Was looking up info regarding how many hours per day can be set aside for copying spells into a spellbook and stumbled upon a question mAc posted on another forum here.
Was looking up info regarding how many hours per day can be set aside for copying spells into a spellbook and stumbled upon a question mAc posted on another forum here.
Originally Posted by Arashi_Leonhart
That said, still didn't find any official commentary on my question. I'd imagine it's going to be between 8 and 16 hours, but knowing the specific number would be better.
Why should a wizard have a hard limit on how long they can spend copying spells?
Let them hunch over the parchment by flickering candlelight until the DM says they need to start making CON saves or fall asleep/gain a level of exhaustion. At DM's option, the careful attention and magical energy involved might make this a forced march equivalent, or they can go on for sixteen/twenty/sixteen+CON mod hours, or they also need to make a INT save to not drop dead of boredom, or whatever. Maybe the other players get concerned at some point and the rogue starts wafting sleeping gas into the room, or the barbarian picks the wizard up and drags them off to a bed and ties them to it.
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From looking at other activities, the traditional D&D work day seems to be 8 hours long.
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Oh, forgot to mention this is for AL. Might check the AL FAQs again, but I don't remember anything mentioned beyond rules for copying scrolls.
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The part that I got hung up on was when the PHB or DMG specifies a task requiring a certain amount of material in gold costs, as if you can just "poof" the gold away and continue on. But you still need the actual materials, which you would need to actually go out of your way to obtain.
But for how long you can write, that's just a general DM question like anything else. It's like asking how long you can read books. Well, I suppose you could get exhausted, but that can't be any more exhausting than running around in dungeons all day.
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
Never mind, found it in an older version of the AL FAQs. You'd think that they'd want to make sure newer FAQs still have this information available, but nope.
All downtime activities are assumed to be eight hours.
Of course, the question then becomes what you do with the other 16...
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
Yeah, that is weird. Came up in my group's first real campaign, especially because the 'fine ink' isn't mentioned anywhere else (like, the equipment section only lists the price of regular ink, and does so by weight). This doesn't tell you HOW much ink you use, and it also mentions other components in experimentation that always work out the same price depending on spell level. It's an abstraction, and my group kind of picked up the "poof" method and also applied it to spell components with a cost to simply things.
Like with Find Familiar, it's much easier just to deduct 10 gold in the wilderness under the assumption that your character had ALREADY spent it to acquire those materials, then figure out how much incense and charcoal makes up the 10 gold value. This actually came up on critical role recently, where the Wizard didn't have the materials to cast the spell and was taking charcoal from the fire place and incense from a party member and trying to work out with the DM what he needed to cast it. After being used to the hand-wave method, this just seemed weird to me.
It's like, Schrodinger's gold.
Given the way gold components specifically aren't covered by spellcasting focuses, I generally consider them important enough to want players to specifically pick them up. If you like your spellcasters, occasionally giving them components as loot is a good way to round out the treasure experience. (Though, by the by, I disagree with mAc's literalist reading of "you magically spend gold and the ink just happens" - I don't think that's the intent of the passage by any means).
Also, obligatory Seika grognard "you don't know how easy you young'uns have it" time.
5e Identify components: a pearl worth 100gp, and an owl feather. As with all 5e components, not consumed because the spell doesn't specifically say so. Can cast as a ritual to not burn the spell slot at the cost of it taking ten minutes.
2e Identify components: a pearl worth 100gp, and an owl feather, made into an infusion with wine to be drunk (and, for obvious reasons, therefore not reusable). Also eight wholly uninterrupted hours. Also eight points of Constitution, recovered at a point an hour; if you hit 0 CON which is much more likely with 2e chargen, you're knocked out for 24 hours. (Also it works 10% of the time per level of the caster, capping at 90% and always gives you false information 5% of the time).
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It's more that I didn't know what else to make of it. Wizard inks as loot had never occurred to me. But I like that better than handwaving it.
I wasn't too worried about the ink thing. If I were DMing, I'd probably make a player state that they had bought ink + other materials for adding spells to their book from other sources IF they weren't in town. Otherwise, I'd assume that they could just find that stuff in town, and could "poof" their gold away if they're adding in the town.
Now, if a player has thousands of gold and plenty of weight left to go before hitting encumbrance, I'd be fine with them saying that they had the material all along, but I'd limit how much they could bring based on how far out of town they are, how long they were planning to be out of town, and if they have a racial or class feature that reduces how much time they need to benefit from a long rest. Maybe 300-500g, as this would be more than sufficient for a few level 1 and 2 spells, which can reasonably be added to the spellbook during a long rest.
Spells that are level 3 and higher I would require downtime days unless the party agrees to protect the wizard all day while they're out and about, which could make for a potential encounter that the wizard can't participate in lest they risk their notes, spell scroll, or spell book getting ruined.
Make someone buy irl the components they use in character for spellmaking.
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Spell components as treasure is classic. The nymph rewards you with a lock of her hair, the triton proffers a scale he's shed, within the dragon's hoard is a shard of agate so fine that it can be used in an Awaken spell ...
Less classic, but much funnier, is "the jeweller carefully examines the diamond you pried from the eye of the State of Urghallagh, and eventually says she'll offer you 499 gold for it".
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That reminds me, some people bring that back by getting rid of focuses and component pouches. Then gathering rare components becomes much more prevalent.
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
Oh, I like the idea of spell components as loot. I may do that when I'm DMing next. I don't know if I'd get rid of foci and pouches because it might be too inconvenient, but I do like the idea of making those details matter more and it's a good way to beef up treasure hoards, as I've found rolling on 5E treasure tables can lead to some monotonous loot.
But as I've said before Mac, my group is very big on convenience so I don't think they'd appreciate it.
Part of the reason they might be like that is because we started with me as an inexperienced DM, and I wasn't aware of the materials used in spells. None of us were aware of foci or pouches, so the Wizard was unable to cast any spell he lacked materials for. I followed the adventure expecting it to be comprehensive, but it didn't specifically have spell components lying about for him to find.
So he'd just keep asking 'does this room have any guano in it?' and I'd always tell him no, why would there be? I didn't even know he was looking for spell components, so I was totally confused by his fixation on guano, spider webs and salt.
It wasn't until they fought some giant spiders late in the campaign that he obtained the webs he needed to cast 'Web' that I understood what he was doing and found the part about component pouches in the book.
Hmm... I neglected to pick up Identify on my current Bard because we're playing Curse of Straid and buying things basically isn't an option. The pearl would be a sweet treasure reward, but I doubt my DM would deliberately throw one in.
Last edited by Saiga; March 8th, 2018 at 11:33 PM.
I used to be all about "hand waving after the fact" type stuff in the name of "narrative" and not getting bogged down "bean counting," but I've found that grounding the game in more concrete details tends to help enrich the narrative.
It still has a place, but they'll get used to it. I already work this in with having very strange recharging methods for magic items. Like a boot of spiderclimb that can't be recharged without harvesting the silk of a giant spider and using it as an ingredient to create a liquid that is used to draw archaic runes over the boots to activate it again.
I never expected components to be a thing either, but players are already primed to hunt for them for their more powerful spells. Some of the more mundane spells have some pretty crazy components too that could be adventures themselves.
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
It might work. I had thought about running a game like Out of the Abyss where both martials and spellcasters will initially struggle to get a full set of equipment (and omit foci/pouches) but the last time we were told to create characters who would start without any equipment we had one player make a Hexblade with Mage Armour and Improved Pact Weapon so that he had armour, a weapon and focus all at will without any equipment so I feel like that could get cheesy.
I still like the idea of hunting down spell components - it feels like a great idea for have players go on adventures to obtain new spells, and the players can choose where they want to go based on what they need.
It's immediately made me think of a system where players don't really need to learn new spells or have a cap on them, but they need to find a bunch of materials for each spell and quest accordingly to obtain them. That'd be cool.
In one of my games, I'm experimenting with having Long Rests take a week. It should enhance the feeling of time passing and characters spending time together.
He never sleeps. He never dies.
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.
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