What's the deal with wish only giving +1 to a score?

[47948201]

It's always kinda bothered me that if, for example, a totally-average commoner who finds a genie lamp or something and wishes for "super strength" (which is, like, a SUPER NORMAL thing to wish for, isn't it?) gets a measly +1, aka not even enough to put them on par with a typical nonelite 1st-level warrior. A 54-year old human who wants to wish for strength needs to burn all three of their granted wishes just to regain average adult strength.

Is there some sort of historical reason within D&D editions that this is the case? Something about the lore or balance of needing multiple wish casters or else epic levels? Or...what?

[MaxiDuRaritry]

It's always kinda bothered me that if, for example, a totally-average commoner who finds a genie lamp or something and wishes for "super strength" (which is, like, a SUPER NORMAL thing to wish for, isn't it?) gets a measly +1, aka not even enough to put them on par with a typical nonelite 1st-level warrior. A 54-year old human who wants to wish for strength needs to burn all three of their granted wishes just to regain average adult strength.

Is there some sort of historical reason within D&D editions that this is the case? Something about the lore or balance of needing multiple wish casters or else epic levels? Or...what?Do keep in mind that there are better ways to grant a wish for super strength. A polymorph any object is within the druthers of the spell, which can massively increase one's Str score, and there are a lot of critters out there (both human-looking and not) that would be of Permanent duration when cast on a humanoid person.

As far as why the epitome of mortal magic is so flaccid when it comes to granting bonuses? Legacy, I imagine. Earlier editions made it incredibly difficult to gain in power through anything but character levels and magic items without huge drawbacks, so the fact that wish could do so at all was seen as massively powerful. Plus, y'know, "Gygaxian" is a term for a killer DM for a reason.

[Dimers]

The spell's legacy would also point toward a +1 bonus because that had a different meaning in AD&D. A single-point increase always made a difference (especially in a stat that's already good enough or bad enough that you'd consider it wish-worthy).

[Zancloufer]

It's always kinda bothered me that if, for example, a totally-average commoner who finds a genie lamp or something and wishes for "super strength" (which is, like, a SUPER NORMAL thing to wish for, isn't it?) gets a measly +1, aka not even enough to put them on par with a typical nonelite 1st-level warrior. A 54-year old human who wants to wish for strength needs to burn all three of their granted wishes just to regain average adult strength.

Is there some sort of historical reason within D&D editions that this is the case? Something about the lore or balance of needing multiple wish casters or else epic levels? Or...what?

Could be worse; it could be 1/10 of an ability stat if said stat was already 16+.

Also an inherit increase to any ability stat is fairly powerful: It's permanent, stacks with most bonuses and is essentially impossible to loose. Most other wishes you can make safely generally can be lost or have a limited duration.

[Sinner's Garden]

I feel that a wish for super strength, for a lowly aging dirt farmer, is more likely to transform him or give him a magic item than give him a small inherent boost he won't really be able to appreciate. If I had to adjudicate this hypothetical, then say it turned him from a human with base ten stats into a human, forcing him to reroll his stats arbitrarily until he hit a good line, why not. Or add on some kind of template, really, because "strong as a buff guy who hits the gym regularly" isn't really "super," is it?

[Elves]

The +1 stat part is written with PCs in mind and weighted against WBL. One of the benefits of the spell being open-ended is that it can be used for more artful story purposes as needed. You can go the route of PAOing the peasant into an ogre or whatever, but if you want your peasant to have gotten super strength, just go ahead and have them get an 18.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

The +1 stat part is written with PCs in mind and weighted against WBL. One of the benefits of the spell being open-ended is that it can be used for more artful story purposes as needed. You can go the route of PAOing the peasant into an ogre or whatever, but if you want your peasant to have gotten super strength, just go ahead and have them get an 18.Silly Elves.

Ogres are for having more layers.

Like a parfait, or an onion.

[Friv]

Wish can reproduce magic items, so it could give you a version of a Belt of Giant Strength that takes the form of a magical tattoo and thus doesn't require a spell slot. That would be a nice +6 Strength right off. It's not quite as useful to adventurers who might already have that, since it won't stack with other magical sources of Strength bonus, but it's all that a commoner needs.

...

Okay, that's a little bit of an oversight. With no cap on the price, you could wish for a Manual of Gainful Exercise and get +5 Inherent Strength with one wish. Obviously not rules as intended, but did I miss a cap? I'm referencing from the SRD right now.

[Psyren]

It's always kinda bothered me that if, for example, a totally-average commoner who finds a genie lamp or something and wishes for "super strength" (which is, like, a SUPER NORMAL thing to wish for, isn't it?) gets a measly +1, aka not even enough to put them on par with a typical nonelite 1st-level warrior. A 54-year old human who wants to wish for strength needs to burn all three of their granted wishes just to regain average adult strength.

Is there some sort of historical reason within D&D editions that this is the case? Something about the lore or balance of needing multiple wish casters or else epic levels? Or...what?

That is so vague a wish that you'd deserve to only get +1 from it. As others mentioned, a Wish for "super strength" could be fulfilled in a number of ways besides the inherent bonus - transforming you, giving you a belt, merely duplicating a Bull's Strength or Transformation or Divine Power spell etc.

[Quertus]

Yeah, it's legacy. In fact, 1 whole stat point for a Wish? Why, back in my day, you had to burn 10 wishes - the equivalent of 50 years off your life - to go from 18 to 19.

Y'all don't appreciate how good you've got it.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Yeah, it's legacy. In fact, 1 whole stat point for a Wish? Why, back in my day, you had to burn 10 wishes - the equivalent of 50 years off your life - to go from 18 to 19.

Y'all don't appreciate how good you've got it.And here I just had to use a character editor on BG for mine.

[tyckspoon]

Okay, that's a little bit of an oversight. With no cap on the price, you could wish for a Manual of Gainful Exercise and get +5 Inherent Strength with one wish. Obviously not rules as intended, but did I miss a cap? I'm referencing from the SRD right now.

No, this is one of the well-known optimization tricks. It's supposed to be limited by the XP cost for doing this - Wishing up powerful magic items burns tons of XP (twice the XP cost of the item plus the 5,000 for casting Wish), and since you can't spend so much XP that you'd lose a level there's a pretty hard cap on how valuable an item you can create in this fashion, as well as a significant cost to do so.

But then you find out there are ways to cast spells that explicitly do not have to expend any components, including XP costs - most spells when used as a Spell-Like or Supernatural Ability don't have to suffer components. So you get access to one of those, and you cast Wish for a +100 sword or +50 Belt of Strength or whatever.

Whether or not your DM/table culture allows this and what they do to reign it in tends to be one of the defining features of how your higher level game will play.

[the_tick_rules]

If you are ever able to get a hold of a ring of spell storing major you can drop a wish spell in it and ignore the xp requirement for wishing yourself better. Right? The ring says it carries no xp or material components cost. Or wish for a ring of spell storing major and only pay the penalty once.

[icefractal]

I think the price is fine ... for high-level people who already have +6 stat items and want to go even higher. The cutting edge always costs significantly more than the improvement it gives, although in practice many characters of that level have ways of avoiding the price. I'd get rid of the "must do all wishes in a row" part though - that's just annoying, encourages people go straight from +0 to +5 instead of a more natural progression over time, and I don't see any balance benefits from it.

For someone who doesn't have any stat-enhancing items and isn't likely to get any soon, if the source was non-hostile, I'd probably have it a give a permanent [animal's attribute] instead (+4 enhancement bonus).

[Fizban]

A totally average commoner who wishes for super-strength? Sounds like they just got upgraded from non-elite stats to elite stats. 5,000xp is enough to Psychic Reformation 100 years*, well beyond infanthood unless you're an elf and with cash to spare for rewriting your nutritional balance. If you're already elite you could maybe rearrange your stats, but if you want more than elite stats you get the +1 inherent because that's what it's for.

Otherwise it'd be a change of race/reincarnation, but the wording clearly lacks any desire to change forms, and I read wishes as positive- unless this is specifically a spitefully granted wish.

*Edit: levels, 100 levels. which take more than a year to gain under normal circumstances.

[Zanos]

Wish is misnamed in 3.5. It is not a single act of unlimited power, but actually a packet of reality reshaping that has well defined limitations. You can use multiple wishes to go up to +5 in any given score. You can attempt to exceed the defined limits but then you invoke the whims of the universe(AKA, the DM).

If you are just wishing for super strength though, as others have mentioned, wish can replicate polymorph any object to permanently turn you into an ogre or something. That would actually be in the flavor of it twisting your wish slightly too, since you would have an Ogres intelligence and look like one.

[Thunder999]

It's a +1 because wish is designed around use by high level characters, characters who already have very high ability scores and are looking to spend vast amounts of gold or xp squeezing a few more points out. The consecutive limitation is probably so that a single wish per day can't get you +5 to every score in just short of a month.

[ExLibrisMortis]

People do buy those +5 tomes, if only at high levels. At some point, you run out of ability score boosters to buy, and those tomes provide a steady increase that works under all circumstances. So the items are balanced around high-level characters, as other people have mentioned. Wealth-by-level and prices for magic items scale up very quickly, and that's what puts a lot of items out of the reach of commoners, including many items that aren't especially unbalanced on a commoner.

If you allow a wish along the lines of "I wish that you do 20 000 gp worth of shopping for me", you can get a bit more bang for your buck. For example, a slotless item of continuous bull's strength can cost as little as 8000 gp (CL 1 bull's strength as first-level spell from the Sand Shaper list). If you assume that your genie goes and fetches two or even three slotless items (bull's strength, bear's endurance, maybe cat's grace), your commoner could get +4 Strength and Constitution (and maybe Dexterity) from one wish, which is pretty close to "great strength".

Given the above, I think you're well-justified to hand out bonuses along the lines of +4 to three stats for a single wish. Your players can't even really abuse this type of wish. Since the slotless items don't stack with regular ability boosters, they'd essentially be replacing the equivalent of 48 000 gp of magic items. That's a lot for a single wish, but it balances out when they start upgrading to +6 boosters and find that the wish items can't be upgraded and are only worth 4000 gp on trade-in.

25 000 gp for a +1 is "balanced" against a belt of giant strength +6, if you think about it really hard. Upgrading a +6 to a +11 takes the cost up from 36 000 gp to 121 000 gp (ignoring epic multipliers), which works out to 17 000 gp per additional point of Strength, which are worth about 34 000 gp slotless. 25 000 gp falls right in that zone. But yeah, that's a bit of a reach.

[Nifft]

It's always kinda bothered me that if, for example, a totally-average commoner who finds a genie lamp or something and wishes for "super strength" (which is, like, a SUPER NORMAL thing to wish for, isn't it?) gets a measly +1

Okay, but you personally are a very large number, so you perspective is probably biased against small numbers.

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In all seriousness, it's a price which was probably "balanced" against 1e rolling conventions ("3d6 in order, then die and re-roll several dozen times before this rule becomes relevant").

Those prices would also have been "balanced" against the vast quantities of treasure you'd tend to accumulate when 1 gp = 1 XP, which is somewhat higher than the 3.x WBL guidelines.

[inuyasha]

I would like to point out that while yes, a Wish spell giving bonuses in +1 increments is a holdover from 1e, this wasn't always a great deal in 1e either, the +1 bonus you got might not mean much since scores were rolled on 3d6 a lot of the time, and 8-16 all have no bonus to melee attack, and a sore of 16 only grants a +1 to damage. Sure it helps your carrying capacity and your bend bars/lift gates, but that's not why most Fighters want Strength increases.

I also think the +1 is a little silly though, but with how many other ways there are to increase your score, Wish is I think supposed to be the icing on the cake. Your commoner wishing for super strength is going to get the magic tattoo or the gauntlets of ogre power or whatever, but your level 16 fighter who looks like He-Man drawn by Rob Liefeld is probably already strong as heck, so he's just gonna get that +1, because how much better can he get through any other means?

[Dimers]

your level 16 fighter who looks like He-Man drawn by Rob Liefeld

*snerk* :smallbiggrin: