So recently in a game I was Running a player ran by me an idea to put a bunch of wands of magic missile around 3 to 5 together on something and use them all at once. Now the other /players are cool with it and think its a cool idea, however I'm not exactly sure how to balance something like this. Said player suggested its a full round action To attacks with. Honestly I have no idea how to go about working with this.
Bump
I'm all for rule of cool, but I'd say "no." Using wands doesn't work that way. For a rapid fire magic missile wand with a similar effect, price it as a wand of magic missile with a caster level necessary for that many missiles to fire at once. In other words, CL 3 for 2 missiles, CL 5 for 3 missiles, etc.
Well this being a non rules type thing I'm not really looking for how to price it that's not the problem, the main problem is figuring out how to balance it as an attack. I posted it in homebrew cause its not really something that exists and the character I. Question is attempting to create a brand new thing.
In the Entombed with the Pharaohs adventure, there is a character that has a rifl that holds two wands.
But I think it only lets him use one wand at a time.
It's all about action economy.
If I can take my combat turn to fire a magic missile, I trade one action for one spell.
If I have 4 friends and we all take our combat turns to fire magic missiles, we trade 5 actions for 5 spells. Fair is fair.
But create an item that lets somebody trade 1 action for 5 spells and it will quickly get very far out of hand.
For example, what if I gave the fighter in your group a ring that let him use 1 full-round action to make 5 full-round attacks - on his turn, he can make up to 5 full attacks at any enemy in reach. Would that be a balanced item?
This multi-wand idea is exactly the same kind of unbalanced.
Don't think that just because it uses fairly lame Magic Missiles that it's OK. Because once the player has that, then in a few levels he's going to want a device holding 5 wands of Fireball, or a device holding 5 wands of Bestow Curse/Hold Monster/Black Tentacles/Stink Cloud/Sleet Storm, or whatever combo of cool spells he wants to load into a single round's action.
Well, dot. But also:
Don't think that just because it uses fairly lame Magic Missiles that it's OK. Because once the player has that, then in a few levels he's going to want a device holding 5 wands of Fireball, or a device holding 5 wands of Bestow Curse/Hold Monster/Black Tentacles/Stink Cloud/Sleet Storm, or whatever combo of cool spells he wants to load into a single round's action.
As the player in question, I can assure you that I'll be content with the magic missile gun for quite some time.
I'll be avoiding posting in this thread too much. I don't want to give the impression that I'm pressuring the GM, after all.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
DM Blake's absolutely right. There's many thematic and mechanical reasons to not allow this. Action economy deliberately limits the great power of magic. This also would cheat the magic item creation system because firing three magic missile wands is essentially getting a CL 5 wand of magic missile at a discount.
However, I would allow following:
1) Combining multiple wands increases the caster level if the combined price of the wands equates to the price of a single wand of higher caster level. In other words, three combined wands of magic missile become a single wand of magic missile with CL 3.
2) Combining wands this way expends a charge from all of them.
This way, the player can combine three wands to fire two missiles at a time, spending a charge from all three wands. I'd consider this fairly balanced as this is mathematically the same as having a wand of a magic missile with a caster level high enough to fire multiple missiles. The expenditure of charges is also proportional because spending 1 charge from each of three CL 1 wands is proportionally the same cost of spending 1 charge from a CL 3 wand.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Here is a 3.5 item that does what you're talking about.
Rod of Many Wands (Complete Mage, 128)
This device, perhaps one of the stranger rods ever created, allows you to utilize more than one wand at a single time.
Description: A rod of many wands is made of steel and constructed in two distinct parts. The handle end, wrapped in leather, is roughly as thick as the handle of a mace, while the top end is roughly twice that in diameter. Each makes up about half the length of the rod. The upper end contains three depressions running down its length, each one designed to hold a wand in place.
Activation: In order to make use of a rod of many wands, you must first load it with as many as three wands you wish to use. Each wand requires a full-round action to load (or a move action to remove). After one or more wands are loaded into the rod, they can all be activated by a single command word unique to the rod. This utterance is a complex phrase in Draconic, and speaking it requires a full-round action, rather than the standard action normally required for command word activation.
Effect: With this rod, you can trigger multiple wands at once. Although you are not required to fill all three depressions, you cannot selectively activate the wands that you have loaded; activating the rod triggers every wand connected to it. This process drains a number of charges from each wand equal to the number of wands loaded into the rod. For instance, if you have fully loaded the rod, each use drains three charges from each wand.
Aura/Caster Level: Moderate, no school. CL 17th. Construction: Craft Rod, Craft Wand, 13,500 gp, 1,080XP, 27 days; Weight:5 lb.
Price: 27,000 gp
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Nice compromise, Cyrad. However...
There's many thematic and mechanical reasons to not allow this.
This should read: "There are..."
Drop and give me twenty.
Nice compromise, Cyrad. However...
There's many thematic and mechanical reasons to not allow this.This should read: "There are..."
Drop and give me twenty.
I'm going to have to write you a ticket and don't worry about why I'm holding my night stick in such an aggressive manner.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Nice compromise, Cyrad. However...
There's many thematic and mechanical reasons to not allow this.This should read: "There are..."
Drop and give me twenty.
Sorry, Coach. I originally wrote "There's many mechanical reasons to not allow this." but later added "thematic" because activating a wand takes some concentration and the invoking of one's force of will. You cannot duct tape a bunch of wands together like they're Canadian squirt guns to create a magic missile minigun. Magical devices do not work that way.
But as you wish.
That's why said player is investing in ways to actually craft it not just duct tap them together
At seventh level his current he would be able to throw four missiles per wand assuming he crafts them for his level. Its plus one missile every two levels to a maximum of five.
I always find it funny that when people want to try to do something to gain an advantage, there is a mindset of either "this will break the game, don't do it," or "you can do it, but it's going to be so not worth your while that you won't want to do it anyway." I'm just making a general observation there. Obviously if every GM caved to every player's every whim then everything would be pointless and the system would have no meaning. But there are ways to reward player creativity without making it break the game.
Yes, to fire 3-4 wands at once you'd have to break action economy, but you can patch that buy making the trade-off something different. Two people have already pointed out the Rod of Many Wands from 3.5. That costs money, on top of expending a max of 9 wand charges for casting 3 spells at once (which equates to money).
You could also make it so that you can fire off three wands at once, but doing so pulls an abnormal amount of the caster's essence and they are staggered for one round after, or impose a condition that can be cured by using an action. The benefit is having a huge damage spike, but leaving you vulnerable. Creativity should be met with creativity.
It seems to me that a 3rd-level greater magic missile spell that fired one missile per caster level (maximum ten missiles) would be reasonably balanced.
So my advice would be to treat a magic missile launcher that fires 10 missiles at once as a wand of a 3rd-level spell with a caster level of 10, which would have a market price of 22,500 gp for 50 charges. The base price for crafting would be half of this, or 11,250 gp.
That's why said player is investing in ways to actually craft it not just duct tap them together
If he's actually crafting a new item, just let him craft a wand of magic missile with a higher CL. Any other solution will have to be priced competitively with that anyway.
... Right, so I don't think you're understanding what I'm asking.
How many missiles does he want to fire?
"3-5 wands" doesn't tell us much, because that can mean a huge selection between three and twenty-five missiles per volley.
So! How many missiles (not spells, the actual missiles) does your player want to fire with each shot?
Everything regarding balance depends on the answer to that question. Without it we're spitting into the breeze.
I think you are actually missing the point of the question: the number of missiles doesn't matter in the concept. The concept is to activate a number of wands instead of just one. I don't think numbers are exactly relevant, just something that the DM can use as a benchmark for trade-offs to make it balanced and justifiable without trivializing the game.
Firing off three CL 9 wands of magic missile at one time (via the Rod of Many Wands) will get you 15 missiles at 1d4+1 each, but will consume a total of 9 wand charges (three from each wand). Each of these wands will cost 3375 gp. You would get about 16 uses out of the Rod of Many Wands with three of these CL 9 wands loaded in it (because 50/3 is 16.67). Each use would thus cost roughly 600gp, not factoring the cost of the Rod since it is a permanent item and the wands are like ammo or fuel.
Whether or not that option is fair in the eyes of the OP, I can't say.
Personally, I think it's the easiest, because it already exists. To scale it back a bit more could be as simple as increasing the number of charges drained.
But if you want to shoot twenty-five missiles at a time, then the answer to "how do we balance this" is "make them wait about five more levels".
But you're only seeing balance as a matter of levels and CRs. There's a lot more to the system than that, and because there are more factors, the DM has the ability to allow things outside of the rules.
The DM can alter the action economy, increase the monetary cost, include the possibility of incurring a negative status effect, all sorts of things OTHER than just telling a player to suck it up and wait five levels.
As an advocate of rule zero, I often have to assert that Pathfinder (and games like it), outside of organized play, is meant to be a cooperative endeavor where the DM and players both contribute to a narrative. Balance is an illusion and blah blah gaming philosophy blah blah...
This feels like the domain of an archetype or maybe a chain of feats. If the player has to invest class resources in order to do it, it can be balanced. The 3.5 feat is a good starting point, a feat lets you activate the 2 wands as a full round action. I think there should also probably be limitations on the caster level of the wand. This shouldnt be a way to back into more powerful spells then a caster of your level could normally cast without considerable investment. For instance, a 7th level caster can cast magic missile with 4 missiles. With the metamagic feat empower (certainly duable on a 1st level spell at that level) it can have 6 missiles. So set up your archetype or feat chain with similar limitations. If you do that I think there isnt a reason why this cant be kept balanced. I mean, in the end its still just magic missiles. Sure they hit automatically, but they are just 1d4+1 damage. 6 missiles is an average of 21 damage. At 7th level, an archer can dish out 3 times that pretty easily.
Roll in the cost of a quicken rod and two CL-9 wands and you could have a magic item that fired 10 missiles. I believe there is a way to increase the maximum missiles fired but I don't remember the specific feat/archetype/spell combination that allows for that.
Find that out, roll the cost of that into it, and probably add 50%. Missile launcher.