[RPG] Can you craft magic items using Wish instead of the required spell

craftingdnd-3.5emagic-itemsspellswish

Say you're a wizard or sorcerer who wants to make a Ring of Protection. You can't prepare/know Shield of Faith, but you can use Limited Wish. Does this satisfy the requirement, or do you HAVE to have the specific spell in order to craft an item with that spell?

Best Answer

The rules don't specifically cover this use of limited wish, but they suggest that a reasonable DM should allow this.

According to the rules on Creating Magic Items:

These prerequisites must be met for the item to be created. Most of the time, they take the form of spells that must be known by the item’s creator (although access through another magic item or spellcaster is allowed).

And you need to effectively cast or trigger the spell effect each day:

The act of working on the armor triggers the prepared spells, making them unavailable for casting during each day of the armor’s creation. (That is, those spell slots are expended from his currently prepared spells, just as if they had been cast.)

In other words, there are three defined ways to meet spell prerequisites:

  1. The crafter knows the spell
  2. The crafter has a magic item which duplicates the spell
  3. Another caster knows the spell is available to help

That second one is important, because activating a magic items is explicitly described as "duplicating" the spell, not casting it. Rules Compendium, p.84:

Activating a command item takes the same amount of time as the casting time of the spell that the item's power duplicates. If the power doesn't duplicate a spell, activating the item is a standard action unless its description says otherwise.

"Duplicating" is the same terminology that limited wish uses. In other words, while limited wish technically does not allow you to "cast" shield of faith, it can allow you to duplicate the spell. The magic item creation rules quoted above do not at any point require you to "cast" the spell, but do allow you to provide it via items which duplicate it.

Now, this is not explicit, because we're still talking about two similar but different things: duplicating a spell with an item, and duplicating a spell with a spell. However, the manner in which ambiguous D&D rules are adjudicated by the DM is described on Dungeon Master's Guide p.6, which explicitly recommends that DM allow inferences from similar rules:

Look to any similar situation that is covered by a rulebook. Try to extrapolate from what you see presented there and apply it to the current circumstance.

It would be a very reasonable inference, therefore, to allow limited wish to duplicate a spell to craft an item. However, it is technically still the DM's call, rather than something that the rules explicitly allow.

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