Why Not Share Spellbooks?

[Umbran]

Imagine if the situation were reversed. You're playing a level 3 wizard who knows every spell except magic missile. A level 1 wizard NPC comes up to you and offers to give you magic missile for free if you let him take a look at your spellbook. Why would you say no?

These are not baseball cards of comic books - having a complete set does not increase their value.

I worked hard to get those spells. As an adventurer, I put my life on the line, either to defeat the owners of previous spell books, or just to earn the 3800 gp required to scribe all those spells. While Magic Missile is a good spell, clearly I've been able to survive without it. That one spell is not worth my entire collection. It is an uneven trade. So, go ahead, and look in my book, and take *one* spell. I'll take Magic Missile, and the trade will be even.

I am not a public library - those probably haven't been invented yet. I am more like an independent contractor. If you want access to my resources, you'll have to pay me for the effort I took to assemble those resources.

 

[Doug McCrae]

It's a question of what model you use for wizard culture. Is it like medieval alchemy, where each practitioner is highly secretive; or is like science, academia, and the open source movement, where knowledge is shared freely?

D&D worlds are typically closer to the modern world, with wizarding universities and the like. However Gygaxian D&D is different. Imo, it presents a cynical view of human nature, where people are more selfish than they are in our own world, partly to make the game more challenging. In Gygaxian D&D, NPC magic users charge a high price to share spells - PCs are always getting ripped off.

The Gygaxian approach, as expressed in 1e AD&D, is somewhat contradictory as there are many 'name' spells such as Drawmij's Instant Summons, which suggests that magic users are learning one anothers' spells with some regularity.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

What I'm really asking is, if a PC wizard asks an NPC wizard to share spells, why would the NPC ever say no? And, if the NPC would always say yes, then how come every wizard in the world doesn't know every spell in the world?

Trust.

Friends (eg fellow party members, a mentor and student, spouses, and some other such relationships) may trust each other enough to do so. I can certainly picture daddy wizard lending his daughter wizard his spellbook, as it can give her an advantage in school, business and even combat.

Giving up a spellbook for even a day is also risky. Much riskier than giving up a sword for a day, because you could have easily bought a backup sword beforehand.

A wizard could backup their spellbook and lend a copy, but said copy is still valuable, because it took a lot of effort to create that backup. WIzards would probably routinely have an adventuring/traveling and a base spellbook, with the base spellbook left somewhere safe. They might be willing to lend their traveling spellbook, but only if they can get back to their base spellbook within a day.

The Gygaxian approach, as expressed in 1e AD&D, is somewhat contradictory as there are many 'name' spells such as Drawmij's Instant Summons, which suggests that magic users are learning one anothers' spells with some regularity.

I don't know if you could learn spells from scrolls in 1e, but I suspect you could. Also, again, if you have any sort of wizardry schools, it would be easy for students to get their hands on spells available at the school as part of the tuition.

I wonder if we should compare spells to textbooks. Textbooks are knowledge, and usually aren't free. In fact, they're expensive. You're probably willing to lend your textbook to a friend at school, but not a total stranger.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Well, in a real (with magic) world, the wizard will say "If I'm the only wizard in town with Locate Object, all the customers come to me to find their keys. If you have the spell, I lose business." That's why guilds kept secret techniques.

 

[Lackhand]

I'm not swayed by the psychological reasons not to share spells, because even if that applied on a personal level, I believe cabals of mages would still pool resources -- and all the arguments against sharing spell books apply even more strongly to taking on apprentices!

I've been toying with introducing more metaphysics to it: when you learn a spell, you learn it from a source.
You learn the spell exactly as the rules text have it, but the source version becomes automatically and retroactively Heightened; it requires a higher level slot to cast. This effect fades with time, but a much copied spell can eventually stick at it's new place, so wizards are careful not to fritter away their power and take on only a small number of apprentices at a time.
Trying to shield oneself from the source doesn't work well: the first person to copy a spell out of a dead wizards's spell book counts as the author of both copies, for purposes of these rules.
The only way to get Teaching Copies of spell books is to craft them as magic items, or capture and keep multiple tutelary archmagi, who are probably not happy about the form of tenure imposed

 

[Jacob Marley]

I'm not swayed by the psychological reasons not to share spells, because even if that applied on a personal level, I believe cabals of mages would still pool resources -- and all the arguments against sharing spell books apply even more strongly to taking on apprentices!

Cabals certainly would, to an extent. As would master/apprentice relationships. But that's not the question GX.Sigma asked. He asked "is there any reason why two wizard characters wouldn't share spellbooks?" He has been given countless reasons why wizard A would not share spells with wizard B: risk/reward, competing interests, a desire to control information, arrogance, insanity, greed, lack of sufficient value to trade. All of these are perfectly valid reasons.

Maybe I'm missing something super-obvious, but is there any reason why two wizard characters wouldn't share spellbooks and copy each other's spells? Or even just look at both spellbooks every day?

 

[amerigoV]

The same reason I do not share gaming books - gamers have a notoriously low Dex and spill/drop stuff all the time. Wizards are no better, esp the min/max'd ones.

 

[Lackhand]

Cabals certainly would, to an extent. As would master/apprentice relationships. But that's not the question GX.Sigma asked. He asked "is there any reason why two wizard characters wouldn't share spellbooks?" He has been given countless reasons why wizard A would not share spells with wizard B: risk/reward, competing interests, a desire to control information, arrogance, insanity, greed, lack of sufficient value to trade. All of these are perfectly valid reasons.

Okay, then I guess I withdraw my otherwise interesting rules-statement about Spells Not Wanting To Be Free...?

You're answering "would any wizard, anywhere, refuse to share spells" with "yes, if they are irrational or think that you are acting in bad faith", which is fine, so far as it goes.
I'm answering "why would wizards tend to not do a thing which is effectively free to them" with "here is how I introduce a cost".

I do worry that without a forcing function, PC wizards (who aren't necessarily arrogant, insane, or shortsighted enough for short-term greed to blind them to long term gain) can get a lot of temporal power quickly and cheaply by giving spells away to follower wizards.
It's certainly the case that within the same party, wizards have none of these reasons not to share spells, unless they simply dislike each other so much that they also might betray each other in battle or something.

Hope that helps!

 

[Ruzak]

These same wizards who battle dragons in the hope of finding spells think it is too risky to swap books across a table for a few hours? If this type of theft is such a threat, why aren't other types? Are wizards in this world constantly killing each other in the street for spell books?
The reward to risk ratio is just too good to pass up without some other reason.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Imagine if the situation were reversed. You're playing a level 3 wizard who knows every spell except magic missile. A level 1 wizard NPC comes up to you and offers to give you magic missile for free if you let him take a look at your spellbook. Why would you say no?

Because at some future date, that wizard might color spray you to death and take all your stuff. Magic users kill to learn spells. Killing a scholar in his sleep is a hell of a lot easier than delving into the tomb of sharp nasty pointy teeth.