Bugs encountered a genie once, you see. The genie granted him a wish: he asked for a carrot. No, wait: two carrots. It’s the same basic principle:
A smart basic principle, too.
Comic of the Day, I Call This The Bugs Bunny Gambit edition.
4 thoughts on “Comic of the Day, I Call This The Bugs Bunny Gambit edition.”
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Yep .. certainly seems to introduce fewer bugs than .. wishing everyone had read *and understood* Kipling in middle school .. or wishing everyone would die of natural causes .. or wishing away sociopathic disorder ..
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Mew
“Those things are always traps”. Yep, Larry Niven had a short story in his “Magic Goes Away” universe involving a subtle trap a genie put in a very carefully worded wish. (Plus of course many other examples.)
There was a series on books written by Nick Polatta based on the “Stalking the Night Fantastic/Bureau 13” RPGs that TriTac made back in the 80s. For the younguns, Bureau 13 was kind of a proto- Monster Hunter Inl./ S.A.V.E. /eta. monster hunting agency run by the federal government. In one of the books the main character, for reasons I can’t quite recall (I think the agency just got walloped by a bad guy and he’s about to fight the baddie) grabs a genie lamp, summons one, and then proceeds to construct a 200 word or so wish to help him out in the battle. Note- he did sit down for a period of time prior to summoning to work out the wording of the wish, so this wasn’t a spontaneous thing.
I was unusually nice about those.
I basically looked at them as a one- time “summon deus ex machina”, and as long as the players kept the chit safely in their pocket until they needed to use it to save their heinies, and provided a reasonable excuse as to how they were going to be saved, they got off with a minimum of negative consequences.
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Of course, players tend to be short- sighted and greedy…
And fear is as good as excuse as any to keep a blank check on the ledger.
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There is one notable exception.
(Which I’ve abused much more than seen others attempt.)
If you are handing over the character to NPC status, you can go a bit nuts. PROVIDED that you add something interesting to the setting, wrap up the character’s arc in a satisfying way, and the wish is in keeping with the character’s goals and ideals.
(Last I heard, one character of mine was still a force in the world, some fifteen RL years after I’d retired him.)