Is this an ironclad wish?: "I wish for just my body to be young again but to keep all of my physical, mental and magical prowess"

Question

Could you have an ironclad wish that makes you young with no unsavory consequences? My attempt was:

"I wish for just my body to be young again but to keep all of my physical and magical prowess"

The "I wish for just my body to be young again" part of the wish would stop the entire world from going back in time, and stop the DM from making everything around the character very old, so that in comparison, their body is young. And since the PC keeps all of their the mental, physical, and magic prowess, the DM cannot reverse time so that the PC is back at lvl 1.

I know that if the DM really wanted to, he could make an unforeseen consequence that would be unrelated to going back in time, and just punish the character, but I would like for some other minds to ponder this with me.

Answer 1

The spell description explicitly gives the DM liberty to rule however they want, even up to ruling that the spell simply fails.

When making a wish for something outside the scope of the given examples¹, the spell description (PHB, pg. 288) gives the DM total freedom to rule however they like:

The GM has great latitude in ruling what occurs in such an instance; the greater the wish, the greater the likelihood that something goes wrong. This spell might simply fail, the effect you desire might only be partly achieved, or you might suffer some unforeseen consequence as a result of how you worded the wish.

So even if you studied contract law and worded your wish in such a way to be technically free from any linguistic loop holes, the spell description gives the DM explicit liberty to simply say: "Your wish fails."

Access to wish should trigger a series of conversations between the players and the DM.

D&D 5e is decisively not a "players vs. DM" game.² Working together to create a fun and enjoyable social space is the player-DM relationship described in the game rules, as presented in the introduction to the Dungeon Master's Guide (pg. 4-5):

The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren’t in charge. You’re the DM, and you are in charge of the game. That said, your goal isn’t to slaughter the adventurers but to create a campaign world that revolves around their actions and decisions, and to keep your players coming back for more! If you’re lucky, the events of your campaign will echo in the memories of your players long after the final game session is concluded.

[...]

The success of a D&D game hinges on your ability to entertain the other players at the game table. Whereas their role is to create characters (the protagonists of the campaign), breathe life into them, and help steer the campaign through their characters’ actions, your role is to keep the players (and yourself) interested and immersed in the world you’ve created, and to let their characters do awesome things.

Knowing what your players enjoy most about the D&D game helps you create and run adventures that they will enjoy and remember. Once you know which of the following activities each player in your group enjoys the most, you can tailor adventures that satisfy your players’ preferences as much as possible, thus keeping them engaged.

What we often see with wish is DMs twisting the wording of the wish into undesirable outcomes, and being aware of this possibility, we see this endless cycle of linguistic one-upmanship where players try to word their wishes as precisely as possible, and DMs try to find the loophole.

Let's break the cycle.

I have had great success with wish, both as a player and a DM, and this success depends on one thing: communication out of game between the player and the DM. As a player, when you get access to the wish spell, it is time to have a conversation about how the table wants to handle the spell. As a DM, this is the first of many conversations I will have about the spell. When a player gets access to a wish, I like to talk about what my personal limitations are as a DM and my philosophy for its use. Much like Genie³ from Aladdin, I like to establish three things:

• Wishes should be worded as "non-meta" as possible, that is, they should be phrased in-character, in narrative terms, rather than in terms of game mechanics. However, I will be flexible about this, so let's talk about it.
• Wishes that make changes to the game rules are probably just not going to happen, but let's talk about it.
• If you are cool with me twisting wishes, I'll twist them while trying to keep things fun, if you aren't cool with twisting wishes, I'll tell you beforehand if it will work as intended.

We're going to talk a lot about wish once it is available, and if you aren't into wishes being twisted, we're going to talk about it some more every time you cast it. At my tables, I have had great success with telling my players what the outcome of the wish will be before we set it in stone. Let's be real, everyone wants to use wish to make something cool happen. And as a DM, I am 100% on board with making this happen. So when a player wants to cast wish, we workshop together what it's going to look like.

I use wish as an opportunity to let my players participate in world building.

After all, this is the entire premise of the spell:

you can alter the very foundations of reality in accord with your desires.

Rather than viewing wish as a player vs. DM pedantry contest, view wish as a tool for letting your players shape the world with the power of their voices. And as always, communication is key. Talk about these things, workshop these ideas together.

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^{1 The bulleted list following "Alternatively, you can create one of the following effects of your choice".}

^{2 It should be mentioned that a "players vs DM" style of play is not "bad wrong fun", rather it is a style of play that should be agreed upon prior to starting play. The cooperative style of play is the default style for Dungeons & Dragons, as outlined in the DMG quotes, but when everyone agrees upon a "players vs DM" style of play, it can work just fine. It is when the players expect a cooperative style and the DM is competing against them that we run into conflict.}

^{3 Rest in peace, Robin Williams}

Answer 2

A list of loopholes I thought up in less than 5 minutes that don't require your DM to ignore chunks of what you wished for:

• Your body is now too young to sustain life outside the womb (note: "Prowess" is skill, not physical attributes. You could maintain your 'level' and your 'skills' but get a body that doesn't match the skills you have)
• Your body is very young, but not your brain because that had to stay mature to keep your prowess. Your skull is now too small for your brain and you die.
• Your body is young, but still old enough to contain your brain...however your old brain is still degrading and you end up with dementia in your 20s.
• Your body is made young, but you don't go with it--becoming a discorporated spirit. After all, you never specified that you should continue to be in your body.
• Your body is young, you keep your skills and abilities, but you lose your memory. After all, memories are stored in the brain and you didn't specify you get to keep those. So young brain = cleared of your old memories

So no, this is not an ironclad wish. It took me less than 5 seconds to think up the first loophole.

However, I can present you with an ironclad wish that will achieve precisely what you're going for.

1. Activate Wish to Replicate a spell: Clone.
2. Wait for the Clone to become mature
3. Self-terminate and 'respawn' in the clone

Per the description of the Clone spell...

you can also choose to have the clone be a younger version of the same creature

And, per Wish...

The basic use of this spell is to duplicate any other spell of 8th level or lower. You don't need to meet any requirements in that spell, including costly components. The spell simply takes effect.

This is the safe "nothing goes wrong" usage of Wish. So you Wish for the Clone spell to be cast on you, produce a younger version of yourself, then 'die' and come back in a younger body.

Answer 3

There are no ironclad wishes

the effect you desire might only be partly achieved,

So the DM would be within his rights to just ignore some of your safeguards.

This one should go as planned anyway

This is equivalent of 5th level Reincarnate spell. Wish can replicate any spell of level 8 or lower with no risk. Then it says

You might be able to achieve something beyond the scope of the above examples.

And follows on how the greater thing you want the higher risk. But you don't want anything greater. You want an effect of 5th level spell, minus the race change.

No DM I know would twist that wish meaningfully, and while what you want isn't technically on the list of surely safe things, it is certainly really close and within the power scope.

Or just use wish to cast Reincarnate.

Answer 4

Even setting aside the frame challenge from Thomas Markov, this is not ironclad, because you haven't defined what "young" means, or for how long you will be young, or how quickly you will age, or any other number of stipulations.

If you truly want to create an ironclad Wish, I would recommend consulting someone who specializes in contract law. There are so many terms that must be defined for the Wish to make sense, and it's unlikely to be something that rolls easily off the tongue.

Answer 5

Your wish is far from ironclad.

Actually, the rules imply the more you try to make your wish ironclad, the more the GM is encouraged to seek paths to pervert your wish. Let me pull an example told to me by a GM: he had a player that once made a wish spell that took about half an hour to read out. It was really really perfect... but for the last moment addition he had made: "and if possible I'd like to keep my body". Of course, he could not keep his body.

What could possibly go wrong?

I wish for just my body to be young again but to keep all of my physical and magical prowess

You wish for your body to be young again but you don't specify any other thing that could lead to your demise or things you could lose:

• How long do you want to stay young? Here, have this second of prime 20-year-old body... and back to your old self!
• How old do you want to be? 1 day after conception is your body. But that body is not able to sustain life outside of a womb even in the slightest. A child's body can't effectively use your skill and ability. You're dead or a burden to the party as you are a child.
• You clearly don't want to be free of illness. Sure you can be young again, and you get the free bonus of plague. You'll be dead soon.
• And you don't wish to be uninjured. Of course, you'll be young, but you're also suffering from a stake through the heart. You're dead.
• You forget to mention any memories you want to retain but your ability to fight, do magic and move as before. Here, have a new body but you can't have any of your memories, so you're amnesiac.
• There's also nothing about wanting to keep your personality and alignment intact! Enjoy being the mirror-universe double that murders his teammates at the earliest moment he's able to!
• And you don't want to be sane either? So you'll be a psychopath from now on.
• You don't mention where you want to be. So your wish also brings you to a place far away. Like Hell or underwater. You'll be dead.
• You don't wish to keep any of your equipment or possessions. You're naked and poor.
• You don't mention that you want to be remembered, so nobody knows who you are, not even your party members.
• You also forget to wish to not anger any deity or such. You're alive and well, but Death, Fate or some vengeful deity hates you now (made your demise their hobby?) and comes over to claim your family, friends, your dog, and your neighbors in the most gruesome way, letting you watch and then smashing your hourglass in such a way that you just stop to exist.

tl;dr:

Writing a perfect wish takes a lawyer several weeks to curb out every possibility the GM could pervert and use to destroy you. And those perfect wishes? Just don't work.

Answer 6

An ironclad wish? Oh my, no, it's not. Doesn't matter what the wording is, even up to an including professionally drawn contracts phrased as wishes, no wish is or can be ironclad... for all the reasons presented in the other answers.

Will it work though? Will you get to be young again without losing any of your abilities and so forth? That's an entirely different question, and the answer to it isn't simple.

Whenever a character uses Wish to do something the outcome rests more with the GM's desires than with how you word your wish. If the GM is looking to pervert your wish for their own reasons - whether it's malicious glee or a desire to preserve the integrity of their world - then no amount of lawyering will get you out of it. On the other hand if the GM wants you to have the outcome you desire, then that's what you'll get regardless of how you word your wish.

The fact that you're asking implies that you at least think that your GM is going to try to mess with the outcome. Maybe it's malicious, maybe just some perceived duty to the long and storied history of wishes gone wrong. We can't measure the tone from here, so take this with a grain of salt.

The Backfiring Wish trope has a lot of variation to it. Yes there are stories of unhappy genies doing their best to get some sort of revenge on their slavemasters, mischievous spirits who delight in tormenting the silly mortals and all that sort of thing, but with wish magic I would argue that when a wish goes wrong it's because the caster messed up in some way. Maybe they got the words wrong. Perhaps their visualisation of the outcome was flawed, or their concentration was a little off. Or it could be that channeling the sort of power required by the wish was just too much for them.

Which in gaming terms makes it an ideal opportunity to get a little roleplaying in. Work with your GM to make a real performance out of it. Describe the visualisation in detail, have your character take steps to ensure they won't be distracted, etc. Then cast your Wish, speak the words... and hope you've done enough to appease the deities.

I find this sort of thing much more fun than agonizing over specific wording. Sure, we don't go through this sort of thing every time we want to lob a fireball at some annoying goblins or something, but clearly a wish is something a bit more special than that. Something everyone should be having a little fun with, no?

Answer 7

Do wishes need to be dangerous and risky?

The reason why wishes go horribly wrong in folklore and fables is because the story would be boring if it didn't. Sometimes there is an Aesop's-Fables-type moral attached to the story, such as, 'Be content with what you have'. The goal here is to entertain and educate the listener.

In D&D, there has been a history of DMs being encouraged to be devious when they hand out such powerful magic, probably as a way of tempering the player's desire to push things as far as they can. The goal here is to entertain the players but limit their ability to unbalance the game.

The question here for a DM should be:

• Is this wish going to cause game balance issues if I grant it?
• Is there some sort of interesting story hook that this gives me?

Ultimately, the question of, "is this wish bulletproof?' is up to the DM. I could personally see several ways in which I could easily twist the intent. Several other replies go into many of the loopholes that could be exploited by treacherous wish magic.

Can a wish be 'bulletproof' in general? Probably not. If you delve deep into linguistics and Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem (into the really deep end...), you could conclude that any language (such as English) is inherently full of paradox and contradictions. As a result any statement is either trivially useless ("I like stuff that is cool") or full of problems. Ex: "Orcs are evil." Evil is a subjective term. What defines being an orc? Is a half-orc an orc? Is an elf raised by orcs an orc? If you get a transfusion from an orc, are you an orc? Language is imperfect by definition, and some really clever mathematicians have proved it. You cleverly worded wishes cannot get by this fact.

The TLDR here is you should probably just 'buy the ticket and take the ride', rather than fret about if your wish is perfectly worded. Just have fun with it, and don't sweat the details.

If I had another strong storyline running, and I didn't want to devote several sessions to wish-related shenanigans, I'd just grant it and tell you to subtract ten years from your character's age. It's a pretty low stakes request to be honest.