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Hi everyone, i am new to the paizo forum but I used to frequent the Wizards one years ago. I gave a casual look at the boards and saw no thread like the one im proposing now.
I wanted to introduce a thread to celebrate the bad calls we have suffered onto our players or suffered ourselves
A few years ago i had a gm decide that magic was just too strong and it needed some nerfing.nthis came with quite a few obnoxious rules.
Casting a fireball now necessitated a concentration check of 20+1/5foot distance. The same went with any area spell, failure meant that it would drift as per grenade rules.
Casting defensively was too easy, he doubled all DCs (forcing people to max out the skill and taking combat casting feat).
Picking up an object while invisible meant the object would stay visible until a new invisibility spell would be cast again(even if put into a bag or other object already invisble.
I once house ruled that if you dropped your sword or where disarmed it would fly away 1d10 in a random direction (yeah that was a bad call)
Using the Critical Fumble Deck
(No one likes cutting their own head off because they rolled a 1)
Using Neutral Zombies as an enemy that don't count as undead because they are controlled by a hive mind and thus can use intelligent group tactics and have an AC of 16 and like 20 HP apiece against level 4 characters who have lvl 1 WBL oh and if you hit them in melee they explode and infect you with their hive thing and oh god I am starting to hyperventilate in impotent rage and angst
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My worst house rule story (I've told it before, so bear with me)...
I was starting a new Pathfinder campaign with a group of people I didn't know. Two minutes into the game, one of the PCs was being attacked by a goblin. The goblin hit his AC, but the player asked: "Can I make a Reflex save to avoid the attack?" The GM answered: "Sure, why not!"
So after two minutes of playing, we had already created a brand new rule that doubled the amount of die rolls needed for every attack. I winced, but I thought to myself: "Maybe it'll get better."
It didn't.
No real horror stories, but I made a terrible set of rules to try and fix multiclass spellcasting that with hindsight, didn't nearly make sense. There was an old thread here in which I vigorously defended it and couldn't see how astoundingly powerful they were. My current house rule for that is less than 1/10th as long and very obvious with hindsight, though nobody's ever used it in my games.
A friend had one of those wonderful GMs who will come up with something, anything, to make something bad happen if you roll a 1. He was told "you stick your head in your bag of holding" when he natural 1'ed a spot check to notice an ambush, for example.
I guess a lot of the stuff in Unearthed Arcana would qualify too :p
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I made a bad call saying a balance check was required to diagonally move over a square that was a pit. I put a low DC so most could pass easily but felt people encumbered with the armor check penalty of heavy armor might have a hard time and want to second guess skirting the edge.
I recently choose to not play in a campaign where magical healing like cure spells were reduced to giving you extra hit points of healing from resting over night. He also had some nonsense(not in Athas, the Dark Sun would) about recovering only one spell a day for arcanists.
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I was unable to play tabletop rpgs with a lifelong friend due to a disagreeing on size modifiers once he started GMing. He 100% could not conceive the notion that a smaller target is harder to hit than a larger one, therefore negating all AC bonuses and minuses on small and large creatures (and all the other sizes). My brain still hurts thinking back on all the examples I used to try to explain the situation, and his inability to grasp the concept.
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I can think of one, but its not exactly a DM mistake.
A long time ago, on the ancient AD&D forum, there was this DM that came to us complaining of a player who wanted a firearm that did 1d1 damage. Now, back then every time you rolled max damage on a firearm, you got to roll again. Every other DM on the thread panicked and yelled about not letting the player have it. Me?
I grinned evilly, and replied that he should give the player EXACTLY what he wanted.
All he had to do was wait until the PC used the weapon. The DM then explains to the group that a massive explosion ensues, and the target is vaporized, along with the landscape directly behind the target.
Then, take the player aside, and tell him he can't rejoin the game until he finishes rolling for damage.
Wait.
Tell the other players that his PC is now just standing there and drooling, eyes totally vacant.
Wait some more.
When the idiot munchkin finally cries "Foul!" explain to him that he now has to roll up a new PC, since his old one is busy trying to count to infinity.
Finally, feel free to laugh, as evilly as the DM possibly can.
PS: I got a nasty rep for that bit of advice.
Now you've done it. I'll have to tell you about the crit fumble.
We were using weapon drop on fumble rules. A foe critted on his character and I olled a one on the crit confirmation. We waisted the rest of game night trying to tell him,"No, the foe does not drop the weapon!" The next night, the weapon drop rule was dropped. A 1 now means you don't hit or you don't crit, nothing else.
In retrospect, I should have ruled,"Your character stops fighting and starts screaming about how his foe should drop his weapon. He takes normal damage. Everyone else goes on fighting."
I usually have something funny or spectacularly stupid happen when my NPC's fumble. Maybe I should do that to the PC's too?
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Back when I was in High School, a friend of mine was running an all furry campaign. I eagerly jumped at the chance, and ended up rolling a rabbit "sacred prostitute" type cleric, based loosely off of real-world love goddess worshipers from the past.
This DM has long had a great many issues with the various variants rules to handle called shots that had been around in the community at the time. So he decided to ban them. A choice which I was fine with, my character not seeing that much combat action outside of healing, buffing, and the occasional THUMB OF GOD anyway.
...
Until we (the players) started to figure out that his main NPC, a fox gunslinger, was doing nothing but called shots to everyone's heads, LITERALLY, every attack.
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While not game breaking or anything like that, a GM ruled in 3.5 that every rank of Perform gave a new performance skill along with the rank. I played a bard, and got to the point where I was adding things like "plate spinning" and "mime" to my repertoire of performance skills. He dropped that for the next campaign.
At one point I was in a game with a GM who did the following (some of these are horror stories from the previous games that got told to me, some after I quit playing in his games). The down side was that he was a nice guy, and had really good stories, that he ruined by jerking around the system.
1) Small characters who had great swords, or reach weapons, had penalties to stealth above and beyond any they had from armor, if he allowed them to make a stealth roll at all.
2) You had to make an Int check to realize the hundreds of people you fought every time you left the temple to try to make it back into the maze to escape the dungeon were undead, and the same ones you killed the day before because you couldn't recognize the same combatants over and over and couldn't tell they were undead because no one had an actual rank in Kn(Religion) to ID undead.
3) You could not break line of sight in a jungle in order to do stealth. Because, you know, trees in a jungle are too skinny to break line of sight and there's no undergrowth in a jungle (he eventually apologized about that one).
4) He once stopped the game and argued with me for 30 minutes about my feeling I could dodge the attack of a t-rex rather than spending my action flamestriking it before it attacked me. After I rolled my reflex and failed, he giggled and said I needed a 20.
5) He ruled a hungry t-rex (from 4) would not release my character, despite the whirling blades surrounding my body that were chewing it's head apart each round because he was too hungry. So... the T-Rex would rather get his head ripped apart than release a bit of meat. My character died. Dead. No ressurection possible, we were 4th or 5th level, and no equipment or money.
6) He ruled an alchemist who got a 30 couldn't tell how powerful the explosives were in the barrels they found, so the entire campaign was ended when they lit one of the barrels and dropped it down a shaft into an underground storeroom with 10000 barrels in it (each one was basically about 100 sticks of dynamite), but they couldn't tell that despite putting a quarter sized drop on the floor and blowing everyone against the wall and taking 4d6 each. (that actually ended his game as he ended up moving for work a couple of months later).
my previous DM used all of the following... in just the last campaign
1. full attacking is a standard action.
2. all crits confirmed with a 15
3. the maximum dex penalty of armor is added to ac.
4. experience points granted in arbitrary amounts, nothing at all to do with cr.
5. all npcs that weren't enemies were epic level, we were level 10...even a bartender my orc hit on...a level 40 fighter/monk...as a 20 year old bartender.
6. railroading of the highest caliber.
7. unstoppable dmpc that frequently "put other party members in their place"
8. dick moves by unstoppable npcs, he had a dwarf time traveler who sodomized my orc with a wooden stick for picking a fight with him, honest too god.
9. the game ended with me and the other guys pc fighting mooks, while the dmpc took on bahamut.
and that's just off the top of my head. the worst part, he thought that 1, 2, and 3 were the actual rules. claimed "the last 10" dms he had used those rules. when he became one of my players he and I had a heated argument that broke down to the "last 10 dms" thing and me finishing with "that's cool but in this game we use the actual rules". the following campaign he claims is still his favorite one. some people just make better players than g/dms.
To be fair full attacks as a standard action isn't TOO bad, but it would make for a big, sudden jump in power that would put the full BAB guys well ahead of the 3/4 guys for a few levels. I don't see the point in rules 2 and 3 though, they just seem arbitrary and stupid.
As for the rest, those aren't really rules at all, they're just GMing without any sense of respect or self restraint.
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As I was getting my butt kicked in a solo campaign, the DM felt that a wolf pack wasn't powerful enough. Wolves HAD to get spring attack for free (5' in, attack, 5' out). There HAD to be 16 or more in the pack. They HAD to be able to share spaces as they are a pack so, if you are following the math, I was attacked by 16 flanking wolves that I couldn't hit back, in a solo campaign. It was a short campaign.
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I had a DM back in the 1e days who used the unarmed combat rules for all combat. If any of you can remember that far back, you know what a bad idea this was.
I cannot! What was the difference?
To be fair full attacks as a standard action isn't TOO bad...
tell that to my orc fighter and the 12 archers he fought. yes I counted. I forgot to mention that for reasons too complicated too explain (and understand), our characters auto resurrected. which they did...almost every game. I believe rocket tag is the terminology used for this kind of event.
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Is it weird that a lot of these actually sound playable if not fun to me?
I'm usually the perpetrator of the house rule horror stories, so I'm not sure which of mine would be candidates.
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A while back, my GM started to use the "massive damage" rule. Incorrectly.
For those unfamiliar, the rule is that if you take "massive damage" from one single blow, you have to make a Fort save or die. The rule existed in 3.X too, but PF changed what qualifies as "massive damage".
In 3.X, it was 50 or more damage from a single blow. In PF, it's half your total HP, rounded up, minimum 50. In both rule sets, nothing under 50 damage counts as "massive", but Pathfinder added the "half your health" part.
Somehow, my GM got confused and decided that in Pathfinder, it was JUST the "half your health" part. He claims that this was a house rule from 3.X games he had played in before he learned to GM.
If this doesn't sound so bad, remember that at level 1, your total HP is 6-12, plus CON. And an average enemy attack deals 1d6 or 1d8, plus STR.
Fortunately he abandoned this rule once we looked up the actual rule and showed it to him. Shortly thereafter, we actually managed to live to see level 2.
I really must have a different style than most people. I didn't implement much in the way of house-rules for the longest time, except to fix rules that literally didn't work and a few that I inherited from the group I was raised in (even those, I'm weeding most of them out). Only now am I really opening up to the idea of making more house-rules and maybe even some third-party products if I like them.
My favorite will always be that a DC 20 sleight of hand let you stealing item off any person at any time even combat.
A first time GM actually put a purple worm in a 10 by 10 room.
Stupid random encounters are actually a lack of a house rule.
"If it makes no sense, substitute with something else."
This applies to The Cleaves when I find a place to playtest it.
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Is it weird that a lot of these actually sound playable if not fun to me?
I'm usually the perpetrator of the house rule horror stories, so I'm not sure which of mine would be candidates.
I'm amused that some of these house rules are just rules from older editions cropping up. No AC modifier based on size? Those didn't exist in 1e/2e. Getting a new method of performance per rank in the performance skill? Right out of 3.0.
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Is it weird that a lot of these actually sound playable if not fun to me?
Nope. The problem in most of these posts is that the house rules were put in place by an ass-hole or by somebody who didn't understand the consequences.
Those 12 archers all full attacking while moving? They are the horror story, not the house rule that makes it possible. I could make lots of CR appropriate encounters that would kill all my players. You don't need zany house rules to be a jerk or a fool.
I can see a game with an obscenely weird critical fumbles table being good fun. Fumble on a 1 on your first attack in a round, a 1 on a skill check, or if the first enemy you affect gets a 20 on its save. A fumble might do damn near anything. You roll on a big, big table. Some results are reasonable, some are absolutely ridiculous.
Full attacks as a standard action sound ok to me. Might have to limit that somehow, like reducing your speed so melee guys can catch up with archers, but on the other hand, spellcasters are perfectly capable of running back and casting every round already, so it could be fine.
A new kind of performance ever 2 ranks, to match linguistics and stop people moving into frivolous stuff so quickly could be a great rule. It sounds like it would break versatile performance though, so something would have to be done about that.
The sleight of hand to steal in combat is cool in principle. Letting characters use the steal maneuver more easily would be a better way to go, but very, very easy stealing actually sounds like fun.
No divine magic sounds fun. Ideally I'd run it with strain/injury plus some other house rules I already use which would make it a lot easier on the players, but even without that it'd be perfectly possible.
+10 bonus instead of auto success on a natural 20? I'm not sure how you'd even tell the difference unless you were already certain to lose. I mean, that god could have just tried again in the same round with a quickened spell. Seems like a fine rule, but perhaps not worth the effort of implementing.
Again, the problem here is the ass who declared he was using it after the 20 was already rolled.
If this was 3.5 and I remember correctly, 30 is very low for a god. 60-80 is more like it. There are also massive benefits for being one, in addition to their class levels and HD, their racial ability score bonuses are stupendous and with 30 levels in a full casting class the chances are there would be a powerful spellcasting buff or two affecting the character.
To make falling more realistic our gm with a physics fetish thought that since you continue to accelerate through a fall, that instead of just d6 per 10 feet fallen it would be d6! (factorial) per 10 feet fallen until a character fell down a 60 foot elevator shaft and instead of taking 6d6 damage, instead took 21d6.
I think it was during our 2e ADND days, so 21d6 was pretty hefty...
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To make falling more realistic our gm with a physics fetish thought that since you continue to accelerate through a fall, that instead of just d6 per 10 feet fallen it would be d6! (factorial) per 10 feet fallen until a character fell down a 60 foot elevator shaft and instead of taking 6d6 damage, instead took 21d6.
I think it was during our 2e ADND days, so 21d6 was pretty hefty...
That's not how factorials work. That looks like triangle numbers, which grow quadratically (and much more slowly than factorials).
And if you think about it, the amount your velocity increases per 10 feet of falling actually decreases as you fall further and further, even before taking into account air resistance - since acceleration due to gravity is constant with respect to time, and if you're already falling faster, you spend less time in each 10-foot region and therefore accelerate less in that 10-foot region - which means that having damage scale linearly is actually harsher than what would be realistic! (A more accurate model would have damage proportional to the square root of the distance fallen.)
Basically what I'm saying is that your physics fetish GM sucks at math and sucks at physics.
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To make falling more realistic our gm with a physics fetish thought that since you continue to accelerate through a fall, that instead of just d6 per 10 feet fallen it would be d6! (factorial) per 10 feet fallen until a character fell down a 60 foot elevator shaft and instead of taking 6d6 damage, instead took 21d6.
I think it was during our 2e ADND days, so 21d6 was pretty hefty...
That's not how factorials work. That looks like triangle numbers, which grow quadratically (and much more slowly than factorials).
And if you think about it, the amount your velocity increases per 10 feet of falling actually decreases as you fall further and further, even before taking into account air resistance - since acceleration due to gravity is constant with respect to time, and if you're already falling faster, you spend less time in each 10-foot region and therefore accelerate less in that 10-foot region - which means that having damage scale linearly is actually harsher than what would be realistic! (A more accurate model would have damage proportional to the square root of the distance fallen.)
Basically what I'm saying is that your physics fetish GM sucks at math and sucks at physics.
I want to high five you for this
I never cared much about the math (I must have been like 14 at the time), but having it play out in game only happened once before the whole table called BS. It was probably the first argument we ever had about the pursuit of realism in a game not being a great idea, though.
I still talk to him from time to time. He's the kind of guy who argues that ironman should be dead either because he'd pass out during tight turns or be crushed from bouncing around inside his suit.
I'm like dude. Its a comic book.
Is it weird that a lot of these actually sound playable if not fun to me?Nope. The problem in most of these posts is that the house rules were put in place by an ass-hole or by somebody who didn't understand the consequences.
Those 12 archers all full attacking while moving? They are the horror story, not the house rule that makes it possible. I could make lots of CR appropriate encounters that would kill all my players. You don't need zany house rules to be a jerk or a fool.
I can see a game with an obscenely weird critical fumbles table being good fun. Fumble on a 1 on your first attack in a round, a 1 on a skill check, or if the first enemy you affect gets a 20 on its save. A fumble might do damn near anything. You roll on a big, big table. Some results are reasonable, some are absolutely ridiculous.
Full attacks as a standard action sound ok to me. Might have to limit that somehow, like reducing your speed so melee guys can catch up with archers, but on the other hand, spellcasters are perfectly capable of running back and casting every round already, so it could be fine.
A new kind of performance ever 2 ranks, to match linguistics and stop people moving into frivolous stuff so quickly could be a great rule. It sounds like it would break versatile performance though, so something would have to be done about that.
The sleight of hand to steal in combat is cool in principle. Letting characters use the steal maneuver more easily would be a better way to go, but very, very easy stealing actually sounds like fun.
What did I just tell you?
"If it makes no sense, substitute with something else."If a rogue tries to snatch the 2 handed sword the Black Night is wielding, they get his repeating crossbow instead.
To make falling more realistic our gm with a physics fetish thought that since you continue to accelerate through a fall, that instead of just d6 per 10 feet fallen it would be d6! (factorial) per 10 feet fallen until a character fell down a 60 foot elevator shaft and instead of taking 6d6 damage, instead took 21d6.
I think it was during our 2e ADND days, so 21d6 was pretty hefty...
That's, supposedly, what Gygax originally intended the falling damage rules to be (1d6 for the first 10' + 2d6 for the next 10' +3d6 for the next 10' and so on ...) though this version would have still been capped at 20d6 but adjusted up or down based on the surface landed on.
The rule he actually wrote was "1d6 per 10 feet per 10 feet fallen" but it being worded so caused the editor to think the second 'per 10 feet' was a typo and he edited it out. So we ended up with the decidedly less lethal falling rules we still use today.
That's the story anyway, not sure if it's true.
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That's kind of ridiculous if you compare to real life, though. In real life, it takes about a 48-foot fall to give you a 50% chance of survival. If you fall 48 feet (treated as 50) under those falling rules, you take 15d6 damage - let's be generous and call it 14d6 because it's a bit less than 50 feet. Your max HP plus CON needs to be at least 50 in order to not have more than a 50% chance of dying outright from that. But then it gets worse when you factor in bleeding-out rules; unless you land right next to a cleric, you're probably going to die a few rounds later from your wounds, which is still as a result of the fall.
The calculations get a bit ugly if you want to factor in bleeding out, but the upshot is that characters would need to be very high-level just to have the same surviveability as real-life humans.
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To make falling more realistic our gm with a physics fetish thought that since you continue to accelerate through a fall, that instead of just d6 per 10 feet fallen it would be d6! (factorial) per 10 feet fallen until a character fell down a 60 foot elevator shaft and instead of taking 6d6 damage, instead took 21d6.
I think it was during our 2e ADND days, so 21d6 was pretty hefty...
That's not how factorials work. That looks like triangle numbers, which grow quadratically (and much more slowly than factorials).
And if you think about it, the amount your velocity increases per 10 feet of falling actually decreases as you fall further and further, even before taking into account air resistance - since acceleration due to gravity is constant with respect to time, and if you're already falling faster, you spend less time in each 10-foot region and therefore accelerate less in that 10-foot region - which means that having damage scale linearly is actually harsher than what would be realistic! (A more accurate model would have damage proportional to the square root of the distance fallen.)
Basically what I'm saying is that your physics fetish GM sucks at math and sucks at physics.
Not quite so. Damage from a fall is proportional to the energy in the fall, which scales linearly with height (E = mgh). The current system is actually the best representation of this.
Looked at another way, damage is proportional to the square of velocity, which agrees with the first part of your post.
That makes sense if we assume damage equals energy. Unfortunately, damage/HP is abstract enough that it's not entirely clear.
Either way, quadratic scaling is stupid.
I've actually been fairly lucky with house rules in my games (both those I run and those I play in).
Normally I try not to house rule things without discussing it with the party well in advance of implementation. This doesn't mean I change things that come up as we're playing and could cause problems, I see a pretty big difference between house ruling and using my discretion as a GM to make a rules call in order to resolve something.
The only home rule nightmare I can really think of was in a game I joined recently. This one imploded after a single session. A player from one of my groups was planning on running Jade Regent as his first ever game. I joined in to give him a hand (the idea was that I'd be a player, but would be available to clarify rules etc for him as needed). Right from a start the whole thing was off to a bad start, due to the size of the group (8 or 9 players from memory). There was a lot of friction between players as they all jostled for attention, and combat was a mess as his way of compensating for the extra players was to just triple the number of goblins. However, we probably would have got past this if it wasn't for the fact that, during combat, he started allowing goblins to set up ambushes out of initiative order and ruled that, since they were waiting for us to walk around the corner, they were able to shoot us with no need to roll. The alchemist called bull$#@% on this one after being told he'd been shot in the face without the GM making a single roll, starting an argument that went on for about half an hour. Later on the GM told me that he'd started receiving messages from everyone saying they couldn't make it anymore. It was a little sad really, as I think with a smaller group and a little more practice he could have been a really good GM, but unfortunately the situation had him so disheartened that he hasn't even thought about giving it another try. Yes, he made a silly call, but to be fair it was his first ever attempt at running a game.
Apart from that all of my horror stories are less to do with home rules and more to do with GMs who didn't consider power levels and their effect on the game. Admittedly some of what skewed the power levels were to do with homebrew rules, but the actual rules were solid, it was just the implementation that caused issues (a case of too much too fast, imagine it as giving 10 Mythic Tiers to a low level character and you've got the general idea).
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So this new group I joined.. I'm the new guy, so I don't wanna seem like the crazy rules lawyer, I'm trying to keep it cool. But they just hadn't realized exactly how AoOs work.
Anytime you step INTO a threatened area you get attacked. Let's just say the fighters were having a rather painful day, since they also didn't wait for enemies to charge THEM.
Later in the session I did gently inform them how it really works, and all was well again in Golarion :)
They just hadn't realized exactly how AoOs work.
Anytime you step INTO a threatened area you get attacked. Let's just say the fighters were having a rather painful day, since they also didn't wait for enemies to charge THEM.
This is probably more common than you think, especially combined with the confusion over the Charge rule being listed as "AoO - No".
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Dude, I had to inform my group the other day that metamagic spells affected casting time. 3rd level sorceress was walking around quickening everything and it didn't affect spell level or casting time.
Also 2 weapon fighter thought he got 5 attacks at level 8. 2 for each hand then 1 for offhand from improved two weapon fighting.
Well, technically speaking, the casting time was probably right on the quickened spells, but how she had slots for those high levels is beyond me...
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Dude, I had to inform my group the other day that metamagic spells affected casting time. 3rd level sorceress was walking around quickening everything and it didn't affect spell level or casting time.
I had that same problem when I first started playing 3.X way back when. At level 3 I was using Maximized Magic Missile every turn. "Oh it's my turn again? 5 damage to each of these guys. *goes back to flipping through PHB, never picks up dice once*"
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I have a few to add:
1. Characters are fatigued when at 25% of max hp or lower. (This one was mine, and a friend of mine and I both like it still; most people don't, however. GONE!)
2. No confirmation rolls for critical hits. Instead, if a threat is high enough to hit, then x2 weapons do max damage, x3 weapons do max damage plus one roll of the weapon's dice (1d12 for great axe, e.g.), x4 weapons do max damage plus two rolls of the dice. This one was also mine. My wife loves it, I still like it, but I never use it anymore because I have had players hate it.
I learned my lesson. No more house rules when I GM, no matter how much I like them.
Here are a few others.
3. Moving through a friendly space counts as difficult terrain. I went into that game with a halfling paladin wearing medium armor. That wasn't the only house rule that made me decide to not return for a second game, but it was the most memorable. To make matters worse, every room seemed to have naturally difficult terrain; it would cost 4 squares of movement to move into a space occupied by a friendly character. If my paladin was behind someone, he could double move the two squares to get in front of his companion for his whole turn.
4. No penalties for ranged attacks into melee, and no soft cover for ranged attacks. Even though I was playing a ranged fighter, this one bugged me. Perhaps it was because I had taken Precise Shot and Improved Precise Shot.
The one I liked the least, however, was with a GM that I really enjoyed playing with (probably the second best GM I've ever had).
5. Instead of charges on wands, roll a die (usually d20, but sometimes smaller dice). On a 1, the wand was on its last charge, and did not function after that use. After twice (in a row!) buying wands of cure light wounds for 750 gp, and having them work only once, I told him how much I disliked that rule.
Ouch! That last one reduces the average charges of a wand by more than half at best! I can see the appeal in less reliable wands that you don't need to track, but those are worth less than half as much money.
If it was roll a 1 or 2 on a d100, that would be ok, but it'd till be really disappointing whenever they ran out. Very unlikely negative results are no fun without a good possibility to balance them out. Since the wand is less dependable and manageable, I think it would be fine to have some beneficial effect on a roll of 00. Maybe add a meta-magic effect?