Wizards: Unsuitable Adventurers?

[Thresher]

At lower levels its quite cheap to pen most of your low level spells onto scroll, then you can squirrel that away somewhere or store them in a scroll tube, then if the primary book gets smoked you can re-pen them into a new book.

Scroll tubes and book covers made of adamantite are some of the better ways of protecting them from physical damage, later at high levels I found the best way of having a spare set was to get a belt of many pouchs filled with your backups, spare components and a Drawmij's Summons on it back home.

 

[marshaldwm]

Well, wizards have an achilles heel, just like several other classes

Paladins have to stay Lawful Good, Clerics have to follow their gods, Monks and Barbarians also have alignment restrictions and Monks cannot easily multiclass.

Unlike the others, they have a pretty easy way around the problem, i.e lots of gold.(and a bit of time)

Making copies of spellbooks is a pain, but it is not overly hard, unless your DM stacks adventures cheek to jowl in your game.

And a serious adventruing wizard needs to think really hard about Spell Mastery. Even five or six seplls would make a world of difference.

 

[Zhure]

D&D assumes that your gear survives anything that you survive. If you fall into acid and don't die, your gear does not get destroyed.

Clerics are partly in the same boat though, as they are fairly useless without a holy symbol, except that they're better armed and armored.

N.B., the Cure and Inflict line of spells don't require a divine focus.

Greg

 

[tzor]

Well if you want to get technical and more detailed ... there was something in the old 1E books about having multiple spellbooks, the wizard's regular spell book which he kept at home and his traveling spell book which he carried with him. After all, high level wizards rarely need all of those spells they learned as low level wizards, only the ones they find the most useful at the time are really necessary. One could even have several traveling books, for land adventures, sea adventures, for war, for red dragons, etc. The loss os any given traveling book is minor because the original is always secure.

In other words, always have a backup. This is just as important in the computer age as it is in the wizard's age. Also make sure that you put two tons of enchantments on the traveling book so that it can stand up to the weather. The fighter's sword is magic and less prone to breakage, so should your spell book!

 

[James McMurray]

N.B., the Cure and Inflict line of spells don't require a divine focus.

Greg

Which is why I said "partly in the same boat" and "fairly useless." There are a few other divine spells that don't require the focus, but the power level of hte cleric gets greatly reduced if he's forced to memorize a bunch of cures and inflicts.

 

[AuraSeer]

And all of this runs under the assumption that the wizard can and will be able to return to the points at which he has stashed the backups, something which cannot be guaranteed for an adventuring wizard, especially one of lower level.

A low-level wizard doesn't worry too much about his spellbooks; he's too busy worrying about his fragile little d4-per-level life. No one's going to bother aiming for his book, because it's easier to use his face for archery practice. If it's possible for a rogue to sneak into camp and steal the book, it's also possible for him to CDG the wizard and consider the problem solved.

By mid levels, teleport means it's always simple to return to home base and the book you keep there. I don't think I've ever seen a wizard who doesn't prepare that spell every day. Those who are particularly concerned will take Spell Mastery of teleport, to make sure they can never be stuck in the wilderness for more than a day.

At high levels, your backup spellbook is always just a standard action away, no matter where you are in the multiverse. That's what instant summons is for.

 

[LokiDR]

Besides the statistical difficulty of damaging a spellbook, any DM who targets a wizard's spell book had better be ready. It is esentially the same as chopping off the arm of a warrior. In most cases, it's more rude than anything else.

 

[Sanackranib]

its all about how you protect your book. I will give you an example of what my last necromancer did. we were using a lot of the optional d20 and quintissenital rules so if you don't use them in your game then take this with a grain of salt.

first off I took the Grimore as a familiar. basically its a construct book with its own INT score. next I performed the ritual to give it an energy attack. basically pick it up or handle it and recieve 1 negative energy level for your trouble. shortly after I had it incased in an adamantite boxlike cover which protected the pages on all sides and had 3 masterwork locks DC 35 to open. I created an extradimentional space in the book and used the imbue with spell ability to grant the book the level 3 spell shadow touch spell [the spell at my level did 1d6+6 STR damage save for 1/2 any creature killed by the spell rises as a shadow in 1d4+1 rounds under the control of the caster - in this case the book]. the idea was to have the book "kill" some weak townies and thus be better equiped to "protect itself." those killed by the shadows the book created would technically be under the shadow that made them, but since all the shadows would be under the master shadow and those would be controlled by the book I didn't see this as a big problem.
next I was able to give the book resistance 20 vs. fire, and I was only getting started. yes a lot of this cost me a good deal of money and the rest was expensive as well as draining xp, but my spellbook was safe, at least from most hazards. it would have gotten much worse if that campaign had continued.

 

[Sanackranib]

there was a thread above that mentioned multiple spellbooks, every wizard I have played gained multiple copies of every spell - usually 2 traveling set one of which was hiden in some bolt hole known only to me and a large tome book in my lab. afterall accidents happen and its so inconvient to be with out your "books"

 

[green slime]

IMO, the main weakness of wizards isn't their spellbook, it isn't their crappy hp. It is the cost to scribe spells into the spellbook. Haven't glanced at how 3.5 solved this issue, but in 3.0, the poor wizard is so hard strapped for cash it isn't funny. And this is just a single spellbook. How to sponsor multiple spellbooks is beyond me, prior to 8th level. BBB costs 9,500 gp in 3.0, or 4,750 gp, 380 XP, a spell secret page (which must be scribed into the old non-BBB) and a feat. They also take a copious number of days to fill.