would you as a DM allow a wish to "irrevokably kill every lich and demi lich on the continent of Faerun"? Or instead of 'continent' maybe "10 mile radius sphere centered on me"

It would be a quickway to simply not have to playout a difficult encounter the players knew was coming their way.

HAHAHA LOL. yes to the trolls on internet also.

Quote from Leif_the_Red406 >>

would you as a DM allow a wish to "irrevokably kill every lich and demi lich on the continent of Faerun"? Or instead of 'continent' maybe "10 mile radius sphere centered on me"

It would be a quickway to simply not have to playout a difficult encounter the players knew was coming their way.

Depends on the DM and what the expectations were set forth during session zero.

For my table, I would just rule that specific Wish spell does nothing because liches are already dead.

thanks XXX, you make two key points - word choice is critical with this spell, and speaking with the dm in also very important. If they are already dead why do they have about 135 HP?

Quote from Leif_the_Red406 >>

would you as a DM allow a wish to "irrevokably kill every lich and demi lich on the continent of Faerun"? Or instead of 'continent' maybe "10 mile radius sphere centered on me"

It would be a quickway to simply not have to playout a difficult encounter the players knew was coming their way.

I can think of no way to word a wish that would successfully accomplish what you describe, which would be to remove all liches and demi-liches from the game, without having unintended consequences. For example, if you said, "I wish every lich and demi-lich in the world were permanently and irrevocably dead," that might get you time-shifted to the far distant future, when the sun is a Red Giant, and all living things on the surface of the world have been destroyed, including all liches. You got your wish -- there are no more liches. And you are now out of the campaign for good, since you exist in a time millions or billions of years in the campaign world's future. Or perhaps, there is some "god of liches" who considers them his "children" or servants or something, and after you killed them all, the lich-god, who is CR 100 or something, shows up and one-shots the entire party. Again, you got your wish, and now you are dead. There are any number of ways such a Wish could go wrong, and because the Wish is being made for metagame reasons as you describe it (the players know something is coming and want to remove the challenge the DM has set up), I would make absolutely sure that whatever happened as a result of that Wish, was so much more infinitely worse than just fighting the lich in the first place would have been.

As a player, one is responsible not to do something that breaks the world or the game, or ruins the game for other players (including the DM!). Taking every lich out of the world destroys thousands of possible plot devices for the rest of the campaign, hundreds of possible interesting enemies, and utterly wrecks the entire world in terms of lore and backstory for the rest of the time in which the table plays in that world. It doesn't just wreck it for this campaign, but it wrecks it for the DM ever setting anything else in that same world in the future, because all the liches are gone and any story about such creatures are also removed. You're not supposed to, as a player, purposely and knowingly wreck a thousand future storylines like that, for any reason. A Wish like this is a Wish made in bad faith by the player, and as a DM, I would try to warn the player off, but if they insisted, I would find every possible way to make it go bad, and make the player wish, that the character had never actually cast that Wish.

My initial answer to the player would be "I don't know, can it?"

But if they cast it, with that wording it simply fails, as they are already dead.
If they say to destroy every lich on Faerun, then sure that works, their bodies are destroyed. After a week they reform and return as their phylactery was not destroyed.

If they target every phylactery, even if successful, does not immediately destroy the lich. The lich still has to be destroyed, it just will not reform if destroyed. And every lich knows if it's phylactery is destroyed so would immediately make another. And you can not target every lich, demilich and phylactery in one wish, it is three different things. And would take 3 separate wish spells, which is high risk of losing the spell, considering the recovery time between (see below). If they do manage to destroy all the phylacteries, they all might be recreated by their respective liches by the time wish is cast again.

There is plenty of logic behind it where the wish would never work. Wording is everything. If they word it correctly enough to actually consider it. Count every lich in Faerun and make them make an arcana check that is the DC of the number of litches in Faerun. Good luck on them making that dc even with a guidance and bardic inspiration.

And don't forget to remind them their STR becomes 3 for 2d4 days. Which I would consider too weak to properly cast any spell, even verbal as they can't even support their own weight at that point, unless they weigh under 45 lbs. And roll a d100 to see if they keep the spell as it is well out of the normal scope of the spell.


Now if it was myself who was attempting this. And I say attempting as I would still not expect it to work. But I would word it in a way to prevent the means of becoming a lich to have ever existed. More detailed than that of course. But to summarize.

If I was the DM I would not allow it to destroy every lich, but I would allow it to destroy the closest Demi-lich or every lich in a 5 or 10 mile radius. I would give them saving throws to survive though, maybe DC 25 or 30 Constitution saves?

And I would turn around and have some of the remaining lichs in the world notice the destruction of their competitors and they would all start to scry to try to learn what happened because anything that could destroy their competitors could also destroy them! I hope the PC who cast the Wish spell that destroyed those other lichs also has a magic item to block scrying and divination magic, otherwise they’re in for interesting times when a couple of lichs start hunting them down.....

All the liches die and something else moves in to fill the power vacuum.  The new thing is of course worse than the liches.

OR

The god of liches sees this coming and changes its identity to the god of Bobs. All liches follow and become Bobs. The wish kills nothing as all Bobs are now Bobs.

OR

Nothing happens yet. You didn't say "Now" and all of the liches know you wished them dead. They will be destroyed eventually but now they're pissed off at you for wishing it.

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The wish spell gives several examples of what can be achieved (it now reads like 1st ed limited wish). Destroying all of anything is way out of scope.

Nothing happens yet. You didn't say "Now" and all of the liches know you wished them dead. They will be destroyed eventually but now they're pissed off at you for wishing it.

That's my favorite one.

Quote from Leif_the_Red406 >>

thanks XXX, you make two key points - word choice is critical with this spell, and speaking with the dm in also very important. If they are already dead why do they have about 135 HP?

Instead of thinking of HP as life in this case, I think it is better to think of HP as the level of entropy an object has compared to its environment. For example, a door is an extremely ordered object with planks and nails at certain places, and if you reduces a door's HP to 0, the game is basically saying that the door is no longer in an ordered form that we recognize as a door, and further attacking the bits and pieces of the wood is no different from beating a dead horse or pounding the dirt on the ground.

Quote from Leif_the_Red406 >>

thanks XXX, you make two key points - word choice is critical with this spell, and speaking with the dm in also very important. If they are already dead why do they have about 135 HP?

 Just about everything in the game that can be hurt or damaged has hp.

It's always to the discretion of the DM, if your DM replies "you spoke your wish, as far as your aware, it worked...", you cannot reasonably know. If I was DM'ing the table, I'd say you think it worked, but it didn't. IF you are trying to derail a campaign that hard your DM could say that the wish worked, but all the Lich's will die in 20,000 years from now since you didn't specify a time, and now none of them can ever  die until that day 20,000 years from now. Or could say it worked, they all died, but somehow you had Lichee essence imbued within your soul, and you also died.

Moral of the story, never try to derail, annoy, or get around a DM with a Wish spell, the DM always wins.

So this seems like a weird wish, because it's simultaneously super-powerful and boring.

Generally I'd want to treat Wishes in kind of a yes-and manner - give the person what they wished for (no need to be a jerk and mess with it over wording, I'm not a fan of that) but make sure it has complications which set up some cool adventure to follow. But this "kill all liches" wish... like, why would the player even wish for that? Is there some specific lich they want dead? Do they just generally hate undead?  How is this wish interesting or useful?

It's way too much to ask for, because it's wishing for the destruction of a huge number of powerful spellcasters, many of whom are themselves capable of casting spells of this magnitude. It's not interesting, because it's not setting up some cool thing to do in the campaign... so it seems like it's up to the DM to make something cool out of this wish, because the player isn't.

So. What can be done here to salvage something campaign-worthy out of this trainwreck of a wish.

One option is just that the wish fails. I think that's a fine outcome here, because it's way too powerful of a request.

Other options... This particular quote makes me think the player is just trying to quick-win a particular encounter:

It would be a quickway to simply not have to playout a difficult encounter the players knew was coming their way.

Winning a specific encounter via the Wish spell doesn't seem like it's too much. They are, after all, risking a 33% chance that they'll never be able to cast Wish again. If they're trying ot murder a specific lich with this, I'd allow it - with the twist that the Lich's remaining forces manage to find and counterattack the party, leading them to have a fight where the wish-caster takes 1d10 necrotic damage per spell level they cast and has 3 str. Or maybe have the Wish spell instantly transport the party in to the Lich's inner sanctum as part of the "kill the lich" wish, thus making them fight their way out  of the lich lair while the wizard is in that state? ...yep, that's what I'd do here. If they're targeting a particular Lich with this, they instantly teleport to that Lich's location, and the lich dies, but then the party has been thrown, unprepared, into the middle of a dungeon, with their wizard being unable to cast leveled spells without taking 1d10 damage per spell level, and unable to walk on his own. ...though at this level, the party might have other spellcasters that can somehow trivialize the escape? Dunno. Make the escape a bit tougher than that somehow.

Alternatively, maybe they're trying to destroy the liches in general, because they hate undead so much. OK, sure, if this is a nice culmination of the character, maybe make this do something. Maybe the effect of this wish is that all current liches' transformation into liches is instantly and irrevocably undone - they turn back into their mortal pre-Lich selves, and cannot become Liches again. They are now mortal, and will all die within the next 10-50 years. They are, of course, all still the kind of powerful and evil spellcasters who really wanted to be liches, and now they have all been denied that. They are *definitely* going to be working on how to get revenge for this, and working on how to undo it! That could lead to some good followup adventures.

Anyway, yeah, I'd say it's up to the DM to read the room and figure out how to make this wish into something fun and not dumb. Though I'd definitely be giving the player some side-eye for even trying this.

The other thing I would have to say we must consider is this, in terms of world logic.

We know that the spell Wish exists in this world, because a PC has it. This means that it exists in general, has existed in the world for some time, and that plenty of NPCs have had the ability to cast it over the years. And we know that liches are evil and dangerous and lots of people would like it if they didn't exist. Don't you think that if a Wish spell could in one fell swoop get rid of all the liches in the world like this, someone would have already thought of it, and tried it? And so if liches still exist in the world, it must be because Wishing them not to exist doesn't work somehow, for one of the many reasons provided above, or for some other reason.

For example, maybe no one has dared try it because they know that making a Wish like this is far more likely to backfire somehow than to actually work and only someone very foolhardy would try such a Wish -- and most people powerful enough for Wish aren't foolish. You tend not to live long enough to learn so much you can do that, if you're a fool.

My point is, wishing an entire group of monsters not to exist, or something like Wishing that no one would ever die, or other crazy Wishes such as this, should be impossible on their face, because they are Wishes someone should have already thought to try and they clearly have not worked, even though someone tried them. As a player character, then, I'd be extremely wary of trying to cast something far-reaching and relatively obvious, on the basis that if it could have worked, it already would have done, and if it hasn't happened yet, Wishing it so must perforce be impossible.

This is frankly the same logic my DM friend, with his 8th grade logic, used to support his ruling that Wishes could not be used to ask for more Wishes. He reasoned that a "Ring of 3 Wishes", the name of the magic item, would only have such a name if a Wish could not be used to ask for more Wishes. Otherwise, the first thing anyone would do on Wish 1, would be to ask for an arbitrary number of extra wishes (tens, hundreds, thousands, infinity -- why not?). If that were so, then the Ring of 3 Wishes would be a Ring of Infinite Wishes. But yet -- it's only got 3, and explicitly so, in its own name. Therefore, it must be impossible to Wish for more Wishes, QED. And thus Wishing for Wishes was disallowed on the basis of logic, rather than game rules.

This logic, though, applies to anything big and world-changing, like I say. If you could "Wish the Roman Empire didn't exist" and get rid of it while its armies are bearing down on you, well... I'm sure lots of its victims wished it didn't exist. Yet the Romans already wiped all of them out. Some of whom were surely high-level spell casters. Therefore, it must be impossible for a Wish like that to succeed, just on the basis of world logic. Consequently, you should expect a wish like "I wish all liches in the world died permanently and forever" not to actually do that... because again, someone already would have tried it, and succeeded, if it could work.

As a result of the wish, all liches spend a year being legally dead for tax purposes.

You feel the spell attempt to warp the fabric of reality.

In reality, nothing happens.  Liches are are powerful creatures and trying to void the world of them isn’t proper.  The DM has immense latitude for this type of thing, but the reality is it just wouldn’t work.  The magic would attempt to distort reality and fail because of the magnitude, and then you have them roll to see if they can cast wish again.  I wouldn’t even have it affect the world.  It just doesn’t work.

If the player is a very new player who has never gotten to this tier of play before?  Explain how you allow Wish to function in your space.  In my head, the Gods would see something trying to interfere with the fabrics of reality in a very large and meaningful way and would nullify it.  

In my head, the Gods would see something trying to interfere with the fabrics of reality in a very large and meaningful way and would nullify it. 

That's close to how I would run it as well.

In my campaign, the Wish spell doesn't actually even exist as a spell mortals can learn. It may exist tied to a very powerful artifact, or as you have said, the gods could cast it. And that's it.

Quote from BioWizard >>

The other thing I would have to say we must consider is this, in terms of world logic.

We know that the spell Wish exists in this world, because a PC has it. This means that it exists in general, has existed in the world for some time, and that plenty of NPCs have had the ability to cast it over the years. And we know that liches are evil and dangerous and lots of people would like it if they didn't exist. Don't you think that if a Wish spell could in one fell swoop get rid of all the liches in the world like this, someone would have already thought of it, and tried it? And so if liches still exist in the world, it must be because Wishing them not to exist doesn't work somehow, for one of the many reasons provided above, or for some other reason.

 I agree to a certain extent. However, if events occurred in the past, then it is entirely possible that the liches were somehow eliminated but the means to create or become more didn't so sure, many were gone but others just took their place.

Quote from BioWizard >>

In my head, the Gods would see something trying to interfere with the fabrics of reality in a very large and meaningful way and would nullify it. 

That's close to how I would run it as well.

In my campaign, the Wish spell doesn't actually even exist as a spell mortals can learn. It may exist tied to a very powerful artifact, or as you have said, the gods could cast it. And that's it.

So I subscribe to the concept that magic doesn’t stop at 9th level casting, but the ability of mortals to cast such spells requires more than just magical power.  Powerful rituals, pooled spellcasting, divine intervention etc.  That being said, Wish does exist in my games it is just that it doesn’t reality bend in very major ways.  The spell is iconic, and with it there comes certain things.  Fireball does more damage at 3rd level than most spells because its Fireball.   Wish does special things because its Wish.  I don’t want to take that away, but I also let my players know my limitations on what it can do.  I’ll be kind and grant an ASI/Feat, but at a 50% penalty to ever cast again instead of the natural 33% for “things outside scope”.   If it affects a powerful being, they get a save.  If that person is important to history/reality, they get a save with advantage because to alter that person means altering more than just “them”.  If the scope of the wish is too big I’ll ask “Are you sure” which we all know is DM for “That’s not a good idea”, and if they go YEAH I WANNA DO IT then well, it fails.  Sorry.  Then depending on the tenure of the player might I have them roll to see if they can ever cast again.  

Quote from XXXGammaRay >>

Quote from Leif_the_Red406 >>

would you as a DM allow a wish to "irrevokably kill every lich and demi lich on the continent of Faerun"? Or instead of 'continent' maybe "10 mile radius sphere centered on me"

It would be a quickway to simply not have to playout a difficult encounter the players knew was coming their way.

 

Depends on the DM and what the expectations were set forth during session zero.

For my table, I would just rule that specific Wish spell does nothing because liches are already dead.

 I would like to point out that death and undeath are two different states of being. Liches are undead, so they can be killed.