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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 3368624" data-attributes="member: 14159">I've been thinking of the way wizards and their spellbooks were treated before 3rd edition.  I didn't DM much before 3e, so I often didn't look up intricacies of rules.  However, among the various DM's I played under, there were two concepts about spellbooks that seemed pretty much constant.  I never could find where these rules were written out, so it might have been house rules that cross-pollinated or rules from some obscure source which became more popular than their obscure source would indicate.I was wondering if anybody knew the origin of these rules, or at least had heard of them being used if they were just house rules.First, that a wizard could cast spells straight out of his spellbook, using the written spells as if they were scrolls.  However, like a scroll the spell disappears off the book as it's cast, and there is a chance (I think it was like 1% per spell level) of the entire spellbook being consumed when the spell was cast.  (If this was a house rule, I think it was a common one, because I remember reading internet humor back in the '90's referencing this concept)Second, that a wizard's spellbook is outrageously expensive, on the order of thousands of gold pieces.  This means that a starting Wizard is the richest member of his party because his book he automatically starts with cost more than the fighter's weapons, armor, and mount.  This also means that if a wizard loses his spellbook for any reason, unless he's out of the first few levels and has a decent chunk of change to lay down, he's up a creek if he loses his spellbook.  Even if he had a captured spellbook if he didn't have Read Magic memorized in one of his 1st level slots, he could be stuck unable to cast spells for quite a while until you found a scroll of Read Magic or bought a new spellbook to start scribing spells to out of memory (since pre 3e you couldn't automatically memorize Read Magic nor "master" a foreign spellbook).  The justifications for this I always heard were something like it being very expensive and difficult to make paper good enough to use for a spellbook and bookbinding was very labor intensive.  They always seemed flimsy to me, especially when you run across entire libraries of books, that at those rates one bookcase full could cost as much as the tower you store it in.</blockquote>

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