DM a game for a bunch of self proclaimed D&D Veterans

Have them free a djinni

The Djinni offers them a wish

Watch as they inevitably panic and spend forty minutes trying to determine a wish that cannot possibly backfire on them due to tricky wording

Djinni: “man, I was trying to do you guys a favor for freeing me”

“But if you’re gonna be a bunch of dicks about it then forget it.”

/vanishes in a puff of smoke

"I wish I were playing a different system."

Even better:

The players try to enslave the djinni when he tries to bail

Plot arc started

The city of Djinn has declared war on you for kidnapping and abusing the trust of their prince

what do you do if they don't do that

Do some other arc

I just knew a bunch of D&D guys in college who LOVED to talk about all the ways they used Wish to fuck their players over

And how they’d NEVER accept a Wish

Because it ALWAYS turns on you

And I always kinda felt about that

Don't do it with me in the party, I'll jump in to waste the wish on something stupid

honestly this is best left on the list as an idea, rather than being an adversarial DM on purpose

Yeah

I don’t actually want to do this I just like the idea of pulling a gotcha on a bunch of munchkin power gamers by having someone act normal

I think what I would do if the party started dickering over the wish is have the djinn just go "Look, you don't need to argue over this, you did me a solid so I want to do you a solid. I won't dick you over with the wish and will do my best to grant it in a way that works well for you."

A certain kind of player would assume this was a trap

They aren’t the kind of player I like to play with anymore

Yeah, if they assumed it was a trap, I would go OOC and explain that, no, it is not, I'm not that kind of GM. And if that didn't reassure them, well, I likely would no longer be playing with them.

you could probably write it as a short story

either that or go with the political drama but the players are on the side of the djinn and the assholes are npcs