Just Another Pointy Stick: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 3a

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This is the third part of an intermittent series that will examine alternatives and possible implications to the standard spell storage solutions built into D&D, Pathfinder, and, in fact, most fantasy games. Unfortunately, it has grown so large that I have no choice but to split it in two. The second half will be published next week, it’s already half-written.
When it comes to fiction, and especially children’s fiction, wands and chairs seem to outnumber every other type of magic item available save perhaps for spinning wheels, which seem all-too-easily cursed. Follow that with bright, shiny, magical, swords. Perhaps it is this exposure to pointy sticks that do something wonderful that leads many GMs to overpopulate their campaigns with wands. Staves, on the other hand, were one of the simplest and most common weapons going around if you weren’t a trained soldier – simply because you could use one to hopefully stay out of reach of those trained soldiers’ swords. Yet they are rare and precious as magic items, and even more rarely encountered as weapons. Clearly, something (possibly several somethings) is a little out of kilter here.
Wands and Staves
Wands and Staves have a lot in common, and yet are (in some ways) very different. One is a power-pack that can be recharged time and time again, the other is a permanent or semi-permanent item – that sometimes has limited charges. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that one is a power-pack and the other is very confused! One of the goals of this article is to cut through that confusion and make sense of the whole situation.
Actually, there is a little edition-confusion in the above statements (but not much) – until Pathfinder came along, most staves were permanent magics with only a few having charges. The earth moved in Johnn’s article of Oct, 2011 – or, more accurately, that’s when the shockwaves arrived (see Why I Fell In Love with Staves Again After 10 Years (PFRPG)) – when all staves were switched to a slot-and-recharge model and some powers began to expend multiples of those slots.
So the trend has been for these items to become more alike than they were, though with enough distinctive touches to make each different from the other. And both have migrated towards the essential power-pack model, if they weren’t there already.
Wands
A wand is a stick about yea-long – generally about a forearm’s length. Sometimes you release the magic by pointing, sometimes by waving it around, sometimes by uttering a command word or phrase, and sometimes by some combination. Modern-day magic wands, as used in Magic Shows, have grown longer over the last century or so, become almost ubiquitously black with white ends, all to make them visible to audience members sitting in the back rows, but the more traditional form is of a reasonable straight piece of turned wood. The Harry Potter books and movies made wands exciting again to younger players (especially their traditional use outside D&D/Pathfinder), not as a bespoke magical item, but as a spell focus. Wands are normally limited to 4th level spells or less (though I have seen rare exceptions).
Sidebar: Wands as Spell Foci in Shards Of Divinity
One of the ways in which I simulated the rising difficulty of casting spells in Shards Of Divinity (described in my forthcoming article “What Is Magic?”) was by adding an optional additional spell focus to all spells. This halved or three-quartered the loss of reliability of magic that was not so bolstered, which started at 18/- reliability in the campaign backstory and progressed through to 14/- reliability at the start of play, declining further to 50-50 odds in the course of the campaign.
To halve the reliability loss, you used a stick or chalk to trace a circle in the ground around the caster and drew a pattern of lines within the circle, a pattern that was different for every type of spell (and had to be discovered by trial and error and memorized by rote); so long as you stood within that circle, your chances of casting that particular spell were improved: from 18/- to 19/-, from 14/- to 17/-, from 10/- to 15/-. Projecting forward in time, when the base reliability dropped to 2/-, a circle would give you an 11/- shot. These circles took one round per spell level to draw – so for a zero-level spell, a simple circle was all that was required. The PC mage was the first mage to discover the cause of this benefit, and in the process gained a clue as to why magic was becoming unreliable, but that’s not all that important here.
He found that he could substitute the mental image of a circle with it’s appropriate pattern, adding a round to his spellcasting times, but achieving the same reliability boost. What’s more, because mages aren’t normally known for their manual dexterity (or their delicate writing, which more often than not resembles a doctor’s handwritten prescription), but are known for their intellect, this enabled him to halve the unreliability a second time.
What he never found out (but would have done, had the campaign continued long enough) was that other mages were finding other solutions. One of them was the substitution of more valuable material components, another was the addition of an additional spell component (verbal, somatic, material) where the spell as written didn’t require one, and a third was the use of a wand to ‘draw’ the arcane symbol or something resembling it in the air (effectively adding a second somatic component); this was faster and sloppier than drawing on the ground, and so, like these other techniques, not as effective – they three-quartered the unreliability – but they also dropped the casting time back to standard. What’s more, eventually it would have been discovered that these were stackable benefits.
Another thing that was known was that creatures who were part-magical, or who relied on non-clerical magic to survive (often a feature of Dragons) were dying out. Eventually, it would have been learned that they could survive within such magical circles, or using methods analogous to those described in order to make their spell-like abilities more reliable (and hence, their survival more tenable). In particular, Dragons would need to start consuming things costing first tens of GPs and then hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of GP each day. Finally, a meaningful purpose for Dragons to collect Hoards! But that’s wandering slightly off-point.
Another thing that would eventually be discovered was that the material of which the wand was made would have a profound effect – at first, a simply wand would do the job, a wand costing ten times as much would do it twice, and so on. Eventually, the cheapest wands would stop working altogether, shifting the baseline cost of the wands. At the same time, the other solutions would also need to be doubled-down, and then tripled.
What I was really doing, in other words, wasn’t so much making magic unreliable, as increasing the cost of a reasonable standard of reliability. Just thought he – and the rest of my readers – might be interested. There will be more such revelations/inspirations in that forthcoming article that I mentioned).
Wand Basic Variants: Expended Charges
A wand should rarely if ever be recovered from the field (i.e. found in loot) fully charged. If nothing else, the caster should have expended one charge verifying that the darn thing works as advertised, and – because shonky operators and con-men are a reality wherever an opportunity presents itself – most purchasers will make a down payment in order to see the wand demonstrated at the time of purchase. I always used the simple rule of multiplying the value shown in the DMG by the percentage of remaining charges to establish the base second-hand value of a wand.
Furthermore, some percentage of the charges would have been expended in the field. Depending on the circumstances and the campaign, I might roll 2d20 for the charges expended, or 3d10, or 4d10, or 3d12, or even a percentile roll. It would be very easy to simplify this into a consistent pattern if you want a bit more reliability.
In the past, depending on how generous I was feeling when setting the ground rules for a campaign (because wands of fireball and lightning bolt and so on can be terribly game-unbalancing), I might set a minimum number of charges remaining – usually (but not always) 10. These days I would put a bit more thought into such decisions.
Wand Basic Variants: Expended Charges 2
For example, I might rank the usefulness of the wand on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the most useful, and then roll [usefulness]d10 for the number of expended charges. Or [usefulness x X]+dY for that value – with X being a value chosen from 5-9. This means that each time such a treasure appeared as loot, a qualitative assessment would be made as to how heavily it would have been consumed – remembering that acquiring one with a lot of charges often makes a mage trigger-happy. “You see a kobold –” “Wand of fireballs, blammo!”
Wand Basic Variants: The Last Charge
Another variation that I have contemplated, but never personally used, is that some extra activation is required to expend the last charge in a wand. This is because of the characteristic of Magic Item Persistence, discussed below – essentially, once the last charge is consumed, a wand becomes just another piece of wood, or crumbles to ash, or something of the sort.
Wand Basic Variants: We just don’t get along
Another such unimplemented idea was the notion that two wands in close proximity might interfere with each other’s magic or short-circuit each other. This notion arose when a player of my acquaintance created a list of the ten most useful mage spells and had his mage begin wearing a bandolier stocked with two wands of each spell on his list. The final straw was his creation of a custom feat, “Two-wand casting” (based on two-weapon fighting) to enable him to use a wand in each hand at the same time. He did specify in the feat that unless they were the same kind of wand that they needed to have different triggering mechanisms – i.e. they couldn’t both be command-word activation unless both used the same command word, but even so…
The same player also came up with the Semi-Automatic Wand, which is a long stick with a bunch of wands attached to it, usually an inch apart, all activated with the same command word.
While I like my players to be creative, this was going a little too far, in my opinion – this variant was the inevitable result.
Wand Basic Variants: Permanent Wands?
I have also pondered the creation of Permanent Wands, i.e. Wands of infinite charges. These would cost 100 or 1000 times as much as a standard fully-charged wand of the specified type. Ultimately, I decided not to implement the idea; there was too much gameplay deriving from a wand getting low on charges – except in a limited fashion.
Ultimately, for SOME wands (where the casting of the spell was a ubiquitous practice, such as wands of Detect Magic), I permitted Permanent Wands (while making them exceptionally rare items to discover in loot), simply because it eliminated unproductive record-keeping and time-wasting in play, and specified that if you attempted to do this with any other type of spell, the wand blew up, expending all the spells cast into it already.
Sidebar: Wands Of Healing
There have been times when I have permitted wands of Cure Light Wounds in my campaigns, especially when none of the players wanted to play a cleric, or insisted on being more than a holy drip-bottle (refer to the All Wounds Are Not Alike series for other solutions to this problem). Here’s my rule of thumb on such matters: if there are only 2 or 3 players, permit it; if there are 4, consider it; if there are 5 or more, consider one of the other solutions to the problem.
Wand Basic Variants: The Wand Charging Line
Another of my sometime-players and acquaintances posited the notion of a wand charging line – instead of one mage doing the charging of a wand, you get 50 of them (most magic schools can boast this number of apprentices and staff, in his estimation) in a row. Each imbues one charge into the wand under construction and then hands it over to the next in line, enabling the school to crank them out like sausages.
Wand Basic Variants: Charge Accumulation
He also proposed the notion that you be able to charge up one wand with the unused charges of another wand of the same type – so that if you had five wands with ten charges, you could dump all of those charges into one of the wands to have a fully-charged item.
Wand Basic Variants: Disposable Wands
The same player also proposed the notion of Wands made of cheap materials in the cheapest and shoddiest way that you could get away with that could only hold five or ten charges and then got thrown away, costing 1/6th of the standard cost. Because they were cheap and nasty, there was a risk that they would break with unexpended charges remaining, hence the slight discounting of the value.
On this occasion I was especially sharp, and realized that the combination of this, plus the Wand Charging Line idea and the Charge Accumulation idea meant that you would be able to create 4 disposable wands for 2/3rds of the price of a regular wand, create a regular wand with only 1/5th the usual charges (costing 1/5th the regular price) and then dump the charges from the disposable wands into the unfinished full wand – effectively discounting the construction costs of a standard wand to 13/15ths of the standard price. That might not seem like much, but for a wand costing 2500gp? That would be roughly an extra 333gp profit, and would also cut overheads because your production line needed only to be 10 mages long. So, while I like the disposable wand idea, do NOT permit it in combination with either of these notions.
Staves
Staves are rod-shaped, made of wood, or sometimes metal, bone, or other exotic materials, usually 4-7 feet tall and 2-3 inches thick – though for metal ones, an inch is perhaps a more appropriate diameter. They are often surmounted by a gem, crystal, skull, or other such device and may be shod by metal at it’s foot; some are shod at both ends. Unlike wands, Staves are not limited in spell level, but they can contain only 10 charges, and may posses exotic abilities that are powered by the spells embedded within, which in turn may consume those charges – sometimes one, sometimes two, and sometimes three, depending on the staff and the ability. Probably the most famous staves are those of Gandalf and Saruman in The Fellowship Of The Ring, first of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
Redefinition As Mundane Weapons
Both D&D 3.x and Pathfinder state that a Staff is like a walking stick, quarterstaff or cudgel, and can be broken with a DC of 24. That means that they do 1d4/1d4 damage (s) and 1d6/1d6 (m), and have a x2 critical range. As far as weapons go, that’s pretty poor when compared with enchanted swords and the like, and the Break DC makes them entirely too fragile (given their expense). A Break DC of 24 is reasonable for an unenchanted weapon, though. Monks, of course, can elevate the combat performance of Staves through class abilities.
For that reason, I will propose, in this section, a set house rule to improve enchanted staves as an enchanted weapon. You are under no obligation to adopt them; they are offered here only for consideration.
- All enchanted staves with at least one charge remaining receive +1 to hit with each blow, as though they were a +1 weapon.
- Staves add the number of remaining charges they contain to the Break DC – so a fully-charged staff would have a Break DC of 34.
- Characters can develop a stave-based combat style that enhance a staffs combat characteristics. For each additional proficiency feat of the appropriate type devoted to the purpose (beyond the base required for proficiency), the character can do one of the following, three times:
- add +1 to the chance to hit with one strike*;
- add +1 to the damage done with one strike*;
- add +1 to the critical threat range (maximum of once per feat allocated) with one strike*;
- add +1 to the Break DC of the weapon.
* Note that normal characters get two attacks per round with the weapon, while Monks get three.
- If the stave to which the character has attuned his combat style is lost or destroyed, he must attune his style to a replacement; no two ever have quite the same balance, etc. This requires one week of daily use (practice bouts of at least an hour count) for each feat allocated to the Staff Fighting style. Feats that have not been ‘attuned’ do not contribute any combat benefit.
The purpose of these changes is to make the staff a more attractive combat option.
Staff Basic Variants: Permanence
Unlike wands, staves may not be destroyed by the consumption of the last charge within the magic item; they persist and can still be recharged. Some GMs may prefer an alternative to this behavior (I do, because it adds to the diversity of magic items). For those who like this notion, I offer the following variant: some Staves persist, and these are in a separate category of magic item to normal staves, Lordly Rods, Staves, and Scepters. The GM defines whether or not any given staff in a member of this category. These are rare and usually restricted to members of the Nobility (hence the name).
If however, the staff is nothing more than a repository for spell charges, it costs 1/10th the price and becomes (permanently) just a mundane weapon upon the consumption of its last charge. Any benefits conferred using the Mundane Weapon (Staff) combat style remain, but the staff can never be recharged and must be replaced if the character wants to use it as a spell storage device.
Staff Basic Variants: Themed Spells
One option that I have seen restricts the spell contents of a staff by Caster Level and not Spell Level. This variation also mandated that the spells contained need not be the same, but should fit a narrowly-defined theme. I’ve often found this a useful technique to employ for granting PCs temporary access to an environment in which they could not normally adventure, eg underwater, inner planes, etc, or for providing other plot necessities.
Remaining Charges
Once again, finding a staff as part of loot should not gift a PC with a fully-charged item, though charges are few enough in such items that characters would be more conservative in their consumption. For that reason, I usually roll d6+6 for the number of charges (with a maximum of 10). I also know of some DMs who are a little more generous and permit a maximum of 12 charges in a Staff, in which case I might make the roll d8+7.
Key Characteristics
There are a number of differences between Staffs and Wands, but there are even more similarities, especially once the most common variations are taken into account, as this section will show. That’s the reason they have been bound together into this one general category for the purposes of discussion; just about anything that can be discussed for one can also be made to apply to the other, with only a few exceptions. The characteristics that define this broad category are:
- Persistence (sometimes)
- Spell Capacity
- Instant
- Command Words and/or Gestures
- Reluctant, Go-getter, or Eager
- Form
Each of these merits discussion:
Persistence until drained (sometimes)
The default is for wands to become dead and useless once their charges are expended, and for staves to retain a functional capacity for stored magic under the same conditions – but wands include the capacity for infinite charges (and an obvious sub-variant in which the capacity is limited but can be recharged even after the final charge is consumed), while staves include the option to give the ‘long-life’ variant special treatment while the regular items are treated like high-level wands. As a result, both items fall on a continuous range of possibilities in this respect.
Spell Capacity
Both are limited to a set capacity, which can be recharged. In the case of wands, 50 charges is the norm, while 10 (or sometimes 12) charges is most common for Staves.
Variants: Subdividing a finite capacity
Some GMs feel that wands are over-powered. After all, 50 fireballs can decimate a small army, and it takes a lot less time to activate one than it does to cross the space between safety and melee. Sure, you could use a massed archery attack – but you need to be fairly precise with your aim (range penalties apply) whereas the mage only needs to hit somewhere in the general vicinity – which means that they only have to traverse a short distance at most before the archers are in range. One or two fireballs later, and the threat has passed. And that ignores the potential for mobile armored wagons to protect the mage until he’s close enough to point the wand, or some other protection from missiles.
One GM I know devised a simple solution: instead of one spell to a charge, he defined wands as containing one spell level per charge, and +1 charges required for attack spells. So the capacity of a wand of fireballs would be 50/(3+1)= 50/4 = 12.5 fireballs. He was generous enough to round up, so that the wand had a rechargeable capacity of 12 spells, but on the 13th use, would disintegrate after the expenditure of the final charge (using it’s very substance to make up the shortfall).
It didn’t take him long to realize that this meant that the restriction on spell levels that could be contained within a wand was no longer necessary; normally, a wand can only contain spells of 4th level or less; that means that one could contain 10 uses of a 4th level attack spell, no more. And that, in turn, meant that using a staff for spell levels 5+ would simply be a more efficient storage medium, which in itself was enough of an incentive to maintain the existing patterns of usage.
He then took this logic a step further, dividing staves into classes ranked 1 to 5. Add 4 to the class and multiply by 10 to get the equivalent in “wand charges” for each class, and mandate that staves cannot hold more than 10 charges. This means that each stave class corresponds to a single level of spell which it can store most efficiently, starting at 5th (class 1) and proceeding through to 9th (class 5). A stave could, then, hold a 3rd level spell – but the maximum number of charges was fixed at 10, which meant that a wand would be a more efficient storage mechanism (and a lot cheaper). This enabled him to control very precisely the level of magic that he was releasing into his campaign.
When he told me of these variants, I immediately pointed out that if he relabeled his system to use “effective spell level” instead of “spell level” that it would enable him to create wands with built-in metamagics on the spells. For example, an Empowered Fireball has an effective spell level of 3+2=5; so a wand could hold 50/(5+1)=8.33 spells, round up as usual. This greatly increased the variety of wands that were available in his next campaign!
Instant
As a general rule of thumb, both commence activation of an effect contained within, instantly the activation procedure is complete. In most cases, this is so rapid a process that it doesn’t trigger an attack of opportunity. That qualifies as being instant, or near enough to it, in my book.
Command Words or Gestures
The most common activation processes are command words or gestures. More exotic procedures are sometimes required but these tend to be custom magic items and not representative.
Reluctant, Go-getter, or Eager
The terms “reluctant” and “eager” were introduced in part two of the series; this time around, I’m adding an additional option to the mix, the “Go-getter.” This parameter describes what happens when the magic item is broken or destroyed. “Reluctant” means that the magic is simply dissipated, and nothing happens. “Eager” means that the entire set of remaining spell charges are activated simultaneously, with the object (and its wielder) at “ground zero”. A “Go-Getter” is a compromise in which just one charge is released to affect/afflict the wielder, and is the option I most often use.
Form: The Ultimate Definition – pointy sticks
When you boil it down, both wands and staves have a single fundamentally simple form in common: they are sticks that you can point toward things. Everything else is a matter of detail.
Now, there are an awful lot of other things that meet that basic description, or something very similar to it. And all of them are potential substitutes for the standard wand or stave.
Since these variations (rather than the spell-oriented ones already described) are ostensibly what this series is all about – offering GMs some unusual substitutes that they may not have previously considered – lets look at some. In fact, I have 7 broad ideas to throw your way – and then still more ideas for wands for you to consider.
This article will continue next week, when I look at variations on the concept of “a stick that points”…
UPDATE: That article has now been published and can be read here.
- If I Could Save Magic In A Bottle: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 1
- A Heart Of Shiny Magic: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 2
- Just Another Pointy Stick: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 3a
- Not Just Another Pointy Stick: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 3b
- The Energizer Bunny: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 4
- The Ultimate Weapon: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 5
- Let’s Make A Relic: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 5a – The Crown Of Insight
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August 14th, 2016 at 4:07 pm
[…] Just Another Pointy Stick I: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 3a […]