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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!decwrl!asente
From: asente@decwrl.UUCP (Paul Asente)
Newsgroups: net.games.frp
Subject: Re: interesting uses of wishes
Message-ID: <3547@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Oct-83 03:03:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.3547
Posted: Tue Oct 11 03:03:05 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 12-Oct-83 20:13:07 EDT
References: <1017@pur-ee.UUCP>
Organization: DEC Western Research Lab, Los Altos, CA
Lines: 42

I'm afraid that I must take exception to the theory that characters have no
idea of level in AD&D.  They most certainly do!  Every character has to stop
and study to gain a level.  Therefore, you can ask a character "How many
times have you studied?".  For some specific classes, it's even more
straightforward:  For spell casters, you have spell slots changing.  For
monks, you have new special abilities at each level.  I have decided in my
campaign to just dodge the entire issue of how to make all this ridiculous
arbitrary detail fit into my world.  Characters can and do talk about being
n-th level.  I'd be interested in hearing about how other people have dealt
with this problem.

I play wishes in a slightly different way than most people here.  For each
wish, I roll a d6.  On a 6, the wish works substantially better than wished
for; on a 4 or 5 it works more or less as requested; on a 2 or 3 it gets
mildly crocked; and on a 1 it gets severely crocked.  Of course the real
severity of the crock depends mainly on how much power was required to
fulfill the wish.  If a character wished for drinking water and the wish was
severely crocked, the water would probably come up tasting a little bit off.
This makes people very leary about wishing for super-powerful things, since
the backlash can also be super-powerful!  In general, anything that is within
the ability of a 9th (or 7th) level spell can be gotten without a terrible
crock (note that this includes various permanent effects)

I've been running my campaign for about 4 years now on a more-or-less
biweekly schedule, and in that time there have been about 8 wishes.  One
character wished for higher con (she had 5); one wished for a large & healthy
family (he will get it.  in fact, he will be impossible to kill permanently
until it happens--this was a "6" wish.  of course he doewn't know this).
One character that happened to get a djinni from a wand of wonder, when told
that some creature or other could go onto the astral plane, said absently, "I
wish I could do that."  Now she can.  This was mildly crocked, so she can
only do it once and can't come back by herself.

I think you only need to crock wishes all to hell if you have somehow made
them far too common in your campaign.  If they are rare, characters will only
wish for things that are important to them, and so I think they should get
what they wish for.  Wishing for a sword to be unbreakable is fine.
Obviously this sword is important to the character or s/he wouldn't have
wished it.

	-paul asente
	    (decvax, ucbvax, allegra, ihnp4)!decwrl!asente