Rod of Wonder: Useful or Useless?

Question

My players recently acquired a rod of wonder. One or two are interested in using it, while others think the risk of a bad random effect is too high. Since the game encourages the DM to change the random effects table anyway, I'm trying to figure out if I should increase the upside potential of a good result.

I doubt I'd use it myself as-written - many of the "good" effects are offensive spells with fairly low save DCs for the level when PCs can afford it. Even a good effect isn't likely to be action-economical.

I'm looking for data on whether players actually use random items like the rod of wonder and, if so, what happens when they do. My rough breakdown of the effects from the default table is:

Result Type	Chance	Effects
Probably Good	38%	faerie fire, flesh to stone, fireball, lightning bolt, slow, invisibility on self
Insignificant	18%	detect thoughts, heavy rain on self, grass grows, leaves grow on target, cone of gemstones, changes color
Probably Bad	18%	darkness, enlarge person, reduce person on self, delude self into believing something happened
Mixed Bag	26%	stinking cloud, butterflies, shimmering colors, summon animal

We're using Pathfinder 1e, but results from other systems might still be helpful.

Answer 1

I've seen characters who'd found an AD&D1e or 2e Wand of Wonder hang onto it, rather than trying to sell it: they didn't fetch a high price in the circles I played in. I recall three occasions where they got used:

• Someone was bored, and wanted to annoy his fellow-players. That worked fine.
• A cleric of mine was desperate, and had nothing better to try against a giant snake of some kind. It got turned to stone.
• An idiot fired one into a bar-room brawl. He got turned invisible, and realised this wasn't such a bad thing.

One DM I know has twice used Gatling Wands of Wonder. This is like a real-world Gatling gun, but with Wands of Wonder in place of gun barrels, with each wand (somewhere between 6 and 12 of them) firing once per round. You need a good supply of kobolds to crank it, because they get disabled fairly frequently. This "weapon" really attracts the PC's attention, which is a good distraction for silly villains trying to escape.

Answer 2

Story Time

I've seen the Rod of Wonder used exactly once in a 3.5 campaign, during character creation.

The campaign started at level 30, which should tell you all you need to know about the resources available to the PCs. The character in question had some ability to manipulate random effects (I forget the exact ability, but it basically allowed them to roll twice on the Rod of Wonder table and choose which effect happened).

The 3.5 version of the Rod has a slightly different table. Critically, Pathfinder's entry for 66-69 is "Reduce wielder two size categories (no save) for 1 day." where the 3.5 version is "Reduce wielder to 1/12 height (no save).". The 3.5 version is unclear as to whether the reduction is permanent (it references a spell, but then explicitly acts differently from the spell), so the GM ruled that the reduction was permanent; for some reason, the GM also ruled that the shrunk creature's speed was unaffected (maybe we had an old book?).

Anyway: the player in question was aiming for the "shrink" option, and got it (twice!) before anything truly bad was forced upon him. His mini was actual size.

As a caster of some sort, that was fantastic for him: he got a massive size bonus to ranged attack rolls and AC (not to mention stealth) with very few drawbacks (he did have an increased risk of being grappled, but freedom of movement isn't that hard to come by).

He then kept the rod in his inventory, but it was never seen or used again.

Theory-crafting (lite)

As a player, I cannot fathom using the Rod in a normal game outside of extreme circumstances (as John Dallman's answer noted: it's simply too inconsistent and potentially-harmful.

As a GM, I have a hard time seeing players using the Rod for much the same reason. ... although, I do know a couple of people who enjoy pulling cards from the Deck of Many Things, so YMMV (on the other hand, the Deck is rarely, IME, used in combat, which does change the math a little).

Regarding:

I doubt I'd use it myself as-written - many of the "good" effects are offensive spells with fairly low save DCs for the level when PCs can afford it. Even a good effect isn't likely to be action-economical.

The vast majority of magic items with fixed DCs offer "fairly low save DCs for the level when PCs can afford" them (and, that's often a generous description). Staves are about the only magic item worth using offensively with save-based offensive spells, once the PCs can reasonably buy them. So, that part of the Rod isn't surprising. That's not why I'd skip it, though; I'd skip it because of the paltry 38% chance of the effect being "probably helpful" in the first place.