Chargeable magic items

[Throne12]

So how might this change the style of play. So I was thinking about having magic items needing to be recharge like items in skyrim. They can be charged by a spell cast using a spell slot or by crystals/some item filled with magic.

[JackPhoenix]

All items? How does that work? Or just weapons like in Skyrim? That's basically adding ammunition to all weapons. Expect the players to be about as excited about it as they are about tracking arrows. How much does it change things depends on how easy is the recharge. If it requires using spells, non-casters are screwed. Anyone who relies on multiple attacks (i.e. fighters) is worse off than someone who makes fewer high damage hits (paladins, rogues). What happens when you run out of charges for, say, +1 sword? People will probably be switching weapons to avoid wasting charges on trivial foes. All in all, screw martials, long rule the casters.

[J-H]

In my next game I will be applying this, but only to items that have charges/day. I'm not a huge fan of "Here's an item that gives 1d6+1 3rd level Lightning Bolts per day." It's a bit overspecialized (bad against certain enemies or in certain environments), but "8d6 for 7 rounds in an AOE" adds up to a lot more potential damage than a lot of magical weapons do, unless you have a long adventuring day or a lot of attacks.

My change will be:
Wands & staves no longer recharge automatically. You can use a spell slot to cast a spell that's in a wand without expending a charge (ie, you have no Lightning Bolt prepared, but have the Wand of Lightning Bolts, so you use a 3rd level slot to cast it).
You can also recharge a wand or staff, but it takes 2 spell slots of the level spell being recharged plus 1 hour, plus a 100gp pearl, which is consumed during the charging process.

The game won't have weeks and weeks of downtime, and there will be other things to spend gold on, so players will, I hope, have to decide how many resources they want to put towards recharging.
Counterbalancing this, though, wands and some staffs won't require attunement to use. There are some other changes going on at the same time, but I'm posting this section as an example of how I'm making it work.