<SNIP>

In Single Player, you can have the game scale the difficulty so that
it's like there's multiple players in the game - monsters are tougher,
meaning you get more experience for killing them.  In the game, press
<ENTER> to bring up the chat line, then type "/players x", where x is
from 1-8.
If you want runes, just kill the countess in the Black Marsh tower in
Act I.  But make sure you have the game set to 1 player - you'll have
the best chance of her dropping multiple runes that way.

On 12/30/2006 10:03 AM, Windwalker@invalid.address went clickity clack
on the keyboard and produced this interesting bit of text:

In single player mode, there's a command you can use called /players n
where n is a number from 1 to 8.  This will raise the difficulty of the
game as if there are that many people playing in the game.  This means
more experience as well.  To use it, hit Enter in the game as if you're
going to send a message to somebody and type:

/players 8

You can use lower numbers as well if you don't want it as difficult.

You can find other parameters at:

http://www.blizzard.com/support/?id=adt0781p

You can find staffs (or wands, if you are a Necro) that are normal
quality or are socketed that also have skills already on them.  You can
normally find good ones in Normal difficulty - in Nightmare or Hell the
vendors sell magic items almost exclusively.  Just look for white or
gray wording for the description of the item.

So if you are looking to make a runeword in an item, you can shop for
an item that has skills already on it; it will make your runeworded
item that much more powerful.  For example, my current sorceress, Nikki
Tesla, uses Charged Bolt as her main skill.  I had the runes to make
the Memory rune word in a staff.  So I shopped Drognan in Act II Normal
until I found a non-magic gnarled staff that had +3 to Charged Bolt as
a skill on it (this took about 25 minutes of clicking on Drognan,
checking what he had, then taking a waypoint to someplace and returning
right away, just to reset his inventory).  Then I took it to Larzuk in
Act V and socketed it (it was a Gnarled Staff, so Larzuk always puts 4
sockets in it), and put the runewords for Memory in it.  Memory gives
+3 to sorceress skills, so with the existing Charged Bolt skills, I had
+6 to my primary skill.  The ideal situation would be to also have
+skills to your secondary attack, but that could take hours or days of
shopping...