>Another twist.. instead of having set wand locations at birth,
>give your wand a random chance of appearing if you trigger the
>location (kill the mob, enter the room, etc.). If it 'hits'
>then that is your wand location. The system could be made
>such that basically if you hit 50 wand locations you're
>guaranteed to have found all 3 wands, or something to that
>affect. It would suck to have checked 99 locations and your
>barrier is in 100.

Unfortunately, once you know spots with one character, what's to stop you from trying to force it to trigger with the rest of your characters?