Can any1 create a spell scroll and can anyone use it? [Archive]

NNescio

2019-08-06, 02:58 AM

Can any create a spell scroll and can anyone use it?
(Thread title)

If the spell is on your class’s spell list, you can read the scroll and cast its spell without providing any material components. Otherwise, the scroll is unintelligible.

So, no.

So I'm looking at the Archivist Artificer and you can make spell scrolls cheap and fast. So I'm wondering what spells can I write down on a scroll and use it?

Short answer: Any spells you can cast, provided you learned it from class levels.

Long answer:

If you're following the DMG rules:
1) You need to be able to cast the relevant spell.
2) You also need spell slots of the spell's level, which you spend for every day of crafting.
3) Your character level has to be high enough; 3rd for crafting commons and uncommons, 6th for rares, 11th for very rares, and 17th for legendaries.
4) You also need to provide the material components, if any, and they are consumed if they are normally consumed during casting (for reusable magical items instead of consumables like scrolls, you need to expend multiples of consumable mat components, once for every day of crafting).

5) You need to spend GP on materials; 100 GP for commons, 100 GP for uncommons, 5k GP for rares, 50k for very rares, and 500k for legendaries. No discounts for consumables
6) Last, you need a recipe ("formula") that tells you how to craft the scroll (or item).

Crafting takes one day for 25 GP of cost. You need to work an 8 hour shift for each of these days.

If you are following Xanathar's, well, consumables now come with a discount (generally 1/2 price), but they still borked up the math something fierce (Fiercer, I'd say). Costs for normal magical items are severely underpriced (particularly low rarity ones that can be crafted for 50~500GP, plus trivial components gathered from CR 1-3 or CR 4-8 encounters), while costs for higher-level scrolls are jacked up to ridiculous levels, making it pointless to craft spell scrolls beyond level 2. To add insult to injury, you also have a ~1.67% of screwing up the scroll for every week spent scribing (spell levels 3 require one week to scribe, and higher levels require more). giving you a scroll of a completely different kind of spell (at the same spell level). I suppose you can get out-of-class spells this way, but you can't cast them either.

As consolation, you no longer need formulae (recipes) to scribe scrolls, and technically you don't need to spend spell slots either (I think). You need skill proficiency in Arcana and have the spell prepared or have it as part of your spells known. Also, unlike crafting magical items, you don't need to hunt down unique components from specific encounters.

On the other hand, crafting other magic items no longer needs spells either, and they don't even need mat components (I assume it's supposed to be covered already by the components you get from the sidequest), even if they can cast multiple spells, unlike scrolls. Of course, they are more subject to DM's fiat (to come up with the sidequest component hunt) and still need formulae.

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Really, consumables should be priced like 1/10 or maybe 1/20 (like in 3.5e), not 1/2, which is silly. And magical items should have individual pricing based on their utility (including expected power they provide) like in 3.X instead of flat 'rarity' pricing that severely underprices some things but overprices others.