Unpopular D&D Opinions Part 2: Popular To Talk About

[Batcathat]

The whole motto of the game is "Losing is fun!"

While I understand why this concept is a bit unpopular, failing can be entertaining, fulfilling or even a goal of certain games. It can be a part of character growth, a good motivator, a good "salt & pepper" for the steak of victory. Without failure, victory tends to feel bland. I enjoy a good steamrolling of opponents just like the other guy, but without failures, the "fun" is not "fun" in most games. Unpopular enough?

I think the point was that failure isn't very interesting from a mechanical standpoint, rather than in general. I think most people would agree with you that a game with no chance of failure would be pretty boring (though I suspect there would be a lot of arguing over how big that chance should be ).

[Morgaln]

If I remember correctly, Call of Cthulhu lets you increase a skill when you fail a check against that skill. So that game lets you transfer failure into better stats directly.

Funnily enough, when I did a one session scenario for CoC once, one of the players was actually disappointed that he succeeded at every roll, because it meant he wasn't going to get any increases at the end. Even though it was a one-shot where advancement was irrelevant.

[Vahnavoi]

@Vahnavoi, I've not seen worlds as… naively paranoid as you describe. IME, 2e Wizards would never have a (travel) spellbook in a saddlebag or inside the wagon. They would have it ("in a sealed box") either…

• on their person (protected by their abjurations), or
• in their saddlebag, on the wagon, on every PC and NPC hireling and henchman they can convince to spare the encumbrance, *and* half a dozen extra places as well.

At low levels, player characters don't have access to many suitable abjurations nor do they have money for many retainers or redundant copies of spellbooks. Magical means are not a replacement for mundane ones at that point, at best they're cherry on top. Meanwhile, beasts of burden, such as donkeys and horses, and then carts and wagons, are basically the next step up from walking everywhere on foot, and among the earliest mobile platforms for storing excess loot and equipment on. Never making common sense use of them and always carrying your spellbook on your person is more "naively paranoid" than any idea I've posed.

By the time you can afford as many copies and loyal retainers as you want, you are close to or above name level and are capable of having an actual stronghold of your own to store important copies in.

But this was based on the general attitude that the PCs never knew where the adventure might take them - or for how long. And also certainly based on the understanding of how items could be lost to saving throws.

In the original Greyhawk model of "adventure for a day, rest and get drunk"? Sure, it'd make perfect sense to leave your spellbook behind.

You seem to forget the "Greyhawk model" requires adventurers are halfway competent at setting camps, even while on a journey. Being on journey does not mean you have no safe spots for retreat or storing items. It also doesn't mean having all your possesions on your person all day long.

Did "stealing magic research" happen? Well, yes. Were the PCs paranoid about it? Um… let's see…

• if someone kills me, I'm dead, what do i care what secrets they learn from my corpse (note that getting my spellbook off my corpse vs Speak with Dead and getting it from my hiding place are roughly equally easy, and I'm just as dead either way)
• if it's easy to steal from my many copies? either
  
  • I never hear from them again, means they didn't kill me, i win, or
  • they come back, and either
    
    • i kill them easily (free XP) or
    • they have good loot and Wizard HP, even better!
• Regardless, NPC Wizards that are *improved* by learning *my* tricks are still not any worse than the monsters (like Dragons and beholders) that I'm fighting anyway.

In my games, player characters' henchmen and retainers are next in line to be played in case a character dies. Which means that a spellbook left with them or set up to be recoverable by them means the book returns to the hand of that player soon enough. A spellbook looted from a captured or dead character, meanwhile, is lost and now in the hands of the enemy.

As for stolen copies, you yourself likened spells to recipes for explosives. The analogy should make it self-evident why you care about said copies being stolen, you don't want your explosives neutered or used against you. It's optimistic to assume stolen information never comes to bite you when said information is by default weaponized and dangerous. It's even sillier to assume surrendering advantages won't make fights worse.

Oh, and since you keep bringing up Speak with the Dead... that's not universally available spell. In games I've played, taking information security seriously means it can even stay that way.

That, of course, was the real reason at many tables, surely, and Ed Greenwood appears to fall into that paradigm in spades.

What you and Pex omit is that the game master being unwilling to surrender powerful spells to the hands of players is perfectly congruent with the in-character motivation of magic-users to keep their spells out of the hands of adventurers, following the logic above. Also, that Ed Greenwood started his work with 1st edition and some 1st edition assumptions carry into his 2nd edition work.

Quertus just realized that, obviously, Bigby, Mordenkainen, Rary, Evard, and company didn't keep their spells to themselves - that getting their spells out there, in circulation, was important for spreading their fame. Thus, he tended towards trading "Quertus' Spell Star".

Quertus, then, did not consider the even more likely alternative: that the spells marketed as "Bigby's" etc. are cheap knockoffs reverse-enginereed by separate people, who are just riding on the fame of more established wizards to make money. The named people may have invented the originals, but that doesn't mean the originals were ever disseminated among lesser casters. Real life example of this happening: snake oil. So much so, snake oil salesman became synonym for fraudulent marketing.

Yup. So, if you don't want to waste *days* when you get back to base, you want to keep your spells topped off (or as close as you can get) while you're on the road.

Which is why you set up camp daily or, at higher levels, have some kind of mobile fortress with you, so you never are too far away from a safe location. Also, the best way to keep your spells topped in transit is to use as few and as low level as possible during travel. Or stock up on scrolls.

Good. The d4 HP imbeciles are welcome to "come and get it"; I'll use Speak with Dead to pry the location of their "hidden" spellbooks from their cold, dead minds. And enemy Wizards drop the best loot!

Excuse me, but you were complaining about NPC magic-users going out of their way to hide their spellbooks so you CAN'T loot them. In the situation under discussion, YOU are the d4 HP imbecile, lusting over spells you have no business having.

No, seriously. If (for example) Bigby hadn't shared his "handy" (heh) spells with the masses, and enemy Wizards had come to kill him? They'd either not be much of a match for him, or he'd more than double his wealth after he looted the corpse of even a single attacker. And, if he's with a party, the enemy is either even deader, or forced to bring a (very lootable) party of their own.

You are again assuming the famous wizards shared their spells or were made famous by their spells. Both are dubious assumptions, neither needs to ve true. Also, all the named wizards had their share of powerful enemies, whom they kept their secrets from; they largely survived by being better at keeping secrets and at revealing secrets of others than their competition. More importantly, the average adventurer has a long way to go before they're Bigby or Mordenkainen or whoever. That someone who already made it big can surrender some information that's no longer vital to them, does not mean you can.

Seriously, most parties would pay to have loot and XP come to them like this. If they found out that this was how things worked, they'd give up adventuring, and just start *advertising* that they've got a Wizard who keeps his spellbook on him!

Tested and found to be false - players don't actually appreciate being constantly hounded by bandits, wandering monsters etc. after their stuff. In fact, they disliked it so much that today, a game master doing this is likely to get shouted at by their players.

AFB - what's the fail rate on [secret chest]?

High enough that you don't want to keep your primary spellbook in one, low enough to serve as temporary safeguard for travel spellbooks and other vulnerable consumables.

In many of my campaigns, you'd come out of the dungeon to find that box empty. "Following an adventuring party" is one of the safest ways to gain loot!

If your camp is easy to loot when you're away, it's also easy to attack when you retreat there to rest, meaning you failed step one of setting up a safe camp. Nevermind that if someone's following you for months and months, that falls under the active pursuit clause I mentioned earlier.

Also, Wizard is a sad panda when they get sucked to another plane / reality without their spellbook.

At lower levels, virtually anything capable sending you to another reality against your will, is also capable of separating you from your items. By higher levels, when this kind of threat is common and not a force majeure you can't reasonably prepare for, the correct defense is to have dimensional anchor or some spell capable of returning you to your home reality. Hugging a spellbook just in case this happens is last of last ditch options - there isn't any guarantee of having a chance to prepare spells on the other side.

Planned incursions to the planes are a different thing entirely. If you're planning a long-term or one-way trip, that's a good enough reason to bring your entire library. But it's also good enough reason to establish a new home base in the target worlds. At highest levels, you aren't going there in person if you can avoid it, you'll be sending a clone or astrally projecting, while your body and spellbooks remain safe in your tower.

Never had the latter; the former tends to fail on the planes.

Never finding secret chest or other by-the-book methods that exist for pretty much just this purpose is pretty sad; never find a warship or other mobile fortress capable of planar travel is a sign you should've convinced your game master to pick Spelljammer over Planescape.

Curiously, almost no-one ever did that. But I cannot deny the efficacy of the 15 minute workday.

If no-one ever did that at you table, you're the anomaly. That's the most common sense use of word of recall and teleport, to the point this whole concept was copied over to videogames and has been repeated a thousand times in them - word of recall in Angband, town portal in Diablo, Homeward Bone in Dark Souls etc.

"15-minute workday" is only tangentially related. That happens when you spill your whole load at earliest opportunity and immediately retreat. I'm simply talking about obvious intended use of using fast travel spells to get back to a safe location when the need arises.

Halls of the High King, the party takes a multi-week boat trip to a foreign land at the start of act 1. And lots of things / places do (or should) get set on fire. And enemy thieves are very much a thing. It *really* shouldn't feel safe to leave your spellbook anywhere.

A "boat" capable of traveling for weeks with adventurers as passengers is big enough to fit the "mobile fortress" clause, and figuring out how to safely pack your stuff is step one of travel by ship. It's not a reason to hug your books. They aren't going to be safer on your person than in a fireproof, watertight container. As for the thieves, thieves are precisely one of the reasons why you'd leave valuables behind lock and key and hidden. Applies to D&D just as much as real life. Again, low level abjurations don't replace mundane means. Your books aren't safer on your person than they are in a hidden, locked compartment.

And it certainly would have been smarter for sometime who had "been a pirate for four seasons" to have carried a travel spellbook to refresh their spells, rather than carrying 10 copies of scrolls of [affect normal fires, change self, charm person, magic missile, ESP, invisibility x3, mist magic, dispel magic, fly x3, wizard eye, and maybe fire shield and mass invisibility]. The time and cost of creating those scrolls seems pretty boggling to me - and the idea that a pirate might handle 10 ship-boarding encounters (plus whatever aquatic random encounters they might have) on just one load of spells? That sounds like truly Realms-worthy thinking.

That set-up has heavy up-front cost, yes. That's not the same as not being smart. Due to those spells being stored in scrolls, no further spell preparation needs to be done in transit, freeing said pirate to do other things. Scrolls can be transcribed into a spellbook, so given time and opportunity, a fraction of those scrolls can be turned into a travel spellbook. The individual spell scrolls can be more easily and safely separated and traded, can be given to minions capable of using them, destroy themselves after use and, if needed, can bring significantly more firepower to the front than what a magic-user merely able to cast these spells is usually capable of in a day.

[KorvinStarmast]

That was the common theme of 2E. Everything was expensive as a means to drain a PCs treasure hoard, so he needs to adventure to get more treasure. The Monty Hall campaign was a common derision at that time.

That approach came in AD&D 1e and OD&D, and was well documented in Dragon magazine and elsewhere (The AD&D 1e DMG even mentions the gold-rush-town-price-inflation model as an example). All of this before 2e was a glimmer in Zeb Cook's imagination.

It wasn't outright hostility because there needed to be a game, but players were on the metaphorical leash.

AD&D 1e moreso than 2e, but I can guess that plenty of 1e experienced DM's carried that 'feel' over into 2e. My growing years taught me the "give 'em enough rope" approach, and it still works.

"Entitlement" was their buzzword.

We also see an impact on over two decades of RPG development as a hobby and new/other approaches to RPGs informing all player expectations, as well as video and CRPG influence in terms of audience/player expectations.

4E was grounding the both of them. No supper. No tv.

RL laughter happened here.

5E didn't bring back the leash. Instead, it locked the DM and player in a room and told them they're not leaving until they get along. After arguing back and forth compromise was reached. A window was opened - the early splat books. The door was unlocked - Xanathar. They can have supervised free play - modules and gameworld source books with Eberron as a Christmas present. Finally they're set free - Tasha. Old tensions simmer. It's to be determined if 5.5E brings peace or open warfare again.

Interesting analysis. And if anyone wonders why there seems to be a shortage of DMs...that simmering tension may inform that. Worlds Without Number (which I am browsing through these days during quiet time) has an interesting take on Player/DM interactions and styles.

The 1e DMG was "You will only get spells by murdering people, unless you are bad with money."

Not quite true. In some cases, yeah, after fighting the magic user you may find their stuff. You could also find them (1) by stealing them, or (2) find them during one of those "dig into the old tower and defeat the monster that's been sitting there since it ate that old wizard...but hasn't the manual dexterity nor inclination to open that box hidden in the back of the locked wardrobe. Oh, yeah, and the box/chest has a poison trap on it... and the false bottom has explosive runes on the cover ..."

Most people I played with just ignored all that process, discard the minimum number, and roll to learn as they found each copy of a spell, up to their max. And I gather that was common.

We mostly rolled as we encountered / discovered new scrolls or new books. Another nod to Vance was that you had to have a certain amount of incredible brain power just to try and handle a high level spell. (Hence the INT restrictions on 6th and above from Greyhawk on).

5E combat feels like somebody played a JRPG and said "I like this a lot but I really wish it were slower and we had to do this by hand"

It's faster than the previous two editions. Not as fast as the original.

and we sure as heck didn't destroy our own books. So while your idea here is interesting, I do not think it is a 100% understood thing for the old AD&D.

My experience was similar.

Thus why you have travel books that contain a subset of spells that makes sense for the road.

We all did that. It's where a lot of our share of the treasure went between adventures. Making that 'traveling' spell book or a backup.

There's nothing sad about it, said "nicer universe" was simply not desired from a game design viewpoint. Literary inspirations behind D&D magic involve Vance, Lovecraft, Howard, the bible, etc. - works where information is both inherently and consequentally dangerous and where magic-users are secretive both towards non-magicians and ESPECIALLY other magic-users. Forgotten Realms doesn't even have the most severe examples of this, out of all D&D settings.

FR is full of a wholly different flavor than the designer's worlds, but in the era that it arose nobody cared: each table had its own flavor. Where FR got so much traction was in the novels, I suspect, written by a lot of writers who are better at fiction that Ed G.

The entire method of getting spells from other NPCs, without killing them, was bonkers to me.

"I will trade spells with you, but only if you give me WAY more value than I am going to possibly give you."

Ever been to a Turkey and tried to buy a rug? It's a fascinating exercise in dickering, negotiation, bargaining, and human interaction. For people raised on department stores and supermarkets, it's an eye opener. See also markets in Italy, where I lived, where I learned the phrase mi fa un sconto (or uno sconto) and its application in a similar exchange. See also offered and accepted prices for a house, if you've ever bought or sold a house. See also the offer and acceptance of a price for a commodity or a stock purchase on Wall Street or other trading house.

There's a negotiation involved in the vending of expensive / valuable items. The core assumption of D&D before the video game era was that magic was rare, expensive, and dangerous. That feel has been lost, somewhat. Harry Potter style magic seems to be more popular ... the stories we are most familiar with may shape our expecations.

Well you're also assuming the DM didn't do something like spring their personal interpretation of the first Dragonlance book on your party of 4th level characters.

"Suddenly dragons! All your homes and stuff other than what you're carrying is destroyed."
<soon>
"We're both wizards, trade spells?" "No."
<later>
"Suddenly a dragon! It breaths on one of the wizards <roll> you, save against <roll> 40 damage. And your stuff.. oh, more than double? Ok your stuff is gone too*. You Mr. Forced-to-be-a-cleric, burn a charge of your staff to raise him."

Yeah, over 30 years ago. We were kids with the core three books. Damn shame I'm still seeing new DMs read the DMG and make those same sorts of mistakes.

Seen those too.

*pretty sure he didn't remember wizards had to cast Read Magic to read another wizards spellbook and you lost all memorized spells when you died.

That was in the AD&D 1e DMG IIRC. (OK, I found what I was looking for)

Obviously, an apprentice must know how to read magic to be of use to his master. It is also an absolute must to anyone following the profession of magic-user, so that spell is AUTOMATICALLY on each magic-user characters list of known spells. Then select by random means one spell each from the offensive, defensive, and miscellaneous categories listed below... any other player character magic-user will than have a total of 4 - count them - 4 spells with which to seek his (or her) fortune! {Three lists follow}...Note that both Nystul's Magic Aura and Tenser's Floating Disc must be located by the character; they can never be known at the start. {snip a bit} If your campaign is particularly difficult, you may wish to allow choice automatically. You can furthermore allow an extra defensive or miscellaneous spell, so that the character begins with 5 spells.

I had a lot of DM's allow us to pick one from each column; I had two who rolled and told us what we knew to start.

Finding new spells was a key motivation for the Magic User PC. It was baked into the class. If you risk your life to get that arcane knowledge/power, you may value it a lot more than if you get it for free.

Dwarf Fortress would like to have a word with you:

So would Great Orc Gods.

If I remember correctly, Call of Cthulhu lets you increase a skill when you fail a check against that skill. So that game lets you transfer failure into better stats directly.

Tunnels and Trolls does that as well. (The edition I own, which IIRC is 5th ed T&T). When you make a saving roll (which is used for a lot of skill checks) you can get points, and IIRC we got more if we didn't succeed. Our campaign was sadly shortened recently by RL.

[Pex]

I'll take people's word for it about 1E. I hadn't played it except briefly in high school when I really didn't know anything about the game or what I was doing. I count 2E as my first official foray into D&D during college. I didn't know 2E had just came out when I started playing it. We were college students but still had that lack of maturity.

[icefractal]

Obviously YMMV, and this is influenced by the games I was personally in or heard about, but the idea of "paranoia = leave your spellbook somewhere you can't see it" seems bizarre to me.

I used to be a paranoid player, and rule #1 of that paranoia was:
Don't trust in anything but yourself, and possibly the other party members.

Keeps got invaded when you weren't around. Followers died if you sent them to do anything dangerous, which "guard our stuff in a hostile area" certainly qualified as. Travel plans changed unexpectedly, sometimes with no chance to return to any given place. NPC allies might turn on you. Social titles could be taken away as easily as they were given. Anywhere you put your stuff left it in danger of being stolen, but at least if it was on your person then you had a chance to prevent it (or could reasonably call BS). Buried nearby? Stored in a keep? Kept in a secure vault? All just different routes that could lead to "while you were away, someone took/destroyed your stuff ..."

Now I'm not endorsing this attitude, it's assuming an adversarial relationship which isn't usually the case and pretty much never should be. But that's what I think of when I think paranoia. Leaving your spellbook off in the distance is practically handing the GM an invitation - "feel free to steal it as a plot hook".

[MoiMagnus]

The more I read the discussion about spellbooks, the more I'm convinced it hugely depends on GMing style (which itself heavily depends on the other peoples the GM has played with in his past).

Sure, the enemy could get stronger by stealing your spellbook, but by how much? Could it have reached the same strength by other means? There is some good chances that had the stealing not happen, the enemies would have found other ways to get stronger (like stealing from a NPC), even if not as strong.

Sure, having a good spellbook might attract robbers, but by how much? Is there really that many fools in the world ready to risk their life against a Wizard known to have that high of a body count? Also, will the GM actually sacrifice fun of the table, or will he just be satisfied in putting some somewhat regular encounters to keep the theme of "peoples want your stuff" but without pushing it to the point where the players are actually bored out of having similar encounters?

Different GMs will likely lead to different optimal behaviour, and it's even likely that multiple equilibrium exists. A world in which the optimal behaviour is to have a high amount of backups is a world where clever NPCs have a high amount of backups, so it's a world in which keeping your knowledge secret is less important as the NPCs have already plenty of way to acquire knowledge out of each others, making it "even more optimal" to have a high amount of backup. A world in which the optimal behaviour is to keep your secrets is a world in which it is possible for some specific spell to be totally absent of the circulation (and not appear randomly in the spellbook of a no-name caster), making it even more important for peoples having this spell to keep their privilege, making it "even more optimal" to keep your spellbook secret at all cost (even after death if you care about your heir).

[Telok]

Honestly the whole spellbook thing is so utterly DM dependent that it can't really be dealt with except on a DM-by-DM basis. Whether a wiz needed, wanted, should, could, do backups & travel books is totally dependent on the type and magnitude of the DMs jerk-ass or clueless. Good DM? No terrible problems, will tell you or clue you in as to how they run things, and if backup/travel books are important they let you make & secure them.

Bad DM? How it goes will be totally dependent on the DMs particular faults. Some you can put copies on each party member and it takes a TPK to un-wizard you, others may fiat theft of all your books to fit their "story-plot". My bad DM just didn't think about it and when the spellbooks got nuked as side effects of "story" we un-wizzed because we'd never had a chance to do anything other than stay ahead of the plot steam-roller behind us.

You can still get nearly the same in 5e today, just have a no-share, no-sell, & very rare scrolls DM and have the book nuked while you have your 'in town social encounters' spells memorized or you'd swapped out for some special circumstance. Prep a bunch of fire spells to fight ice demons, book gets nuked, then spend the rest of the campaign on the plane of fire where no books because !!fire!!. Bad DM is bad DM, but you can at least warn new/ignorant DMs with a blurb in the DMG or something.

[Talakeal]

IMO the whole thing boils down to neither tyrannical DMs nor realism, but rather a heavy handed attempt to make the core concept of killing stuff to get stronger make sense.

Just like in 3.X I often gave NPCs inherent bonuses rather than magic items. My players ofc threw fits because it felt like cheating, but the reason I did it is because it is impossible to actually maintain the reward cycle of killing, looting, and shopping when every kill doubles your wealth.

TLDR, its a gamist kludge to keep PCs and NPCs unique and to make sure getting new spells always feels rewarding.

[Quertus]

At low levels, player characters don't have access to many suitable abjurations nor do they have money for many retainers or redundant copies of spellbooks. Magical means are not a replacement for mundane ones at that point, at best they're cherry on top. Meanwhile, beasts of burden, such as donkeys and horses, and then carts and wagons, are basically the next step up from walking everywhere on foot, and among the earliest mobile platforms for storing excess loot and equipment on. Never making common sense use of them and always carrying your spellbook on your person is more "naively paranoid" than any idea I've posed.

Even at high level, not all PCs had Ride proficiency. And not all roads - and very few off-road excursions - were suitable for a wagon. So these were not necessarily good investments.

If the PCs *did* have such, yes, they make great places to store extra copies of your spellbook… *if* you trust your companions, henchmen, hirelings, etc.

By the time you can afford as many copies and loyal retainers as you want, you are close to or above name level and are capable of having an actual stronghold of your own to store important copies in.

That doesn't match my experience. AFB, but IIRC a book, quill & ink run much, much less than a horse.

You seem to forget the "Greyhawk model" requires adventurers are halfway competent at setting camps, even while on a journey. Being on journey does not mean you have no safe spots for retreat or storing items. It also doesn't mean having all your possesions on your person all day long.

Suppose Evard wants Bigby's spells. Is it easier to get them from Bigby, or from Bigby's camp while Bigby is out? Which location encourages Evard to come (or send his agents) more? IMO, "back at camp" is the juicier target.

In my games, player characters' henchmen and retainers are next in line to be played in case a character dies. Which means that a spellbook left with them or set up to be recoverable by them means the book returns to the hand of that player soon enough. A spellbook looted from a captured or dead character, meanwhile, is lost and now in the hands of the enemy.

0) remember, the context is the claim that my rant about hidden spellbooks is misplaced.

1) that's the player, not the character; that's metagaming, not role-playing.

2) we're talking 2e, not "your table" (unless you happen to be Ed Greenwood, or game at his table, which…). Citation on this being a standard 2e rule?

3) even if this *were* a standard 2e rule, and even if we didn't care about role-playing and only cared about the player, my rant is about NPCs.

3a) (by definition, NPCs don't have players)

4) also, more often than not, it's not "the enemy", but an unknown agent you'll never see again, a rival, or even a fellow PC stealing your book.

As for stolen copies, you yourself likened spells to recipes for explosives. The analogy should make it self-evident why you care about said copies being stolen, you don't want your explosives neutered or used against you. It's optimistic to assume stolen information never comes to bite you when said information is by default weaponized and dangerous. It's even sillier to assume surrendering advantages won't make fights worse.

Again, more likely that it *won't* impact you, personally and directly, than that it will. After all, whoever has your spellbook already has your spellbook - why should they care about you any more?

Oh, and since you keep bringing up Speak with the Dead... that's not universally available spell. In games I've played, taking information security seriously means it can even stay that way.

Um… now, I know I'm senile, and get things confused, but…

In 2e, is it not the case that

• Speak with Dead is a Cleric 2 spell;
• by default (ie, outside things like specialty priests from Faiths and Avatars), Clerics get access to "all the spells"?

Unless I'm really confused, it's pretty dang trivial.

What you and Pex omit is that the game master being unwilling to surrender powerful spells to the hands of players is perfectly congruent with the in-character motivation of magic-users to keep their spells out of the hands of adventurers, following the logic above. Also, that Ed Greenwood started his work with 1st edition and some 1st edition assumptions carry into his 2nd edition work.

Ed Greenwood's works not making sense in 2e is kinda my point - you can't really refute it with, "Ed Greenwood's works don't make sense in 2e".

Quertus, then, did not consider the even more likely alternative: that the spells marketed as "Bigby's" etc. are cheap knockoffs reverse-enginereed by separate people, who are just riding on the fame of more established wizards to make money. The named people may have invented the originals, but that doesn't mean the originals were ever disseminated among lesser casters. Real life example of this happening: snake oil. So much so, snake oil salesman became synonym for fraudulent marketing.

You are correct, Quertus did not consider that possibility. He is… poorly suited to such games of deception. That psychological flaw may be related to why he has researched so many custom information-gathering spells…

That said, fortunately, we have stats on those characters, and no such discrepancies are listed.

Which is why you set up camp daily or, at higher levels, have some kind of mobile fortress with you, so you never are too far away from a safe location. Also, the best way to keep your spells topped in transit is to use as few and as low level as possible during travel. Or stock up on scrolls.

Also good options. Note that I made fun of Ed Greenwood's NPCs for failing that way, too.

Excuse me, but you were complaining about NPC magic-users going out of their way to hide their spellbooks so you CAN'T loot them. In the situation under discussion, YOU are the d4 HP imbecile, lusting over spells you have no business having.

I should really QUOTE myself here, but… to paraphrase, the context is "enemy Wizards know that their best source of spells is other Wizards", to which my response is, "if they think that way? If they come to get my books? I'd rather face them in person, where their d4 HP and inferiority to me (because why else would they steal my spells?) makes them so much weaker than the monsters my party usually kills, they're like free loot and free XP by comparison. So, to them I say, 'come and get it!'. And I'm sure my party feels the same".

In that context, your response *only* makes sense if the PCs specifically hunted down the NPC Wizards for the express purpose of killing them for their spellbooks, as opposed to the module hurling the suicidally homicidal NPCs at the party.

You are again assuming the famous wizards shared their spells or were made famous by their spells. Both are dubious assumptions, neither needs to ve true.

Granted. That said, canon sources say that they *are* the spells, however they came to be in circulation.

Also, all the named wizards had their share of powerful enemies, whom they kept their secrets from; they largely survived by being better at keeping secrets and at revealing secrets of others than their competition.

Citation?

More importantly, the average adventurer has a long way to go before they're Bigby or Mordenkainen or whoever.

Or Melf? Or Tasha? Or…

I think it's fair to say that the *average* adventurer is *better* than some of the Wizards that have spells named after them, and that an average Playgrounder is probably better than them all.

That someone who already made it big can surrender some information that's no longer vital to them, does not mean you can.

True. Hasn't been a problem for Quertus (granted, he's not exactly free with his "best" spells (not that anyone else could cast them)), and, really, given how much time most PCs spend fighting monsters IME, it's rarely a problem if some random Wizard knows one of more of their random spells, too.

Tested and found to be false - players don't actually appreciate being constantly hounded by bandits, wandering monsters etc. after their stuff. In fact, they disliked it so much that today, a game master doing this is likely to get shouted at by their players.

Eh? How does "what players appreciate" possibly figure into a question of whether or not a strategy is idiotic? I mean, "Wizards don't like losing their spellbooks, therefore 'keeping it on your person' should be perfectly safe" seems to follow that logic, yet leads to conclusions other than the ones you've drawn.

Also, "PCs love playing the bandits hounding the NPC adventuring party, *especially* if they follow your 'leave my spellbook behind' logic".

High enough that you don't want to keep your primary spellbook in one, low enough to serve as temporary safeguard for travel spellbooks and other vulnerable consumables.

Fair enough. Most players I've gamed with are too loss adverse to accept such, generally refusing to even use consumables. But that's obviously not a universal stance.

If your camp is easy to loot when you're away, it's also easy to attack when you retreat there to rest, meaning you failed step one of setting up a safe camp. Nevermind that if someone's following you for months and months, that falls under the active pursuit clause I mentioned earlier.

Eh, not exactly.

If, during the Time of Troubles, Selune met a couple of jesters on her way to find civilization, and left them to guard her spellbook while she popped into a dungeon for a few hours to gather extra items? Yeah, I think I'd steal her spellbook from camp, and not be interested in attacking her camp when she got back.

Point is, the PCs are the primary deterrent, IMO & IME, from PC-class infiltration.

At lower levels, virtually anything capable sending you to another reality against your will, is also capable of separating you from your items.

Most modules don't run that way. Most.

Most GMs that Isekai the party don't have them appear naked. Most.

Most portals aren't built by gods of perversion to strip the party. Most. My god of perversion, OTOH…

So, IME, that's *usually* not an issue.

By higher levels, when this kind of threat is common and not a force majeure you can't reasonably prepare for, the correct defense is to have dimensional anchor or some spell capable of returning you to your home reality. Hugging a spellbook just in case this happens is last of last ditch options - there isn't any guarantee of having a chance to prepare spells on the other side.

Citation on the existence of "Dimensional Anchor" in 2e?

And, while I agree with the general "bamph home" strategy, such "15mwd" cornerstones really weren't done much IME with 2e. (Insert Syndrome "help me help me lame lame lame")

Never finding secret chest or other by-the-book methods that exist for pretty much just this purpose is pretty sad; never find a warship or other mobile fortress capable of planar travel is a sign you should've convinced your game master to pick Spelljammer over Planescape.

Too true.

If no-one ever did that at you table, you're the anomaly. That's the most common sense use of word of recall and teleport, to the point this whole concept was copied over to videogames and has been repeated a thousand times in them - word of recall in Angband, town portal in Diablo, Homeward Bone in Dark Souls etc.

I played at every table I could find, and… it just wasn't something that was done back then.

And, for reference on what "I haven't seen it" means, I gamed with every group I could find (except 1, long story), topping out at 6 sessions per week, and, last I tried, I still remembered the names of about 200 people I'd gamed with.

It wasn't just 1 table; IME, it just wasn't done.

"15-minute workday" is only tangentially related. That happens when you spill your whole load at earliest opportunity and immediately retreat. I'm simply talking about obvious intended use of using fast travel spells to get back to a safe location when the need arises.

We may have to disagree on how "obvious" that usage was. You saw it, I saw it, but most people I played with? Not so much.

Intended, though? Got a citation on that one?

A "boat" capable of traveling for weeks with adventurers as passengers is big enough to fit the "mobile fortress" clause, and figuring out how to safely pack your stuff is step one of travel by ship. It's not a reason to hug your books. They aren't going to be safer on your person than in a fireproof, watertight container.

Hmmm…

Spoiler: module spoilers

Show

So, turns out, according to the module, the boat burns to the waterline unless the PCs are there to defend it. Which matches my "PCs are the primary deterrent" logic.

Regardless, after the voyage, the PCs after in a foreign land, bereft of their previous safe places.

As for the thieves, thieves are precisely one of the reasons why you'd leave valuables behind lock and key and hidden. Applies to D&D just as much as real life. Again, low level abjurations don't replace mundane means. Your books aren't safer on your person than they are in a hidden, locked compartment.

Um… I don't know how you roleplay your PC Thieves, but… give me the option of "steal from dangerous Wizard" or "steal from a safe"? I'm choosing the safe.It sounds… safe.

That set-up has heavy up-front cost, yes. That's not the same as not being smart. Due to those spells being stored in scrolls, no further spell preparation needs to be done in transit, freeing said pirate to do other things. Scrolls can be transcribed into a spellbook, so given time and opportunity, a fraction of those scrolls can be turned into a travel spellbook. The individual spell scrolls can be more easily and safely separated and traded, can be given to minions capable of using them, destroy themselves after use and, if needed, can bring significantly more firepower to the front than what a magic-user merely able to cast these spells is usually capable of in a day.

If the pirate were written as not spamming spells like they were candy, that might make sense. Instead, her completely full spell loadout, her tactics, and that strategy are all three at odds.

[RandomPeasant]

Obviously YMMV, and this is influenced by the games I was personally in or heard about, but the idea of "paranoia = leave your spellbook somewhere you can't see it" seems bizarre to me.

Paranoia is playing a Sorcerer. Or maybe a Druid or Cleric, though those invite other avenues for DMs to screw with you.

Sure, the enemy could get stronger by stealing your spellbook, but by how much?

If you're talking about the party's enemies, I don't think spellbook theft is happening to increase their power so much as to decrease the player's. It's not bad tactics so much as it is a shift in the social contract that can be unreasonably effective because people assumed they didn't need to take precautions. It's relatively easy to have backups against spellbook theft, but since that makes "your spellbook was stolen" uninteresting, most DMs won't steal the spellbook, meaning most players won't take the precaution, meaning that DMs who do are effectively metagaming against their players.

Just like in 3.X I often gave NPCs inherent bonuses rather than magic items. My players ofc threw fits because it felt like cheating, but the reason I did it is because it is impossible to actually maintain the reward cycle of killing, looting, and shopping when every kill doubles your wealth.

Once again, WBL delenda est. Enemies having non-item bonuses (or things like the Drow's disintegrating equipment in earlier editions) is crappy. The solution is to have a system where you cannot turn yourself into a demigod by lighting a large enough pile of gold on fire, or turn a hoard of +1 swords into a +10 sword. Then enemies can have regular equipment, and PCs can simply not use that equipment, or maybe get a marginal upgrade like turning a Lightning Axe into a Fire Spear because a Fire Spear works better for their character.

[Gurgeh]

If you're talking about the party's enemies, I don't think spellbook theft is happening to increase their power so much as to decrease the player's. It's not bad tactics so much as it is a shift in the social contract that can be unreasonably effective because people assumed they didn't need to take precautions. It's relatively easy to have backups against spellbook theft, but since that makes "your spellbook was stolen" uninteresting, most DMs won't steal the spellbook, meaning most players won't take the precaution, meaning that DMs who do are effectively metagaming against their players.

Yes. Punishing people for failing to describe their elaborate security precautions is only worthwhile if the scenario is something the players enjoy. If the players don't want to play as paranoid murderhobo sociopaths then the world shouldn't expect them to be.

Or, from a non-RP and purely mechanical point of view: trying to balance something by making it tedious for the player to do is never a good idea.

[Talakeal]

Once again, WBL delenda est. Enemies having non-item bonuses (or things like the Drow's disintegrating equipment in earlier editions) is crappy. The solution is to have a system where you cannot turn yourself into a demigod by lighting a large enough pile of gold on fire, or turn a hoard of +1 swords into a +10 sword. Then enemies can have regular equipment, and PCs can simply not use that equipment, or maybe get a marginal upgrade like turning a Lightning Axe into a Fire Spear because a Fire Spear works better for their character.

Much easier said than done.

Players like getting treasure, and like that treasure to have a mechanical benefit.

At the same time, enemies with lots of flavorful gizmos is fun, and depending on the system maybe mechanically necesary to keep up with the PCs.

Like, imagine if comic books worked under the same assumptions as D&D, where every time a villain was defeated their gadgets (and to make the analogy more apt, powers) were added to the hero's arsenal.

[Batcathat]

Much easier said than done.

Players like getting treasure, and like that treasure to have a mechanical benefit.

At the same time, enemies with lots of flavorful gizmos is fun, and depending on the system maybe mechanically necesary to keep up with the PCs.

Like, imagine if comic books worked under the same assumptions as D&D, where every time a villain was defeated their gadgets (and to make the analogy more apt, powers) were added to the hero's arsenal.

I think Batman has used villain gadgets on occasion, at least. But yeah, it's not exactly common and that has always kind of bothered me a little. Someone creating revolutionary equipment and using it to rob banks is weird enough, no one else using said equipment for anything is even weirder.

Also, doesn't the solution of giving NPCs inherent bonuses instead of equipment go against the above reasoning just as much as RandomPeasant's suggestions? With the added "bonus" of possibly annoying players more, since having a system that relies a lot on magic items but not giving any seems less honest than having a system that relies less on magic items.

[Ignimortis]

Much easier said than done.

Players like getting treasure, and like that treasure to have a mechanical benefit.

At the same time, enemies with lots of flavorful gizmos is fun, and depending on the system maybe mechanically necesary to keep up with the PCs.

Like, imagine if comic books worked under the same assumptions as D&D, where every time a villain was defeated their gadgets (and to make the analogy more apt, powers) were added to the hero's arsenal.

Using ABP sorta circumvents the issue (up to a point — the game still expects you to have at-will Flight, and Mind Blank, and Death Ward, etc). But at least enemies don't have to have magic swords and an array of armor items by level 8.

[gnomish dwelf]

constitution, whenever higer than level, should determine hit dice.

[Lucas Yew]

Once again, WBL delenda est. Enemies having non-item bonuses (or things like the Drow's disintegrating equipment in earlier editions) is crappy.

Also, doesn't the solution of giving NPCs inherent bonuses instead of equipment go against the above reasoning just as much as RandomPeasant's suggestions? With the added "bonus" of possibly annoying players more, since having a system that relies a lot on magic items but not giving any seems less honest than having a system that relies less on magic items.

TBH, it's less "annoyed" and more like "infernal wrath" for me, though my rationality and ethics keeps me from bull rushing my fellow player(s including the GM) equipped with torches and pitchforks...

Using ABP sorta circumvents the issue (up to a point — the game still expects you to have at-will Flight, and Mind Blank, and Death Ward, etc). But at least enemies don't have to have magic swords and an array of armor items by level 8.

A solid proven solution (if a bit band-aid-y). If I ever run a PF2 game, I'll run both the vanilla and ABP rules together, ruling that only the higher of item / potency bonus apply (to simulate a newbie adventurer picking up a +3 Major Striking greatsword by fate and actually benefiting).

[icefractal]

Inherent bonuses are fine ... if the PCs can operate that way too, and if it's presented as "this guy with a bunch of permanent buffs, implied to have pretty serious backing" rather than "just a normal bandit".

When you have stuff like a normal person using low-quality equipment, but the numbers are set to match fully geared PCs, it makes the PCs look pretty crap. Wow, with significant magical augmentation you can be the equal of some random dude who's not trying that hard!

[Tanarii]

Obviously YMMV, and this is influenced by the games I was personally in or heard about, but the idea of "paranoia = leave your spellbook somewhere you can't see it" seems bizarre to me.

I used to be a paranoid player, and rule #1 of that paranoia was:
Don't trust in anything but yourself, and possibly the other party members.

One failed save, and your spellbooks were in serious danger. If you failed a save all items on your person had to make a save or be destroyed, and paper had some pretty bad item saves.

[Quertus]

Inherent bonuses are fine ... if the PCs can operate that way too, and if it's presented as "this guy with a bunch of permanent buffs, implied to have pretty serious backing" rather than "just a normal bandit".

When you have stuff like a normal person using low-quality equipment, but the numbers are set to match fully geared PCs, it makes the PCs look pretty crap. Wow, with significant magical augmentation you can be the equal of some random dude who's not trying that hard!

Caring too much about the NPCs Captain Hobo's the PCs.

One failed save, and your spellbooks were in serious danger. If you failed a save all items on your post had to make a save or be destroyed, and paper had some pretty bad item saves.

Citation? AFB, but iirc there was a… maybe 10 entry table, that said something like, "find the top 4 that apply, and roll a d4".

constitution, whenever higer than level, should determine hit dice.

I'm guessing you believe in HP as meat points? Or just that the healthy Wizard should hit more often than the Fighter?

[gnomish dwelf]

I'm guessing you believe in HP as meat points? Or just that the healthy Wizard should hit more often than the Fighter?

I believe that the unexperienced commoner should have an equal chance that the experienced adventurer to survive from attrition, mind you, i come from 2nd edition, so I am not sure I would defend the same position for 3rd edition.

[Khedrac]

constitution, whenever higher than level, should determine hit dice.

Ah - did you ever play or see a copy of Gamma World 1st or 2nd Ed? (Not sure about 3rd.)

There your Con score was your hit dice (adding points to stats under 18 was one of the bonuses one could choose for "levelling").
If I remember correctly 1st Ed was d6 hit dice for all, 2nd Ed started handing out bonuses for "pure strain humans" (other than having computers usually react positively to them) and one of them was d8 for hit dice.

[gnomish dwelf]

Ah - did you ever play or see a copy of Gamma World 1st or 2nd Ed? (Not sure about 3rd.)

There your Con score was your hit dice (adding points to stats under 18 was one of the bonuses one could choose for "levelling").
If I remember correctly 1st Ed was d6 hit dice for all, 2nd Ed started handing out bonuses for "pure strain humans" (other than having computers usually react positively to them) and one of them was d8 for hit dice.

sounds nice but I really propose a hybrid system... most characters have 8 or 9 constitution, so most would have 8 or 9 hit dice... however those that level, if they level above their constitution, get hd based on level, so a 21st level adventurer is still better than a 0th leve commoner with 3-18 constitution (3-18 HD).

[KorvinStarmast]

I count 2E as my first official foray into D&D during college.

I give the 2e authors some credit. First off the prose style was more accessible. The books were a little bit better organized. The re organiztion of classes was a noteworthy effort, I have mixed feelings about it but it was coherent. But as with its predecessor, bloat was going to happen and it did. I liked the extra descriptions of monsters in the MM, personally. If you were going to start in AD&D rather than B/X-BECMI 2e was a lot easier to digest than 1e AD&D. They'd had a decade or so of experience and fan feedback to make a few course corrections.

but rather a heavy handed attempt to make the core concept of killing stuff to get stronger make sense.

Which is unfortunately only part of the level progression concept from the original idea. And it very much took the game over in 3.x, unfortunately. The GP/XP approach and the monster XP, both together, was IMO the superior one. YMMV. Gave you multiple paths to advancement. Heck, getting XP for a magic item was a whole 'nother good idea, though its application was uneven from table to table.

If the players don't want to play as paranoid murderhobo sociopaths then the world shouldn't expect them to be.

You can be paranoid without being a murder hobo and/or sociopath. My warlock, for example, pact of tome, chose Alarm as her first ritual ... because she is paranoid.

One failed save, and your spellbooks were in serious danger. If you failed a save all items on your person had to make a save or be destroyed, and paper had some pretty bad item saves.

Yep. Dragon's breath wiped out many an item in my experience, but man, rolling all of those saving throws took a while. Lesson learned was "Avoid Dragon's Breath!"

[Lord Torath]

Regarding the cost of spellbooks, I think in the 2E DMG they had rules about how much spellbooks cost and how many pages each spell took up in the spellbook and such. If I recall correctly, it was something outrageous like 2000 go for a 100 page spellbook, and 5000 gp for a smaller, lighter, 50 page spellbook, something really ridiculous. Maybe if it made spellbooks harder to destroy than regular books, but I don't reme,ber anything along those lines.

[KorvinStarmast]

Regarding the cost of spellbooks, I think in the 2E DMG they had rules about how much spellbooks cost and how many pages each spell took up in the spellbook and such. If I recall correctly, it was something outrageous like 2000 go for a 100 page spellbook, and 5000 gp for a smaller, lighter, 50 page spellbook, something really ridiculous. Maybe if it made spellbooks harder to destroy than regular books, but I don't reme,ber anything along those lines.

We had a player in AD&D 1e who went to the trouble of having metal (steel with copper coating on the inside) boxex made to protect his spell books. The DM and he came up with a price, and this very much increased the saving throw of the books when someone laid a fireball on us. He even had, in the same book bag, a pottery container of beeswax to reseal the boxes when he stowed them.
Why?
The first time we ended up in the water the DM did a percentile check to see how much water intrusion happened, and a couple of the spells, randomly determined, were ruined. What I loved about the player was his response to that. Not "DM, you screwed me" but "how do I prevent that in the future" and beeswax is what he came up with.

When you embrace a modest amount of simulation/verisimilitude, stuff like that can be part of the fun.

Whenever he was in town, he was always scrambling for money and a chance to write another scroll. His scroll tubes were made of bone and had tapered wooden stoppers with, once again, beeswax seals. (He even provided the DM with a drawing/specs, yes, we were engineering students ).

[RandomPeasant]

Yes. Punishing people for failing to describe their elaborate security precautions is only worthwhile if the scenario is something the players enjoy.

It's similar to the attempts to balance planar binding by having devils weasel out of contracts. It sounds good at first glance, but the end result is a conflict of technicalities between the players and the DM that ends up not being fun.

Players like getting treasure, and like that treasure to have a mechanical benefit.

I didn't say no treasure, I said no WBL. Others in this thread have mentioned PF's ABP, while my preferred solution is Tome Magic Items. But the basic idea is that you make it so that you can't turn a big pile of crappy magic items into a game-breaking bonus. Then you can just give enemies treasure and that treasure can be different from the magic items the PCs currently have (and therefore rewarding to get), but not game-breaking. So you fight a bunch of Yuan-Ti and instead of having generic +1 swords and +1 chainmail and whatnot that go to the upgrade from +2 to +3 on your cloak of resistance, they have various snake-themed weapons (like acid whips and poison daggers) which have roughly the same bonuses as your current gear and you can use them if you think it is cooler to have a poison dagger than the ice hammer you got from when you fought some Frost Giants last adventure.

[Milodiah]

Yeah, my stance on magic items is that I mostly detest the Just Numbers ones, like rings of protection and cloaks of resistance. I'm coming around to the idea of PF's ABP because my current GM is using it, and he managed to dissuade me from my stance on "I like muh barbie doll dressup how dare you take away muh magic item hoard" by pointing out that I had just said "Man I wish I could use this Cloak of Piercing but I can't really afford to get rid of this Cloak of Protection, my Fortitude AND Will saves suck ass".

When I'm DMing for 3.5/PF I spend a lot of time thinking about magic items, and usually end up creating my own at least once per Drop. I focus on getting a fine balance of "stuff I think my party would like to have" and "not making it obvious the GM is doing that", with the knowledge that anything they don't like they can certainly find a buyer for. Plus just enough of a sprinkling of trapped, cursed, or otherwise dangerous items to temper the impulse of "aw yeah free stuff!" with a bit of caution, but not so much to turn them off of Loot.

It really paid off with an entire arc that ended up getting started by a cursed scimitar that started some diabolical whispers to the glory hound fighter who was in it for the fame that the others were stealing the spotlight and downplaying your role in the heroics, especially the bard, who you never really liked anyway. They're trying to shut you out of your rightful place in the legends. You can't just let them do that, you know.

Plus, creating custom magic items lets me fiddle with game balance in little ways that wouldn't really be well suited to sweeping houserules. As much as I dislike 5e's massively expanded Concentration spell nerfs (which could probably be an entirely new chain in this thread), I acknowledge it'd take a lot of cautious houseruling to adjust without wrecking the built-in balancing decisions in unexpected ways. But I can offset it a little bit by giving the wizard my homebrewed Magemind Amulet, which lets him choose to either shunt one Concentration spell onto it to hold two Concentration spells at once, or automatically succeed on one Concentration check per round. I got a really happy player, a balance item adjusted somewhat for my liking, and a good reward for clearing the dungeon, all at once.

[Vahnavoi]

@Quertus: in order to have time to reply to some other post, I'm limiting my reply to just few points:

That doesn't match my experience. AFB, but IIRC a book, quill & ink run much, much less than a horse.

Per quick online search, normal spellbook costs 50 gold pieces per page. A travel spellbook costs 100 gold pieces per page. Chapter 7 of Dungeon Master's Guide. IIRC, spells take one page per level, so one travel spellbook for four 1st level spells costs 400 gold pieces.

If a character has bookbinding proficiency, they can cut costs by 50% to 75% percent, and it takes two weeks, plus one day for each five pages, to make. Player's options: Spells & Magic.

A horse, on the other hand, costs between 75 and 1000 gold pieces, depending on how good of a horse it is. Donkeys and mules are cheaper.

Conclusion: if you've been getting redundant copies without significant time and financial costs, you have not actually played under the rules on which my arguments are build on.

Like, you can argue for cheaper paper books - the basic rules assume vellum or parchment. But under the basic rules, books are expensive. You only get one book for free at character creation.

Suppose Evard wants Bigby's spells. Is it easier to get them from Bigby, or from Bigby's camp while Bigby is out? Which location encourages Evard to come (or send his agents) more? IMO, "back at camp" is the juicier target.

You are skipping steps. Let's quickly go over basic requirement of a safe camp: ​easy for you to reach, hard to reach for enemies

Basic form of that is not having location of your camp be common knowledge. So if Bigby is doing their job right, Evard does not know where their camp is, forcing Evard to go through Bigby or Bigby's associates.

Another basic form is limiting access. One of the better ways Bigby can do this is by using his unique spells, the very same ones a potential enemy might want, as keys. So now even if Evard knows where the camp is, they have to go through Bigby.

All the while, there's the question of what Bigby himself is doing. If he's say, going through a dungeon where he might have to wade through water, have fireballs or flaming oil thrown at him, have to crawl through mud-filled tunnels, get in a fight etc., he has a lot of very good reasons to not have a cumbersome and fragile object such as book on his person. On the plus side, for Evard, that is, if Bigby exhausts himself in those activities, ambushing Bigby when he's returning to camp is one of the likeliest occasions Evard can best him. Provided, of course, that Evard knows where Bigby is. Before even asking your questions, nevermind figuring out the answers, Evard has to win a round of spy versus spy. If Bigby wins, it doesn't matter which Evard thinks is the juicier target, because Evard doesn't get to choose. The actual odds of either winning the information game depend on exact character traits, so cannot be calculated in the abstract.

Again, more likely that it *won't* impact you, personally and directly, than that it will. After all, whoever has your spellbook already has your spellbook - why should they care about you any more?

They can use the information to counter and kill you so that you won't take revenge; they can sell information on what spells you have to your enemies; they very likely are your enemies because you are trying to kill or steal from them; so on and so forth. Like, replacing "spellbook" with "recipe for explosives" should make many of these answer self-evident. Then there's, you know, the possibility of them using your spells against other people you care about. YOU have that many reasons to care about THEM.

Game master: "The terrorists stole your blueprints for a nuclear weapon while you were away."
Quertus: "Cool, that means they won't try to kill me anymore!"
Game master: " . . . "

Um… now, I know I'm senile, and get things confused, but…

In 2e, is it not the case that
Speak with Dead is a Cleric 2 spell;
by default (ie, outside things like specialty priests from Faiths and Avatars), Clerics get access to "all the spells"?

Unless I'm really confused, it's pretty dang trivial.

It's Cleric 3. Accessible to clerics above X level, limited number per day, reliant on preparation, is not "universal access". I forget if it's 5th or 6th character level, either way, at the start players don't have access, then for several level after there's significant opportunity cost to preparing Speak with Dead instead of something that helps you from becoming dead. Speak with Dead not prepared? Oh gosh, time to retreat to camp to rest and recover spells... really hope no-one attacks when we're doing that....

We may have to disagree on how "obvious" [using teleport, word of recall, etc. to return to safety] was. You saw it, I saw it, but most people I played with? Not so much.

"The word of recall spell takes the priest instantly back to his sanctuary when the word is uttered."

That's how the spell description of word of recall begins, for example. Tell me with a straight face it's not obvious. Your anecdotal experience matters not, when easily acquirable evidence shows this was common enough to become an established trope across gaming mediums.

To draw this to some kind of a close: those "most people" and "most modules" you played with? Yeah, they didn't observe the basic rules of the game any better than Ed Greenwood's modules. If my observations and conclusions look alien, it's because in reality we were playing different games.

[Quertus]

Heck, getting XP for a magic item was a whole 'nother good idea, though its application was uneven from table to table.:

The XP values in the 2e dmg were for creating items, not for just finding them. I'm not sure 2e gave XP for treasure (except to Thieves, as an optional rule).

Regarding the cost of spellbooks, I think in the 2E DMG they had rules about how much spellbooks cost and how many pages each spell took up in the spellbook and such. If I recall correctly, it was something outrageous like 2000 go for a 100 page spellbook, and 5000 gp for a smaller, lighter, 50 page spellbook, something really ridiculous. Maybe if it made spellbooks harder to destroy than regular books, but I don't reme,ber anything along those lines.

Huh. My senile memory could be wrong about the pricing details, I suppose.

If your memory is correct, that puts it well above the couple hundred gold cost of a good horse, but within the price range of a wagon plus multiple horses to pull it.

Spoiler: Halls of the High King spoiler

Show

And well within the range of what you could afford if you haggle with the quest-giver.

But what else is a 2e Wizard gonna spend their share of the loot (which, mind you, probably includes "all the cash and valuables", as the random tables have very little in the way of magical items of use to Wizards) on, besides spell books? A tower? (How much did that run?) Golems generally didn't come online until level 16-18, you usually paid for powerful spells with years of your life, not expensive components, and "gathering components (for items)" was a series of adventurers, not a trip to the market. There really wasn't much else/better for Wizards to do with their cash.

Perhaps at some point I'll make it back to my books…