[JLV]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

There is a LOT to like with a staff/wand/etc. Strength Battery. And yes, I've thought about it. This thread is making me think about it again.

Things to dislike, or at least to look at hard:

- 99% of wizards will now take the STAFF spell. Does this matter?

I don't think it does -- quite a high percentage (in my experience) already take it so they can have a melee weapon of some kind, just in case they run out of steam.

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

- It becomes a very big deal, affecting the way the world works, that a wizard does not want to be separated from his staff. A subset of that: a broken staff is a disaster of the first order. Would staves have to be more like a Staff of Power, immune to Break Weapon to keep all wizards from taking that spell too, and all combats reducing to whose BW could hit first?

I think that would be okay since Wizards should have some things to be concerned about, and in a LOT of fantasy fiction, losing your Wizards' Staff is a very big deal indeed; as far as the broken staff goes, I'd say leave it alone -- them's the chances you take, and sometimes things go...badly. However, you might want to make it harder to successfully cast BREAK WEAPON against a Wizard's Staff -- maybe roll 4 dice for success?

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

- Of course, the rule about "staff explodes when someone else picks it up" has to go.

No, please don't change that. In effect, it's a Wizardly booby trap, and yes, it would take the Wizard some time to build a new one (and, if you do it the way I did it, time to charge it too), but the cinematic effect is just too cool to lose!

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

- The ST Battery, as written, is a LOT harder and costlier to make than a staff that could do the same job.

I tried to make it hard for Wizards to charge the staff -- it took a long time and a lot of ST to get a single ST point into the staff; it didn't self-recharge, and it took hours (eight of them, in fact) to get a single ST point into the staff. It was basically a long magical ceremony that "imbued" the staff with a ST point from the caster, who then had to rest up for a day before he could do it again (because of the ST he spent on the ceremony (8 ST; one ST per hour), plus the ST he lost in the actual imbuing -- the total was 9 ST, and since I made folks rest for an hour (instead of 15 minutes) to recover each ST point lost due to fatigue, that meant nine hours of rest). His Staff could never have more than 10 ST (Staff of Power went up to 25 ST max), and effectively it gave him another resource to manage...

The upshot was that Wizards went to all that effort and then only used it in a very dire emergency, because it was going to take them anywhere from a week and a half to almost a full month to do a full-up recharge on that sucker, and only if they did nothing else for that time period other than charge their staff and rest between ceremonies! And that assumes they weren't so badly wounded that they couldn't afford to spend 9 ST to do something; if that were the case, they had to heal up first. Of course, when their Staff ran out of juice, it was still a Wizard's Staff, and usable as a melee weapon... Oh, and the Wizard couldn't use AID Spells to get help -- he had to charge the Staff HIMSELF! (The theoretical explanation I advanced for this was because the Staff had to "attuned" to the user, and someone else's ST screwed that up...sort of based on the "if someone else touches your Staff -- blooie" rule, actually, so everyone bought the reasoning.)

This tied in well with the downtime issues though, and we always had a lot of downtime due to injuries anyway. If you change *that* up some, you might want to make it easier for the Wizard to charge the Staff than I did!