Getting wishes from an Efreeti

[Crake]

That still requires ignoring the fact that what gives you those abilities in the first place is a spell. There's no rule that says once an ability given by a spell is used up, another casting doesn't give any more uses.

Your issue here is that you're tracking it wrong. You don't track "uses remaining", you track "uses expended".

If you cast a spell that gives you an ability X/day, and you expend Y number of uses before it expires, then when you recast the spell, you have still used Y uses that day, so the remaining uses is still X-Y.

This works equally for say, cleric turning. If you cast eagle's splendor to give yourself 2 additional turns per day, and then you expend those 2 turns, when you recast eagle's splendor, you've already expended those 2 extra turns. Same reason nightstick stacking doesn't work.

As written every spell cast works just like any other. The spell gives you x abilities with y uses per day. There are plenty of forms with a, b, c, etc uses per day of the exact same ability. Is each form a different ability? Or is the cap for daily uses actually the amount proffered by the form that gives the most? It seems like an unnecessary amount of complexity that is easily solved by just saying you don't have any per day uses of the ability available because it hasn't been a day yet.

It does get confusing when you start looking at SLAs, because yes, how do you distinguish between each form's SLAs. If you transform into a form that has an SLA at-will, and expend a bunch of uses, then transform into another form where that SLA is limited, are you completely out, because you already used the ability a bunch of times? Luckily, Shapechange does not grant SLAs, it only grants supernatural abilities, which are, for the most part, pretty unique per form.

And no, I'm not conflating them, however they are similar. They both have a per day mechanic that does not care at what point the hour strikes midnight. That said, the closest thing the rules state on the subject is that SLAs function just like spells. Also, not all casters need to prepare spells.

Right, except the difference is that spells have an active recharge mechanic (ie, you have to DO something to regain them), while all other abilities are simply a "have you used this ability in the past 24 hours" check, and not an active recharge.

I have been trying to find the exact citation that states how the cooldown on abilities works, I remember it being in a super unintuitive rules section, and my table actually houseruled it, because it was actually just too much bookkeeping to keep track of WHEN you cast an ability on each day, so we just set it to recharge at sunrise, because it was easier, and we had a gentleman's agreement to not abuse the game.

It doesn't help that, with 3.5 being so out of date, it's a nightmare trying to look up anything rules related, as it all just defaults to 5e search results.