[Before writing my own version, I just want to say that this really is a heading on page 11 of the DMG. Why Gygax and the editor Mike Carr felt this needed to be here, under the greater heading of "Creating the Player Character," I couldn't say. A new character in my world would probably play a year or more before they had any chance at making a "wish," if ever they had any chance at all. I play wishes straight, and as such I don't dare make them a common thing.]
Wishes in the game ought to be extremely rare, and we should hope that players would find something better to wish for than to increase their ability scores. However, players are entitled to spend their windfalls as they please, without our intervening for personal reasons. I feel strongly that DMs should not restrict players from making wishes to be stronger, more intelligent, more charismatic or what have you, even unto saying that the wish to be as "wise as a being can possibly be." My only stipulation would be that the player character could not state their wish as the desire to have an "18" of something, since the characters themselves cannot perceive their own strength in metagame terms.
We need to remember, always, that a wish is a means of weaponizing language. Some DMs may fear that a character may wish to be "the most intelligent being in the world," and thus rush to create boundaries and limitations that abilities can only be increased to 18, or even 16 or 17, even arguing that it should take multiple wishes for a character to achieve a greater strength. But such concerns indicate a very limited imagination where it comes to the verbalization the player might choose. Suppose the player doesn't ask to be the most intelligent being, but rather wishes that every one else be dumber than the player's intelligence at present! Suppose the player says, "I wish for everyone in the party to be as strong as a giant." For that matter, why not wish for everyone in this town, or everyone in the world? The player might say, "I wish everyone in the party to have their beloved personal characteristic heightened a dozen times over." The words that might come of a player's mouth could be anything.
Naturally, this is a reason why DMs will reach for The Monkey's Paw method of retribution, to punish the hubris of a player who would dare show innovation or imagination in creating a wish. This is the reason why DMs create arbitrary limits to the abuse players who are creative, resourceful, enterprising or who show a flair for getting the most from a game metric. Wishes bring out the prohibitional spirit in DMs, causing us to wonder why they let wishes appear in the game at all, being that wishes break games when put in the hands of a capable genius.
Therefore, let the player boost their ability stat to the top of their ceiling. It is hardly a game-breaking ask, and much less damaging than the player striving to get the best of the DM, while the DM cracks down on the player's ingenuity.
Interestingly, I've not thought about my ability scores since joining your game. Not that they don't affect me, of course...but they aren't a constant concern. They are what they are.
ReplyDeleteIt's very freeing.