Cheap, disposable wands of cure light wounds--pros & cons?

[Vrecknidj]

I so feel like agreeing with both sides on this. I'm not entirely sure how to resolve this paradoxical position...

Dave

 

[Victim]

I _always_ heal people to full, or at least within 2 or 3 of full. And I'm playing a ranger with a wand.

The money saved on the charge just ain't worth diein' over.

This assumes you are in a world (say Sharn in Eberron) where buying level 1 wants is as easy as buying a masterwork greatsword or full plate.

Yeah, even a little bit of extra healing can make a big difference. In a high level 1 shot, our Shifter - err, Master of Many Forms/Warshaper - ended up dying by 1 HP with more than 400 total HP. If you're using Cure sticks, then people should probably be within 5 HP of their max.

CLW wands (and Lesser Vigor ones) are probably too cheap, given their power. Market forces in our game have sometimes pushed the price to around 1k GP, and we still thought it was worth it. Being able to eliminate normal downtime healing spell uses is really nice.

But it's not like people don't run out of spells anyway, so the party still needs to rest. If they don't need to rest as often, well is that really bad? In many ways, there are still too many incentives to pull out, turtle up, or Rope Trick after an encounter to reload spells even if the group has cure sticks. To use a CRPG example, I played through Neverwinter Nights with my monk. He had max ranks in heal, so he could easily recover his HP with cheap healer's kits - I hardly ever needed to rest. Or you could just play like my brother did and rest after every fight, which usually isn't anymore difficult than using the kit.

And really, the serious life and death operation feel is mostly reserved for in combat heals.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

I despise the idea of carrying around wands of curing. Someone once suggested every character in the party should buy their own wand for curing; the idea of that sickened me. It's such a "computer/console" mentality, IMO.

That being said, some of the previous posters have some good points about the escalation of damage output in 3E. I just don't particularly like the wand solution. I'd rather have some kind of natural healing increase.

My 2 cents.

 

[shilsen]

I despise the idea of carrying around wands of curing. Someone once suggested every character in the party should buy their own wand for curing; the idea of that sickened me. It's such a "computer/console" mentality, IMO.

That being said, some of the previous posters have some good points about the escalation of damage output in 3E. I just don't particularly like the wand solution. I'd rather have some kind of natural healing increase.

My 2 cents.

Different strokes. I actually ruled recently in my game (PCs just hit 10th lvl) that I'm not even going to bother tracking buying or use of wands of Cure Light or Lesser Vigor, but will assume that the PCs spend a certain amount on them. So once the PCs are outside combat, they can just heal up to full.