Using the Editor to make a staff without charges
 

Hi there! I'm brand new to Hero Lab, so there's a lot to wrap my head around. My character has a staff that does not use charges, but instead allows a handful of spells to be cast a few times per day each. I know that isn't the standard staff behavior, but that's what my DM gave me. Is there any way to make that work and have the spell use tracked on the Spells tab?

If I create the staff with charges, I see the usage as I would expect. Each cast of the spell reduces the total charges available and I can see how many I have cast. When I use the checkbox to enable "Doesn't Have Charges?", I still see the spells in the spell list, but with a 0/0 uses shown and no way to increment the values to show how many times I have used the spell. Am I missing something basic?

Many thanks!

I think all you need to do is bootstrap the spells without Helper.StaffSpell and tweak a few other things. In the editor, click on the "Included Spells" for your staff, then to the right of each spell there will be 4 buttons. Click on "tags" and you'll see 3 tags. One will be "ChargeUse" and "some number", click the X to the right of that to delete the ChargeUse tag.

I'm assuming the spells can be cast a certain number of times per day? In that case, change Helper.StaffSpell, replacing "Helper" with "Usage" and "StaffSpell" with "Day". Leave Helper.ItemSpell alone. When you back out (hit "OK" instead of "Cancel"), one of the "Leave Checked" boxes will now be unchecked, that's fine, don't worry about that (the box was applying Helper.StaffSpell, but your staff works different).

Now click on the fields button and then "Add a new field". For field ID, enter "trkMax", and for the Value, enter the number of times per day this spell can be cast.

Do the same for each spell you've attached to the staff.

That worked perfectly! Thank you so much for your assistance! :)