Another difference is hand & action economy. A wand that can cast (for example) Fireball X times can be held in doesn't need you to manipulate to ready a new scroll each casting if you want to cast multiple times in a row, and only occupies one hand (vs maybe 2+ if you hold multiple scrolls).
At first I was going to say, sure, just make it cost the same as 50x a scroll. But I hadn't considered the thoughts on the actions to pull out scrolls and change them, so yes that would give the wand an advantage in those aspects over a scroll.
Some might say that you should then make them cost more, but I don't know, perhaps having them be a concentrated, item make them a bigger risk and that might be enough of a drawback for the cost.
I'm guessing however that your plan was to make the wand give you a per-casting discount as if a bulk scroll. I suppose that means that how much it breaks things would just be by the amount of the discount you give them for them being a bulk consumable spell device. If you make it anywhere close to 50% you are making such wands significantly discounting their cost. If you make it a 40% discount like the old wands, that is close to 50%. If you make it a 10% discount, it gives a reason.
You can also argue potentially, wands can't be used to learn a spell. You could also make using such a wand such that it can only be activated once per round. (or make it once per minute)
You could even have 10 charge wands either cost even for 10 scrolls (or maybe (5% discount). While 50 charge wand might give you a 10% discount (might even have a longer delay between castings, to say a minute)?
Does it break things... if it makes it so no-one would want scrolls, that is probably problematic. But you can probably make it so there are good aspects as well as bad for the choice, it would likely work. The biggest thing is making sure such a change improves the feel for most or all your players. (frequently they like things that make things easier for them, better for them, so might not be hard to have them like it)
Actually, I like the idea of having the wand have an activation action. As a single action, but I'd suggest that it only be a concentrate action, and require the wand be in one of your active hands.
By activating your wand it is enabled until the end of your next round. While activated, it allows you to once, spend the actions to cast the spell as if you were casting it from a ranked slot per the rank of the wand, but that casting adds the manipulate trait (waving the wand) if it doesn't already have it, and if cast it consumes a charge from the wand. If activated, but not cast, the charge does not get consumed.
This means while the wand is logistically easier than a scroll, but the wand won't actually blow the scroll's action economy out of the water. It still enables the casting of three action spells, and you can potentially justify a small discount, since it would be similar action economy of scrolls or slightly worse.
Something else to consider would be if the wand activation would be a form of spellshaping, as if so it might keep the wand from being useable with spellstrikes or other spellshape actions. I could see reasons to potentially go either way.
Some people may like rolling a skill check for the casting, others may consider it cumbersome. I don't think a critical success should cast it without using a charge, but potentially making it a free action seems reasonable. I might also be ok with, on a critical success allowing the 'option' to expend a prepared/spontaneous spell slot of your own of the equivalent rank if you have one of an appropriate tradition for the spell instead of a charge. Which would let you extend the life of the wand a little on critical successes, but would technically be keeping the payment of consumable/daily resources upheld.
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I'm guessing however that your plan was to make the wand give you a per-casting discount as if a bulk scroll.
In PF1 a wand costs 30x what a scroll costs. There's a pretty notable bulk discount there, but that also makes them rather pricy.
Ported 1:1 into PF2, a wand of a 1st level spell would be priced similarly to a 4th-5th level magic item, and a wand of a 4th level spell (the cap for PF1 wands) would be priced like a 12th level magical item. That means they aren't super affordable until you radically outlevel the spell being cast. On level magic items are pretty pricy from a wealth perspective too, so you're looking at waiting even later before they become particularly affordable.
This makes the PF1 wand mostly useful for a spell you want to spam but has enough of an evergreen effect that you don't mind if the spell itself is way out of date. The classic PF1 example is cheap wands of healing that you can spam to quickly get people to full hp, but that's less enticing (though still somewhat appealing) given how many other forms of cheap healing exist in PF2... though I guess you could flip that around and say that something like this means a mid level party would be less pressured to have feats invested in out of combat healing. PF1 wands were also good for very low end utility spells with static or semi static effects where you didn't need any kind of scaling. A lot of these don't exist in PF1 (heightened awareness, rope trick), or would be better as PF2 style wands (2nd rank tailwind, alarm), but there's still some stuff that might be appealing (like fleet step).
In PF1 that's kind of where the value of wands ended, because DCs rank based and boosting CL on wands was expensive... but PF2 doesn't have CL and proficiency gives spells automatic scaling, so PF1 wands in PF2 would be really good on spammable buff/debuff spells. A wand of third level fear would give you 50 castings of a reasonably good AoE debuff. A wand of first level bless would let you stand in for a Bard, a little bit. Stuff like that.
There's definitely some edge cases that might be weird and toe-stepping here, but potentially you can also kind of see a way in which these wands might let you use low level spells to stand-in for certain party composition features, once the party is high enough level to make them cheap, at least.
I don't think a wand that (even just potentially) costs 3 actions every casting is going to be popular for any sort of combat use.
How about making this sort of wand use require being in a stance? The stance could even have certain disadvantages and advantages. Like maybe you can't cast any other spells, but you get a +1 save against similar spells (as defined by sharing at least one from a list of tags like flame, mental, fortune, etc). Normally knowing a stance is a feat, bit in this case part of the magic item could be that holding it grants you the stance action, meaning you could have multiple types of wand even, with different stance effects.
Well depending on your specifics, casting from a scroll theoretically costs an action to get the scroll out. (unless it is already in your hand) Granted, you can argue, this takes getting the wand out (one action) and then one more action per time you cast it. This is intentionally designed to make it less efficient (but more consolidated) than a stack of scrolls.
Also note, my suggestion the activation made the spellcasting action available until the end of the next turn. Which means you could use it and cast a two-action spell that round, or if it were a 3-action spell you would have to do it next round. One action (or even reaction) spells could even be done this way, though someone will complain it is sort of doubling the actions to cast it (but if casting a spell with a scroll that is already sort of the case).
As to the costs, unless you require an action for each time it is used, you effectively are making it better than scrolls, which would sort of demand you raise the per spell cost, not lower it.
You could have a feat that lets you when attuning to it in your daily preparation, spend a spell slot of the appropriate rank to get a temporary charge good for use that day. This would effectively giving you the ability to treat it similar to a permanent wand, at the expense of a spell slot per day.
If you made it cost 1:1 then a 1st rank wand would cost you 200gp for a 50 charge wand. A traditional wand of the same spell would cost 60gp, but would be far less flexible. While true, the 50 charge version would be consumable vs. permanent, but again the flexibility of being able to cast it as many times you need a day, makes it more valuable. If it has better action economy because of not needing to retrieve scrolls, it becomes even more valuable.
If you gave it the old discount in PF1(40%), and reduced the charges in the wand by default to 25 charges. That would mean that the 1st rank wands would cost the same, choice of 1/day at 60gp, vs a 25 charge consumable version for 60gp. 2nd rank spells, that would go to 160gp for the 1/day wand, and 300gp for the 25 charge consumable one. 3rd Rank ones would be 360gp for traditional ones, and 750gp for the consumable one.
Again, granted consumables get used up, so they would be certainly a real expense, but that seems to advance somewhat like the traditional 2nd edition wand. Again, primary concern left in my mind is to not make the wand better than a scroll in action and hand economy.
If your ultimate goal is to make spell slots more available, and want consumable to be cheaper across the board, you might consider some other options (although potentially re-instating first edition wands is one). But you could also create multi-use scrolls. Have it be a scroll with multiple charges, only a portion of it crumbles away. You could have first casting of the spell cost full, additional castings of the same spell for the scroll could be 'added' during crafting, by adding an extra 75% gold per additional casting. (i.e. 25% discount)
Then you could have wands be the 'bigger' bulk. If you are trying to make the PCs have more slots at their hands easily, you could make the wand have a bigger discount. (such as the old 40% discount overall) In such cases, if you already allowed scrolls to be multi-use, there might not be as much need to limit the wands as much, especially if your goal is the reduce the importance of peoples daily spell slots, making money being able to more readily replace them.
I'm guessing however that your plan was to make the wand give you a per-casting discount as if a bulk scroll.In PF1 a wand costs 30x what a scroll costs. There's a pretty notable bulk discount there, but that also makes them rather pricy.
Ported 1:1 into PF2, a wand of a 1st level spell would be priced similarly to a 4th-5th level magic item, and a wand of a 4th level spell (the cap for PF1 wands) would be priced like a 12th level magical item. That means they aren't super affordable until you radically outlevel the spell being cast. On level magic items are pretty pricy from a wealth perspective too, so you're looking at waiting even later before they become particularly affordable.
Great comment. This is really the important part. A PF1 style Wand in PF2 would be really expensive for the spell rank. In typical scenarios that won't break anything: a normal wand of utility spells like Tailwind makes more sense than one of these wands, price wise, since those are in the ballpark of the cost of ~10-12 scrolls (it varies some by spell rank).
Now if it's just a normally priced wand except it has 10 charges that you can fire off at will instead of 1/day? That's mostly just action economy gains over a stack of scrolls. There's not a ton of cases where that will be a big deal, and the cases where its actually useful would be something like "spam Synthesia/Slow on a boss every round when you don't have enough of those prepared/ran out of spell slots."
A 50 charge wand at the price of 30 scrolls is so expensive that I don't know why you'd do it in PF2 because what spell are you going to want to cast 50 times in bursts multiple times per combat, that will be 3 ranks below your spell slots in order to make it affordable? The way PF2 plays, this just doesn't seem like a thing that will typically make much sense to do. By time you can buy this style of wand, you can just cast those spells a bunch and likely cast something stronger.
Why spend the actions spamming a wand of a 4th rank spell when you can cast a 7th rank spell and probably end the fight faster, and also have that money invested in an item?
I think there's a reason why in PF1 level 1 wands are popular and they fall of REALLY fast after that in terms of "will players actually spend money on this". Like, how often is any PF1 player spending 21,000g on a wand of a 4th level spell? I hardly ever see anyone wanting to do that, especially considering the really good items in that price range.
So I don't think this needs extra actions or anything special around it because it doesn't seem like a thing players are going to actually want to do most of the time anyway. As it stands, folks tend to use wands in PF2 for utility spells they want to put up daily or for things they like to have on hand that will come up infrequently (which scrolls also cover). I don't see people spamming them in combat and I don't think this variant option will cause that to start happening.
Though it would be pretty cool for a Wand Thaumaturge to have their implement wand also be a Wand of Synthesia or something that they can fire off since they already have it in hand. That'd be worth investing gold into and would be a place where I'd probably actually do this. (It helps that Synethesia never gets outdated as a spell. Slow would also be a contender.)
It sounds like you are saying in your world you have first edition and second edition heroes all coexisting in the same world and you use the rules related to the heroes for things except for things that can't fit which you just have not work for them.
In that case, and you are saying these wands already exist, and you want them to be better than unusable for the second edition heroes, I might have an option for you to consider.
Make a second edition character who can cast the spell in question contained in the wand able to cast the spell from the wand as if it were a second edition wand. It would be limited to 1 casting per day, unless you risk overcharging it. It would actually, as is the nature of the first edition wands, also consume one of the first edition charges. I'd probably suggest if you fail your attempt to overcharge it you burn out the ability for a second edition character from being able to use the wand ever again, and would also consume a single charge from the wand, but the wand would remain with whatever 1st edition charges which would be able to be useable by a first edition character. (i.e. it could be sold)
Alternately, if you want them to be able to more easily use more charges of a first edition wand daily, you could allow them to burn a focus point along with the wand's charge to skip the overcharge roll for the wand.
I'm also a little curious about how you handle the pricing of things, since Second edition moved to a Silver Standard, so things that used to cost 1gp were normally costing more like 1 sp. So unless you made your first edition gp worth about 10x as much, you their stuff would probably be super expensive in your world.
Again, I'd suggest using magic items crossing Affinities, I don't think that the 'foreign' wands should be better action economy than native scrolls, but you need to juggle that yourself to make sure it feels right. I think the right answer is to make them less action efficient, but easy to adjudicate, but it seems like you really want the answer to to be they should just be able to use them. The most important item is insuring you and your players are happy with what you choose.
edit: I forgot to mention, as number of base-line spell slots went down going to second edition, it isn't unreasonable to perhaps establish that one spell slot in second edition consumes two charges from first edition devices. So a 1st edition wand would only produce 25 charges. Which if I recall with my math above, made the charged version of wands cost close to the same amount to start but progressively higher at higher ranks.
A first-rank wand with the same relative pricing to scrolls as PF1 would be 60 gp, which seems totally out of the price range of any character for which it would be relevant. Which it turns out is exactly the same pricing as a normal PF2 wand - I knew they were expensive for their limited utility.
Pretty sure that should be 120 GP, or double the price of a PF2 wand. A scroll of cl1 clw is 25 gp vs 750 for a wand, so 30x the price. A first level PF2 scroll is 4 gp so that'd be 120 for a wand.
The second reason was, as much as the "happy stick dance" could get annoying in 3.P, the Medicine checks after every fight is not much better. And even with Free Archetypes, it is annoying for someone to be stuck as "The Medicine guy". It would be nice to offer some alternatives, of which charged or otherwise reusable wands might be one.
There's a few ways to tackle this:
1. In any group I GM that has someone with any infinite way to do downtime healing, if they're not time pressured/threatened I just estimate how long it'd take with average rolls and give them the option to handwave it. "Take 40 minutes and you're all full health" instead of rolling checks/rolling for elixirs/etc. While someone does still need a way to do it, there's a ton of those (Medicine, Focus Spells, Alchemists, etc).I don't do this if time is a factor or if someone is actually threatened (if you have persistant damage/poison/etc you need to resolve that normally). But in a typical case, doing these rolls is just a waste of game night time and we'd rather get back to the narratively interesting dice rolling. :)
2. If you prefer the "happy stick dance", make Healing Vapor a very cheap item in your setting. That's not a combat usable item but it's AoE healing in downtime. Crack a couple of those and the party can recover without needing any skill investment, and if they're cheap enough to be readily used, you've given back the wand spam option for downtime recovery without changing any PF2 mechanics at all. Plus, carrying a pile of elixir bottles around for recovery is a classic RPG feeling.
Soothing Tonic can also do this but I prefer Healing Vapor as a "we're specifically making this cheaper so you can have downtime healing" option given its 10 minute length.
3. If no one wants to be "the medic" but you want them to have downtime recovery without changing anything, give them a camp follower. That's an NPC medic who can do downtime healing but has minimal combat applicable stats and will not follow them into danger. If a fight breaks out? They hide. This is a great option if your players really just don't want to engage with downtime healing at all because you effectively eliminate it without impacting the value of combat healing options. Maybe the follower gets paid, maybe they just really believe in the cause and want to help.
That's a more drastic option but it doesn't change any rules at all and provides a potential plot hook NPC. It's a great option if your players just actively dislike this part of the game since it eliminates what to them feels like a feat/skill tax. And given how you described your setting, maybe this NPC can use PF1 wands so fueling that NPC requires finding wands of CLW/Infernal Healing (my favorite PF1 wand option).