D&D 5E Market price for a spell book?

[FireHammer]

It is a good point that a superlinear price makes it convenient to just make copies and sell them (subject to availability of buyers, of course). So a linear price will do.

I think I will go with the 100 + 50 per spell level as a market price, so around half of that as sale price. When in the future my PC will want to buy spell books at this price I can easily restrict their availability and use the rules for buying magic items.

Thanks everybody!

 

[HarrisonF]

The way we have played it is that you can generally get access to most spells in local libraries for 50gp * level for copying purpose, based on city size and availability. This is on top of the normal cost for copying spells (which they sell the components for!). You can easily get discounts if you are willing to do services for them (ie. they happily pay in spell access for services since it doesn't really actually cost them anything).

With the ability to readily get access to spells at will, the value of a random book of spells to any given wizard goes down significantly. Most experienced wizards that have been around for a while will already have accumulated most spells they want, so even if the spellbook you find has 30 spells, only a few would be unknown for any given wizard. In addition, the local spell source would not think highly of you undercutting them -- so if you try to sell it, you (and the buyer) can lose access to your normal spell source.

This all combines to make found spellbooks useful for the Wizard, but basically useless for selling.

 

[77IM]

I think you mean "50 gp per spell level, or half..." But that is only the cost the first time you copy (learn) it. Per PHB 114, creating a backup spellbook of spells you already know is 10 gp per level. Definitely not 200 gp, unless your DM has changed it.

You are right. I... I actually have no idea what I am talking about and everything I said on this thread can be safely ignored. Sorry, I am not sure how that happened.

 

[Mistwell]

I think for my campaign I will make a spellbook tied to a spellcaster, in that each spellcaster can only have one spellbook at a time. If they die, the spellbook survives for someone else to use and copy from. If they sell it, they have no more spellbook until they get it back or destroy the old one. That way, spellbooks are much more rare and valuable. If you're buying one, you're buying a dead guys spellbook, or a stolen spellbook, or the spellbook off a very desperate spellcaster.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Seller: This spell book came from Izzy the Spell Monger, some of these spells are old and can only be found in the MU guild of Greyhawk, I will sell it for 1000 gp or a scroll of a spell for 100 gp!

(GM rolls some dice: bargain, knowledge, etc vs the Sellers CHR, Level, and skills)

Buyer: Izzy was a low rate wizard at the best, I will give you 300 gp for the book!

(GM rolls some dice: bargain, knowledge, etc vs the Buyers CHR, Level, and skills)

Seller: OH! you wound me good sir, I thought you were a buyer of knowledge of Magic not a thief in the night, that would steal food from my three wives and 10 kids! Will will let the book go for 750 gp!

(GM rolls some dice: bargain, knowledge, etc vs the Sellers CHR, Level, and skills)

Buyer: Okay, okay I will take the book for 750 but you are robbing me.


Seller: You wound me

 

[Sunseeker]

Copying spells DOES have a cost -- 200 gp per spell level, or half that for spells of your arcane tradition's school.

But you are right, that is a linear cost, and my guideline is exponential, so for spells of level 4+, transcribing them becomes super profitable.

One solution is to make the spell book price linear as well. But this seems unsatisfying, since 9th-level spells are some hot , and from a labor market perspective, the few people who can produce them probably have better things to do with their time and the few people who might want to buy them can probably afford to pay a king's ransom to make it worth their while.

Instead I might suggest that the time required to find a buyer is also exponential with the level of the spell. So yeah, you can crank out a book of 5th-level spells that is worth a pretty penny, but it takes so long to sell it that the profit evens out to a reasonable level.

I would also think there is a time component, just like preparing a spell. Sure, that's only like a minute per spell, but this is a little different, this is writing an instruction manual that everyone can understand, for all we know, you'll have to write it in 7 languages and include pictures!
-on that note, whatever languages it's written in should be an important factor.
If a player really wanted to make such an item, I'd probably add a substantial time cost, say, half an hour per spell they wanted to copy. Making such a book for such a massive profit is more akin to a job and it should reflect that. Producing an intuitive, instructive book of spells is something that's going to take some real time and energy, especially for that level of reward. Sure, a player might produce a few of these when they have some downtime, maybe take some time to figure out which spells the market is most interested in, finding a shop that will sell them, etc...

Hmmm. Apparently Shidaku has me on Ignore.

No, I may have skimmed over your post though.

 

[lordxaviar]

AS a base line from decades ago now this didnt take into account what Gary wrote in the first DMG about the cost of the inks. yes inks each one being specific to the type of spell.

Book, Spell book Standard 1000gp, Plus 100gp/spell level written in.16" tall, 12" wide and 6" thick 25 lbs Bound with dragon, bulette, gorgon, Purple worm or other thick hide that has been tanned, Non-Human spell books may even be of Human skin, orc or other Humanoid Hides. Sewn together with Giant spider silk or other unusual strong material. They have 100 pages

Book, Spell book, Traveling 500 Plus 100 /spell level written in. 12" tall, 6" wide, and 1" thick. Bound with supple yet strong hide, such as Giant Cobra or other giant snake, Giant Fire Lizard, Ballisk, or even Hydra. These books can be sewn with similar material in regular spell books or by fine platinum, silver or electrum wire, gold being too soft. Though woven Blink dog hair is a thought. Non-Human spell books may even be of Human skin, orc or other Humanoid Hides, and will always be of the traveling type. They have 25 pages



Both spell book descriptions and information are taken from Dragon Issue
#62, June 1982, " Spell books, Rules for M-U's to read by E. Gary Gygax

 

[Coroc]

I value scrolls at (spell level x spell level x 50) gp. That undervalues high-level scrolls according to the pricing guidelines, but I am not sure I care, as I'd rather have an easy-to-remember formula than stick to the arbitrary pricing guidelines.

So I'd value a spellbook at the same rate. Spells in a book are less useful than scrolls because you can't cast them -- but for the purpose people are buying the spellbook they are more useful than scrolls because they don't vanish after writing, giving the book tremendous resale value. So it's a wash and I'd price it like a bunch of scrolls.

Adding up all those spell levels can be a pain, so a quick-and-dirty approximation is to just look at the highest level of spells and do (spell level x spell level x spell level x 100) gp. So a book with 3rd-level spells in it is worth 2,700 gp, and a book with 9th-level spells is 72,900 gp. This assumes that the book also contains about 4 spells per level at lower levels; if the spell book is sparse, cut the value in half or so.

Of course, I'd use the Selling a Magic Item rules in the DMG to offload the book. I'm of the opinion that trade in magic items should be allowed, but only as a tricky and adventure-prone process.

EDIT: Handy table of pre-calculated values.
Max Spell Level : Spellbook Price
1st : 50 gp per spell (just add them up, if it's only 1st-level spells)
2nd : 800 gp (total; don't count the spells at levels higher than 1st)
3rd : 2,700 gp
4th : 6,400 gp
5th : 12,500 gp
6th : 21,600 gp
7th : 34,300 gp
8th : 51,200 gp
9th : 72,900 gp

I normally use the formular (spell level)^2 * 100
so 1st 100, 3rd 900, 9th 8100 for scrolls.
In comparison a two handed sword is 100 in my campaign a full plate goes for 800 and the best horse for 1000.
But I have an economic system for all basic goods and also wizard spells (The wizard actually has to buy them, no automatic learning but otoh every spell is available and some more at a major mages guild)

But spell scrolls vanish once you copay them.

I also use silver as a standard therefore I did not write gp because a gp standard is unrealistic, ridiculous, encumbersome, not historically accurate and makes lower coinage absolutely worthless.

I highly recommend making such a custom system, it is a little work but the RAW price tables are useless the way they are.

I also use the rule of thumb that selling price can be higher up to 2x and buying price normally is about 25% of the nominal.

For your ( @FireHammer ) spellbook in question, it is a thing which might be best sold to some wizards guild if your world has one. A spellbook is a personal thing. I would rule that copying a spell from a spellbook equals ripping out the according page(s) and using them like a scroll, in like you need to "training cast" the spell once to really understand it. which destroys the scroll / spellbook page.

So reduce the value of the book to its material values and deduct the spells that your player copied and then use my or @77IM s formula to determine the value of the remaining spells and sum it all up and divide it by 2-4 to get a baseline selling price.

Then use competing deception and insight checks for the discussion between the seller and a shopkeeper to determine any additional +-50% of negotiation variance in the price.

 

[R_J_K75]

If I were playing a wizard spellbooks generally arent something Id sell. Id stash it somewhere in case I needed it later. I learned the hard way on more than one occassion that replacing a spellbook isnt easy or cheap so it never hurts to keep an extra one. Just looking at it from another perspective.

 

[DarkBolt]

Feels like creating an objective price on this creates a slippery slope no matter how you come at it. And probably because this shouldn’t happen in normal course: specifically, it seems to me that wizard guilds do not want spellbooks being sold in unregulated markets (think doctors and prescription drugs). With spell scrolls being a historical exception (and those theoretically being one-time use only).

Thus the buyer and the seller of a deceased wizard’s spell book are going to make the “at large” wizards guild very unhappy. Not to mention the friends/mentors/guild of the deceased wizard now have a paper trail to his killer (who fenced his most personal possession). I’d guess that any transaction therefore Is likely a black-market/back-alley deal (read: discounted and difficult). And creates some awesome RP opportunities as fallout if a transaction does go through.