I'm running a campaign in Faerun, with Red Wizards as one of the main antagonists. My party includes a wizard. Every time the party kills one of said Red Wizards, they expect to find a spellbook, and rightly so. This will lead to my Wizard having a lot of spells to choose from.
If you have a wizard who concentrates on damage (or if I was being honest who I would say "wastes their potential"), then in all honesty you can probably give them as many spells as you want. They have already decided to skip the best spells, and likely already have the strongest damage spells, so you won't be making much difference in their power.
Free Spell Books Download
tag_hash_104 🔥 https://urllie.com/2yjZrJ 🔥
If you have a wizard who chooses their spells carefully and has something for every situation then you are giving them a significant buff, because now there will be no situations where they can't do something.
There is also a considering in terms of downtime, if the party get into situations where they have a day to prep then knowing a lot of spells is a big advantage when you can change them on a long rest, but if they don't always have a day to swap spells then knowing all the spells in the world won't help if they don't have the right ones prepared.
As an example in one campaign I play with a wizard who could have every spell in the game, they would still spend 10 minutes wondering what spell to cast before deciding to cast fire bolt or magic missile. Then there is my wizard who has a list of about 20 spells that I want other than what I am already going to take, and anything not on that list would pretty much make no difference to me, but giving me any of those spells would give me a considerable boost in power and I actively advise my DM not to give me everything they know I want.
I consider a spellbook as treasure, and I use Sane Magic Item Prices to calculate what treasure I am going to give the group (though I do run a pretty high magic campaign, because loot is fun to me). I decide what spells are going to be in a spellbook, calculate the value, and then work out which mages are going to have spellbooks, and which are not.
Often my group will find a spellbook that simply contains no new spells, this lets them feel good that at least they found something, but means I can give it away from essentially free (they can still sell it, but for a significantly lesser value).
The reason for it is that one of the major limitations as a wizard is how many different spells you can prepare in a day. After you prepare all the generally useful spells like those listed below under "bread and butter", you typically have preciously few "free" preparation slots left. It does not matter if you have a spellbook of dozens other spells then. I speak from practical experience: I have copied several spells to my book that in the course of seven levels worth of play that I have never even once used; and that even though I make it a point to prepare such subpar spells on purpose, to see if I can find some fun, creative application.
In addition, I agree with @Jack that often it may be difficult to transcribe all the spells you find for time and cash reasons. I know that I have struggled with that for many levels in a relatively fast paced campaign, where the other players' characters have no reason to hang back at home for days on end. The money is also always too short and I am in debt. I think it is a valid reason why handing out spells liberally at some point yields diminishing returns to the player character wizard. But Jack made this point much more eloquently already.
Quantitatively: to learn all the spells from the core rules up to 3rd level (after your picks at caster level 6) would cost you nearly 8,000 gp. Your expected wealth by then is about 4,500 gp. You'll not be able to afford it. (As gold grows quicker than spells, you will catch up around level 8, but this does not even factor in costly components you need, like a crytal ball for 1,000 gp, or a Leo's chest Replica for 5,050 gp).
However, I still would be somewhat stingy in handing out good additional spells: the longing for that which they do not yet have is a great driver for engagement by the players, and finally finding a long-sought spell is a great reward. So don't go monty haul. Make it meaningful for the wizard to find the great spells. The following methods can help you do so:
Wizards are really scared to lose their spell books. That is why it is common that, once they have learned the selection of spells they like, they hide their books in a safe place. In this case, the wizard will not have the book on his person, and finding it becomes a challenge in itself. Spellbooks are not magical items either, so they are not easy to detect through floor tiles and such. Clever wizards may even use decoy books to foil things like Locate Object. There are many published adventures where the spellbooks are cleverly hidden somewhere. Have your wizards do so, too.
Granted, not all wizards should have the exact same spell list. But many spells are bread and butter for a wizard and will likely be shared, think Detect Magic, Armor, Shield, Magic Missile, Invisibility, Misty Step, Counterspell, Dispel Magic, Haste, Fly, Fireball and/or Lightning Bolt, Sending, Polymorph. If your red wizards share a core of common spells, the number of extra, novel spells that reflect each wizard's specialty can be kept small, maybe one or two spells per book. This will make players happy (and can be reflected by accounting for it in the overall treasure calculation), upholds believability, and limits what you effectively hand out.
This is of course subjective and likely worth a discussion for each case, but there are a lot of spells that are not that desirable, because they are rarely applicable, or they have effects that are in many regards inferior to a similar spell.
By providing such spells as the extra spells, you can keep the spellbooks varied while at the same time not granting much power to the wizard. Some spells I can suggest (although other's opinion may differ, and they surely have some value in special circumstances): Illusory Script, Jump, Ray of Sickness, Witch Bolt, Darkness, Darkvision, Nystul's Magic Aura, Bestow Curse, Feign Death, Vampiric Touch, Elemental Bane, Blight, Phantasmal Killer, Seeming, Move Earth, Symbol, Control Weather
There also are spells that have largely similar effects. While they may add slightly to the versatility of the PC wizard, the benefit will be mild. For example, instead of Fireball they could learn Lightning Bolt or Vitriolic Sphere, and while that may be of use in an adventure against fire-resistant enemies, in many cases they substitute for each other as mid-level area damage spells.
Even if they are not magic items, spellbooks are only useful to wizards. There may not be a market to sell spellbooks easily, especially when in contrast to scrolls, it also costs a lot of money to copy them into a form you can use (50 gp in inks per spell level plus an empty spellbook on top). You as the GM can rule that it is as difficult to offload a spellbook as it is with a magic item, so their monetary value is questionable. Furthermore, merchants may not want to buy a spellbook that is clearly one of the red wizards', for fear of being targeted for retribution from that group.
Just because a wizard finds a spell, that doesn't mean the wizard can use a spell. Time, money, and a the need for a safe place can slow down your wizard's ability to make use of the spells they find.
At lower levels it takes hours to copy a few spells, at higher levels it takes days. I have found in my own games that wizards have to carefully choose what spells they have time to transcribe into their own books. This seriously slows down their acquisition of spells.
Wizards live and die by their spells. Everything else is secondary. They learn new spells as they experiment and grow in experience. They can also learn them from other wizards, from ancient tomes or inscriptions, and from ancient creatures (such as the fey) that are steeped in magic.
How many hours can they copy spells in a day? That's maybe a reasonable whole separate question, but a reasonable answer is somewhere between 8 to 16 hours a day, so those 3 3rd level spells will easily take more than a day, maybe more than 2. That's just 3 spells.
Some wizards can copy spells in their own school faster than other spells, and Order of the Scribe wizards are faster still. These are important subclass features and should be given a chance to play out.
Something should be happening while the wizard is doing this copying. The bad guys shouldn't just say, "we'll check back with you next Tuesday", they should be advancing their own plots. That time pressure makes the wizard have to pick and choose which spells to copy.
And copying spells takes "material components you expend as you experiment with the spell to master it, as well as the fine inks you need to record it". It is reasonable at a minimum that the wizard must buy inks ahead of time, and for some spells, if you want to play hardball, maybe the wizard needs access to a town or city or some other place to get fancy components.
Take away their spellbook, or even just suggest it. Let your wizard know about "some other wizard" who lost their spellbook, and let them think about the implications of that. The PHB specifically talks about keeping a spare spellbook in "a safe place". If you even give a hint that such a thing might happen, then your wizard is also going to want to spend time making a backup, and that takes even more time.
I'm going to argue with the idea that NPC wizards carry spellbooks with them at all times. Yes, that's normally how PCs work, but PCs are weirdos. They wander the world looking for trouble instead of living in a home (or at least some sort of semi-long-term quarters). If I were a wizard and I had an apartment that I expected to go back to every night, my extremely valuable spellbooks would be well-secured and hidden there, not stuffed in my robe where I could lose them or be robbed. Anyway, if they're close to home, are they even going to have a place to put a big spellbook? Most people don't just walk around with a backpack all the time unless they're in school. 0852c4b9a8
son of neptune ebook free download
free downloading of folder icons