A bag of traps, a chargeable magic tool which creates a random trap on your space. Alternatively, have it be a wand of trap creation, which would be nondirectional.
There could be some way to force creation of a specific trap, perhaps by wielding a component which gets consumed, such as arrows for an arrow trap, or a potion of water for a rust trap.
Wielding a beam or ray wand and hitting a monster with it should zap it for a distance of 1 in that direction (so the monster gets hit), and there should be a chance that it does not consume a charge.
Because giving Cavemen a way to get good weapons makes the role less differentiated, and because the roleplay experience of a Caveman is perceived to be best when using a club, they should be restricted in nearly all weapons except for the “caveman basics” such as club, spear, sling, and boomerang.
It might be necessary to make them exempt from getting their skill unrestricted by their god, because if they could still do that, most players would probably just use the same old artifacts at Basic skill, again hurting the role’s differentiation.
Forcing them into using primitive weapons might make them interesting by virtue of incentivizing using attack wands much more to deal with threats; an interesting gameplay change would be for cavemen to get more uses out of attack wands than other roles, but that would make little flavor sense.
Of course, this would require their quest artifact to be changed to either a non-weapon or to one of the types of weapons they are allowed to use.
A monster with a wand (or wand-like attack that requires being lined up with it) that always kills you - no matter what extrinsics or intrinsics you have, like a souped-up wand of death - but cannot or will not use it until you have seen it for a turn, to make it not an unavoidable instadeath.
Orcus is a possible candidate for this, if his wand of death is either turned into a special “Wand of Orcus” artifact or it’s just more powerful when he’s the one zapping it.
If you put too many wands in the same place (inventory, bag, stash, floor pile, etc), there should be a risk that the magic in them will reach a critical mass that sets them off and blows some of them up. This would destroy only wands, not any other type of objects stored with them.
The intent is to address a balance issue with wands where the player steadily accumulates them over the game and has a huge arsenal of them, many of which aren’t even that useful, by the late game.
Wand of jumping. When you zap it in a direction, the beam finds the first square in that direction you can’t occupy because a monster, boulder, wall, or edge of the map is blocking it, and moves you to the square right before it. There is no maximum range, meaning the “jumps” could be very long and might be better off flavored as teleports at a certain distance. Liquids count as a square you can occupy, so zapping it at e.g. a wall on Medusa’s level with water preceding it would result in you falling into the water and possibly drowning. Not specified what the behavior would be if you tried to zap it diagonally through an open door.
There is the potential issue of using this wand on the Astral Plane to zip around much faster than usual and without needing to spend resources on jumping boots or the spell. One possible solution is to make this wand very rare, about as rare as the wand of enlightenment, so you find about 0-2 of them per game.
Add the following events on Halloween:
Add a wand of roll boulder, which if zapped at a boulder will cause it to roll away in the direction of the zap.
The spell of change metal to wood should work on rings and wands: it turns any metal ring or wand into a randomly selected wooden type of ring or wand. (Note that there is currently only 1 wooden ring). If the wand of wishing happens to be made of wood in the current game, it can’t be randomly chosen.
For wands, it works the same as polymorphing, so the resulting wand will keep its charge count, but of course unlike polymorphing it can’t be repeated since the wand will no longer be metal.
Zapless conduct, which bans any zapping of wands and casting of spells, or more specifically anything in which you use the ‘z’ or ‘Z’ command and don’t immediately decline to select a wand or spell. Cursed wands exploding, selecting a directional or spell to zap then escaping out of the direction prompt (“The wand glows then fades” / “The magical energy is released”), or casting a forgotten spell to become confused all break the conduct. The feedback in #conduct is “You have never attempted to zap a wand or cast a spell.”
The intent of the conduct is to create a game without magic that can be used repeatedly or spammed. There is one important repeatable use of magic via wands that is not covered above: engraving with wands, which allows using all the charges in nondirectional wands and burning or carving Elbereth in the ground. In particular, banning wand engraving would mean a follower of the conduct cannot use wands of wishing. If the implementation of the game does not already have an Elberethless conduct, banning wand engraving could be a good addition to this conduct.
Eating a charged ray wand gives you the ability to breathe or shoot that kind of ray for a few turns. The UI for this would be either zapping “-“ or using #monster since no form that can eat wands currently has a defined #monster command.
Since Barbarians are thematically supposed to be wary of magic use, they should get an alignment penalty whenever they use magic. This could just be for casting spells, or it could be made harder (but more relevant since Barbarians tend to do very little spellcasting anyway) by also assessing the penalty when using obviously magic items like wands or scrolls.
Charges have physical weight in wands. Not a huge amount, perhaps only 2 aum per charge, but enough to make a difference in carrying around tons of loaded wands.
Wizards should have be restricted in all weapons. To compensate, Magicbane should have its base type changed to a wand, and its specialty should be that it has a random wand effect when zapped, with infinite charges.
You can quiver a wand; firing with the “f” command will then zap your quivered wand instead of throwing the wand.
If you zap a cursed wand and it backfires, zapping you, the death is currently given as “zapped him/herself with a wand”. This should be changed to “killed by a wand backfire” to indicate it wasn’t deliberate.
Remove the recharge counter from objects. Most tools can be infinitely recharged, so they don’t need one. For wands, replace the recharge count with a chance of a wand becoming eroded when the wand is recharged, or of exploding if recharged when already eroded.
Not specified what happens for the few items that don’t follow this pattern, such as magic markers and the wand of wishing. For the wand, it will likely work to make the erosion guaranteed the first time, and the explosion guaranteed when it’s already eroded. Magic markers could possibly just be un-rechargeable.
Wands should require being wielded before they can be zapped; this way it adds a bit more strategy for the player on when to wield a wand and which one, and balances them a bit relative to monsters. On the other end of the change, you now get a turn or two of warning when a monster is about to zap a wand, because they have to wield it.
Rangers break wands on their knee rather than raising it high over their head, because that’s what they’re used to doing with firewood.
Wearing rings that correspond in appearance to wands double, augment, or otherwise enhance those wands’ effects, including possibly turning a beam into a cone shaped blast.
This could also extend to drinking potions with matching appearances to worn rings, such as drinking a ruby or emerald potion while wearing a ruby or emerald ring.
Allow wielding some types of traditional magical implements to reduce spell failure rates:
New role, the Artificer:
Also see dtsund’s proposed Tinker role.
Zapping a wand with no charges remaining, if it fails to wrest with the usual odds, will cancel it instead of letting it crumble to dust. This allows you to recharge the wand.
A reduced version of the Wands Balance Patch in which there is still a new wand-use skill, but not varying wand effects at different levels of skill (because the skill of the wielder shouldn’t affect the magic in the wand). Instead, increased wand skill gives you higher accuracy (no more/much less missing Rodney with a death ray, for instance) and perhaps other perks such as being able to zap a wand once per turn as a bonus action, as with a stethoscope.
Zapping directional wands while stuck in a pit restricts the range of the wand to 1, basically shot at an angle to hit something right next to the pit.
Wearing gauntlets of dexterity allows you to quick-draw a wand (zapping any wand in your inventory as a half action, similar to applying a stethoscope - it costs no time but can only be done once per action).
Also, they allow you to use a container in inventory as a half action. For balance, you should probably only be able to do one half-action thing per turn.
When zapping a wand when confused, one of the potential random directions to zap is at yourself. This could potentially apply to any directional prompt, not just wands.
Instead of electricity blowing up your wands and rings, it makes you incapable of using rings (and potentially disables your rings’ extrinsics) for a few turns.
Artifact wand that causes monsters trying to zap wands at the wielder to drop them instead.
Creatures that get caught in a wand’s explosion (from the wand actually breaking, not from the regular effect of the wand) become uncancelled, unless the exploding wand is a wand of cancellation. Notably, this can be used by the player to remove the Cancelled status.
Zapping a wand requires touching it, so unless you are wearing gloves, this causes you to incur any effects, such as silver damage, from handling something of its material. Conversely, monsters usually won’t use a wand that will hurt them (unless they’re wearing gloves), and will incur material effects if they do.
Change one of the existing boring wand descriptions to “gold”, and make its material gold, for the purposes of being stealable by leprechauns.
When a disenchanter hits you, it may drain charges from your wands instead of your armor.
You must have at least one free hand to zap a wand. Otherwise the game won’t let you.
Wielding a wand will give you an accuracy or damage bonus with that wand. Or if the Wands Balance Patch is implemented, you get the effects of the wand at the next skill level. Monsters will always wield wands they intend to use, so you will usually see them doing so before they get a chance to take you by surprise with a fire or death ray.
Spell of blindness (possibly also available as a wand), which blinds monsters.
Beams and rays from wands have a slightly reduced range if the wand is cursed, and a boosted range if it is blessed.
If you throw a wand upwards and hit yourself on the head with it, it consumes a charge and zaps yourself. Come to think of it, this should extend to wielding a wand and hitting monsters with it.
Wand of detect magic. Non-directional; if you are carrying any items in your inventory which are magical, “You feel a magical aura inside your knapsack.”, and any object classes in open inventory which are magical but not type-identified are identified as being magical.
Wand of charging: non-directional wand that uncursed-charges an item in inventory. Will explode if an attempt is made to recharge it.
Wand of identify: a non-directional wand that will always identify one item when zapped.
Shopkeepers won’t buy wands from you if they are empty.
For variants with wand skill, higher wand skill improves the outcomes from snapping a wand. Ideas include increasing the effective number of remaining charges, increasing the explosion radius, and decreasing the damage the player takes.
You can consolidate wands of the same type by rubbing them on each other. This transfers one less than the number of charges in the wand (or just 1 charge if the wand has only one charge), and increments the recharge counter of the new wand. Overcharging a wand like this beyond its normal generation limits is likely to make it explode.
Give cursed wands some bad effects other than rarely exploding, such as a cursed wand of fire also hitting your own inventory.
When you crush a monster who is carrying a wand with a drawbridge, the wand explodes.
Wand breaking effects that depend on the number of remaining charges use (charges+1) instead of (charges), to account for the wrest charge.
A wand that, when it hits a creature, saves that creature’s position and forces it to teleport back to that position after a few turns.
Artifact whose invoke power creates attack wands.
Proposed nerfs for ring and wand destruction due to electric damage (some of them extensible to scrolls, spellbooks and potions for fire and cold damage):
Wands may generate pre-recharged.
