[3.5] Experiences with Wish Spells

[Chrizzt]

Greetings!

1. Who has actually used the Wish Spell by casting it him/herself? I understand why he is easily the most potent arcane spell available, so no re-clarification on that topic is necessary However, the 5000 XP cost strikes me at really high.

I have yet to achieve higher levels with my characters, as I have in my experience mostly played mid level characters, but I guess that high XP cost would probably prevent me from ever casting it (If my char would ever be granted a wish, thats an entirely different topic, of course).

2. Has anyone ever casted (in a non-epic campaign) 5 Wish Spells in consecutive rounds (him/herself) to give an attribute an inherent +5 Bonus?

The only way in pre-epic I can think of which would allow this XP burn would be thought bottle cheese, and thats... just like that.

Thank you for your kind replies!

[Kurald Galain]

Yep, we used it once, to duplicate a teleport-without-error effect (which we couldn't cast yet) to bypass most of the adventure. The DM was not happy with that.

[Gavinfoxx]

You needed to go all the way to a Wish to bypass a location based adventure to teleport somewhere? Hee, there are cheaper ways to do it! =D =D

[Kurald Galain]

You needed to go all the way to a Wish to bypass a location based adventure to teleport somewhere? Hee, there are cheaper ways to do it! =D =D

Not exactly. We got a random encounter with an efreet, defeated it, and the DM declared that now we could make a wish. Then one of the players came up with a safely-worded wish for teleportation to the McGuffin, and the DM couldn't think of a plausible reason why that wouldn't work. So there we were.

[Fouredged Sword]

EXP costs can be circumvented with preperation. Thought bottles are a great method. You can cast 7 or 8 wishes with ease and then reset your EXP.

Your first wish should be for a thought bottle.

[Glimbur]

2. Has anyone ever casted (in a non-epic campaign) 5 Wish Spells in consecutive rounds (him/herself) to give an attribute an inherent +5 Bonus?

Yes, the party wizard did this in an E6 game for all four of us for all of our stats. The reason this is not insane is because we were also using the Advanced d20 magic system. One of the features of this is you don't have to pay XP or GP costs for spells if you don't want to, but the check to cast the spell is harder if the spell normally has such costs. He... was a very powerful wizard.

[Tyndmyr]

Yes, the party wizard did this in an E6 game for all four of us for all of our stats. The reason this is not insane is because we were also using the Advanced d20 magic system. One of the features of this is you don't have to pay XP or GP costs for spells if you don't want to, but the check to cast the spell is harder if the spell normally has such costs. He... was a very powerful wizard.

Dear god. And I thought my abuse of spell points in E6 was broken. The idea of casting a wish hadn't even crossed my mind.

If you rule that wishes can be used in conjunction with tomes(back to back), they are *slightly* more accessible in this manner. Realistically, 25k xp has always been too hefty a cost. I love high stats, but I also like leveling up.

[liquid150]

I prefer having two planar-bound efreet do my 5 successive casts of Wish. It doesn't state that they must be from the same caster.

[Curmudgeon]

I had a religious fanatic Rogue character who got a Ring of Three Wishes as a reward for completing a solo mission for his deity's church. He used it as follows:

• 1 Wish to quickly turn 1,000,000 gp (which he already had acquired) into a temple to the deity.
• 1 Wish to enable his sneak attack to function, despite the target's immunity, for 1 round; with that he assassinated the head Cleric of a rival deity.
• 1 Wish to be better able to serve the deity.

The reward for the last Wish was pretty special. Normally 3 Wishes would be enough to get 3 inherent ability boosts. The Rogue's reward was better than that: a +5 sacred (actually profane) boost to Wisdom ─ but with a catch: it was +1 point immediately upon attaining each of 5 Cleric levels. (I guess in the DM's mind it didn't hurt that 1,000,000 gp would have been enough to buy 10 more Rings of Three Wishes.) So my straight Rogue 16 started multiclassing as a Cleric for the next 5 levels. Happily Dragon # 357 came out shortly after that with the Sacred Outlaw feat, so at least his sneak attack progression didn't suffer.

[FMArthur]

I sometimes make single-use items of Wish or Miracle as serious MacGuffins for the players to hunt down to solve some enormous problem or help kill the BBEG.

This would be pretty yawnworthy in a standard game with the normal rules for acquiring those spells early and easily - in fact it's kind of impossible to make them as big a deal as they should be. For this and many, many other reasons I've houseruled 8th-and-9th level spells out of the game entirely (spellcasters gain Heighten Spell for free when they get 8/9th level slots).

So no, not really. Wish is just different in my games.

[Kantolin]

Wish was used a small handful of times to duplicate lower level spells in my most recent game (Which ran from 5 - 20).

It was used three times for more nebulous effects. One for 'I wish he would give us a real chance to talk to him', the second was to try to get at the macguffin (Which workedish), the third didn't work as it was aimed at a target who was far beyond arcane magic and wish the spell wasn't powerful enough to aid there, so it did a relatively minor healing effect instead.