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You can borrow books but it requires spellcraft checks to prepare spells from someone else's notes.

Also, it's going to matter when I make the old school version of spellbooks. A full spellbook has an equivalent encumbrance of 30-40, and costs 1,000 GP (for blank books). Travelling spellbooks have an encumbrance around 6, but cost 500 GP for 1/4 the capacity, are more fragile and your former tutor didn't buy one for you.

I think the 3E specs are one of the things they bungled. They have it as 15 GP for a spellbook. I'm not sure that even makes sense. 15 GP for an item that requires dozens of large animal skins, with months of work on top? You can buy genuine parchment on Amazon, and a single page of a spellbook would cost you like $30. And I imagine the raw materials are a lot cheaper these days due to industrial farming.

 

surely, a wizard's spellbook would be a large financial investment, college textbooks today go for hundreds of dollars a pop. Then again, wizards don't need to buy armor.

 

Yeah. It'd be a shame if your expensive spellbook got stolen, eaten by bookworms, or set on fire by a fireball. Maybe you should make a backup. Sounds like you should get in good with the leather worker, since he's going to have to repurpose his entire output for like a year to make you one book. Or maybe you need the trading post to import one, even though they're going to rip you off.

 

I think the ink needed for spellbooks is not spell specific. Just required to be the highest quality.

What does specify special ink is scroll creation. It's sort of like you need to put material components in the ink, which makes sense since scrolls are self-contained (I think). And yeah, it's like alchemy.

It's kind of interesting how the 1E rules are designed to siphon money off the players. Like, the potion creation rules require a stocked alchemy lab. And if you're employing an alchemist to assist you, the lab requires upkeep, because the alchemist just spends their time frittering away the lab's stocks on their own investigations. But of course, not having an alchemist to assist means you can't brew potions as efficiently, so they cost more when you do make them.

3E is disappointingly bare bones by comparison. Ostensibly the gold cost represents rare ingredients and stuff, but it doesn't give much guidance on that. If you don't go out of your way to add flavor, the character is basically just purchasing items from themselves.

 

Yup, use a feat and get 50% discount on magic items. Sell to the other players and make a profit. Perhaps it was only Pathfinder that explained about the time required with proper facilities compared with crafting while adventuring.

I like the idea of Wizards using skill points as they would Pnp.

 

This would solve the OP unlimited scroll carrying problem. Make scribers gather ingredients for each scroll. The ingredients become scarcer for higher-level spell scrolls.

BTW Marc included a TON of new purchasable (or findable) potential spell components in his Paladin's Cove module.

As an example, a first-level Burning Hands scroll could require:

regular ink and quill
vellum ("blank page")
red dye
paprika

a third-level version would require the above, plus:

a finely crushed rhodochrosite.

Something like that ...

If this is something you find interesting, I can spend some time noodling spell components for popular spells.

 

The only reason I used scrolls as consumables in ToEE was because I could easily and reliably make stacks of them. Those resources could easily be put toward permanent items.

Complicating an intentionally simple system in this case isn't my style. I'm approximately opposite your target audience for this.

Thankee!

 

Have random encounters drop some ingredients. butcher skill for the win.

 

@Shiningted
Sarcasm noted, sir.

 

Hello,
There's an error with the feat "improv skirmish".
It's not +2d6/+1 AC but +2d6/+2 AC

 

I've been investigating something else for that, too. Strictly speaking, you're supposed to actually be reading a scroll when you use it. Or, pointing a wand at something. So, maybe you should have to equip them in your hand to do so. Then you don't have every scroll in your inventory available at all times; they're consistently slower than actual spells (unless you happen to be carrying the one you want in combat). Maybe that doesn't fix all the problems with them, but it's something.

Maybe, but it requires adding functionality to the crafting stuff that I haven't looked into yet. I'd like to add (some) actual material components, too, and have some ideas for how to make it happen. But my ideas aren't trivial to implement.

Also (I forget if I mentioned this already), at least for crafting, I think one of the missing aspects in 3E is that everything is (written as) just known. In 2E, when you want to craft something, the DM decides what will be necessary, and then doesn't tell the player. Their character needs to engage in research and stuff to figure it out. You don't just know how to make things once you happen to have all the prerequisites.

But, it's unclear how that sort of thing would actually fit into this game.

----

BTW, I chanced across another example of this sort of thing. I've been listening to books recommended in one of the AD&D 1E appendices on road trips, and recently learned that ioun stones are from book 4 of The Dying Earth. Toward the end, the secret of where they come from is revealed (spoilers for a 40+ year old book).

Spoiler: Ioun stones

Ioun stones are found in the cores of burnt out stars. No spell known to wizards is able to access them. So, you have to wait until the stars drift out to the edge of the universe, which acts like a sphere of annihilation. Sometimes only half of a star will get annihilated, leaving the other half with the ioun stones exposed. Then you need some kind of anti-gravity device to protect you while you harvest the stones, because the star's gravity is still immense.

In 3E any 12th level character with Craft Wondrous Item can manufacture them.

 

Oh, on a less pessimistic note, one other idea I've had is that the wondrous item system should work more like the arms/armor system. There are rules for combining magical items, and putting them on non-standard slots and such.

So, that's obviously more powerful, but it also solves some issues. Like Co8 (I think) had to duplicate each cloak 5-9 times in the crafting menu for all the different appearances. What if instead the tailor were able to sell 'fine cloaks' that were more expensive, but could be enchanted with the one magical effect?

Also, then I could have magic boots that don't look like they were made for a clown.