Spell Books (player's perspective)

[Scott Gibbons]

It's been a few months now since Rifter #40 came out with my article on spell books, and I was wanting to get some feed back on it from players of the various PB games, if I could.

Specifically, have any of you incorporated spell books into your characters? Has your GM put them into your game as a part of a plot/NPC/villain/treasure yet? And most important, has it been fun for you?

I know how it works in my own group, but would like to know how it's faring in the -real- world. Thanks!

[Library Ogre]

I liked the basic mechanic of allowing an additional spell per level to be learned if spellbooks were maintained; in fact, I think it's a bit better for spellcasters than my mechanic of allowing them to go over their notes for certain spells and cast them for greater effect (i.e. a 1 level boost). Your thoughts on the use of spell books (as notebooks and lab books) mirrors much of my own thinking on it.

Beyond the basic mechanic, I did not like the article. I don't like the investure of permanent PPE into spellbooks, nor the associated mechanics (such as spellbooks being inherrent amplifiers of a man of magic's magical aura, simply by being in their possession).

While I understood, even if I personally disagreed with, the restriction of "no computers", I thought the restriction that they must be in codex format (i.e. bound, with a spine) to be ludicrous. Long before there were codicies, books were scrollls, and there's no rational reason that a spellbook could not be one, as well; it would simply have an equivalent page count. These then tie into vague rules for how much fits into a spell book... between one and six spells, regardless of the size of the book. If I'm using a small diary I picked up at Borders for $9.99, it will hold as much as a codex the size of my thigh, because both are books.

Furthermore, your rules for learning new spells from a spell book (specifically, the expansions thereon) ignore some of the basics of learning spell magic; PFRPG put that learning a spell takes two days per level of the spell. The basic times you have listed make sense in this regard, as lacking a teacher, you must experiment on your own. However, cutting that in half with access to a teacher means you're actually learning faster from a teacher than you would... with a teacher. Similarly, doubling the time spent on study will, in some cases, drop your study time beneath that of having a competent teacher, and you don't address the impact of having Speed Reading; how much of that time is reading the material, and how much is learning to use it?

So, if I were to use spell books, I'd likely lift a single mechanic (learning an additional spell per experience level) from your article, and ignore the rest, using my own material, instead.

[Snuffy]

Thank you for writing that article. It came out in the Rifter about a week or two after I had introduced a book into our adventure. Unfortunately, the player who is/was playing the Ley Line Walker has been problematic. I intend to use it the future and test it out.