So my players freed an Efreeti and rolled high enough to grant a wish.

Here is their wish:

“With no physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional harm or manipulation to our friends, families, ourselves, or others who don’t intend us harm, grant us the skills and abilities and mastery we would have earned had fate allowed us to survive and triumph through twenty lifetimes of heroic adventure.”

So great, we made copies of their character sheets and they are setting up their new spells and all that.

This is quite an immense concentration of power into mortals, and now, as far as they concern, are level 20.

What are some ideas you’d might have for cosmic or divine intervention? I plan on letting them enjoy level 20 for a session or two, but with great power comes great responsibility.

What should happen? I’m thinking maybe Mordenkainen appears and offers a warning? Perhaps a god instead?

I’ll most likely take level 20 away after a trial or something, and give them a few levels past their starting point all said and done. BUT THEY MUST EARN IT.

Any ideas help!!

EDIT: Might have struck a cord with this one. Thank you for all of the positive responses! I truly appreciate all of the creative feedback and nuanced approaches to this situation. To all DM’s suggesting I flat out end the campaign in a passive aggressive way just to spite my players, please reconsider why you run games in the first place…

One of my players is an Artificer, and they’ve decided that their long-term character goal is have passive income to fund increasingly expensive magic-item crafting.

Their first idea was becoming a landlord. The party saves a town, they buy damaged or cheap property there, repair it, rent it out, and then collect passive income while the party is off adventuring.

But apparently that was only the beginning.

Some of the other ideas they’ve floated:

• A village they went to was recently almost destroyed by a dragon. The artificer offered the villagers reconstruction loans to rebuild their homes and businesses. The goal is the loans eventually get paid back with interest.
• Buying businesses in places the party regularly visits and hiring NPCs to run them while they’re gone.
• Financing merchants or caravans in exchange for a percentage of the profits.
• Buying land around settlements they expect to become more valuable after the party makes the area safer. This is a big one! They want to do this one in combo with their other ideas.
• Investing in mines, lumber operations, farms, etc. to secure cheaper raw materials for their own crafting.
• Eventually establishing some kind of bank or moneylending company where NPCs can deposit money or take out loans.
• Offering towns development money after disasters, wars, monster attacks, etc., and then making money off the recovery.
• Buying warehouses and charging merchants for storage.
• Funding new taverns or shops in recovering settlements in exchange for partial ownership.
• Creating an adventurer insurance scheme where people pay regularly and receive compensation if they lose equipment, get injured, die, etc.

I like these ideas in theory, because it gives them something to care about besides adventuring and creates a ton of potential plot hooks. At the same time, I don’t really want every session to become Fantasy Accounting Simulator, or for passive income to completely trivialize the normal D&D economy.

How would you handle this mechanically?

Would you just abstract investments into downtime rolls and periodic income? Actually track individual properties, businesses, and loans? Put risks on them like defaults, destroyed property, corrupt managers, bad harvests, monster attacks, economic downturns, etc.?

My party (5 PCs, all level 10) defeated a dragon and found a luck blade in its horde. It has one wish. After endless negotiations, the glamour bard got it. He asked me above table whether I'd let him use the wish to gain an additional bonus action per turn.

The answer, of course, was a hard no.

However, I was curious what exactly he wanted to do. His character has fey touched and he doesn't like that misty step competes with bardic inspiration for his bonus action. I said well what if I add a house rule that lets you use an action to use any bonus-action feature? (I've seen other DMs use this house rule.) He didn't like that idea very much.

So my question to the group is this: would you try to accommodate this in any way? I was thinking maybe let him use wish to gain the ability to do those two specific things--and only those two specific things--a certain number of times per day (like PB/LR)? Or maybe charge an additional use of bardic each time he wants to do it? It feels like it would still be a pretty powerful buff, but maybe a fair trade for a wish?

Or is this a just say no situation?

The old advice to "shoot the monk" encourages DMs to basically intentionally make mistakes if it's satisfying for players.

Since DMs are also just players, should this also be applied to them?

Should players step into suspicious corridors, trust the cloaked villager that offers to join them, step on discolored floor tiles etc?

The only real example of this I hear talked about is being adventurers at all by accepting quests and entering dungeons.

often being smart adventurers directly opposes the rule of cool

Hi everyone,

Looking for some advice on what to do with my small group of players that absolutely abuse the help action. They've gotten to the point where they are asking if they can use the help action literally every time they doll the dice, and often times than not it's hard to deny it because they have gotten really good at explaining how they are helping so it's hard not to honour the rules.

Obviously I don't want to punish them for being creative and helping each together, but they effectively are perma-rolling with advantage at the moment and it's making it really hard to throw obstacles at them.

Does it seem that way? I'm running a game in Roll20 and I feel like I have to provide a map for absolutely every scene. This is a massive amount of work for a 3-hour session.

Talking to an NPC? Need a map.

Jumping across a chasm? Need a map.

Hanging by the bar and putting out the vibe? Need map.

If you DM online with little or no maps, can you please straighten me out here?

I'm in a group where my DM creates unique maps for absolutely EVERYTHING. I'm spoiled. I think I can't provide the same quality to my players if I don't also do this.

This might just be a very tiny insignificant issue but one of my players is a beastmaster and whenever they go anywhere or try to do anything that even has the slightest chance of going wrong they send out their beast of the sky and go on a whole scouting mission while the rest of the party just sits and watches as i describe everything the bird sees and they dont get to interact with it whatsoever unless they know its safe.

This is not only boring for the party as theyre starting to complain about this player but also for me as i cannot surprise the party whatsoever. Issue is this is a very possible and reasonable thing to do and its also what their character would do.

What do i do? Do i just accept it as is or find a middle ground or what

TLDR: Players want to both set off a nuke and not kill anyone and will probably be upset when it kills so many people.

So my Starfinder game is reaching the finally of the first act, and I handed my players a thermonuclear warhead.

The players are trying to stop a mega corporation from unleashing a cyborg elder god on the world (you know, normal stuff). They became sort of allies with a murder death cult who handed them the bomb and told them they should set it off in the middle of the city they company is located in.

My PCs are decent people and don’t love the idea of doing a mass murder but for some reason are also dead set on using this nuke. They keep trying to come up with plans for how to set it off in the busiest part of the largest city in the setting in a way that won’t kill any civilians.

They’ve told a handful of NPCs this plan and every single one I’ve had tell them it’s a terrible idea. I’ve told them above table what the blast radius is, I also mentioned that they don’t need to use it at all.

However I know that in the very likely case that they do use it they will get upset that it kills so many people.

I’m not sure if I give them a big blatant warning that their plan will result in a lot of civilian casualties or let them run with the consequences of their actions

Update: Since some people have mentioned they do have some other options on how to deal with the cyborg elder god and I’ll be reminding them of those next session.

Also I am fully prepared and fine with them using the nuke, I’m more thinking about how they will be upset that they somehow thought it would be non-lethal.

Sup, im the world player of 6 character players​, and one of them are very vocal about wanting our party to create characters who are complete ​unconnected strangers, ​preferring to withhold any info until session 1 and only reveal things through roleplay strictly

I heard him out and respected his opinion while sitting at the table with everyone else, but i honestly find this a terrible idea that could only make the game more boring and have a higher chance to go wrong

it usually requires ​a lot more work for the DM in the mix too​​

I've never heard of anyone doing this outside of one-shots / short campaigns as a gimmick, and its definetely not my cup of tea

Am i being unreasonable or overly zealous?​​

So I'm running a homebrew campaign and without getting into too many details and bloating this post, my big main villain is currently hanging with the party as an NPC in disguise. The purpose of this is because my villain wants to understand the party and possibly sway them to his side of thinking, so his disguise basically consists of the most sympathetic sides of his story, and he is generally just being a very personable guy because that is a side of this villain that very much exists. However, he is objectively trying to achieve a bad goal and has done horrible things to go about it, so he's not good by any stretch.

I've sat on this reveal for almost two years, I've written so much around this reveal, this reveal genuinely saved me from horrific narrative block and paved the way to a good ending to this campaign that I've put heart and soul into for three years.

I was having a conversation with a player a couple days ago, my partner to be exact which makes this worse, and they voiced how much they dislike the 'the villain was disguised alongside the heroes the whole time trope' and now I am massively stressed. I tried to convince them otherwise, citing my own reasons for doing this without revealing anything: it's easier to understand a villain's character, imo, when they are removed from 'villain/BBEG' status. Whilst they sit in that space, players can often disregard any complexities to their character because they are the evil thing that needs to be destroyed. And yes, I want my players to defeat him, but I think it would be a bad story if he just did all his evil things and then when they catch up to him, he monologues about how his life was so bad, or they read about how he has a family or smthn. I wrote him as a complex character, I don't wanna introduce that aspect in an unsatisfactory way.

Now I'm just concerned that the twist that I thought was going to work well will actually be unsatisfactory for 1/3 of the whole table (I only have three players total), and that one of the big points in this game is gonna feel shit for one of my players, but I don't really know if I can reverse something that has been so vital to everything I've planned.

I guess I'm just a bit stuck and could use advice

Edit: Should clarify as well, the end goal of this reveal is not to like, jump the players in the middle of the night. It's to have the villain go 'okay I know I tricked you, but now you understand me and I understand you, can we have a conversation?'

edit 2: Thank you for all the kind words and helpful advice! I think I'm gonna stick with it for now, because I have come to agree with the comments saying that at this point, it would be worse to change, and I need to try and kick my people pleasing habit lol. I appreciate any more perspectives on this tho, if only because it might help others in similar situations!

So a few months ago my players went to the hells and one of them, an edgy Dwarven rogue, made a deal with a devil for help during the fight with the archdevil they needed to take down. It basically turned a deadly encounter in to an average encounter. I made sure it was a powerful feeling boon to have this help.

Fast forward to yesterday that player died in combat right near the end of the fight. The cleric rushed over to cast revify as they do on such rare occasions.... So I had the PCs body rise as if it were alive and then it spoke in a voice not his own. "Hello friends, ehehehe. Sorry but he's mine now" and the body fell limp.

That was where we ended the session and the room just had a wierd vibe. One player was on my side the cleric was arguing because I had the diamond consumed and felt like his powers got undercut and the dead player was just kinda quiet and left a bit after.

I kinda had this in my back pocket sense the was made and now that I've done it I just feel dirty, but like what did they think selling their soul meant?

Idk thoughts. Maybe just moral support. I haven't tried to speak to anyone since the session.

It's in almost every GM guide, every YouTube video, and every "how to build better NPCs" thread, and the advice isn't wrong, a want, a fear, and a secret genuinely do more heavy lifting than a random name and a job title. I followed that framework for years, only to realize most of my npcs still blurred together after a session or two.

It took me way longer than I'd like to admit to figure out why because the framework tells you what to put on paper, It tells you who this person is, but it says almost nothing about what happens once you're actually running them.

Turns out there isn't one trap here I found, there are two.

The first one is softening. I'd build a genuinely great secret for an npc, and the moment it was about to come out in a way that might disrupt the pacing of play, make an npc the party liked look incompetent, or complicate a session I'd quietly smooth it over.

This trap never appears during prep. It appears live, mid scene, in the three or four seconds between an npc getting cornered and you deciding what they actually do, without realizing it, I hadn't prepared a person who I could act, I had prepared a description and once the scene demanded a real decision and real ropleplay I instinctively protected the description instead of letting the character respond honestly to what was happening.

To be clear, this isn't about being a harsher DM or making every interaction punish the players.

The second trap is almost the opposite, and it's harder to notice because it hides right before the players are supposed to understand who this person really is. Either the npcs want, fear, and secret stay so deeply buried that the character just reads as blank... or I overcorrect and practically announce their motivation out loud.

Looking back, both failures came from the same place, during prep I'd decided who this person was, their psychology, but I'd never decided how that psychology actually expressed itself through behavior, so, live at the table, I was forced to invent that translation on the spot.

Sometimes I showed nothing, sometimes I showed far too much, and while I managed to run the occasional NPC well, doing it consistently felt impossible. It’s a brutal skill to sustain, especially if, like me, you can easily improvise situational complications, scenes, and environments, but you aren't naturally gifted at character acting or deep roleplay on the fly.

Faced with that constant struggle, I decided to try something different, a few campaigns ago, I finally let myself stop softening things and focusing more on what the psychology would come out as behaviour. A witness lied under pressure, badly, about something completely minor, nothing the party actually needed to solve the case, I could've smoothed it over and moved things along. Instead, I let the lie sit there, raw and obviously wrong.

The party spent the rest of the session distrusting someone who'd actually been honest about everything else, none of it moved the main story forward an inch. Yet, after a long time, they still remember this npc.

Because the "want-fear-secret" framework isn't the finish line, it's just the setup.

What actually makes an npc memorable isn't writing better psychology, It's deciding, before the scene ever happens, how that psychology naturally turns into behavior, and then trusting those behaviors enough to let them cost something, letting them reveal themselves a little at a time instead of explaining them away.

Honestly, even after realizing this, npcs are still the part of GMing I feel least confident about, every time I think I've figured them out, I find another layer I hadn't considered, so, I'd love to hear what approaches have actually worked for you, any habits, techniques, or ways of thinking about npcs that you've found genuinely changed how they feel at the table?

Hi relatively new DM here. I’m currently running DOIP for a group of first time players we are nearing the end of this module. Everyone is really into it which I love however.

One of my players has just brought the monster manual. These players have already been trying to meta game and I’m worried about this recent purchase. Ive already had to ask them to not google the monsters they’re fighting once or twice.

Am I overreacting here?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Edit: wow thanks for all the replies. I guess I was overacting a bit.

The meta gaming part I’m not too worried about. I have already changed up some stat blocks because of this. Like you all suggested I’ll keep doing the same. Thanks again.

I'm running a D&D 5e (2014) campaign, currently in the middle of a heist-style dungeon based on Keys from the Golden Vault's adventure "Fire and Darkness". The party is split (yay!), fully committed to the heist, and things are tense in a good way. We had a remote 2-hour session today, and part of the party ended up fighting two Stone Golems.

At the start of the session one of the players cast Darkness over the whole combat area. Honestly, this was a perfectly valid and natural tactical move. It made the encounter much harder for the golems to run effectively and that's good.

The problem came when I, the DM, was about to make an honest mistake. I was going to have one of the Stone Golems use Slow on three PCs inside the Darkness, forgetting in the moment that the ability requires sight.

The player who had cast Darkness immediately corrected me by quoting the Stone Golem stat block, saying something like:

"I think it's fair to metagame this much: it literally says 'one or more creatures it can see within 10 feet of it'".

Another player also reacted strongly in the background, saying something like "that's not possible!" when I asked for Wisdom Saving Throws.

Mechanically, they were 100% right. I was about to make a mistake, and I have no problem with players correcting rules interactions. If someone says, "Wait, doesn’t Darkness mean it can’t see us?" or "Does that ability require sight?" that’s totally fine and helpful.

But what bothered me was that the player appeared to have the monster stat block open, or at least was referencing exact DM-facing monster text they had been most likely dissecting together at some point before, during the fight.

The characters had never encountered Stone Golems before in this campaign, and as far as I know the player has not encountered them before in another table or game either. It wasn't phrased as character knowledge or a rules question. It was a direct quotation from the monster entry.

There is also a broader context: the players have a separate Telegram channel where, in their own words they "theorycraft" and plan between sessions. I've known about this and haven't objected to it. Players planning together can be fun and healthy. But after this moment, I'm now worried that at least some of that planning may involve looking up monster stat blocks optimizing around it.

And it's not the mechanical deed of googling a stat block and building an optimized strategy against that that's actually hurting/worrying me.

It's the fact that I feel that the activity within that Telegram channels is making our table's D&D slide into the territory of being an adversarial game.

The party, for some reason, feels the need to "win" me and that's why they seem to have now resorted into stuff like building tactics based on stat blocks between sessions (I don't believe there is other way two players would have reacted in this way in the same moment of game today).

Somehow I feel the party doesn't realize I'm not trying to "beat" the party. I'm rooting for them. I want them to pull off the heist. I want their clever plans to work.

I also felt weirdly violated as the DM. Not because they corrected my rules mistake, but because the hidden side of the game felt exposed in the middle of play. The monster stopped being a unknown creature in the fiction, failure stopped being an option, and the monster became a database entry the players were reading for weaknesses.

So my questions are:

• AIO?
• How would you address this with the table?

I just try to emphasize the second time that I'm not upset about their efficient use of Darkness (and almost trivializing an encounter that way). I want the players to win the campaign. I'm never going to say otherwise.

My players wanted to "buff" their magical items (turning a +1 sword into a +2 and similar stuff). They are friends with a local temple, and I allowed them to have the buff In exchange for some favors for the clerics. The temple people said it's very hard to do so, and needed some special rituals and send them out to collect rare materials. It was purpousefully a hard task since I don't feel that they are on the right tier for such items (level 5) and also wanted the achievement to feel better.

When they heard that there was going to be a quest to do that, they quickly ran out of interest, and searched for the same service in the black market. There they found a guy (scammer) from the bbeg evil cult (Wich the players knew very well), that said he could do it for 250 gold and 2 weeks. I rolled deception for him behind the screen, and passed their passive perceptions, so I didn't tell anything about the lies. No one cared to even try to see if they were lying.

So this guy took half their magic items and left. In two weeks they will return to the black market and won't find that man anymore. And their items will be lost.

I'm planning a mini arch about finding that guy and retrieving the items.

I know for sure I won't just give them the items, maybe I can have the scammer mail them back with the money saying he can't do it or something.

In my group, a character has some poor stat rolls, and declared he would instantly get his character killed so he could reroll. I declared that he has plot armor, so it probably wouldn't be that easy.

Fast forward several sessions, and the group comes to a vendor that offers the player 1,500 gold for his plot armor. (Party is currently Level 4) The player passes on the offer, but another player says "Hey do I have plot armor? How much can I get for it?" For 1,500 gold, he has sold his plot armor.

What are some fun ways to show he doesn't have any sort of favor? I thought of crit failing on 1's or 2's. What else would be fun? This is a long term group of players who knows the rules, and the campaign is pretty tongue in check.

edit Man, ya'll are evil. I love it.

EDIT 2 There are some great sugestions. Here are some of the tops:

1. Death saves, disadvantage, no death saves, or failed saves don't reset
2. The vendor has your plot armor and is now an antagonist, or part of BBEG's plans
3. Gritty rules. Encumbrance, rations, rest modifications, ammo tracking
4. Social penalties. Being ignored by NPC's, being targeted by monsters, scapegoated, red shirted.
5. Extra crit failures, anti-luck, higher DC's
6. Straight up character swap. Here is your old character's stat block, you're now this NPC who has plot armor.
7. No inspiration
8. Damage vulnerability

The party i DM had to go to a city undercover and the closest place they could teleport to was an abandoned necromancer tower next to a village, where they would look for horses. Upon arrival at the village, they noticed everyone was a black dragonborn and they didn't look friendly, so they kept walking until they found a human old man, who happened to be the patriarch of the village.
Without a glimpse of suspicion, they talked to the patriarch, who asked in repayment for him taking them to the city a bit of news from the capital. the reason for this is the patriarch is an exiled ancient black dragon that can't leave the village because of a powerful curse bestowed by a council of metallic dragons.
My players started answering dodgingly, calling him disrespectful stuff like "Geezer" to keep their cover and, since the city they are heading to is a place full of scammers, the patriarch gave them a piece of advice about not paying before getting what they want (As in, don't give me the info before i take you there, tell me on the road).
My players, thinking the patriarch didn't want to give them the horses, proceeded to intimidation attempts that peaked on the barbarian grabbing him by the neck. Luckily, the druid used detect thoughts and noticed the huge danger the party had put themselves into and suggested everybody to run.

After the session, one of the players snapped saying he hates to see powerful characters in disguise and what i did was bullshit. I told him the world is out there not waiting on their levelling all the time. Not every NPC would be a push over for them. He didn't like that.

¿Was i an asshole for putting that kind of character there? He wasn't meant to antagonize them or anything. I have my world already written so the dragon patriarch was already there. I didn't really expect them to attempt to rob an old village dude his horses...

For me, it's introducing powerful NPCs way too often (in my current campaign, our DM introduced a bunch of them, and sometime it's like watching the DM playing with his toy) and make too many combat where you "intended" for the players to run from it (1 or 2 time maybe fine, but from the 3rd time foward, it started to get annoying)

So, in this last session, two of my players went off to rent a hotel room for the night, and besides setting the scene, they didn't really seem to need me. Their players just talked with one another and learned more about each other. It was largely role-playing. Is there anything I can do as a DM to make these scenes better?

Personally, I don't drink while I DM, but I tolerate my players having a drink. So far, I didn't have any issues with anyone becoming drunk, even when our sessions ran for 7 or 8 or more hours. Luckily, my players can manage and control themselves, and I know for a fact that some of them can get properly shitfaced outside the D&D table.

So, as the title says, do you allow alcohol at your table? Why? Why not? What were your experiences thus far?

my players in first session went through a cave fought goblins and an ogre. They peaked through the main door to see the ritual happening with a shaman goblin and 4 guards ritual on 3 civilians they were paid to find.

They were worn out on all spell slots and decided to leave the cave and take a long rest. They've taken it and ended it before the door. Should I punish them for taking a long rest?

I'm thinking of the ritual being completely and now they have a really difficult fight they might need to flee from but I don't know if that's too harsh and I should just let them have it and continue it as normal of a challenging fight where they are able to disrupt the ritual.

I recently had a Player ask me, in the middle of a debate between Players as to what to do next, "what do you want us to do?

I almost snapped. I have told them numerous times that D&D is not a video game, they are role-playing characters with their own motivations and agency, etc. Yet the Players will often ignore or forget basic quest/plot points and then wonder what they should be doing. It was during one of those conversations that the one Player seemed to get frustrated and asked me what I wanted them to do. My response was "whatever your characters want to do!" but that did nothing.

I don't know what else to tell them for them to get it. Advice on how to deal with Players like this would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: want to thank everyone for the constructive criticism and great advice, I will definitely be implementing some of these moving forward

EDIT EDIT: definitely forgot detail in my post and have an update. The Players were in a town and had three objectives: help town find missing miners, help town negotiate with neighboring druids, help PC gain vengeance against nearby dwarf clan. They had been in the middle of the "rescue miners" dungeon when they thought it was too hard and backed out prior to the final boss and were having the discussion outside. They decided to leave the town entirely. I definitely could have been more clear about their remaining objectives, though I did mention them again via an NPC, but they decided to dip and head to another town. All's well now, I have travel situations lined up depending on Survival rolls etc.

How do you handle a party who have setup an entrepreneurial enterprise that nets them thousands of gold pieces per month?

My homebrew campaign is set in a world where, for fun, there are some odd differences that keep them interested and curious in the world. Some are very obvious, such as kangaroos have been domesticated instead of cows, or camels speak common. Others are more 'once you see it you can't unsee it' such as batting sports and curtains haven't been invented.

One such oddity is that umbrellas don't exist in this realm. When my players learned this they soon set about setting up an umbrella business.

It seemed like an inventive idea but I wasn't going to give it to them easily. We've spent several sessions dedicated to them establishing the supply chain for the factories of the different parts, negotiating contracts with a business partner, and even traveling to a tax-haven the other side of the world to become citizens and open a bank account.

They are now in a position where they can earn about 5000gp per month from this venture. It's not enough to break the economy of my world but it's enough to break the economy of their world. After a month or two in-game there will be almost nothing they can't buy and they'll be rubbing shoulders with the financial elite (who are connected to one of the primary evil factions of the campaign).

Their next big quest pointer requires them getting an airship, which is expensive enough to keep them occupied, however how would you keep them in line when it comes to the ability to spend frivolously on basically everything else in the world?

I'm on my third campaign as DM, a modified Tyranny of Dragons run. There are these masks the ultimate villain's cult are trying to gather, and part of the storyline is our group trying to find them first.

I have explicitly told told them, either by them asking for NPCs telling, the following about these masks:

- They are able to wear/use them, and it would give them certain abilities
- Their allied factions want to keep the masks fortified and not out in the open where they could be captured by enemies
- If they do decide to use them in the field, their allies will no longer be allies and want to hunt them down to place them in safekeeping
- Enemies, particularly those in the cult, will be targeting any player wearing/using the mask and then run away since they want to secure them.

Of course, they found one mask early, decided to loot it from the Lord's Alliance fortress, and promptly lost it during a following battle.

Now they have no mask, their allies are mad at them, and have been robbed. They don't want to follow the main questline since they just want the mask back. We're really off the rails, story wise, and are kind of losing interest in the campaign since I'm "railroading them" by having the enemies target them a certain way.

Moving forward, should I ask them more directly "Do you understand the consequences of your decisions?" without it making it sound condescending.

Updated 7/19/20224

I've been playing since AD&D back in 1994 and have been DMing since 3.5. We have been playing with each other for over a decade and are all in our mid-late 40s. No one is oblivious the fun of the table. We are currently playing 5e and My players recently encountered a Djinn, gained his favor and as a payment he has offered 1 wish per player. I try to run a "yes and" table and I'm always open to where they want to take it.

Player 1: I wish to know my father's story

The genie produces a vial for the character to drink on the 3rd day after the summer solstice which will involve a dream sequence encounter.

Player 2: I wish the evil queen that killed my family to be here in front of me right now.

Queen shows up with an as yet undetermined personal guard, to be resolved next session.

Player 3: I wish to be 20th level, later amended to I wish to be an archdruid.

I've narrowed it down between two options:

This one requires a little retconning but I think they'd be on board for it. As soon as the words leave his lips "I wish to be 20th level" he's filled with a power that feels like he's going to burst. The druid's wish immediately kills both of the other PCs and with that, the druid has to fight the queen on his own, and they nearly kill him. His vision fades to black ...

The archdruid is suddenly woken up by two characters he does not know, (2 new 20th level characters played by the other two players). It's the future and the Archdruid is grizzled and scarred. He doesn't remember anything of the last several TBD years, for him the fight that kills his friends was moments ago.The lands have been overrun by the queen and her evil minions. And it can all be traced back to the wish. The two new players inform the archdruid about their mission to gather powerful items to fight their way backward through time to stop this horrible future.

As they go back in time they lose levels, I'm figuring every session is them completing a mission going further back. Until they are back on the fateful day. He's back in his 8th level body. The Djinn notices and smiles at him "oh you're back" when the druid corrects himself to say "no, I wish to be archdruid" the Djinn confirms his wish and gives him the archdruid class feat from level 20 and maybe some magic items befitting the title. He and his friends, alive again, fight and defeat the evil queen and we begin the journey to find out about player 1's father.

Or

He gains the ability to essentially go super Saiyan, once a day, and it lasts until a long (or short?) rest. He makes a constitution roll after he reverts back, with an upward scaling DC, on a failed save he loses a level in druid, this continues until he reaches his original level or until he meets the other PC's levels. He maintains the archdruid class feat.

Thank you everyone for conversation, a special thank you to:

u/Kerrus

u/Aware-Contemplate

u/DrizzHammer

u/Nylius47

u/drunken_augustine