D&D 5E Keeping Spellbooks Unique

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I mean, my first thought would be "why"? What specifically, is the problem with the scenario you describe? That's literally how wizards operate, and always have operated in all editions of D&D that I've played.

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.

In one of my games, I have 16 players. 6 of them are wizards. If they wanted, they could have a huge selection of spells, but instead all the players want to keep their secrets locked away. One player did manage to steal another player's spell book, but he can't actually prepare any of those spells or else his rival might realize what happened.

Good times.

 

[MoonSong]

I'm looking at starting a campaign that is mage centric. One of the things I would like is some uniqueness to the spell books.
What can I house rule to make this so. As an example, if Dave the Wizard finds a scroll of Ice Storm and copies it into his spell book, how can I prevent that spell from quickly finding its way into Steve the Wizard and Chris the Wizard's spellbooks.
The 5E rules allow this, I would like to at least make this hard. Thoughts?

G

Quickly, I would say that I see two options to your dilemma:

A) Do sorcerer centric instead of wizard centric.
B) Bring back opposition -forbidden- schools from 2e and force everybody to pick a different specialty.

 

[NotAYakk]

Make copying a spell always destroy the source. Spells are magical, they aren't just writing.

The only way to duplicate a spell from one book to another is to first create a spell scroll. Then, you can destroy the spell scroll copy.

That should make the cost non-trivial. At the same time, wizards can find plenty of dead wizard spellbooks they can cannibalize.

In addition, all spells are customized for the specific wizard. You cannot just take another wizards spellbook and use it. You can transcribe their spells, but that (as noted) destroys the source pages.

Now, hand out lots of interesting spells, don't be frugal, and players will have different spellbooks yet won't be hamstrung by lack of spell choice.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I was thinking separate from tradition - if each school had their own language, while that would make a degree of logical sense, it would be incredibly restrictive to micromanage.

Is this something along the line of how magic-users and illusionists had different scripts in 1e and couldn't read each other's spells? One could set things up so that each magical tradition has its own unique script and it takes specialized skills or spells to read a spell written in another tradition if at all.