Recharging consumables, exploit or not?
Chronicler
Member Posts: 1,391
There was a little discussion of it in the Did You Know thread, and I wanted to get to the bottom of this.
The other thread was getting a little heated, so let's try and set a ground rule right off the bat not to assign any value judgement to whether it's an exploit or not. This is a single player game. We all have ways we enjoy playing, and none of these ways are threats to eachother. Whether it's an exploit or not everybody will remain equally justified in their choice to recharge or refrain.
Some points in favor of it being an exploit, in my opinion.
-The "recharging wands" mechanic is laid out nowhere in the game, despite being much more gamechanging than a bunch of mechanics like nonlethal damage on unarmed strikes that the game would hammer into you every time you hit a loading screen.
-The method of selling the item to a merchant and then buying it back is pointlessly roundabout. As opposed to having a "recharge item" function at the shopkeep like they have an "Identify item" function.
-If wands were meant to be rechargeable, there's no reason for them to disappear after you've used them up. They'd just hang around at 0 charges waiting for you to take them back to a recharging station.
-It is the only place in these games where your resources are limitless, constrained only by your budget. There is a finite number of potions or scrolls or ammo you can buy, but you can buy infinite charges of a wand of any charge based item this way. Contrasting something like a wand of fire against an arrow of detonation in particular tells a very stark tale, with them both having near identical functions, but the wands "restock" so long as you keep bringing them in before you use your last one and the arrows do not.
In favor of this not being an exploit Arvia writes
The discussion so far starts with Thacobell's comment here if anybody wants to read it in its entirety.
The other thread was getting a little heated, so let's try and set a ground rule right off the bat not to assign any value judgement to whether it's an exploit or not. This is a single player game. We all have ways we enjoy playing, and none of these ways are threats to eachother. Whether it's an exploit or not everybody will remain equally justified in their choice to recharge or refrain.
Some points in favor of it being an exploit, in my opinion.
-The "recharging wands" mechanic is laid out nowhere in the game, despite being much more gamechanging than a bunch of mechanics like nonlethal damage on unarmed strikes that the game would hammer into you every time you hit a loading screen.
-The method of selling the item to a merchant and then buying it back is pointlessly roundabout. As opposed to having a "recharge item" function at the shopkeep like they have an "Identify item" function.
-If wands were meant to be rechargeable, there's no reason for them to disappear after you've used them up. They'd just hang around at 0 charges waiting for you to take them back to a recharging station.
-It is the only place in these games where your resources are limitless, constrained only by your budget. There is a finite number of potions or scrolls or ammo you can buy, but you can buy infinite charges of a wand of any charge based item this way. Contrasting something like a wand of fire against an arrow of detonation in particular tells a very stark tale, with them both having near identical functions, but the wands "restock" so long as you keep bringing them in before you use your last one and the arrows do not.
In favor of this not being an exploit Arvia writes
I've never understood why recharging wands is seen as an exploit. They're magical items, why shouldn't you be able to go back to a store that produces and sells magical items and pay a lot of gold to have them recharged? It's so expensive that I believe it was intentional.
Why else would you get several wands with only one single charge in Chateau Irenicus? Seems like a waste otherwise.
If you think it's overpowered and don't use it, that's a personal choice, but to call it an exploit while it costs tons of gold is not an opinion I share.
The discussion so far starts with Thacobell's comment here if anybody wants to read it in its entirety.
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Comments
and even if it is "costly" that is lol-tastic at best, most players are going to have 20 REP with their most charismatic person up front, so lets average that at 18, and with that, how do those wands cost? 9000, maybe 12 000 gold? even more lol-tastic, in bg1 without even trying i bet most players can hit 100 000 gold and have nothing to spend it on, and worse case scenario if you are a little low on cash just go ankheg farming for 500 gold a pop and before you know it all wands recharged with barely and muss or fuss
in my opinion i dont think there was ever the intention of selling wands to recharge them, my guess is that it was perhaps a bug or some weird whacky programing that sets wands to those charges when you sell them, because in reality it makes ZERO sense that you sell a wand that has 1 charge in it and then you buy the EXACT same want literally a nanosecond later and now it has 50 or 100 charges lol what?
personally if this "mechanic" was intentional not only should the more expensive wand price should have stayed the same, but it should at least have given back less charges, like 10 or even 5, wands are insanely powerful, that is why they cost so much in the first place, casting time 1 and a lot of them come with penalties to the save, that is the reason why their price is so high
in my opinion wand recharging by selling and buying IS an exploit, and its quite obvious that it is, if you sell an item to a shopkeeper with 1 charge ( or whatever it has at the time ) then when you buy it back it should have the same amount of charges
and another thing actually, when you buy default wands from merchants they never have 50 or 100 charges, they usually have around 10-20 charges like the holmes at sorcerous sundries, luckily he has 10 each, so you have to burn through quite a bit of wands before he will sell you the 50-100 charge ones
and this isn't even with wands, the necklace of missiles is an AMAZING item because its a wand of fireballs that is super cheap that ANY class can use ( well except for wizard slayer i suppose ) and you can do the exact same thing, in fact, every once in a blue moon when i play solo games that exactly what i do, is it an exploit to recharge that necklace at 1 charge sell it, then buy back for a pitiful amount of gold for 25 gold? hell yes it is, but because i can do it, that is why i do it
if it was intentional to recharge items with finite charges as you mentioned earlier having some sort of "recharge" function at either temples or wizard shops would make WAY more sense then selling and buying back
Most importantly, in PnP, shops can recharge wands. In my opinion, that settles the issue.
Some items that carry several charges are rechargeable. Recharging isn't easy, but it is easier than creating an entirely new magical item. High-level wizards or priests may find it useful to boost up an old item.
To recharge an item, it must first be enchanted either through the use of an enchant an item spell or prayer [...]. Once prepared, new charges can be cast into the item. [...]
However, recharging is not without risk to the item. Each time the item is enchanted to recharge, it must roll a saving throw vs. spell (using the saving throw of the caster) with a -1 penalty. If this saving throw is failed, the character has accidentally interfered with the magic of the item and it crumbles into useless dust.
This doesn't entirely settle the debate in my view, because apparently only "some" charged items are supposed to be rechargeable, and becasue recharging should carry the risk of losing the item in the process.
Be that as it may, recharging is indeed accepted practice and in fact it's meant to be a whole lot easier than producing an item from scratch. For that, first the right materials have to be found. According to the above-mentioned source book, those materials have to be rare. They then have to be prepared for enchantment, which normally take two weeks to a month, and this process can fail. Finally the item has to be successfully enchanted, which in itself is a very complex process, requiring among other things a successful enchant item spell, and a spell of permanency for the item to have more charges. And even if all requirements are met, a success roll must be made. The basic chance of success is 60%. Each level of the wizard adds 1% to the chance, while each spell, special process, or unique ingredient used lowers the chance by 1%. The DM can further adjust the percentage for any extra-special precautions or notorious shortcuts the character might take.
So looking at this from a pnp perspective, it can be argued that recharging items makes much more sense than having a Halbazzar Drin in the game with dozens of wands in his inventory. The developers just refrained from adding any downsides to recharging apart from the cost. If the player wants to "balance" item recharging, they could for example only sell/recharge at a high level wizard's shop (Thalantyr, Halbazzar) or a temple though I don't think there are any temples that buy items. One could also look up the saving throw of the vendor mage, roll a d20, apply a -1 penalty and roll for a succesful recharge. As a level 11 mage Thalantyr should have a save vs spells of 8, so rolling less than a 10 would mean a recharging failure and having to drop the reacharged item on the ground.
A case in point being the removal of the permanent 1 point Con loss on Resurrection which effectively and deliberately wrote a massive exploit into the game.
From both a gameplay and story perspective I'm not sure it's really an analogous situation here.
Addressing each of these points one by one.
I'm pretty sure in the originals everything had a finite stock. You could even buy up all the unenchanted arrows if you were enterprising enough. I could be wrong on that. Wouldn't swear by it.
Algernon's cloak is a known bug. A rollover error. When it should go down to 0 charges, it instead rolls around to several thousand charges, and if you use all those up then it just rolls around again.
The Wolf Cloak provides one charge a day. So while that is technically "virtually infinite" it is not limitless by any stretch of the imagination.
https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Relair's_Mistake
Wiki seems to be backing you up there. Says it lets you transform into a wolf "At Will", which is usually the terminology for abilities you can just use whenever.
Are there any other items in the game with "At Will" abilities? I don't know of any but that would make it pretty unique if it was the only one.
Algernon's cloak was (in)famous for its infinite charms. This was pre-EE though. Other than that I can't think of other items with at will abilities.
Actually, looking them up ... the name and description have valid string pointers. The strings they point to are just blank.
"-If wands were meant to be rechargeable, there's no reason for them to disappear after you've used them up. They'd just hang around at 0 charges waiting for you to take them back to a recharging station."
Having 1 charge left or 0 should have zero impact on the ability to recharge them. But no, wands completely disappear when used up.
Why? A magical wand with no charges is a stick. I doubt it would even register to detect magic. It's harder to enchant non-magical objects so I don't see that as the 'definitive' answer.
If a bow came pre-loaded with exactly 16 arrows, had no functionality for you to swap out or replace those arrows, and disappeared forever when you used the last one, excepting of course, you sell your bow to a merchant, and then buy it back, at which point he will have topped up your quiver when you weren't looking, that would strike you as an unorthodox setup would it not?
wands get used up because that's definitely something that happens. some products are lost when abused. they are irreparable. that doesn't mean they were never meant to be fixed, it's just that it's no longer worth attempting to fix this one in particular. for example, at my company, some of the products were left out in the rain for a year and forgotten. the damage would be so extensive that anyone would immediately know that any diagnostics would likely damage the diagnostic equipment. it would be uncontested it's user error. similarly the shop would not give it to a master wand smith for recharging; it simply disappears because it's irreparable.
wand behavior is not indicative of its intended availability. it's like saying red items shouldn't be usable, so the wand of magic missiles shouldn't be usable by anyone because of its color. the two elements are completely unrelated. just because it disappears doesn't mean it's not supposed to be fixable, it may represent the inability to scavenge enough pieces to call it a 'wand'.
So going by your train of thought, why the step of selling the item to the merchant at all?
Why does your ability to hand this merchant a wand with 1 remaining charge have any impact on his ability to find another wand to sell you, for full price?
Technically, wands SHOULDN'T disappear when used up. That's not what happens in PnP.
But anyway, as to the original point, I don't feel that recharging wands is an exploit, no. D&D rules do explicitly allow wands to be recharged, although one could argue that your average shopkeeper would not be able to recharge a wand. (NPCs like Thalantyr would be able to, of course, but not some random innkeeper.) I do acknowledge the points about wands coming back with 50 charges etc., although I'm inclined to lean towards the side of "it's there as player convenience as opposed to have multiple 5-charge Wands of Fire".
Ultimately, as players are free to simply not recharge the wands if they feel it is too powerful a tactic, it's not something that's of particularly high priority to change or fix.
They sell for a token 1 gold, so they can be recharged.
I don't like to state the obvious, but unfortunately, some people need to hear it: I don't tell people how to play just because I call it an exploit. You can still use that if you want. That's not up to me.
Yes, the same with a wand of frost with zero charges from Centeol.
This might as well be turned around: If they had any intention to not let you recharge wands or any other type of consumable item, they would not make it an option via vendors, etc.
I really can't see how the fact that vendors buy empty items and sell them recharged clearly indicates developer intent against recharging. A recharge function wasn't included for PCs, so why not have it done at a considerable price by an NPC, at a shop? Makes sense to me.
I don't know if you realized it yet, but your response to me does not make sense. At all. There is no option intended to let you re-charge these items, even at vendors. There is an unintentional glitch. When you interact with vendors in-game, did you see these tab/option "recharge equipment?" Yeah, I can't either. You can use a glitch/oversight from the developers, though.
Restrict selling wands to arcane dealers, and I'll look the other way on "recharging".
As it is, I rarely take advantage of this, as I generally keep wands for "backup" - situations where my mages need a touch of assistance to get through a situation. Most of the time, I use no more than a few charges of any wand.
It wouldn't surprise me if the developers used the shop system in lieu of creating a separate "recharge items" menu. Adding a separate window in Thalantyr's shop and Sorcerous Sundries would have taken more coding work.
The main difference between recharging consumables in BG1 and doing it in PnP is that there's a chance of failure in PnP. But then, the devs also removed those sorts of limitations from Raise Dead.
They might have the same reasons behind them: making these PnP features act just like they did in PnP would take more work from the coders and bugtesters. Like a lot of developers, they published a simplified version of a traditional system.
I'm not sure it's entirely intentional. It seems like a coding oversight that just happened to mimic PnP behavior.
The lack of guidance on the issue by the original and subsequent creators has, imo, created the current confusion over how or even if this should be allowed.
Replaying BG:EE currently, I've come to this conclusion as well. Having a few wands with 20 charges, even if you first sold them and then bought back, sounds like an absolutely no issue for me. It's too bad that wands are so rare in BG2 because that doesn't affect balance there at all, especially considering you're swimming in wands in BG1.
I'm fine with recharging wands to 100 charges, though - will just mean I get one item place instead of 5 item places (5 wands per 20 charges) in one purchase.
I just remembered that one of these loading screen tips mentions selling to vendors items that were out of their charges. The tip explicitly mentions that the vendors will offer you 1 gold for such an item, citing that the reason for that is that said vendor would think the item does not have any use.
With that in mind, with this tip being about a very specific situation and very close to the topic, it comes to me as strange that the game doesn't inform you about the possibility of recharging items like that. It does not hint at that possibility, instead mentions the item being useless. That makes me think even more that the item recharge thing is not intentional.
I tried to google a screenshot with that exact loading screen tip but couldn't find it. I can try to dig out my old BG2 copy and try to take the screenshot myself. The only problem is, it would be in Polish. So, if anyone here who has access to classic BG2 in English, you can provide the screenshot if you so desire.