GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Power Items

[vitruvian]

The rules for items of power also say that a caster must spend $5/FP to recharge the staff, but (per GURPS Supers) you can buy consumable signature gear at 5 x cost. Can I say that this staff recharges for free and pay $ 25 per FP extra from my signature gear fund, or is mixing those two rules a bad idea? If I do say that this item of power recharges for free can I use that cost to raise the base cost of the staff, thus letting it hold more FP, or is this unfair because 'The maximum FP it can hold depends on its value as a nonmagical item'? Maybe instead, or in addition, I should just buy some Paut as comsumable signature gear (x5 cost) at $675 per dose per adventure?

I wouldn't let you pay in $ to have the power item recharge by itself. What I might do is allow characters to spend meditation time to recharge the item in play, rather than having to go to a city, but have it require quite a bit of time. If working it out from the TL3 value of $500 per 1 CP, and figure 1 CP per 200 hours, at $5 per energy point that works out to 2 hours meditation time per energy point put back in the item. That doesn't seem too unbalancing to me, given all the other things your character might do (or other characters in the party might *expect* them to do in order to pull their weight).

You could also look at what the character's effective daily salary would be, and get a figure for recharging time from that. The only problem is that wealthier wizards (and clerics) would then be more effective at recharging their power items on the fly, which doesn't seem quite right.