Wands/staves etc and Command words

[garhkal]

For those of you, who USE command words for magical items, such as wands and the like.. How do you keep track of which has what command word? How easy are they for pcs to find out when they find a wand? Once they've learned it, how do they track if they remember it say 9 Years (IN GAME TIME) later, when its only say been used thrice??
Do you consider all PC's to have some sort of photographic/perfect memory?
Do you require the player to have it wrote down, and if they can't locate where its wrote down, the character's forgotten it??

[Halaster-Blackcloak]

I stopped using command words long ago because they were too much of a hassle. Took up too much game timer trying to find it. But when I used to use them, it was assumed that once the character possessing the item discovered the command word, he simply knew it permanently. Unless he lost memory due to a forget spell or some such thing, he always remembered it. If another PC wanted to use the item, the owner either needed to tell the borrower the command word, or I'd sometimes allow the borrower to do a 1/2 INT check to remember having heard the owner using it, and then remembering what it was.

[Halaster-Blackcloak]

Oh...If the owner hasn't used the item in a very long time, I would probably require an INT check to see if he remembers it.

[garhkal]

So in essence you gave them perfect memory..

[JadedDM]

It's a command word, not a 16 character alphanumeric encrypted password. Unless a person has a dozen wands on them, I don't think there's much danger of them forgetting it.

[Halaster-Blackcloak]

Garhkal wrote:

So in essence you gave them perfect memory..

I wouldn't call it perfect memory. I remember the key to the combination lock on my basement storage unit, and I haven't used that in almost a year. I remember my phone number from 40+ years ago and my grandmother's from back then as well, which I probably had to dial all of 2-3 times in my life, the last time being (at the latest) in 1983 when we sold the house and moved.

I gave a violence prevention lecture to the security committee at work last October, and I tried just now to remember the opening speech. Pretty much got it word-for-word, and it was a 15 speech. I've got a pretty good memory, but nowhere near photographic.

So I'd say it's generally easy to remember a command word.

Remember, the INT check for even an INT 16 gives a 20% chance of the command word being forgotten. At INT 14, there's a 30% chance it's forgotten.

Now, if the PC has half a dozen or more magic items and rarely ever uses them, I can see an INT check to see if he mixes them up. But overall I'm of the mind that a command word is relatively easy to remember. Abracadabra!

[garhkal]

How many times have you told your players a key piece of info in game, that cause they never wrote down, not one REMEMBERED about when the key moment came up?
How is that different than forgetting a command word?

[Halaster-Blackcloak]

Players aren't characters. There are times when I think we need to differentiate. A player may only look at his PC as a game piece and may play every few weeks or even every few months. It's easy for the player to forget, for example, something that the PC was doing near the end of the last session that was 3 weeks ago. To the PC though, that last session was just a few seconds ago in game time. The character wouldn't forget because it wasn't a few weeks ago when the last session left off - it was just a second ago.

Also, I'd assume that most PCs would work hard to memorize command words, similarly to how they memorize spells.