Talk:Magic Staves

Staves always have the following traits:

• all staves can be used as a normal melee weapon (a quarterstaff), OR they can be used to make melee touch attacks.

• If you use touch attacks, you don't get to add your STR modifier to the damage.

• all staves have 3 spells on them, selected at purchase, max 4th spell level, just like rods.
• all staves have 10 charges that automatically come back after a full night's rest. Cannot be boosted or recharged with manastones.

• 0th level spells cost no charges, 1st level spells cost 1 charge, 2nd level spells cost 2 charges, 3rd level spells cost 3 charges, and 4th level spells cost 4 charges.

• all staves also have 1 wand effect on them, which affects the caster's spells, and/or the spells castable through the staff...

• when purchasing a staff, the buyer picks 3 rods, and 1 wand, and totals the cost of all 4 to get the price of the staff.

thought: as written, staves are severely limited in their daily usefullness for anything but buffs, and honestly, the good buffs are also kinda bad. i'm thinking we leave staffs as currently written, but update manastones. three versions of manastone now; small, for rods, large, for staves, and huge, for 'settlement stuff'. all three sizes can be used for other stuff as we wish. ie, a small manastone may be needed to power an alchemical clock, a large manastone to power magical traps (and could be part of their 'treasure'), a huge manastone to run town wards, a golem, etc. (and part of their treasure) large manastone would be about a thousand gp, a huge about 10,000gp  staff needs large charges, cannot use a small stone. thus, you can recharge a staff to use it a lot, or let it recharge itself to use it 'some' 

well, if you're really worried about it, we could also give staves more than 10 charges per day...  Honestly, the only reason I added in the 'move action' or 'swift action' option was because of the limited charges.  If we make the charges easier to come by, I feel like this is giving epic-level quicken to a non-caster as early as level 10 or so.  Granted, a min-level staff will do crap damage, but it could still be an absurdly powerful minion mopper to fire off 3 spells in one round (creator level 4 magic missile comes to mind -- that's 12 minions per round, and you could do it 3 times before the staff used up its 9 charges).

If you think the buff options are bad, we could always add more of the good buff spells into the rods.

i thought about that, but the new manastone rules are very good and i'd like having a similar mechanic for rods and staves, its effectively another form of currency, and we all love those :) simply adding more daily charges (and 15 sings to me) or 'better buffs' addresses part of the problem, but i'm also looking at the settlement pass a bit away and i'd like to have manastones be a 'thing' in that system. trying to lay some groundwork ffor future 'stuff'

• Staff of Power
• Staff of One Hundred Hands
• Staff of Summoning
• Fortification Staff (wall spells)
• Upheaval Staff (pillar spells)
• Staff of the Burning Man