On the ethical uses of wish.

[Chris]

I am in the Grit Gate for the first time, and I was damaged while wearing Fortuitous Clogs of Shuppa Musem, which blinks you away at random if you take damage.

I blinked myself into a closed off room and I have no keys to get out. I'm playing a four-armed melee guy, and bashing my way out has proved to be an impossibility.

I kind of feel like this should be my character's fate: to starve to death in a room he blinked into, or risk throwing a grenade to blow up the wall and risk blasting myself (It's a small room).

Is this what the wish command is made for, or would that be cheating, in the opinion of the Caves of Qud community?

[MayoCulpa]

To me that does sound like the kind of situation Wish is for. Like maybe the wish command that lets you noclip back up to the surface, so you can go back and continue exploring as normal. You're not giving your character an unreasonable advantage; it's correcting for a happenstance that put you in an impossible situation.

You'd already tried beating through the walls, which I've found to be impossible sometimes myself. Like if your weapon only damages the wall on a critical hit and the wall has a high AV and lot of hp, it can naturally recover faster than you can damage it.

And if you don't have any recoilers yet, or don't have any energy cells to use the one you got from your starter town quest, that means of escape wouldn't be available either. Town quests do give you the town recoiler and data disk at the same time. But if you hadn't completed the quest yet, or if your recoiler didn't come with an energy cell and you don't currently have one, it's not gonna help in this situation. Getting your many hands on a fully charged recoiler before going dungeon delving is a good best practice in general though! Next time the thing that teleports you into a closed room might be a voider or yondercane etc.

[Via]

If I were you, I wouldn't use wish. As far as I know, most walls can be destroyed with some acid, heat, etc. (and yeah, recoilers help us anytime), so using random teleport before preparing them should feel like my fault and a narrative with a lesson.
But never mind about that. As it's your game, you can do anything. The game has even no-permadeath option. Everything is for fun.

[Chris]

Thanks for the input. Happily, I was able to withstand a couple of explosions and bash down the walls with my melee weapons. Unhappily, a holy templar a few levels lower ended my journey.

[Faital Ryuu]

I personally use Wishes mostly for game-related mishaps that aren't intentional. I usually use questdebug for when village quests are not possible to finish or when I get a relic from a relic quest and the quest step didn't complete even though I had the relic. In one scenario, I had a snapjaw villager in a zone where I got the message that I found the snapjaw that had Stopsvallin. The lone villager didn't have Stopsvallin. Since it wasn't possible to get Stopsvallin, I used Wish to spawn it since I should've rightfully gotten it.

Back when Temple of the Eaters was in beta, there are wishes specifically to try that quest out. If you're not doing a serious run, I see no qualms with using wishes to start out new content that you can't realistically reach reliably by playing the game legitimately with permadeath turned on. You could also do the in-between where you turn permadeath off and work your way up to it, but the wish is faster.

Technically, Qud is still in beta, so a lot of the wishes make it easier to test certain things out. Many game mechanics in the game are very hard to document through everyday play. There may be uncommon item or ability interactions you don't get to see naturally, which is where testing can come in handy.

[AlphaBeard]

Imo wishing is there, in part, to extricate yourself from bad or buggy corner cases that are unavoidable with this many messy, interlocking systems.

[CHOO CHOO]

If you blinked in, blink back out again, Get yourself damaged somehow!

I'd say never use wish. You wore the blinky bits, they blinked you, you reap what you sow.

[Chris]

Originally posted by CHOO CHOO:

If you blinked in, blink back out again, Get yourself damaged somehow!

I'd say never use wish. You wore the blinky bits, they blinked you, you reap what you sow.

I tend to agree with you. Luckily I had some bombs.

[raixel]

I have over 600 hours in this game, Ive played off and on since way back in the day and it is one of my favorite games of all time

My standard is - "if the game bugs out, use wish only long enough to put yourself back to where you were before the bug began".

I remember back in the day a really common one was falling in a pit that was just a square big enough for you and every other square was filled with usually brinestalk. That one was some kind of map gen failure and doesnt happen anymore, but that to me is the prime example of what I mean.
I'll do it on a "casual" (IE playing just to explore new content and playtest) run though, but I dont consider those "real" runs.
But if I put myself in a dumb situation on an actual run, wishing my way out is cheating
Glad to hear you got out, I always carry some form of digging tool, burrowing claws or other wallbreakers. Getting trapped from blinks or falling into something sucks.

In the end though, as long as you are enjoying yourself and not doing something like a leaderboard run or planned build run with other people where your use of wish impacts a score related to others, play exactly how you want, turn off permadeath, wish ll you want, ect. Thats the beauty of it - no one is going to be like "you wished, you suck" unless your use of the wish impacts someone else thru a community run type situation.