D&D 5E Keeping Spellbooks Unique

[SkidAce]

My recommendation is not to do anything to dissuade PC Wizards from spell swapping.
It is a rare pleasure. Besides, PCs sometimes withhold spells from each other.

I would recommend giving out magical grimoires though. Have each grimoire contain a set of themed spells for a multitude of different levels, that the user can treat as prepared spells, but don’t count against the prepared spells limit.

These spells, cannot be copied.

This will ensure a different feel to each Wizard.

I have done this also. Its why Wizards search for the "Lost Grimoire of Sultan's Foul Necromancy"...world shattering spells and now the person with the tome is the target of other wizards.

 

[SkidAce]

My answer to the OP is to use two ideas...

a. Use the grimoires idea, and also have it like it was in older d&d, wizards were culturally unlikely to swap spells with anyone other than an apprentice (or their guild). Handle this through NPC roleplay.

solves your world feel problem.

b. Let the players do as they will with the associated costs. They tend to self police themselves if they want to be the only "Black Star" wizard, and if they don't care, let them swap.

 

[dave2008]

I mean, it's unlikely you have multiple Wizards in the same party. Even if you, it's probably two Wizards, and it's hard to see why that would present a problem, especially given all Wizards copy from the spellbooks of others.

The OP stated it was to be a mage heavy campaign and that is the reason for this thought process.

 

[Shiroiken]

That struck me...odd. I don't recall this leading to player conflict. What did you see players arguing about?

When both magic-users in the party have the same spells to choose from, they tend to step over each other, creating a rivalry (especially in high school). When they have the same spells memorized, it makes one of them feel redundant. The only exception I've seen to this is damage spells, because everyone's cool with lots of those.

It's probably group dependent. I don't game with any of those players anymore, and my current group has no friction issues. 5E also helps with this by having prepared spells, rather than memorized spells, so a duplicate prepared spell doesn't take away a spell slot.

 

[Tonguez]

Dont have scrolls

Every spell is the unique result of research and effort on behalf of the Spellcaster, their Spellbooks arent Instruction manuals, they are arcane theories, rambling formulas, diabolical notes that need to be synthesiszed in the mind of the Wizard before a spell can be constructed - and only the writer understands their own notes and formulae*

You may want to give another Wizard a chance to research the formulae and theories to try and reconstruct the spells, but that should be a difficult and intensive task done in secluded towers far from any distractions

 

[Ruin Explorer]

When both magic-users in the party have the same spells to choose from, they tend to step over each other, creating a rivalry (especially in high school).

I was thinking "I've literally never seen that happen!" and then I got to "in high school", and I got a dreadful flashback to exactly this lol between two PCs (they were Clerics though).

I don't think adult players are typically going to do behave like that, though.

@Sabathius42 I'm sorry, asking why is not threadcrapping at all. In many cases, in can strongly inform the advice you're giving. It's genuinely silly to complain about that. The OP didn't make it very clear what the holistic objective was. There would be a big difference between someone who wants a "Mage academy"-type feel where all the PCs are Wizards (or most), and thus wants some overlap but not too much, and some sort of grim sword-and-sorcery deal where spells are things that are fought over and guarded far more jealously than normal. I've been assuming it's more the former than the latter.

Over the decades I think we've all seen countless threads where the OP comes in asking for suggestions about something, then it emerges, in the thread (often after people have put a lot of effort in) that their actual objective is somewhat at odds with what they asked (sometimes they can be rude about people failing to mind-read, too! ), so I've found more and more over the years that "why" is a helpful question.

I also disagree that one-off list of the issues associated with doing a thing is "threadcrapping". If you do it repeatedly when no critique or "what would happen if..." question has been asked, then yes absolutely that's crummy and should stop. But again, over the years, what I've seen and I suspect you've seen too, is people ask for advice on how to do something, and we all assume they know the consequences, and then part-way through the process, it turns it out that they totally don't, and that either they don't want to do it after all, or they want to take a different approach that doesn't have those flaws.

I do agree though that one should always try and offer some kind of positive suggestion as to how the thing might be done (within reason, which this is). I think here the best approach is simply making checks to learn spells. It's traditional, it makes sense, you can charge money to make it not get overused, and it doesn't lock out spells forever because someone else picked them, just makes it less likely everyone will know exactly the same spells.

 

[wingsandsword]

In the Dying Earth series that gave D&D its Vancian magic, spells were a source of great power and therefore closely held secrets. You didn't trade them around like Pokémon cards. Wizards risked life and limb to gain a new spell from another wizard.

I vaguely remember in 1E that there was a percent chance based on intelligence of learning a new spell that was found. But I'm probably misremembering.

That was a rule in 1e and in 2e, it wasn't eliminated until 3e.

1e and 2e also had hard caps on how many spells you could know of each level, based on your intelligence. One of the big perks of getting a 19 INT was that cap was lifted and you could finally learn any spell you could put in your books.

I knew a lot of DM's that made it a house rule that spells you researched yourself either didn't count towards that cap, or only counted as half a spell, to encourage research and take the edge off a rule that was widely disliked (I don't think anyone cried when it disappeared in 3e)

Of course, D&D magic only loosely resembles Vance's magic system that inspired it, and Vance's works didn't involve adventuring parties with multiple wizards that would have a totally different dynamic than the loner wizards of Vance's novels.

 

[Gwaihir]

Thank You all for your feedback.
to answer a couple of questions, I expect the party but not the world will be mage centric. Perhaps none of the players will choose to play a wizard, which will make this all moot. The starting town certainly is mage centric, as it is home to a magic school, which Is why I suspect there will be multiple wizards.

Im trying to avoid having multiple wizards sharing the same spellbook mostly for flavor reasons. I think what ill do is what Monayuris suggests, allow them to share as they wish, just make it expensive to do so.

G

 

[delericho]

The easiest way to deal with this is probably just to ask the players not to duplicate spells within the group. IME, that usually works... mostly.

If you really want a mechanical solution, my recommendation would be to rule that spells can't be copied from one spellbook to another. Instead, Wizards can memorize spells from captured spellbooks, but the Wizard must first attune himself to the book (as with magic item attunement, but without a limit on the number of books) - so they can swap books round, but only one Wizard can use any given book at any time.

If doing this I would still allow some duplicate spells - but to get a duplicate one Wizard would need to choose the spell as one of his two 'freebies' for gaining a level.

 

[jgsugden]

...There was some meta discussion talk a couple months ago about establishing a framework on how to tag your thread as "Constructive Only" and it's not really happened yet...but man it would be nice if people could refrain from threadcrapping on everything they don't like or see a need for.

It's not constructive to point out "Who cares if all the wizards share the same set of spells". It's obstructive and contributes nothing to the topic except derailing a creation thread into one that low-key tells the OP "Your idea sucks."

Before you use this type of harsh language, please reflect on whether it is appropriate. What you describe is far more rude than what I saw on this thread.

If someone says, "I want to do XXXXXXXXXXXXXX. How can I do it?" ... there are relevant questions about why they want to do it that influence how you might best answer their question of what you'd suggest they do.

Here, the OP said he was starting a mage heavy game and he wanted to make spellbooks unique, but then his attention/examples focused on copying spells only - while there are a variety of other things that can be done to make spellbooks feel unique. Asking why he wanted to limit that mechanic, specifically, when other options are available to make spellbooks more unique, is a valid question for the topic at hand.

There are clearly places where people are being obstructive - but I do not see that here.

Thank You all for your feedback.
to answer a couple of questions, I expect the party but not the world will be mage centric. Perhaps none of the players will choose to play a wizard, which will make this all moot. The starting town certainly is mage centric, as it is home to a magic school, which Is why I suspect there will be multiple wizards.

Im trying to avoid having multiple wizards sharing the same spellbook mostly for flavor reasons. I think what ill do is what Monayuris suggests, allow them to share as they wish, just make it expensive to do so.

G

This may also be best addressed via role playing, as opposed to mechanics.

In the real world, people create virtual things. Digital music, video games, digital art, etc... a small percentage share these freely. Many value the time and energy they put into creating these things and seek compensation before they are willing to share them. Wizards may treat their spells the same ways in your world - they just do not want to share.

If I were building a mageocracy where I wanted each spellcaster to feel different, I would:

a.) Have wizard's treat their spellbooks as trade secrets and often show pride over their unique spells.
b.) Introduce a lot of new spells from alternative sources. The NPCs that the PCs meet would not have many, if any, PHB spells.
c.) I would provide avenues for people to by spells from brokers - but I would have those brokers be seen as criminals or wrongdoers by the majority.

"Why don't you just go buy your spells from the Dark Wing? Then you can be like every other jerk throwing around Magic Missile and Flaming Sphere. I will stick to my Myztek's Glaive of Strife. It is far more powerful than those weak missiles, and doesn't risk destroying the neighborhood like some giant ball of fire. Now begone. I'm in the process of developing a spell that will change how we think about the relationship between time and light forever."