Shard O'Glase
First Post
Dimwhit said:
well duh, they're just including the dance like a chicken for 23 hours purification ritual into that 24 hours.
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D&D 3E/3.5 [3.5] Scribing Scrolls Clarification
- Thread starter Archade
- Start date
well duh, they're just including the dance like a chicken for 23 hours purification ritual into that 24 hours.
Shard O'Glase
First Post
Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought. I saw change all scribing to 1 hour. Period. Whether making a scroll or scribing into a spellbook. Screw balance. Wizards are getting enough of the shaft in 3.5 anyway, how bad could it really be? [/QUOTE]
Honestly not at all. Whether its 1 hour or 1 day the question is always the same. Do I screw the wizard and have a gang of orcs jump him form nowhere while he's scribing or not. The answer to that in no way is based on it being 1 day or 1 hour. I suppose in the rare time is of the essence campaign the diff between 1 hour and 1 day might mean something but that's fairly situational and not really much of a overall balance issue.
Dimwhit said:
I don't know, it can take several hours or days to copy a good set of blueprints or engineering schematics by hand. It only takes a few minutes to read through them enough to understand them (although you would want to study them on a daily basis if you were on project that required you to use them for several days).
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Dimwhit
Explorer
That's a good point, though my argument would be that while schematics and blueprints require precision and detail, spells are just words. I don't know, maybe they have to be all fancy like the Bibles monks used to hand-make in the middle ages. Took 'em forever to hand-scribe them. I guess scrolls won't work if the text isn't pretty.
Dimwhit said:
That's a good point, though my argument would be that while schematics and blueprints require precision and detail, spells are just words. I don't know, maybe they have to be all fancy like the Bibles monks used to hand-make in the middle ages. Took 'em forever to hand-scribe them. I guess scrolls won't work if the text isn't pretty.
Given that it takes specialized knowledge (a spellcraft check) or magical aid (read magic spell) to understand a spell or scroll, I don't think they are "simple words". A spell probably consists of arcane words, detailed pronunciation guides, specialized diagrams illustrating the somatic components, instructions on putting yourself in the proper mindset, and possibly pictures or symbols representing the material components.
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Destil
Explorer
Uhm.... by this reasoning can't anyone cast spells, if the're just words? I mean, any fighter can learn a few words real easy, right? There's clearly a lot more to it...Dimwhit said:
That's a good point, though my argument would be that while schematics and blueprints require precision and detail, spells are just words. I don't know, maybe they have to be all fancy like the Bibles monks used to hand-make in the middle ages. Took 'em forever to hand-scribe them. I guess scrolls won't work if the text isn't pretty.
Scrolls are Magic items. Being able to activate them quickly is part of the magic, and why they take XP to make. It takes at least 1 day to make a scroll, and the wizard needs to prepair the spell first, which is at least an extra 15 minuits, as well. The reason scrolls are fast is the prepairation involved.
Spellbooks are non-magical and need to be not only exact, but they also need to be transcribed in the wizard's personal magical shorthand (or whatevr, I know the PH mentions this someplace), which includes quite a bit of 'translation' when making a copy from some other wizard's shorthand, or from a scroll.
Centaur
First Post
I think there are some valid points here.
tasks that aren't specificaly "magical in nature" should be able to be broken down into short segments of time. Wizards transcribing spells from one book into their own or researching spells should be able to be broken down into shorter segments of time that you can fit in here and there while on the road.
However, I would say that when it is done this way, your time would be used less efficiently. You could count all time spent in 1 hour increments, but make the first hour of each session worthless as the wizard uses it to refresh his memory as to where he was in the work. It's just like programming, If I haven't been working on a coding project for the few days, it takes me a bit to get back into the right mindset.
In this way, if the wizard wants to spend 4 hours at the end of a day studying in his tent, he can, but it only counts as 3 hours total time spent. Once he's accumulated enough time, he is done.
It becomes different when the expendiature of magic is involved. Creating scrolls or any other form of magic item including potions. This time must me continuous and uninterupted. If you interupt the flow of mana, you ruin the process. This includes transcribing a scroll into your book.
That said, I don't think I would have a problem with say that it takes 1 hour per spell level to write a scroll rather than 1 whole day per 1000gp of value in the scroll. That way, a wizard could write several in a day, or a couple of low level ones in the evening when the party is resting from the days events.
For people who like to run fast paced campaigns, where there isn't much in the way of down time, why not allow any magical enchantment to be accomplished in a single day. The wizard is already expending a bunch of GP and XP to get the job done, why make the fighters wait arround while the wizard plays with himself.
As an flip to that however, if the party is hiring an NPC to make the item for them, have him still take the normal time to make the item and say it's because he's not as gifted as the PC... or something like that.
tasks that aren't specificaly "magical in nature" should be able to be broken down into short segments of time. Wizards transcribing spells from one book into their own or researching spells should be able to be broken down into shorter segments of time that you can fit in here and there while on the road.
However, I would say that when it is done this way, your time would be used less efficiently. You could count all time spent in 1 hour increments, but make the first hour of each session worthless as the wizard uses it to refresh his memory as to where he was in the work. It's just like programming, If I haven't been working on a coding project for the few days, it takes me a bit to get back into the right mindset.
In this way, if the wizard wants to spend 4 hours at the end of a day studying in his tent, he can, but it only counts as 3 hours total time spent. Once he's accumulated enough time, he is done.
It becomes different when the expendiature of magic is involved. Creating scrolls or any other form of magic item including potions. This time must me continuous and uninterupted. If you interupt the flow of mana, you ruin the process. This includes transcribing a scroll into your book.
That said, I don't think I would have a problem with say that it takes 1 hour per spell level to write a scroll rather than 1 whole day per 1000gp of value in the scroll. That way, a wizard could write several in a day, or a couple of low level ones in the evening when the party is resting from the days events.
For people who like to run fast paced campaigns, where there isn't much in the way of down time, why not allow any magical enchantment to be accomplished in a single day. The wizard is already expending a bunch of GP and XP to get the job done, why make the fighters wait arround while the wizard plays with himself.
As an flip to that however, if the party is hiring an NPC to make the item for them, have him still take the normal time to make the item and say it's because he's not as gifted as the PC... or something like that.
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Centaur
First Post
Or, if you are really pressed for time, have the wizard get one of these Genie Bottle, or Portable House. That way he can scribe scrolls or transcribe spell books while the fighters and the rest of the party travel for day after day across the open plains....
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