Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 khaba Aug 10, 2010 19:11:30	I'm considering a house rule for wands in my upcoming 3.5e campaign.  The proposal is that instead of wands having 1-50 charges they have a burnout percentage 2%.  After each time you use the wand, you roll d100 and on a 1 or 2 the wand is destroyed. I arrived at 2% a couple of ways.  First, such a wand has a .98^50 = 36.4% chance of being destroyed after 50 or more uses.  For comparison a 1% burnout wand has a 60.5% chance of surviving at least 50 uses and a 5% wand has only a 7.7% chance. A level 1 wand costs 750 gp for 50 charges.  If you scale each charge linearly (which isn't quite perfect - 50 wands with 1 charge each are better than 1 wand with 50 charges), that comes out to 15 gp per charge.  It seems reasonable that if the value of one charge is 15 gp, then the value of a wand with burnout chance of 2% is Sum (15 + 15*(.98)^1 + 15*(.98)^2 + 15*(.98)^3 .....) Which reduces (I'm told by someone I trust) to 15/(1-.98) = 750 Here is the formula: Sum(a + ar + ar^2 + ar^3 + ...) = a/(1-r)   So the idea is all wands created will have a 2% burnout chance and (for level 1) cost 750 gp. The only real reason for doing this is to simplify bookkeeping of charges and add a little drama to wand use.  I contemplated rolling burnout before use, but that could be too dramatic.
#2 khaba Aug 12, 2010 13:37:36	No one has any thoughts on this?