Least Useful Spells

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by MikMod

Ah. I always imagined that a wizard could have (attuned) ONE staff, not a main staff and a pocketful of wands, rods, toothpicks, silver knives etc, any and all of which he could turn into multiple snakes and or leave lying around as 3 dice bombs...

You are correct about that. You can only have one staff at a time. Per ITL 148, you can only have one, but you can make another, at which point the previous one stops being your staff. It also loses all the stored ST in a staff charged with mana (but it doesn't affect the mana stat which governs how much a staff can be charged).

So, wizards who don't invest much in their staffs risk much less and so might tend to do more with using their staff for disposable purposes and schemes, compared to wizards with impressive and/or highly-charged staffs.

It would seem foolish for a wizard with a powerful staff to risk casting Staff to Snake on it.

But that also makes it less expected that such a wizard would fool around with such low-powered hijinks. (And less likely to be suspected and/or accused of having done so...)

However, especially when they have used the mana stored in their staff for other things, they might consider casting Staff on some other object to use it for some disposable purpose, and then later re-cast Staff on their good staff. That does add two 5-ST castings of Staff to the cost, but in a peaceful non-combat situation, that just means a couple of extra 75-minute rests. Meanwhile your disposable staff to snake goes and does its covert mission, and you're an unlikely suspect because your ostentatious signature "staff" has been with you the whole time.