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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 7855273" data-attributes="member: 93670">You'd be incorrect about the longsword relevance because the argument falls apart once you start looking at it as xge actually has rules for crafting that sort of thing. Since we are talking about 50gp increments, it's easier to use a longbow, heavy crossbow  chain shirt, or scale mail as they are all listed at 50gp & there's no sense in complicating things if we go that route as those 4 5-gp items each would take 25gp of materials & 1 workweek to craft.Using that calculation, the archmage spellbook has 72 spell levels worth of spells (unless I miscounted) & a wizard put in between 1800-3600gp scribing it... at a rate of .  If you double that as the half the resources towards a final price you get 3600-7200gp... but the work week part of the formula vibrates that to bits because under the "For each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp. " formula, the spellbook only took 4-5 days.[SPOILER="Crafting an itm from XGE"]CRAFTING AN ITEMA character who has the time, the money, and theneeded tools can use downtime to craft armor, weapons,clothing, or other kinds of nonmagical gear.Resources and Resolution. In addition to the appro—priate tools for the item to be crafted, a character needsraw materials worth half of the item’s selling cost. Todetermine how many workweeks it takes to create anitem, divide its gold piece cost by 50. A character cancomplete multiple items in a workweek if the items’ com—bined cost is 50 gp or lower. Items that cost more than50 gp can be completed over longer periods of time, aslong as the work in progress is stored in a safe location.Multiple characters can combine their efforts. Dividethe time needed to create an item by the number of char-acters working on it. Use your judgment when determin-ing how many characters can collaborate on an item. Aparticularly tiny item, like a ring, might allow only oneor two workers, whereas a large, complex item mightallow four or more workers.[/SPOILER]Unfortunately, spellbooks are a magical item.  While there is a table for magic items, that table is based on item rarity & a spellbook is not the same rarity as the scrolls within it just as a 3rd level fireball spell is "uncommon", a wand/necklace of fireballs is rare, a staff of fire/staff of power is very rare.  By that scaling, a spellbook with fireball or nearly any other spell in it it common. We do have prices for common magic items at 50-100gp & that is dramatically beneath the cost of a spell scroll.    If the spellbook is common & perhaps closer to the cost of spell levels*skilled labor rate of 2gp/day on phb159, then the price for selling it is about half and dramatically less than is needed to scribe spells despite people in this thread pushing it as an extremely attractive solution to that expense without being subjected to derisive laughter.  Unfortunately the problem still remains that WotC has set the expectations that spellbooks should be extremely uncommon (at least in the published 5e material I've seen, perhaps you've seen otherwise in other content?).  So I hope that you can now see why the guidelines are not at all clear.Yes I brought up the fact that wizards need to spend gold & time to scribe spells once they do something to find them, as have others,  That fact is especially relevant to the way spell versatility works, its complete absence of cost, and that it allows selection to the entire class spell list.  People attempted to dismiss them by suggesting methods that lack rules in 5e or have rules that don't quite work in ways that would dismiss the problem so the suggestion of selling a found spellbook was proposed & that led to this rabbit hole of 3.5 & chaining 5e subsystems A, B, C & D together to arrive at a value nobody can say "This is the calculation" because too many parts of that haphazard formula never intended to be strung together are unknown & just being guessed at.Rising from the last war has various organizations with very affordable yearly dues that mention giving members access to spellbooks, but that assumes that you are playing a game in eberron where magic is much more available & does nothing for a setting with baselines closer to FR Ravenloft or Darksun.  If the solution to balancing spellbook availability & scribing cost against how spell versatility works is "play wizards in one particular setting or one like it" then spell versatility is even more problemagic as is by not being limited to that setting.  You could say that not everyone plays published modules or that many play games where the gm makes up every adventures, but i's absurd to suggest that those published adventures do not influence how the gm builds & runs things (especially if they are a newer gm).  Since spell versatility could apply to both groups no matter what setting they are playing in, it needs to be balanced for both groups.The problem is that people are trying to estimate value by the published costs of an item that is an extraodinarily more valuable item.  Pointing out that the absurd value is only possible by doing that requires pointing out how the use cases of the two are remarkably different.  That +3 longsword can be used by every class, nearly every race(size/morphology aside), & even NPCs.  If you wanted to compare the value of a +3 longsword to a +3 longsword scematic that could only be used by a fighter to use with  the xge 128/129 rules for crafting a magic item to make one of their own that only that fighter could use, I'm sure you could agree that the +3 longsword would be worth dramatically more than the schematic  or the copy that only that single fighter could use as a longsword.As to the cookbook question.  No it would probably not have been worth looking at because I would have already had so much information on making curries that I'd be looking for some other type of recipe book.  If the recipe/spell book is trivially priced akin to a common magic item or mundane book, then perhaps it would still be worth the price (looks to be 20$ new).  If however the recipe book were priced similar to the cost of a banquet for hundreds to thousands, it might never have sold a single copy because the publisher clearly does not understand the market they re targeting.  That level of price inflation makes even the worst priced college textbooks look downright trivially affordable.    If I decided that there might be enough in the cookbook to be worth thinking about dropping 20$ on it, I could go to the library & perhaps check if they could acquire a copy as is possible in many libraries.  Back in prior editions this was reflected in the cost of copying from some other wizard's spellbook but 5e rules for such a thing don't exist in a setting neutral format.</blockquote>

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