Do the rules speak to buying partially charged wands, one way or another?

Question

The SRD has a 1st level wand with 50 charges costing 750gp.

Does anything address the question of whether you can buy wands with less than 50 charges? I'm looking for anything which will be a useful guide to a DM facing this question.

Answer 1

Wands cannot be created with fewer than 50 charges. The Craft Wand feat does not give that option. The value given in the SRD and Dungeon Master’s Guide for partially-charged wands are for used wands, wands that used to have 50 charges but now have fewer.

So a craftsman cannot open a shop selling wands with fewer charges. At best, a pawn shop might have a few random wands lying around—which is a decent use-case for the random-wand generation tables in the SRD and Dungeon Master’s Guide and elsewhere. But the odds of any such shop having the wand a player wants, with the number of charges the player wants, is very low.

From a balance perspective, partially-charged wands are really problematic: wands are far cheaper, per charge, and far easier to use, both in terms of required class features and in terms of their shape and durability, than scrolls or potions. As it is, there is almost no reason to make much use of either; a few scrolls of something like restoration for an emergency maybe, but beyond that you really don’t want to use either. Wands are vastly superior in every way except that you have to buy 50 charges at once. Without that requirement, there might as well not be any other form of spellcasting item.