Has your BBEG ever used Wish?

[Lysander]

You know, people always talk about ways THEY can use wish. What it'll give them, how it'll backfire, how they should word the request. It's entirely from the PCs perspective. Have you ever (as DM or player) seen an enemy, friendly, or neutral NPC use wish? What for?

[woodenbandman]

Only miracle, and only to duplicate other spells.

I don't have a deathwish. And if your DM plays it right, you need a deathwish to use those spells to their full potential.

[taltamir]

wish was a typo, they meant to call it "suicide".

[oxybe]

wish was a typo, they meant to call it "suicide".

which itself is a typo of "genocide, with possible symptoms of : deicide, regicide, natural disasters, diarrhea, time-space anomalies, continental shift, reality implosion, stuffy nose, double genocide, race swap, reality explosion, personality rewrites, non-sequitur & hives"

[Runestar]

Same - use miracle to duplicate spells the class normally cannot cast, such as a cleric replicating irresistable dance.

[Optimystik]

The problem with letting the NPC make wishes, is that it opens the door for the players to do the same - thus it's a good idea to stick with the "replicate spell" usage.

[Evard]

I was always very loose with wish, i would allow my players to kinda abuse it but i tell them... if you abuse it so will i :p

[Brendan]

How is it deicidal? a ninth level spell for some somewhat underwhelming powers? what makes it so abusable?

[gallagher]

How is it deicidal? a ninth level spell for some somewhat underwhelming powers? what makes it so abusable?

sometimes there are those who will poorly word a wish... and if the players can do it then so can the bad guys!

[Phlale]

I once had an Orc Warlock call and "bind" a demon lord who could grant wishes to humanoids. Since he wished for a method of driving the civilized races off the island, the demon thought it was a great idea and created a horrific disease that orcs were only mildly resistant to. To drive home the point to the PC's, I had them show up in a town right before the public funeral of a Paladin. Dead by disease. Never seen LG characters less inclind to help the really needy.

Since he was a demon lord and wasn't actually bound in any way, he eventually got bored, and left the warlock with a slowly dying army, under attack by the combined armies of three nations.

The entire use of wish was offscreen though, not in combat or anything.

[FMArthur]

For some reason I've always treated Wish as being a rare and somewhat sacred thing when I DM, moreso than Miracles. More than once a Wish was a plot device the PCs needed to get their hands on to put an end to otherwise unbeatable foes. And to the 10th-level party, Wish really was special. 17th and later sort takes the magic out of the magic by making it ordinary.

The villains never used Wish or Miracle, since the campaigns never went above 15th level. I sort of took pride in the fact that my BBEG wizard was the same level as the PCs but was optimized enough to take them all on in a fight.

[Dimers]

I saw it in a book once ... I think Flint the King, one of the bazillion Dragonlance titles. The BBEG used a scroll of wish to try to get the girl. Too bad for him, he worded it with the incorrect assumption that she was dead and had to be returned to life, so he got diddly. So, yeah, just about as effective for BBEG as it would be for a PC.

[PhoenixRivers]

Yeah, I've used BBEG wishes/miracles. I tend to stick to "safe usages" of wish, the same I allow my players.

[Justin B.]

I don't use Wish as a spell. A "wish" is something special, and is generally given out by a very powerful magic. In game, this is more accurately represented by powerful magics that players would abuse and NPCs would only give out sparingly.

If the Genie grants a wish, he might be casting a series of lower level spells to gain some effect, or he might be casting a custom spell that none of the PC's have access to. A "wish" spell just makes the whole thing too... mechanized, I guess.

[Seatbelt]

I had a wizard use lesser wish to gain spell resistance

[The White Knight]

I want to implement a BBEG someday who habitually planar binds noble djinn to abuse their granted wishes (maybe even originally with good intentions), only to find the repercussions (via either outsider enmity or universal backlash from the wishes themselves) so severe that he continues to do so, chasing his (the world's?) losses and causing the a perpetual descent into chaos.

[Longcat]

I tend to use it rather frequently on high-level BBEGs. Gotta love the lack of somatic components.

[Gamerlord]

One BBEG once wished the characters into the past, hoping that once they get there, they mess something up and make him the god-emperor of the planarverse.

They did .

[Pyro_Azer]

I have had multiple bbegs use wish to increase their ability scores.

[onthetown]

I once got a Ring of Three Wishes. I was at a total loss of what to do with it, since my character was rich, happy, and a lot of things had already been resolved in the campaign.

I've never seen a BBEG use Wish before, though.

[illyrus]

Short answer: Yes to raise a PC mid combat

Long answer:
In the last game I ran one PC wrote about how his character was looking for his long lost sister. I made her into one of the potential BBEGs (necromancer) for the campaign and had a rule that she stayed his level or one level higher so she with a few lower level allies and undead from animate dead would be a decent but not overwhelming threat. The PC learned who she was and went to meet her by himself. The big issue for him to overcome was she was not a trustworthy individual due to her background (the same could be said for him). In a moment of insight the PC said "Ok, I'll prove to you I'm trustworthy, go ahead and dominate me and see for yourself that you can trust me, I won't resist."

I was very surprised by his thought process and let it work (in my mind it was a very chancy but effective plan). While it was far from a super touching reunion, that act plus what he said caused his character to go from "blood relation that will probably betray me" to "person I hold more dear than anyone else past myself". Three times in the campaign when they knew they were going to be entering into a tough situation they called on her to aid them. As a DM I even offered for the player of the brother to manage her character for combat to prevent her from possibly stealing the spotlight as an NPC. The player refused as he didn't like to manage spellcasting. The last time they called on her the brother PC was killed and she used wish to bring him back to life mid combat.