DF Felltower: Minor Ring of Wishing

So on Sunday, the PCs picked up a Minor Ring of Wishing. Here is the description straight out of my notes:

"Minor Ring of Wishing (appears to be a gold ring with three diamonds. As a Great Wish, but only about 1/3 power - equal to a 300-point spell casting, diamonds disappear as wishes are used, last wish turns ring to lead)"

So what can this thing do?

Per my Great Wish post, all you get now with Great Wish in DF are options #1 (cast a spell, 300 points to determine effective energy/effect) and option #4 ("anything else").

Thanks to this being a lightweight version of Great Wish, though, additional limits apply:

#1: A spell cast with this is automatically successful, but does not automatically overcome resistance. Nothing permanent can be created.

Part of the why for this change - the "does not automatically overcome resistance" - is that this becomes a much better choice than Great Wish for any resisted spell that costs under 301 points. It's a Ring of Three Automatic Enslave Spells, or Ring of Three Automatic Annihilation Spells or something of that sort, which both makes it more powerful than I'd like it to be and dramatically undercuts the value of getting a Great Wish.

#4: Effects are limited compared to Great Wish. Effects will tend to be just enough to get the job done, and scope and area may be limited for large effects.

The why on this is because it's minor, not great. Great has more power, and will do more.

One of the players said, "This is basically a ring of three Resurrections." I warned against such reductive thinking. At that point, it's better to try and sell the sucker for $45,001+ and then save $45,000 of that for three Resurrection spells and keep the $1+ as profit. It's also imagination limiting - you've defined it from "can potentially do almost anything, three times" to "does one specific thing three times." And further, that kind of thinking to lead you to avoid using one wish from the ring to, say, whisk the party out of immediate danger that is risking a TPK, and then have to suffer the near-TPK and bring back multiple dead people. Using one wish to avoid something that might lead to a TPK, or avoid some catastrophic loss, may be much better than using multiple wishes to try and partly undo the effect. Timing is key.

Since one of the players specifically asked about wishing to get pulled out of a near-TPK situation, that's at least under consideration.

We'll see what happens with this. Will it be easy come, easy go? Will it spark endless table debate and hypothetical questions? Will it grind a game to a halt as they write a legal pad length wish to make sure they word it so carefully that nothing can possibly go wrong? Will they hold onto these until basically the entire campaign is nearly over, because they want to save them for "when we really need them"? We'll see.