Nerfing Staff

[Shostak]

With the powerful mana reservoir capability now in the higher staff spells, I've found some of their other powers to make staves too potent, and have adopted some standard house rules to nerf them:

1. Staves must be held as a ready item in order to be used for any purpose.
2. Staff II+ are no longer immune to Drop Weapon, Break Weapon, or critical failures. If you want immunity to Drop and/or Break Weapon spells, add them as enchantments.
3. Staff III+ occult attacks to targets out of the wizard’s field of view are at a -6DX, consistent with attacking an invisible foe.
4. Staff IV+ like Staff III but occult attack does 1d+1 damage. No free occult attack action.
5. Staff V merely adds extra mana capacity and does not break when “exploding.”

How do you weaken the staff spells (if at all) in your games?

[hcobb]

Allow only Staff I at character creation and let the wizards decide when it's worth 500 XP per step to improve it.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Allow only Staff I at character creation and let the wizards decide when it's worth 500 XP per step to improve it.

Good idea, but it is worth it, at least eventually, if you survive, just for the staff mana.

As mentioned before, I've split the new staff zap powers away from the mana staff powers... It's definitely worth it for the mana staff powers alone, if you're going to be surviving and getting XP enough to put points into that.


The only way I see the zap powers counterbalanced in RAW is that it encourages wizards to get close to hostile figures, which may tend to get them killed more often than if they had stayed further from danger.

[hcobb]

The most broken thing about a Molly is the armor piercing snake. A dozen attacks for 1 fatigue. It helps that the snake is harder to hit and has more hit points than the wizard.

[TippetsTX]

My approach was two-fold... first, I limit access to the Wizard's Staff on Cidri (in my campaign it is a symbol of membership in the Wizard's Guild which must be earned) and second, they are no longer spells. The ability to create and attune a Wizard's Staff (or wand, etc.) is implemented as 'Powers' which in my game are supernatural abilities that characters may unlock only thru the expenditure of XP.

On the flip-side, however, the Wizard's Staves in my campaign are potentially more powerful than the current spell-based versions. It just requires more time and experience to build them up to that level.

I also think that the new 'occult zap' is probably the least interesting (and most problematic) aspect of the new Staff spells so I may be replacing that ability with something more flavorful.

[hcobb]

The big sticks in the lore have either come from bound oaths (Odin) or bound spirits.

I.e. the contract written in the runes of the wizard's staff is a contract on himself.

[Steve Plambeck]

As I prepare to draft a new set of my own house rules for the Legacy era, I've nearly settled on eliminating all but Staff I, but including the mana stat in the basic Staff from the beginning (making it's size proportional to the experience and/or talents of the wizard). It also has a couple minor enhancements unique to my old group's house rules to make it more colorful and useful to beginning wizards, but these are minor tricks I already mentioned elsewhere. I'm sure I'm dropping the occult zap in its entirety.