The following vignette highlights some of the hazards and headaches of allowing certain kinds of “undesirables” at your gaming table. This is a partial transcript of an actual gaming session, partially redacted for brevity and to protect the litigious, and very slightly memeified to better infect the zeitgeist.
Party: *fighting the BBEG*
Wizard: I cast Wish.
DM: Cool. The air crackles with fate-
bending power as the very fabric of the Weave thrums around you, ready to obey your will. What do you wish for? Wizard: I wish the BBEG would disappear.
DM: Even those unattuned to the arcane can sense the swell of raw power around you, channelled by your Wish, focussed on the BBEG. He is frozen in time and space for a fraction of a moment, and then he is.. gone.
DM: The BBEG is now permanently invisible. All of his attacks have advantage. All of your attacks are at –5 and have disadvantage.
Party: *slaps collective forehead*
The Party includes a Cleric, who is played by an 11th level Linguist with the Pedant background, the Tolkienana feat, and two levels in Nerd. The Linguist casts DWIM (“do what I mean”) as a ritual (which takes 10 minutes). The material component is a Philosophy of Language textbook, which the Linguist takes out of his backpack. The somatic component is Continual Handwaving. The verbal component is a Condescending Explanation of Wrongness, focussed on the DM.
Linguist: There is no reason to expect that disappear has both the “cease to exist” or “be removed from this location” meaning, and the “turn invisible” or “effectively hide” meaning in Common, or Gnomish, or Celestial, or Arcane Latin
— which might be the same as Celestial, based on some recent research I’ve been doing — or whatever language the wizard made her wish in. As a side note, Command as written only allows one- word commands, but the spirit of the rule should really include single- lexeme commands — “fall down”, “blow up”, “get out” are all quite reasonable and while some have single- word equivalents, many are also single words in other languages. Do you want the French to have an easier time playing than we do? Inconceivable! Even commands with a pronoun should probably be allowed, since in many languages those can also be incorporated into “one word” — don’t even get me started on the definition of a “word”! For now we can approximate it in most European languages with orthographeme, though that is inherently too limiting. Anyway, consider Spanish ¡cómelo! or French tue- le! Linguist: But I digress. The examples given for Wish, dating back to AD&D first edition, clearly encourage the DM to find weaknesses in the logical structure of the wish, not the polysemous denotations of the lexical components of the wish. There is also a convention in the game of scaling puzzles and other intellectual challenges between the skills of the characters and the skills of the players, so it also goes against the spirit of the game to act as though a 19-intelligence Wizard immersed in the arcane arts would clumsily choose an ambiguous wording when casting one of the most powerful reality-
warping spells in existence, just because this 2nd level Office Worker — with what? an 11 intelligence on a good day? — Office Worker: Hey!
Linguist: —chose poorly when relaying the wish to you. Furthermore, in The Silmarillion
— widely and correctly recognized as one of the foundational texts of our illustrious hobby.... Linguist: *continues for 8 more minutes, using Talk Without Breathing*
DM: *fails a DC 25 Intelligence/
Arcana check needed to cast Counterargument* DM: *fails a DC 30 Constitution saving throw*
Linguist: DWIM gives me +83 on my Persuasion roll.
Linguist: *rolls nat 1* I’m pretty sure that still succeeds.
DM: *simulcasting Turn Tables and Petty Revenge* The BBEG
— holding the Exalted MacGuffin of High Importance — disappears from the Material Plane. He has been banished to the Plane of Plain Speech, where linguists, pedants, and politicians are all magically prohibited from opening their mouths — and he lives happily ever after. You, on the other hand, must now track down another Exalted MacGuffin of High Importance. Party: *slaps collective forehead*
Office Worker: *smacks Linguist*