Question about rods

[Flambard]

He mostly used wands, I suspect. (He also took 1.3 million turns finding the gear he needed, so he got a lot more devices than he would find in an ordinary game.) Wands of annihilation do massive damage in the hands of a mage. And wands of TO have a lower failure rate than rods.

And you missed on component: he had a ton of banishment/mass banishment scrolls. Those are hugely powerful objects.

Thanks for the clarifications, I'm not too good at reading char dumps.

Grotug, I guess this dump has something to do with the topic at hand... PowerWyrm, could you maybe clarify?

[Derakon]

I agree with Grotug's analysis. Wands are, simply put, more powerful than rods. You don't need a gigantic stack of rods to be able to fire one bolt per round for however long the fight lasts; you just need to be able to recharge the wands afterwards. And, yes, you'll be paying a certain amount of "recharge tax" when you do that, but I would be quite surprised if replacement wands were more rare than replacement rods.

That's all not to say that MAngband might have different priorities. With a persistent surface level and the ability to trade obsolete gear between players, I could easily see a situation where every player starts out with ten Rods of Acid Bolt, gifted to them by someone else, that they lean heavily on for the first ~1500'. If you actually have situations like that going on, then it might well be worth taking action.

(Also, keep in mind that a stack of 10 only means "infinite acid bolts" so long as you're at normal speed; rods recharge in game turns, not player turns)

[Pete Mack]

Hmm. A bigger problem than acid bolts is TO, whether it be wands or rods. An early stack of TO from a retiring character is a massive boost. Really, there are any number of high level utility objects that could unbalance the game this way--let alone top ego items and artifacts(?)

[Flambard]

Yup, now you can appreciate my concerns a bit more

While this doesn't generally happen, and we have several safeguards in place to prevent this from happening (including good old moderator action, as suggested), it could happen, so I HAVE TO assume any character can get his hands on any items, in any quantity; thus kinda discarding the rarity argument.

Like I stated up-thread, that might sound like we have bigger problems, than rods, but the system works remarkably well, because most things from V have built-in penalties.

Derakon, thank you for extending Grotug's analysis, this is greatly appreciated.

[Pete Mack]

Requiring black market prices is a start. The trouble is that great items are guaranteed this way, not nust a lucky find, and only available once, whether or not you have the money at the time. Even stat potions can be cached, and bought at leisure.

[Flambard]

Requiring black market prices is a start. The trouble is that great items are guaranteed this way, not nust a lucky find, and only available once, whether or not you have the money at the time. Even stat potions can be cached, and bought at leisure.

Don't want to derail this topic into MAngband discussion, as the question was about V rods, but if anyone's interested (and I think it's pretty interesting how V translates into multi-player environment), here's what we do in terms of cheez:

1. Servers have rules. You can run your own server with any amount of cheeze you want, but the "official" mangband.org servers simply discourage that.
2. Simply giving stuff to other players is discouraged, there's logging and audit mechanism.
3. If you want to trade with other players, you should use shops (we also have player-run shops, with BM prices, like Pete Mack imagined).
4. But if you party together, it's feasible that the gear is distributed among the party, DnD style, and we feel it's fine.
5. Artifacts can't be dropped above their base depth, meaning you need to dive together for a simple trade, that's a pretty cool safeguard.
6. Lastly, but very importantly: the regular V mechanics do work on their own! Giving stuff to newbies most likely leads to that stuff being lost when they die, plain and simple

(The game has been running for about 20 years now, so we're pretty familiar with most of the caveats. It's those damn rods, that bugger me!)

[PowerWyrm]

Thanks for the clarifications, I'm not too good at reading char dumps.

Grotug, I guess this dump has something to do with the topic at hand... PowerWyrm, could you maybe clarify?

This was a char with a challenge of winning with a mage by using devices without ever equipping an ego or artifact item. Basically:

- early game you have your big dice weapon, a shooter and some crap wands
- mid game you use stacks of rods (fire/frost/lightning/acid bolt) and activatable items (DSM, rings of acid/lightning/flames/ice)
- end game you use wands of drain life/annihilation

Notes:

1) 10 White Gold Rods of Teleport Other (5 charging) {!d, ignore}

Notice the inscription... this means I have these rods "ignored" because 10 are enough to give an infinite supply of TO, which makes the game trivial

2) 23 Copper-Plated Wands of Annihilation (2 charges)

IIRC MAngband has the "safe recharge" feature, which means in theory I only need ONE of these and recharge it forever. Makes any rod pointless at this point, since there's nothing that can compete with Annihilation.

[Pete Mack]

10 rods of TO is nowhere near enough to give continuous charges. You would need close to 90 at speed 30. I suspect he stopped picking them up because of the weight.