Non-50 Charge Wands

[Small Attention Span]

I've been reading through some modules lately and I've been seeing that NPCs have wands with less than 50 charges on them, and I wondered, "How much do those cost?" I've been stating up NPC's for a short adventure I'm writing, and I need to fit wands into the stats, but with the gold limit, I can't get the full 50 without going over.

So my question is this: how do you calculate the cost of a wand with less than 50 charges?

[ArchLich]

I just divide the full cost by 50 and multiply by the actual charges in the wand.

[Saern]

Exactly. Those aren't so much "non 50-charge wands" as they are wands (which started with the standard 50 charges) that have been used and depleted. ArchLich is totally right; just divide the cost of the fully charged wand by 50 and then multiply by the number of charges the wand actually has. One way to think of it is that a wand actually has a cost per charge, but all newly created wands always have 50 charges and thus you have the price in the DMG.

[KnightErrantJR]

The Magic Item Compendium has lots of 10 charge wands listed in it when it shows wands of "less value" than a brand new wand, and, as others have said, its pretty much just 20% of the total value of the wand.

[Molech]

And even when the wand runs out your PC can still use it as a back-scratcher.

-W. E. Ray

[Saern]

Back scratcher? Back scratcher!

Fun with references! The day after that episode I played in a game, and we got to yelling "Sorcerer? Sorcerer!" in the same fashion.