Give a Wish Spell to Your Low Level Party
Give a Wish Spell to Your Low Level Party
An analysis of the wish spell for Dungeons and Dragons players. It includes advice for DMs about why to use or not use it.
Hi friends! I'm new to Beehaw (this is actually my first post.)
I thought I'd share something I wrote about a year ago but I'm still proud of. Giving wish to your low level Dungeons and Dragons party then ruling to let it undue one major mistake prevents worst case scenarios while still letting players feel like they are in control. Plus, the obvious concerns you are thinking of right now aren't as bad as they seem!
I like the idea, and may just implement it in my game. I'm planning out a PF2e game in the near future, and a lot of the concerns of 5e's Wish are circumvented through the wording of PF2e's Wish:
You state a wish, making your greatest desire come true. A wish spell can produce any one of the following effects.
- Duplicate any spell from the arcane list of 9th level or lower to which you have access.
- Duplicate any spell from another spell list of 7th level or lower. It must be common or you must have access.
- Produce any effect whose power level is in line with the above effects.
- Reverse certain effects that refer to the wish spell.
The GM might allow you to try using wish to produce greater effects than these, but doing so might be dangerous or the spell might have only a partial effect.
This would allow for revive spells and the like, but nothing (that I'm aware of) that could terribly break the campaign or the story.
I'm glad you are thinking about trying it! It's one of the few "tricks" I have as a GM that that really just works every single time. So I'd be really happy to see more people using it and getting feedback on how it went for them. DnD has some pretty similar wording in the text of the wish spell. However, in the discussions I've had about the spell online and offline I've found that the power of the spell tends to get misremembered and flattened to "the player gets to do whatever they want" which can be pretty intimidating from a GM perspective. Anyway, every time my players have cast wish it always ends up being a huge deal that they remember for years after and as long as you do a little prep before hand it's not that hard to manage on the back end. Since I'm kinda lazy as a DM I like getting big payoffs for my players without having to put in too much effort :P