So in the previous strip (929), Durkon started to cast Protection from Daylight but was interrupted. Obviously he can cast the spell using Malack staff (or he seems to believe he can). What happens when all the PfromD spells in the staff are exhausted? Can Durkon recharge the staff with a spell he doesn’t know?
ETA: and in fact, with Malack dead, nobody in the world knows that spell.
The rules provide no way of recharging staves. However, it’s kind of fuzzy how newly-researched divine spells work, since divine casters have access to all of their spells automatically.
Also, of course, Durkon has the option of doing like all the other vampires, and just staying inside during the day.
Seems weird about the no-recharging staffs since previous editions allowed it but it certainly explains why I couldn’t find rules now.
I believe that previous incarnations allowed you to recharge a staff/wand with any spell it contained since the item itself just drained “charges”. So a staff that could fire both Fireball and Lightning Bolt for instance could be charged with applications of either spell, even if you had depleted it by solely using Fireball. By those rules, we know that Malack used the staff to heal V so Durkon could recharge the staff with some Cure X Wounds variant. But I don’t know what the in-story answer will be. Maybe using the spell via the staff will allow Durkon to ‘know’ it as a divine spell?
Edit: It also seems odd that Malack would casually heal V (who was in no actual danger) with the staff if doing so made it one step closer to junk.
Huh. I just assumed staffs and wands were rechargeable somehow. Silly me. Working only at night seems like it would really hinder the OOTS mission, so there must be some way to protect D going forward. But, hell, I can’t predict this comic any more after seeing Julio show up in the current strip, which is both awesome and ridiculous.
Too late to edit but Laurin recognizes Malack’s staff so it’s not as though Malack enchants wood sticks by the dozen and throws them away like empty soda cans. It’s (presumably) the same staff he has before Tarquin did his “Three Empire” plan. Between Laurin knowing Malack’s staff and Malack casually healing V with the same staff he relies on as an emergency “stay alive”, I can’t believe there’s no way of recharging it.
Is that how staffs work? I always thought they were a sort of storage device for spells. I knew that D&D limited the amount of spells a wizard can cast in a day and that amount gets renewed each day. And a staff was a way to work around that.
Let’s say a wizard can cast ten spells a day. But he knows in a hard day of dungeon crawling he’s going to need a lot more than that. So for the weeks before he enters the dungeon, he’d summon up his ten daily spells (or whatever it is you call the process) and instead of casting them, he’d load them into his staff. Then when he was in the dungeon, he could cast the spells that were loaded in his staff and they wouldn’t count against his daily limit.
It was useful because it allowed a wizard to have a much larger inventory of spells on hand. But it wasn’t overwhelming. A wizard still had to put in the work of loading up all those spells (although that would usually be done “off camera”), it didn’t give him access to any higher level spells, and it meant a wizard was vulnerable to a significant loss of his power if his staff was lost.
Staffs are made with specific powers and generally fixed at the time of creation.
If you want to throw around extra spells, you work like my last 3.5 Wizard. I convinced the party to put aside an extra share of treasure that I and the Cleric turned into scrolls and wands. Then I memorized only attack spells, and put any utility spells and emergency spells onto those scrolls, which are one-shot items. Most of the wand money went into “Happy Sticks” (Wands of Cure Light Wounds) or Wands of Magic Missile (basic attack spell wand even the Rogue could use).
Chimera is correct. I was just saying that if you had a (hypothetical) Staff of Wizardly Might that cast Fireball, Disintegrate, Protection from Missiles and Teleport then you could recharge it with any of those spells although you might need to cast Protection from Missiles on it five times to charge up enough energy for a single Disintegrate.
The other major caveat was that a completely discharged staff was dead. If you used its last charge, there was no bringing it back and a new staff would have to be made.
Oh, yes. I had a cleric who inherited a Staff of Striking from a defeated enemy. A few hours later she was fooling around with a Deck of Many Things and drew the skull card (You fight Death, he never misses with his scythe, and you suffer an unresurrectable death if defeated). House rules had the instant kill option (20 - hit - 20) and exactly that happened the second blow.
She grew really fond of that stick, even after she’d outgrown it.
One notable exception : the 6th level Druid spell Spellstaff allows them to do precisely what Little Nemo says, store one spell inside a random quarterstaff which they can then cast whenever. At their own caster level and for free, too, unlike scrolls. Can’t enchant more than one staff that way, and it’s only the one spell, and you’ll have to endure endless jokes about “polishing your staff” when you cast it, but it’s still hella useful.
Or would be if by that level Druids didn’t dungeoneer 100% of the time in one Wild Shape or another and thus could ever use their fucken’ staff :D.
Personally I use it for… whatchamacallit, the travel super long distances via plants spell ? It’s a borderline useless spell, more situational than a crimson polyester suit, but when that situation arises you really are damn pleased with yourself to have it handy :p.
That used to be imaginatively named Transport Via Plants, but I don’t remember ever casting it or seeing it cast. 
I believe its called tree stride these days.
How does that Deck work during games anyway? I always thought that a deck that might kill you, change your alignment or give you 50 gems (or whatever) was sort of odd. Do players use it when they’re about to die anyway? Doesn’t the deck risk upending the game? SRD:Deck of Many Things - D&D Wiki
There’s a higher-level spell called Transport Via Plants which has unlimited range. Tree Stride sounds vaguely familiar, I’ll get my butt off the sofa and check my old PH in a bit.
Never experienced it myself, but from the accounts I’ve seen the Deck of Many Things is a campaign-ender. Using it is likely to change the fates of individual characters so radically that they won’t be adventuring together anymore, so you use it when you’re ready to end the campaign.
It varies from player to player, and character to character. Myself, I’ve never had a character who would touch a DoMT with the proverbial ten-foot pole, but I know some folks who will never pass up the chance to draw two or three cards. You can get some really nice things from a deck; it’s just risky as [del]Hell[/del]The Abyss.
I’m now picturing Tarquin cheerfully asking a mind-controlled dupe to draw again.
It can be, but if you look at the description you’ll see some of the fates are (relatively) minor. Karitsa, my character, didn’t recognize it for what it was or she would not have fooled with it. I wrote it up (of course):
She drew two cards and the first was the Star card. This was 2nd edition rules so things might have changed a bit but it was interpreted as a +2 to an ability score, Wisdom in her case; I didn’t get to pick it. Since it was already 18 (that’s why she was a Cleric in the first place) that made it 20 and pretty much the end of roll vs. Wiz for her, at least in that campaign.
True, the deck will most likely take an orderly campaign, tie it with a cheap bow, piss on it, set it on fire and bury it in the yard, no questions asked.
However, it can become an adventure or campaign in and of itself. For example, one of the cards gives one player in the party (and only ONE) a number of wishes. No limits to the power of those wishes, or restrictions of any kind on them besides the “you only get so many” part.
Now you give a group of four-five geeks the proverbial 3 wishes to debate, and you give one of them ultimate and dictatorial veto power, sparks *will *fly. Murder will ensue. Kingdoms will burn. And dollars to donuts, the guy with the wishes ends up becoming the Big Bad of your brand new campaign ;).