Eternal Wands

Disposable magic items were always a moral dilemma for me. Investing in something that's single-use leaves you really intent on getting your money's worth out of that one usage. A scroll, for instance, can cost you a pretty penny but holds a spell you can only cast once. Thus, it's not uncommon (in my experience, anyway) to hold onto the item indefinitely, always convincing yourself that it's being saved for when you really need it. Even when you do really need it, you'll save it for when you really, really need it. In such a case, it ends up being wasted money. Most players are more comfortable buying a ring or a +1 weapon or some other item with a permanent and tangible benefit.


Wands are the beginnings of a compromise in that direction. With 50 uses before they're spent, they have a large enough store that players are usually comfortable spending charges when they're needed. However, 50 is indeed a finite number, and for wands that aren't holding severely specific spells, one that is liable to run out eventually. Until you've used all 50 of those charges, you haven't actually gotten your money's worth out of the item - and yet after you have used all 50, you no longer have anything to show for your spent gold!

So what's the real solution? Is there a way to comfortably spend money on an item that isn't yet another +1 to something on your character sheet? Can one make appropriate use of an activated item and still have something to show for it one or twenty levels later? Surely there's a way to take the utility of a wand and stretch it out a bit, isn't there?

Heroics

Feats are a precious resource: most characters get seven over the course of their entire career, with humans getting eight and fighters getting eleven more... but at the dire cost of having to be a fighter. That's not even taking feat taxes into account, with many of the more desirable prestige classes necessitating one or more feats that are otherwise of little to no use.

So how can you ensure your feats are working hard enough for you? In particular, more specific feats might have a strong effect, but they run the risk of being useless in most situations. Well, there is a rather simple way to not only get more feats, but to get them on-demand, picking up whatever suits the situation as you need it.

There's a little gem in the Spell Compendium called heroics - a level 2 sorcerer/wizard spell that lets you grant the subject a single feat off the list of fighter bonus feats for 10 minutes per level. Even at minimum level, that's half an hour to make use of your new feat. Having to be a fighter bonus feat is indeed a big restriction, especially from your viewpoint as a spellcaster - no crafting, no metamagic and nothing along the lines of spell focus, obviously. But if you look, you might be surprised by how extensive the list really is, often with bonus feats appended to it with every book. In particular, versatile feats that grant you choices gives you a 'feats-within-feats' situation that can be tooled to suit any character.

Items of Creation

It's said that half of an adventure's successes are determined beforehand in town. Actually, nobody's ever said that, but I figured it would lend some credence to my words if I make it sound like an established idea. Really though, asides from preparing spells (which only some of us get to do,) before every adventure it's wise to properly equip oneself. How can you be exactly sure what you need, though? Rope and torches are safe bets, but will you need a mirror? What about a shovel, or a crowbar, or chalk? How much easier would things be if you had antitoxin or holy water? Will there be a water hazard? A cliff wall to be scaled? A chasm too wide to cross...?

Forewarned is forearmed, but most of the time you'll ultimately be guessing at what obstacles you'll encounter, or simply settling for the most standard useful items and hoping ingenuity will take care of the rest. After all, it's not like you can afford to haul around every single mundane tool and semi-magic item in existence 'just in case.' Wouldn't it make things so much easier if you could, say, choose which items you brought after the fact? I'm not advocating for lying about what's written on your equipment list, but rather relying on a single item that can replace a whole suite of mundane tools on a whim!

Trickery Devotion

It's a rewarding feeling to make the most of low-level spells. Knowing you're working within a restricted but open-ended set of guidelines makes for the most delightful creativity, and creativity is often what helps you achieve greater power than the game designers ever counted on. A chief example is unseen servant, mentioned in a previous article as an excellent way for a low-level spellcaster to expand on his or her combat actions. Of course, non-spellcasters should be allowed to get in on that fun, too.

Feats, one of those things that every character gets, aren't quite the same. Even if you carefully sidestep the lousy "+1 to something" ones, they're almost always set in what they can or can't do. Power Attack is a great feat, but it's not like there's a wide variety of things you can do with it. Surely you can get a versatile and open-ended feat you could use in a different manner every day? For just any character to pull that off, well, it will take some real... trickery, won't it?

Iron Heart Surge

Tired of needing to be a spellcaster to perform supernatural feats? Man-with-stick has long been able to perform truly ludicrous damage outputs, but asides from just hitting things with a stick, he has no versatility or special defenses to speak of. Surely being able to remove negative levels, blindness and antimagic fields is purely within the realm of the spell-slinger, right? Well, have we got news for you.

Aptitude Weapon

For the sword-swinging adventurers of the world, you don't have to worry about spell selections. Your big choices in leveling are going to be feats, those precious resources that all-too-often give less than they ought to. Feats that add a bonus to something you can already do - what one might call "number feats," since they only make your numbers go up - are rarely worth it. While it's nice to be able to do something better, it's more important to be able to do something at all. The other option is "ability feats": those that give you more options in what you can do.

Asides from the more general combat maneuvers (tripping, disarming, sundering etc.) most ability feats are going to be hindered by specificity: if you want the option to do something cool with your weapon, chances are it's going to have to be a specific kind of weapon. Want Boomerang Daze? Well, you'd best be using a crapsack boomerang or it's not happening. Think of it as the divine/arcane split, except much more unfair and crippling. We're not here to complain, though, we're here to break the system open a little and make it work for us. This game is about open-ended character creation, and one should be able to fit together options however they please. So wouldn't it be nice to make use of all those neat weapon-specific feats on whatever you like?

Bloodstorm Blade

For those of you whom distrust the Tome of Battle, turn back now, for there is nothing here to assuage your skepticism.

The book was written to give more options to the sword-swinging mundanes of the D&D world, and with them a bit of a power boost. Some of the abilities on offer tread dangerously over the line between "powerful martial techniques" and "reality-bending nonsense that even magic would have trouble pulling off." While a lot of the most abusive combos in the system aren't exactly obvious and require a lot of book-diving to pull off, sometimes you get a real doozy that was somehow designed that way. Enter the bloodstorm blade, a prestige class based around throwing weapons. Not throwing "throwing weapons," mind you, but throwing melee weapons. I won't bore you with all the details, but if you read the following ability and don't immediately cackle at the possibilities, you ought to re-read it until you do.