Infinite wishes in one wish?

[Lord8Ball]

So I just happened to come up with the most insane use of a wish that no sane dm would allow. Imagine someone wrote all their wishes in a book? You could say I wish that whatever I write in this book happens in reality as I intend it to. Boom you have a premade script in the book that will literally do anything you can think of. Even if you were to lose the wish-casting ability you'd basically have an artifact storybook. From then you can make it so that you'd be invincible and nobody can do anything against you or your power. Seriously if the wish is not limited by the dm you can become god. That's all I wanted to say ps use this at your own risk because most likely your dm will make sure that this will never happen.

[Naanomi]

Wish can’t make an artifact, it is powerful magic but not boundless

[JNAProductions]

You know wishes are limited in power, right? So, charitably, a DM would let the first few things you wrote work, and then say the magic fizzles out and no longer works. More likely, the DM would flat say no.

[RazDelacroix]

While the scenario as described would probably not happen in most reasonable games, the actions leading up to it do have some merit for delicious plot/adventure ideas...


In the attempt to circumvent the normal limits of a wish, the caster creates a book filled with desires they want to see realized by the ultimate mortal magic. At first, things seem to go well... For about one minute. Then the prismatic sparkling begins as magic gets entangled and rips apart the local fabric of reality and desire.

Perhaps this manifests as a zone of Wild Magic? Or perhaps a storybook demiplane is created with a permanent bookmark/portal in the vicinity? There is potential here and I thank you for providing it!

[Greywander]

Or perhaps a storybook demiplane is created with a permanent bookmark/portal in the vicinity?
The book itself becomes a portal to a demiplane that where all the wishes are true... but it is otherwise completely empty aside from the fulfilled wishes. I expect it to look a lot like the areas of the map in a videogame that the developers didn't intend you to reach, so there are a lot of missing details and parts where their just isn't a floor or walls. Maybe people with no faces. The sky is completely black, despite the environment being normally lit.

But wait, we can make it better. The character can continue to write in the book, essentially creating more things in this demiplane. But nothing created as part of the demiplane can leave, so while the PCs can freely enter and leave the plane, they can't create something inside and remove it. The character can choose to continue fleshing out this fake world, driving themselves to madness and after dying of old age leaving behind a surprisingly thorough, yet ultimately still incomplete world within the book.

EDIT: Alternatively, instead of dying of old age, the character retreats into the book to live in their fantasy world. Of course, while inside the book, they can't write in it to add new things. But someone else might come across the book and begin writing in it...

This is a pretty cool idea for a magic item and NPC.

[Asmotherion]

Have you seen Xena the Warrior Princess? This came up.

So, you basically have a book were you write things down, and they happen. Literal interpretations would be a pretty limiting factor to make you think twice about abusing it. "I wish [person's name] was Dead" and you literally get a very strong hateread towards that person, and a determination to see them dead/kill them. Instead writing "[person's name died] in the past tense could reveal them to secretly be a Vampire, a Lich in disguise or other form of Undead. Writing "[Person's Name has a heart attack and dies this instant] does not guarantee they won't come back as an Undead, Fiend etc.

Basically, any DM who has a general idea of the Butterfly Effect, not only will allow this, but will rejoice at the chance to mess with you every time you try and use it; The greater the effect, the greater the concequences (for game balance). I'd allow it to occasionally work without side effects (rolling percentage dice, 10 percent chance of success) so it will have it's uses.

[Sirithhyando]

[...]The greater the wish, the greater the likelyhood that something will go wrong.[...]

This book of wish is way stronger than what the wish spell is suppose to do. So let's say the DM say yes to your wish.
It could come with a single use per day with a 10% chance of doing an explosion of 100d10 force damage. Then you cumulate this chance so that the 2nd time the book is used, it's 20% chance.
But you don't tell the player directly, you stay evasive but make him understand there's a possibility that something will go wrong and that it seems to be more probable as the use goes on.
At 1/day, it's like one additionnal spell slot lvl9. It's strong, very strong... too strong, but... put a risk, and... why not?

It can also be stolen and turned against you at some point. :smallbiggrin:

[nickl_2000]

It can also be stolen and turned against you at some point. :smallbiggrin:

This.... if an artifact like this existed, it would be something that every powerful being in the cosmos would be seeking out. You would have archdevel and archdemons hunting you down, celestials trying to get it for safe keeping, and dragons trying to get it (because dragons). You would be hunted by everything, all the time.

[Willie the Duck]

So I just happened to come up with the most insane use of a wish that no sane dm would allow. Imagine someone wrote all their wishes in a book? You could say I wish that whatever I write in this book happens in reality as I intend it to. Boom you have a premade script in the book that will literally do anything you can think of. Even if you were to lose the wish-casting ability you'd basically have an artifact storybook. From then you can make it so that you'd be invincible and nobody can do anything against you or your power. Seriously if the wish is not limited by the dm you can become god. That's all I wanted to say ps use this at your own risk because most likely your dm will make sure that this will never happen.

I'm sorry, did you think you were bringing wisdom to the masses by coming up with literally the oldest and most well known exploit in the D&D game? One that every edition has yet another version of attempts to mitigate?

I mean, seriously, 1978's AD&D players handbook had the additional rule that boosting stats from 16 or higher took 10 whole wishes specifically because the past four years had shown Gygax just how often DMs let players get too many wishes, and he needed additional checks on wish abuse.

Look, your point is not specifically wrong--open ended magic has the potential for open ended consequences. That's almost a tautology. But that's why there are so many gatekeeps around each version of the spell. Such as the current 'You might be able to achieve something beyond the scope of the above examples. State your wish to the DM as precisely as possible. The DM has great latitude in ruling what occurs in such an instance, the greater the wish, the greater the likelihood that something goes wrong.' But open ended means DM discretion, and treating it like it is auto-broken is like saying that the persuasion skill is broken because it can help you convince people to do 'literally anything.'

5e has wish abuse, but it is in the form of a (near-) infinite wish-loop. Wish plus Simulacrum can create as many wishes as you have gold for Simulacrums. It's cheesy. It's so glaringly obvious I'm halfway convinced the designers did it deliberately to get this edition's wish-abuse out of the way, since they weren't going to stop it from happening anyways. But it is there. But wishes are well under control in terms of what they can do, and the 1/3 chance of losing the ability seems like it keeps normal wizards (after the DM smacks the guy who actually tries Wish+Simulacrum upside the head) from going crazy with it. All in all, the system works better than the old days when wishes cost years of lifespan, and then players just found ways around that (or burned-out expendable characters, etc.).

[Naanomi]

This.... if an artifact like this existed, it would be something that every powerful being in the cosmos would be seeking out. You would have archdevel and archdemons hunting you down, celestials trying to get it for safe keeping, and dragons trying to get it (because dragons). You would be hunted by everything, all the time.
Good thing you could write that the book was never stolen, lost, or destroyed... or that all those who tried to do so would instantly forget about it...

[tieren]

Good thing you could write that the book was never stolen, lost, or destroyed... or that all those who tried to do so would instantly forget about it...

Yes, but just because it wasn't stolen does not mean it will not be stolen.

And I would love to mess with the PC's with that "instantly forgot about it" clause, particularly if you try to adjust the restriction to be forward looking. Maybe after enough monkey paw in the future at some point the PCs tries to lose the book, ooops he instantly in the past forgot about it. as soon as that is written the whole thing becomes worthless luggage that he'll tote around and never remember why.

Also- I love the demiplane idea and that is how I would run it. Let the character have his fantasy and the power to create whatever he can imagine but have no impact at all in the "real" world.

[PhoenixPhyre]

An idea for a vengeful DM--

Yes, anything written in the book becomes true. But that works because the book forces the writer to write everything that happens in the world anyway (basically reversing the causality). You're then reduced to an immortal pen that writes endlessly in the book. NPC time.

[Amdy_vill]

you could always write in the book first then wish everything in the book was real. boom not an artifact just a normal book. as no DM would ever let you do this ever.

[iTreeby]

you could always write in the book first then wish everything in the book was real. boom not an artifact just a normal book. as no DM would ever let you do this ever. Congratulations! All the pages in the book now truly exist. They existed before as well but now they still do.

[Naanomi]

you could always write in the book first then wish everything in the book was real. boom not an artifact just a normal book. as no DM would ever let you do this ever.
If I were feeling generous; I would grant the first identifiable Wish in the book and then have the rest of the pages erased

[Ventruenox]

But that works because the book forces the writer to write everything that happens in the world anyway (basically reversing the causality). You're then reduced to an immortal pen that writes endlessly in the book. NPC time.

I love this as a monkey's paw solution.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I love this as a monkey's paw solution.

Someone who tries to screw around with wish like that deserves pretty much whatever he gets. Of course in a real game there would be a conversation before committing to anything like that. I tend to negotiate with players on those sorts of things, telling them how I will interpret that wish and letting them try out some wordings. But people trying to break things...no mercy.

I actually had the climax of a campaign revolve around a mega-wish-granting artifact. Literally anything you successfully wrote with this pen became a part of the fabric of reality. The twists--since it's part of a safety valve for reality, it has to be used periodically and will attract people to try until one is successful. The real bite was that you were writing with your own existence. Anyone who uses the artifact ceases to have ever existed. The things they did get ascribed to other people and you get completely written out of existence--not even a memory remains. Most people who try don't have enough existence to power it, so it takes the equivalent of a T4 character to successfully power it. It's been successfully used a total of 4 times so far--3 of those caused world-changing events (continents cracking, moons dropping from orbit, etc).

Presenting this to the party and saying "if you don't choose someone from your party to do it, someone will get to make this wish. And you'll have no control over what they wish for" was a lot of fun. Cruel, but fun. They ended up sacrificing an NPC that they had rescued and who had been their loyal friend. She went willingly, but the loss was palpable.

[iTreeby]

They ended up sacrificing an NPC that they had rescued and who had been their loyal friend. She went willingly, but the loss was palpable.

The player who made the wish with their character got erased and you "decided" it must have been an NPC.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The player who made the wish with their character got erased and you "decided" it must have been an NPC.

Heh. Funny.

Nah, we spent a whole session talking about it and hashing out what different characters would be willing to sacrifice themselves for. They came up with something that perfectly fit the NPC. I even had a sacrificial offering prepared (an ancillary NPC that they had turned from the evil side), but they came up with something better than I did.

[SirGraystone]

What I would do with a book like this, each thing the player would write on one page a picture of it would appear on the opposite page. He write "I want a chest full of gold" then a picture of a chest would draw itself, "I'm king" then a drawing of the PC with a crown on his head.

Or have the book work once like the player want, then have some God just appear and take the book away with a warning not to do that again.

[Iados]

So I just happened to come up with the most insane use of a wish that no sane dm would allow. Imagine someone wrote all their wishes in a book? You could say I wish that whatever I write in this book happens in reality as I intend it to. Boom you have a premade script in the book that will literally do anything you can think of. Even if you were to lose the wish-casting ability you'd basically have an artifact storybook. From then you can make it so that you'd be invincible and nobody can do anything against you or your power. Seriously if the wish is not limited by the dm you can become god. That's all I wanted to say ps use this at your own risk because most likely your dm will make sure that this will never happen.

That's a really big 'if', since Wish, by its nature, is subject to the DM's whim. (Unless you're using it to cast a Level 8 or lower spell.)

If I were DMing a game in which a player did this, I'd give them the standard, "Are you sure you want to do that?" before moving forward with the spell. If the player insisted that was what he or she wanted to do, then the wishes would begin to manifest as written in the book. The player would become immortal, gain a Holy Vorpal Polearm +17, be worshiped as a deity, and/or whatever the character specified in the book. I'd then explain to the other players that, relative to them, their characters see their wish-writing ally literally become absorbed by the aforementioned book. The newly self-created deity would continue to enjoy a reality wherein he or she gained all the blessings specified in the book, and would perceive an existence similar to the primary reality, with the exception that he or she enjoyed all the wonders of divinity. The rest of the characters, however, would continue on their quest. I'd then ask the first player to roll up a new character.

[Contrast]

Why are you bothering with a book? At that point you may as well just literally wish for infinite wishes. Has just as much chance of working as your wish does (which is to say, none whatsoever) with the potential upside of saving yourself repetitive strain injury from writing all the time.

[sightlessrealit]

I would totally allow my players to break the game like this.

[Lord8Ball]

@Constrast Just to start off there is no limit to what the wish can do by RAW. Only the magnitude of the wish and effect based on wording is decided by the DM. Onto your point of wishing for infinite wishes, there are so many things wrong with trying that since it has vague wording. Boom guess what your mind has to comprehend and an infinite amount of wishes (braindead), You now desire everything, etc. Why use a book? Well using the book gives you the advantage of grammer which allows for a narrower interpretation of what you want to be done. Here is an example of how grammar changes the meaning. "A women, without her man, is nothing" as opposed to "A women: without her, man is nothing". So there are advantages to having a writen wish as opposed to a spoken one.

Also everyone I really love all these ideas they are awesome. I hadn't even considered the demiplane option and @PhoenixPhyre that was a great twist on the wish.

[Joe dirt]

Everything is true.... then u wake up

[StorytellerHero]

"Wish granted. You are granted a magic mirror that allows you to peer into all the possible timelines one by one in which you made a different Wish."

Still within the limits of Wish, while producing a potentially useful effect for roleplaying and moving the story in an interesting direction.

"All things that could happen have happened and may happen again."

"Seek wisdom in the infinite realm of divergences."

[Unoriginal]

If a Genie offer you three wishes, and you respond by giving them a book full of wishes, the Genie would at best read the first three things and grant them, then be done with it.

There is no reason why your one Wish spell would be able to grant more than one Wish.

[Gorgo]

A wish like this is just crying out to be monkey's-pawed.

If I were feeling generous, I'd rule that the universe decided that the simplest way to grant the wish was to erase everything written in the book and make it impossible to write in the book.

If I were feeling un-generous, I'd have it work, and have the caster realize that every time a wish was written in the book, they were effectively casting wish, with all of the side effects of casting a non-standard wish, including the chance of never being able to cast wish again. And then they'd realize that the book works no matter who writes the wish. And maybe has a side effect causing it to vanish off somewhere after granting each wish ...

[Contrast]

@Constrast Just to start off there is no limit to what the wish can do by RAW. Only the magnitude of the wish and effect based on wording is decided by the DM. Onto your point of wishing for infinite wishes, there are so many things wrong with trying that since it has vague wording. Boom guess what your mind has to comprehend and an infinite amount of wishes (braindead), You now desire everything, etc. Why use a book? Well using the book gives you the advantage of grammer which allows for a narrower interpretation of what you want to be done. Here is an example of how grammar changes the meaning. "A women, without her man, is nothing" as opposed to "A women: without her, man is nothing". So there are advantages to having a writen wish as opposed to a spoken one.

Also everyone I really love all these ideas they are awesome. I hadn't even considered the demiplane option and @PhoenixPhyre that was a great twist on the wish.

As others in this thread have pointed out your wish is still incredibly easy to subvert. So it only works if your DM wants it to work, exactly like just wishing for infinite wishes.

The more you try and rules lawyer the wish spell, the more your DM will rules lawyer it back at you. The DM always wins at that game because they decide what the rules are.

[Beelzebubba]

@Constrast Just to start off there is no limit to what the wish can do by RAW. Only the magnitude of the wish and effect based on wording is decided by the DM.

Nope. Not at all.

The spell is very specific about the scope and power of what it does. It does 8th level spells or lower instantly. And, when it comes to other effects, it's this specific:

Example: "You grant up to ten creatures you can see immunity to a single spell or other magical effect for 8 hours. For instance, you could make yourself and all your companions immune to a lich's life drain attack.."

That means ten creatures, not 100 or 1,000. And it's not permanent, only for 8 hours. And it's not all damage from a specific energy type (that's taken care of the one above that grants Resistance), it's one spell or specific attack.

When it gets to the other stuff, 'the greater the wish, the greater the likelihood that something goes wrong. This spell might simply fail...' So, the spell is explicitly limited. And, doing anything other than a spell - including the stuff above - will risk damaging the Wizard forever.

If you want to justify 'no limits on power' with something like 'well it doesn't totally say every limit' then you're just being dense and dishonest. It's really clear.

I've been having these arguments since (almost certainly) before you were born. They didn't work then. They won't work now.

[Quietus]

The easy route to solving this would be making the book into the new "components" for that character's Wish spell. The spell's components change from "V" to "S", and writing in it strips a 9th level spell slot from you, and has all the side effects of casting Wish normally.

[Unoriginal]

The easy route to solving this would be making the book into the new "components" for that character's Wish spell. The spell's components change from "V" to "S", and writing in it strips a 9th level spell slot from you, and has all the side effects of casting Wish normally.

Sorry to ask, but how is it solving this?

[Beelzebubba]

If using a Wish for anything more than an 8th level spell risks stripping the power forever, then trying that shenanigan means getting a horrible premonition that this is the worst thing to do.

I'd give them a series of HUGELY foreboding dark omens. As in: lightning strikes the book in the middle of the day. Animals start frantically barking, howling, or getting incredibly antsy in the presence of it as it's being made. And, a series of incredibly unlucky things happen along the way to it being written - the desk collapses, the ink well explodes, a stray ember from the fireplace lands on the parchment and burns a hole in one of the pages.

If they soldier on, and actually cast it... oh man, I'd have fun.

[Arkhios]

I mean, Wish can backfire really badly regardless of how you word it.

Let's say you wished that all of your wishes in the book would become reality. Wish might start doing that one page at a time. But it could backfire so that you'd end up in infinite loop in time. Every day you wake up the Wish you made does one wish from your book, and once the day ends, everything that happened would either reset to whatever was before the first Wish, or everything you wished cancels the previous one in order for the next one to happen. And on and on it would go. Infinitely, because that's what you technically wished for.

Come to think of this, this might be a good mystery for players to solve. An old retired hermit, a former wizard is forced to live every day as if it was always the same day, albeit with a different wish happening each day.

[DnDegenerates]

Reading the actual Wish spell, as per the PHB, it seems pretty weak. It really wouldn't be able to do anything half as cool. Unless there's something I am missing.

[FreddyNoNose]

The Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets had a limited wishes and wishes table of wish sources and guidelines for results. It was well used around people who DMed games back in the day. It had columns like:
guideline, Gold Pieces, Granted %, Repercussion %, Splash, Damage, Other.