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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7642503" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree with Umbran in this at least partially.  Character class doesn't exist as a thing in the world.  It's not for example possible to cast "Detect Class" in order to know someone's class or classes.   In some cases it's not even possible to infer in game what class they are from what they can do.  For example, while the spell casting traditions are knowable from the different techniques and sources of power they use to gain access to magic, for non-spellcasting classes even the PC themselves does not know what class they are represented by on their character sheet because character sheets don't exist.However, since your spell limits itself to just the spellcasting classes for my game at least, that would be sort of OK... maybe.  I mean 'wizardly' magic is definitely distinguishable from clerical or shamanistic magic in my game, but depending on the nature of 'relevancy' it might not be possible to distinguish a book relevant to wizards from one relevant to sorcerer or one relevant to clerics from one relevant to shamans, and there would definitely be a category for 'general relevancy to spellcasters' since for example, there isn't a separate skill of 'Spellcraft' for each magical tradition.Speaking as a GM, this spell is a nightmare to arbitrate.  It's bad enough when players start pulling random titles off of book shelves and start reading them, with the expectation I can describe the contents of every book in the library (and presumably quote what is written on page 212).   Now you are putting a spell in their hands that will force me to do that for all the books in the library.A mandatory prerequisite to this spell existing is therefore a means to randomly generate the results that it produces.   But even if you did, then it would be up to the DM to generate those results ahead of time otherwise you are dealing with a spell that when cast requires the DM to take potentially hours of game time to resolve.   So the play burden of this spell for me would almost certainly lead to a ban on it before it ever saw play at the table.This is also one of those spells that troubles me because it seems to be balanced on effect and not on methodology.  That is to say, it seems to me that despite the relatively trivial nature of the effect, the degree of magical puissance required to produce this effect is tremendous.   The ability to summarize 100's or 1000's of books per second implies either you are ignoring how the spell works, or else that books are semi-sentient spiritual beings so that you have some sort of interface with the book that makes them self-describing.   And if the later is the case, then another prerequisite for this spell even existing for me would be a "Book Spirit" entry in a monster manual, and if the book isn't self-describing then it would seem than an arcane caster can perform a feat of godlike intelligence as a mere 5th level spell.</blockquote>

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