work, but I can't see a reason why you'd want to.

Or the Efreeti's do the remotely smart thing and use a mind controlled non genie slave to proxy Wish for themselves.

[eggynack]

Or the Efreeti's do the remotely smart thing and use a mind controlled non genie slave to proxy Wish for themselves.
I suppose, but there's still a much higher chance of a given efreeti having some wishes unused. It helps a bit that they only have 12 intelligence. Not low, but it means that you're going to find some efreeti that have some wishes, even if not all of them do.

[Kazyan]

Or the Efreeti's do the remotely smart thing and use a mind controlled non genie slave to proxy Wish for themselves.

This saved my campaign when the Archivist decided he didn't care about not being That Guy anymore and kept trying to bind them over and over. Eventually turned into a plot point when the Elder Evil got around to dealing with the City of Brass.

[JDL]

A pit fiend requires no food or sleep. Their basic needs are few if any. They are immortal and so have infinite time to spare. Whatever physical goods the Wish could bring them would likely have been provided many decades ago.

In most lore, what they desire most is a mortal soul. It's the one thing their Wish can't provide, the one thing every other Pit Fiend desires. Basic Economy 101: in a post-scarcity economy, only that which cannot be created or produced in infinite amounts is valuable. If a Pit Fiend can obtain a powerful soul through the trading of their Wish, the return is far more than using it themselves. If they needed a Wish, for example, they could quite possibly trade that soul to another Pit Fiend for several such Wishes. Having one Wish per year isn't power in a society where everyone else can do the same. Only having possession of powerful mortal souls gives real power to a Pit Fiend.

[Invader]

That logic works both ways. If it was me and I lived in literally hell, I would horde my wish for when I needed it most and if at the end of the year I still had it, then I'd use it. That's assuming the yearly constraint works off a calendar system...

[Necroticplague]

Easy:because they know their wish is valuable. Your typical wizard isn't gonna have heavy abuse of debuffing to get it for free, so your average pit fiend can wring something out of it. Keep in mind that even Wish has limits. However, its entirely possible for them to use their Wish to trade for things. So they'd keep it off-cooldown, that way they can trade it if they need to. As far as I see, this is a bit like saying "Why would you ever expect someone to have money if you mugged them? I'd spend all my money as soon as I get it, then think about how to spend my next paycheck, just to avoid losing anything if I got mugged." In which case, most not paranoid people don't do that because it leaves them vulnerable to expenditures they didn't see coming. So a Pit Fiend keeps its Wish as a form of investment. And given the year-long cooldown, it has to be very careful with how it spends it, since it'll be a lot of time before they can spend it again if a better deal comes along. Think of the wish as a million bucks that you can only spend all at once. You'd be very careful that the thing you spend it on is actually worth a million bucks.

[With a box]

Easy:because they know their wish is valuable. Your typical wizard isn't gonna have heavy abuse of debuffing to get it for free, so your average pit fiend can wring something out of it. Keep in mind that even Wish has limits. However, its entirely possible for them to use their Wish to trade for things. So they'd keep it off-cooldown, that way they can trade it if they need to. As far as I see, this is a bit like saying "Why would you ever expect someone to have money if you mugged them? I'd spend all my money as soon as I get it, then think about how to spend my next paycheck, just to avoid losing anything if I got mugged." In which case, most not paranoid people don't do that because it leaves them vulnerable to expenditures they didn't see coming. So a Pit Fiend keeps its Wish as a form of investment. And given the year-long cooldown, it has to be very careful with how it spends it, since it'll be a lot of time before they can spend it again if a better deal comes along. Think of the wish as a million bucks that you can only spend all at once. You'd be very careful that the thing you spend it on is actually worth a million bucks.

I have never seen person who held entire paycheck in pocket.. aren't they use bank in your town,are they?

[Necroticplague]

I have a never seen person who held there entire paycheck in pocket.Aren't there banks in your town?
1st off:please check your grammar, this was very hard to read (thus why your quote is different, its what I think you were trying to say).

2nd off:Yes, my money is in a bank (thank you, direct deposit!), but I ignored that for the analogy because there isn't some way to bank a pit fiend's wish uses in a similar fashion. And even trying to modify it to include that, that merely means my debit card stolen and PIN beaten out me (instead of merely being mugged), in a process analogous to a wizard debuffing the fiend into giving the wish for free.

[Jack_Simth]

2nd off:Yes, my money is in a bank (thank you, direct deposit!), but I ignored that for the analogy because there isn't some way to bank a pit fiend's wish uses in a similar fashion. There kind of is, actually. Wish up a charged Luckblade / Ring of Three Wishes (or Wish to improve an empty one to a charged one). Wishing for more Wishes is cheesy, I know, but it's not too bad if you first wish up an uncharged luckblade (about 22k value), and use subsequent Wishes to charge it at a rate of one each. Of course, you risk that valuable magic item being stolen, but you do get to stock up, so to speak, at a rate of three Wishes every four years.

[Elricaltovilla]

An alternative, totally made up and completely inaccurate (by RAW) reason why these pit fiends always have wish available:

The spell you use to summon a Pit Fiend doesn't just summon one, it creates a brand new one for you to summon. The armies of hell are near infinite, and thus contain a near infinite number of Pit Fiends. When you summon a Pit Fiend, either you create one whole cloth or your act of incredible evil (you are summoning an incredibly powerful evil entity) is great enough to empower a lesser fiend to ascend to the rank.

And that's why summon spells get the [evil] tag when you summon evil creatures, because you're actively bringing new evil into the world. kinda cool right?

[Yahzi]

And that's why summon spells get the [evil] tag when you summon evil creatures, because you're actively bringing new evil into the world. kinda cool right?
That's brilliant.

[RoboEmperor]

Pit fiends had 100000000 years to use wishes on themselves. Now they ran outta stuff and want to use it to tempt mortals.

Look up glabrezus and their usage of wish. Pit fiends are similar.

Lesser devils are supposed to tempt mortals, and if an amazing opportunity arises, they petition the pit fiend for the usage of the wish.

[Eldan]

There was one time when my players decided to start binding fiends over and over for exactly that purpose. I decided to bend the fluff a little and give them the same pit fiend each time. The first time, he was both vaguely bemused and annoyed. After a few times, he'd start swearing vengeance, which happened in the form of the occasional cultist or summoned devil encounter, plus one memorable case of the fiend interferring with the legal process of a city the players visited. After a while, it just started smiling and making notes while negotiating with the players. They soon got unnerved and gave up.

Of course, there was also one fiend who responded to being bound with casting wish on himself wishing that he wasn't bound by the magic circles or obligated to follow the binding.

[Mr Adventurer]

There was one time when my players decided to start binding fiends over and over for exactly that purpose. I decided to bend the fluff a little and give them the same pit fiend each time. The first time, he was both vaguely bemused and annoyed. After a few times, he'd start swearing vengeance, which happened in the form of the occasional cultist or summoned devil encounter, plus one memorable case of the fiend interferring with the legal process of a city the players visited. After a while, it just started smiling and making notes while negotiating with the players. They soon got unnerved and gave up.

Of course, there was also one fiend who responded to being bound with casting wish on himself wishing that he wasn't bound by the magic circles or obligated to follow the binding.

Ha! "I wish to be ten feet to the left. Now what were you saying?"

[Andezzar]

And that's why summon spells get the [evil] tag when you summon evil creatures, because you're actively bringing new evil into the world. kinda cool right?That does nothing to dissuade people capable of using planar binding from using it to call evil creatures. There is no drawback for a wizard for changing to evil. Quite the opposite actually. The smite good ability some monsters have won't work on them.

I guess whether wishing itself out of the magic circle works is a question of initiative.

[Eldan]

Sure. And I'm quite sure a sufficiently paranoid and/or optimized wizard can find a countermeasure to it quite easily (continent mind control? Very fast ally with a wand of mind control spell? Paralysis effect? Something like that.)

[Andezzar]

Sufficiently advanced wizardry is indistinguishable from paranoia. Or to put it in the Words of Jim Butcher:
Paranoia is a survival trait when you run in my circles. It gives you something to do in your spare time, coming up with solutions to ridiculous problems that aren’t ever going to happen. Except when one of them does, at which point you feel way too vindicated.

[Seto]

That does nothing to dissuade people capable of using planar binding from using it to call evil creatures. There is no drawback for a wizard for changing to evil. Quite the opposite actually. The smite good ability some monsters have won't work on them.

Well yeah... If you're Good, you're not supposed to renounce evil because there's a mechanical drawback, but because it's Evil.

[Andezzar]

Well yeah... If you're Good, you're not supposed to renounce evil because there's a mechanical drawback, but because it's Evil.Well, no. You are not good/evil as a perpetual state. The sum of your previous actions determines your alignment at that moment. If you use evil creatures to perform good deeds and maybe perform good deeds on your own you may still be neutral or good as a whole. And even if your actions momentarily make you evil, you are not in any way compelled to perform additional evil actions or prevented from performing good deeds. Contrary to clerics, paladins and some other classes wizards have no problems coming back from being evil.

[Seto]

Well, no. You are not good/evil as a perpetual state. The sum of your previous actions determines your alignment at that moment. If you use evil creatures to perform good deeds and maybe perform good deeds on your own you may still be neutral or good as a whole. And even if your actions momentarily make you evil, you are not in any way compelled to perform additional evil actions or prevented from performing good deeds. Contrary to clerics, paladins and some other classes wizards have no problems coming back from being evil.

I know, there's also the Malconvoker that summons Fiends for Good purposes. And using one spell with the Evil descriptor doesn't immediately turn you Evil anyway. My point is, calculating "I can get away with doing Evil without being Evil if I also save orphans", and a fortiori "I'm Good for the time being, but not being Good is actually more advantageous because there're no drawbacks and I'll be more impervious to Evil's attacks" are both completely impossible thought processes. Partly because it's using metagame/OOC information, partly because a Good character, at any moment when he is Good, has no impulse to become Evil. (He may have the impulse to do Evil, but avoiding Smite Good is based on being Evil - again, metagaming).

[Andezzar]

Smite Good and Alignment are both ingame concepts. The former can be known with sufficiently high knowledge checks:
In many cases, you can use this skill to identify monsters and their special powers or vulnerabilities. In general, the DC of such a check equals 10 + the monster’s HD. A successful check allows you to remember a bit of useful information about that monster.

For every 5 points by which your check result exceeds the DC, you recall another piece of useful information.
The latter can be measured with the various detect spells.
Both pieces of information can be available to a wizard. So he can reason in game, that for fighting such creatures it is advantageous not to be of good alignment. I see no metagaming here.

While the wizard need not have an inclination to be evil, doing enough evil will cause him to be evil. Thus he can control whether he is evil.

[atemu1234]

They have the wish mostly because they don't particularly need it. Most have about everything they need in life (eternal life). They are literally embodiments of cruelty and evil. Being able to offer a mortal something for their immortal soul, then being able to torture that soul is tantamount to dessert for us.

Note that there is demand for the wishes, but in general the intelligent people (those with ranks in Knowledge [the planes]) would by common sense not try to summon and make a deal. Those that do are the people stupid enough to think they can outsmart a pit fiend, but smart enough to actually try.

[Eldan]

Of course they have a need for wishes. They are the general of a war that stretches across multiple infinite dimension and casually destroys worlds, against an enemy infinite in number. They need all the resources they can.

[atemu1234]

Of course they have a need for wishes. They are the general of a war that stretches across multiple infinite dimension and casually destroys worlds, against an enemy infinite in number. They need all the resources they can.

Not particularly. They're big, strong and are capable of things beyond just casting wish. That's something a lot of people forget; mostly because we only use them for that. But they are more than capable of waging war without it, and probably prefer the souls.

[Eldan]

A soul's a soul, sure. That's just one more devil, though. A wish is also a 25000 gold magic item.

[atemu1234]

A soul's a soul, sure. That's just one more devil, though. A wish is also a 25000 gold magic item.

That's like saying pizza is only saturated fats and future excrement. It's the process of torture they love, the feeling of gaining a soul.

[Eldan]

But that's entertainment. They are incarnations of pure lawfulness, they should care about their duties first.

[Andezzar]

A soul's a soul, sure. That's just one more devil, though. A wish is also a 25000 gold magic item of arbitrarily high value.FTFY ten characters

[Psyren]

You assume they don't want to be bound. Metagame-wise, we can come up with all kinds of legalese to try and get good outcomes out of an evil entity's wish; in-universe however, afroakuma will tell you just how easy it is for them to pervert your intent or even say "no, not evil enough."

In fact, a Pit Fiend might even argue that using its one wish/year on something totally RAW-safe with no negative consequences for any mortal is wholly unreasonable. If I were literally formed of evil, I would want my most powerful abilities to further that goal at all costs.