On the Operation of Rods, Wands & Staves

[teachu2die]

I guess the problem with natural recharge is that there's no penalty for wasting time, so -- even in a dungeon -- you can just sit around for ages until your rod is at full mana.

Maybe if they drained xp while recharging?

like the -1hp penalty, this solution is needlessly complicated and overly punitive. if you want to include any kind of natural recharging, just make rods and wands separate, that way you can control the means by which abilities can be used. if someone rests at the end of the dungeon to recharge their basic rods of detect monsters, detect traps, then whats the big deal?

[Hedrachi]

xp drain to recharge might be ok if it was activated from the menu... or if it used a percentage of the xp from monster kills to recharge itself. But an unstoppable xp drain just from having wands in your inventory would make fighters and thieves looking for ranged attacks cry.

[Repton]

Well, the xp drain would stop when the wand was at full charge

[madmonk]

Thanks for the comments, very much appreciated and I agree it is overly complicated and easy to work around! So out it goes!

There will be no natural recharge...

Someone mentioned encumbrance earlier so I thought that I would pick up on it here:

Wand = 1
Rod = 3
Staff = 5

Seems to be fair.

I will summarise shortly!

[Grey]

Complication is part of the big problem - I always believe in keeping things simple. There's also the general problem with people having to horde things in their inventory for them to recharge eventually. Seems silly that a fighter won't zap his last rod of fire charge since he wants to wait 5 turns for charge 2 to appear. Also seems silly that you'd have characters sitting waiting several thousand turns for their rods and wands to fully recharge. Without a food clock and monster regeneration on the level there's nothing to stop this happening.

I do kinda like the idea that rods will recharge whilst wands will be purely disposable items. In this way rods are like special charges that you find on suits of armour, but with much more interesting effects available (indeed, so interesting that I think that the "sensed" armours should be removed in favour of rods). Having them separate from the limited use wands would present more interesting tactics and choices to the player. I'm all for lots of choices...

Overall the game should be careful not to have wands/rods be simple replacements to existing spells. At the same time though they must be of most use to fightes/rogues who do not have access to common magic functions and must rely on items previously imbued with magical functions by high class mages. For this reason I'd suggest that use of wands shouldn't rely on the mana/willpower stats. They should be like bullets loaded in a gun - it matters not who pulls the trigger.

I also agree with zero cooldown, except perhaps for specialist rods that naturally recharge - these should have limited usage at a time, but over a very long period come back into use. Hmm... to prevent scumming, maybe these rods should only recharge whilst physically moving or performing actions (fighting, shooting, activating talents, etc). They'd be a bit like those fancy kinetic energy watches...

[edge2054]

I figured rods would be almost artifact if not artifact level (like the Rod in the game already) and would follow similar recharge rules.

I figured wands would be disposable charged items like the charged ego items in the game already. Able to be recharged if you take them to a vendor but other then that just glorified scrolls really.

Staves I hadn't considered.

Anyway I like the idea of encumbrance being a limiting factor.

[teachu2die]

grey - i believe darkgod said he intends to remove the charged egos (which never worked very well) in favor of wands/rods.

i don't think there is any need to have staves as magic devices at all - staves already exist in te4 as weapons, adding a different type of staff is only going to add confusion. even in more traditional rogue-likes, staves and wands are only really differentiated by the type of spells they contain (wands generally target monsters, staves generally target the user, but even that isn't always the case) and the element they are potentially destroyed by (lightning for wands, fire for staves). it would serve no real purpose to have them in te4 as such.
i say just have:
wands for offensive and utility spells, multiple charges, recharge only at shop, fair chance of destruction upon recharge.
rods generally for basic utilities and defensive spells (or as powerful artifacts), single charge, recharge naturally, moderately high encumbrance.