D&D 5E Unfortunate Wording

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, but the fighter doesn't have it, while all wizards do. I was talking of the spirit of the rules and the general lore of D&D settings, taking also into account past editions (2e and 3e). With the current wording anyone can try the Arcane check, there are no trained only skills anymore.
Anyway the wording was different in the playtest, and we only have a preview now.

I'd point out that this is all PERFECTLY in keeping with 4e's approach. Anyone could use any skill, trained or not, though the DM was within his rights to require training (there was a 'trained only' attribute that a given TASK could have, but not a whole skill). 4e scrolls could be cast by anyone who could make the requisite check(s). Given that the effects often scaled by the quality of the check there were many cases where a PC could cast a ritual from a scroll but had no chance to attain a useful effect in the given situation.

Scrolls do fill a different role in 5e's system, but I think there's at least a residual bit of the 4e "everyone has magical ability" meme left in 5e.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Wow, I had never noticed that. It says they can read the spell, and based on the context in which it is written, it would appear that by read it means cast. Thanks for pointing that out. Presumably that's a carry over from OD&D?

Protection scrolls in AD&D (and OD&D IIRC) were basically a different class of item than spell scrolls. There was SOME commonality but protection scrolls didn't reproduce the effects of any given listed spell, they were generally unique (though later as the game evolved spells tended to be created that produced similar results). 'Protection from Undead' for instance was both pretty close to absolute, and not like any spell in the book. So these were not items restricted to casters, just consumables that took the form of a scroll (and generally partook of the basic rules of scrolls where appropriate). I don't even think there was a defined way to make a protection scroll, but I may not be correct on that.

And yes, if you could read the scroll then you would evoke its magical power, so in AD&D 'read' was the term, not cast. You cast spells and you read scrolls. The results were the same if it was a spell scroll (but there were possibly differences like the level of the effect) but it was still reading, not casting. This could have a variety of implications as casting was subject to many restrictions that reading might not be. Different DMs naturally disagreed on this point to various degrees.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a very good point, and a nice idea! (WotC flirted with this idea towards the end of 4e: one of the late books, I think "Into the Unknown", had Scrolls of Power usable by any character. But the idea was not really developed very far.)

I think it was pretty much INHERENT in 4e as a concept, though it wasn't much spelled out. Rituals were intended to be made up as-needed by the DM to suit the plot of the campaign, and a ritual 'McGuffin' that follows the ritual rules is a pretty straightforward concept that IIRC is obliquely referenced in various materials.

4e in my view was very much built on the idea of being able to take any of the rules systems and take it wherever you wanted to. You could make Earth Shattering rituals, artifacts of stupendous power, items with basically any power imaginable, etc. The BoVD gets a bit into this sort of concept, particularly in terms of doing bad things to PCs. The disease system has great potential and they did do a bit with it in terms of curses at the end. I love to lard that stuff into my epic games, it makes it much more fun. Just come up with stuff that is WAY over the top. "Hey how about a ritual of Mountain Summoning!" Sounds good to me, just be careful where you put that sucker...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I hope not.

There is a huge verisimilitude hit if there are magic items, but no way to craft them. Where the heck did they come from?

DM: "Well, they could be crafted before the Sundering, but no longer."

That's totally lame.

Not that I want PCs creating a ton of items, but if the group decides that they want or need some minor scroll, that should be doable without some major quest to get the butt cheek of a gargoyle.

The DMG should have good item crafting rules. It's not that the game should have a ton of crafting, but it should allow the players to do so if that is the direction where they are spending their resources.

And the "this is not 3E" argument is a bit weak as well. One of the goals of 5E was to get back to some of the 1E, 2E, and 3E roots. That should include magic item crafting. IMO.

PS. If you have read the first Sundering book, some spell casters in it are cheering that magic is back to the way it was before the spellplague. So if magic is back to the way it was, so should magic item creation. Or at least that seems logical. Granted, spells are not identical to 3E, but they are pretty darn close. They feel like 3E spells (with some buffing and other limitations, along with revised Vancian).

The way I see it ALL previous editions have tried to take on the bugbear of crafting and all of them have had poor results. In OD&D and IIRC most forms of Basic etc you couldn't craft at all, it was pure DM fiat. 1e had Enchant an Item and some rules that made it stupendously hard to craft anything which made the existence of low-level items (and their relative commonality) hard to understand at best. What Wizard would sacrifice a point of CON, months of work, a major quest, and tons of cash to make a +1 Dagger that is basically a back-up weapon for one of his henchmen? 2e didn't fix that. 3e went totally hog wild the other way and made a system where it was relatively cheap and easy to craft ANYTHING at all. We all know how that turned out.... Then we have 4e that followed in 3e's footsteps, and then backtracked so that the current 4e rules allow the easy construction of a limited number of items and no way to make anything else at all, though the rules in fairness seem to suggest that other items can be crafted after jumping through whatever hoops the DM wants. So basically 4e is a weird hybrid of 0e and 3e.

Dare we hope that 5e has some sort of rational plan in mind? Some process that makes low level items not TOO cheap, but possible to construct and not so expensive that they aren't worth it, yet also makes it tough to produce the more desirable items and virtually impossible to produce the really coveted ones? 4e ALMOST did it, they had all the elements but they somehow failed to muster the energy to put it all together. Perhaps it is finally time!