Are those issues present with this issue?
Could be with any issue, potentially.
We remain with an issue which I've never seen anyone complain about in 5 years of the edition being out, and everyone else is shrugging and saying this has never been an issue that they are aware of for anyone playing the game. I think it's fair to say experience is meaningful for this issue.
It may seem fair when you have the consensus on your side, and he may be obviously wrong, but that doesn't mean it's valid to dismiss a criticism of the rules with an appeal to common practice.
and where the guy complaining now is doing it in theory only
And seems pretty easy to answer on the same terms.
(Though, at this point, I've lost track of which specific claim you were dismissing out of hand, rather than readily disproving on the theoretical level.)
Heh. 5e is following the 1e route of becoming somewhat schizophrenic. The books say one thing, but, then in actual application, something else. Is it a game where no magic items are assumed or not? The answer is, well, it depends.
No magic items are assumed in
how the game is balanced (that it's balanced 'badly' notwithstanding), thus you should be able to exclude items from any analysis and get a valid result, or, conversely, expect that introducing items will throw things out of whack. If, indeed, you ever find them to be in whack to begin with.
No. No no no. No "people" would complain, it's JUST YOU.
...oh, you mean in the sense of people being plural, rather than in the sense of denying his personhood. Sorry, carry on...
Show us how this is a meaningful issue. To anyone - including you.
Clearly it's meaningful, to him, or he wouldn't be arguing so stridently from such a poor position!
Literally nobody else is agreeing with you that the cost to scribe scrolls is a meaningful issue in their games.
Doesn't really matter.
It's an absurdly small sum beyond low levels.
Or it's a lot of money, it all depends on the campaign. It's a strength of 5e that it doesn't assume wealth/level & items, so you could run a campaign where the PCs are driven to adventure from necessity, just to scrape by. It's an expansion of covered play styles relative to 3.5 or 4e w/o inherent bonuses or the TSR era (XP for gold, de-facto wealth/level & magic items assumed in class & monster designs, and broadly baked into myriad price lists, so it's nice to avoid throwing under the bus.
It's lower than spell component costs for some spells - for you entire career as a wizard combined! Fighters buy armor - and they do. The cost of that armor is MORE THAN THE COST OF ALL THE SPELLS YOU'D LIKELY SCRIBE THROUGH LEVEL 10!
STR based fighters (and paladins & clerics, and anyone else depending on heavy armor over DEX, including a certain notorious wizard build, for that matter), and even DEX 14 types, are going to need to acquire better armor, or they'll go from theoretically leading DEX-primary/light-armor types (and good-DEX wizards &c casting mage armor, for that matter), to lagging them by up to 3 points of AC. Which, under bounded accuracy is pretty significant. So there's clearly impact going around to being impoverished in the long term, and there's clearly classes and builds that suffer from it worse than a wizard who misses out of scribing and some spells with expensive components (which, as the campaign's nature should be up-front, he can avoid choosing, or if it becomes apparent later, stop preparing).
(Amusingly, Mountain Dwarf lets you inflict wealth-dependence upon any class that might otherwise normally get by with light/medium armor and a decent DEX - I can only assume it would be a sub-optimal choice for very-low-wealth campaigns.)
What's more, the wizard with no gp to spare for scribing still compares very favorably to known-spell-only casters! Still more flexible than they could hope to be from one day to the next (even under these variants), still safely ensconced in class Tier 1.
