Scrolls

[willpell]

I don't get the deal with scrolls vs. wands in D&D. Scrolls are vastly more complicated mechanically; you have to meet their Ability requirement, they provoke AoOs, and if you screw up you risk mishaps. The only advantages I see are that they're cheap and not capped at level 4, and I see no particular reason why wands being capped at level 4 isn't a rule to break in every campaign, given that psionic dorjes prove that there's nothing inherently wrong about a level 5-9 magic effect being put on a stick that you can use 50 times. They probably assumed that for higher-level effects you'd always want a staff, but that wasn't a good assumption IMO. In any event, for spell levels 1-4 at the least, it seems as though you'd always rather pay 750*X for 50 of a spell, instead of paying the same price for 30 of that spell and having to jump through more hoops getting it off, unless the spell is so niche that you'll hardly ever want it, in which case why even bother getting the scroll? This may be a case where my lack of practical expertise is hurting me, but I really don't see why all the rigamarole of scrolls is necessary when they're inherently worse than a single-use spell trigger item would be, and there's no particularly strong reason why such items don't exist other than that the rules make no allowance for it.

Is this another of those grognard things where it just keeps being the way it's always been, or is there something about scrolls which I'm missing where the extra hoops you have to jump through are somehow necessary?

[Ashtagon]

If you're playing a magic mart campaign, then yes, scrolls make very little sense.

Magic marts didn't become a standard game assumption until well into 3rd edition.

[ahenobarbi]

Scrolls are good for those spells that you need rarely. For example:

Create Water - for drown healing :smallwink:. Or if you need to put out fire and have no better idea how to do it. Or if you have no water - by surprise. and it's cheap.
Delay Poison - so your cleric will not have to memorize it at low levels
Floating Disk - too poor to memorize it ever but you may want to use it one day (hey, it's cheap!)
Lesser Restoration - see above (and cheaper than potion)
Mending - hardly ever useful. But sometimes it is.
Mount - you will hardly ever need it but sometime it's very useful


And it's chepaer to learn 1st level spells from scrolls (25gp) than from other wizards spell books (50gp).

[Suddo]

If you are crafting the items yourself you'll quickly realize that scrolls have usefullness. Especially with that one magic quill from Complete Mage that does the work for you while you sleep, or do other things, you'll quickly find that you can easily create scrolls with the extra spells you have at the end of the day. Wands are a little less useful in this regard and can be quite annoying to make.

But as stated above Wands are pretty much superior if regularly available after you can afford them.