Crafting staff help

[Jimbob]

Afternoon all,

I want to create a staff for my wiz/cle/MT prob a healing one so I can use other spells in combact so I had a look at the "staff of healing" and it gives you a base proce for the finished article but not how to make it and how much each spell costs.

So can any one give me a break down on this please.

[Saph]

Full details on crafting staffs can be found in the SRD here.

[Jimbob]

Sadly its blocked any chance you could put it as a spoiler?

[Douglas]

The base price for making a staff of a single spell is 750 * spell level * caster level. The second most expensive spell you add to a staff has a 25% discount, and the rest get a 50% discount. You can choose to make a spell cost multiple charges to use, and this divides the cost of that spell by the number of charges required. You must use the same caster level for all of the spells used to make a single staff. The staff is created with 50 charges.

For example, you want to make a staff that can cast Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, and Cure Serious Wounds (don't actually make this example, it's a terrible design). To save on cost, you decide to make CSW take 3 charges to use. Due to the property of staffs using the user's caster level if it's higher than the staff's and the customer having a respectable caster level of his own, you want to use the minimum caster level, which is 5 for CSW.

CLW: 750 * 1 * 5 = 3750
CMW: 750 * 2 * 5 = 7500
CSW: 750 * 3 * 5 / 3 (charges per use) = 3750.

The most expensive property is Cure Moderate Wounds. CLW and CSW are tied for second. One of them gets 25% off, the other 50%. The total cost of the staff is 7500 + 75% * 3750 + 50% * 3750 = 12187.5. This staff has a base price of 12187.5 gp and can be used to cast CSW for 3 charges, CMW for 1 charge, or CLW for 1 charge. It has 50 charges. It costs half the base price in materials and 1/25 of the base price in XP to make, so crafting it costs 6093.75 gp and 488 xp.

This particular staff is a pretty stupid idea, as you will practically never want to use the CLW ability when CMW is available and costs the same number of charges, but it demonstrates the math involved. If any of the spells you choose have an expensive material component, that adds an additional cost.

[Saph]

Douglas: One important detail you should add to that: staffs have a minimum CL of 8th.

[Douglas]

I'd forgotten that little detail, but I just looked it up and you are correct. So the example staff I gave is not just stupidly designed but invalid. To be rules legal you'd have to increase its caster level to 8, increasing the base price to 19500 gp, and the crafting cost to 9750 gp and 780 xp.