How would you balance sorcerers if wizards didn't need to pay for scribing spells?

[Tony Vargas]

You may not need to adjust Sorcerers at all. If the game is going to be relatively low-wealth, or if it's going to be hard to find scrolls and spell-books to copy from, the Wiz may net-gain nothing from the eliminated scribing costs, he may even be weaker than in a more typical game /with/ scribing costs.

Assuming that's not the case, what eliminating scribing costs does is give wizards even more of what they already have plenty of: spells known.

Balancing that by giving Sorcerers more of what they /desperately need/ (known spells) will result in imbalancing the whole thing towards sorcerers.

Instead, you'd want to open up a new option for the sorcerer that gives him even more of what he already has plenty of (spells/day, for instance). Or, since you've made the Wizard less dependent on money (making him more like a Sorcerer), give the Sorcerer an option that will cost him money - give him an item creation feat.


....

It might also be a good time to sugest something very reasonable, like giving the Sorcerer a few CHA based in-class skills.

 

[graydoom]

This depends in part on the style of your campaign. If your players have no time off, and therefore no rest time to make scrolls in, then nothing really needs to be done for this.
Now then, if you did play in a campaign where wizards did have nice amounts of time off to make scrolls, I actually think that it might be ok to just let it go. After all, the wizards still has to spend the XP, right? And the whole party would benefit from the additional scrolls.... It might end up perfectly fine to just not give anything extra to the sorcerer. Though it would still be good to give the sorcerer something, at least. Maybe something like magic feat at first level, or maybe automatic scribe scroll (but scribing still costs money)?