IF (and this "if" is up for debate) the Feature is replacing the clause in the Rule that defines the expenditure (see above) of the process, then the Feature does NOT have to explicitly list a monetary cost if that cost is 0. That's just grammar.
The only reason there could be for the feature replacing the gold cost as well as the time is if it said it replaced the gold cost as well as the time, which it doesn't. So no, the "if" is not up for debate. Well, I suppose it technically is, because we're debating it, but it really shouldn't be.
If the Rule says "The expenditure is 2 hours and 50 gold pieces."
and this gets replaced by "The expenditure is 2 minutes."
Then that is a grammatically correct way to specify that the time cost is 2 minutes and the monetary cost is 0 gp.
You might have a point here if the Wizardly Quill feature replacing text from the transcription section didn't explicitly state that it is talking about time. The fact that it calls out time but not money means it isn't replacing the entire line, it's replacing the time portion.
Ok, this just shows that you guys are both completely missing the point here. Like, there are ways to debate against this idea, but these aren't it. These just show that you aren't getting it.
It's actually tough to explain it more clearly at this point so I'll just go with another example instead:
Suppose you come to locked door and the doorman tells you that in order to get in you need to correctly follow the instructions at a nearby activity. You see an empty basket and next to the basket is a pile of apples and oranges. The sign says, "Put into the basket: 10 apples and 5 oranges." But, just before you get started the doorman yells "Wait!" and pulls away that sign and replaces it with a new sign which says, "Put into the basket: 2 apples".
Now, if you put 2 apples and 5 oranges into the basket, I can guarantee you that the doorman will not let you in. The 5 oranges were not required. The correct answer was to put in 2 apples and 0 oranges. The 0 oranges was not explicitly stated on the sign -- it is implied by the rules for grammar and math.
Now, if instead the doorman had yelled "Wait!" and then broke the sign in half and took away the half that said 10 apples and replaced it with a half of a sign that said 2 apples, then the correct answer would be 2 apples and 5 oranges.
THAT is the debate here. Not whether or not the Feature explicitly refers to oranges or not. It doesn't. We can all read that quite plainly obviously.
The time and the money both independently scale off of the spell level, not off of one another. A 1st level spell takes 2 hours. A 1st level spell costs 50 gp. A 2nd level spell takes 4 hours. A 2nd level spell costs 100 gp. The amount of time it takes does not dictate the amount of gold it costs (nor vice versa), but instead it's very explicitly shown that they are both dictated by the spell level, so changing the proportion of one to the spell level would not change the proportion of the other. For all you know, the "material components" could all be burned in a brazier within the first minute of the process, so there's no reason to believe spending more/less time means using more/fewer material components.
This is all very logical but it's not actually what the Rule says. The rule does NOT say the process takes 2 hours / level and costs 50 gp / level.
Instead, it says this: "For each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp." Yes, it's pedantic. But this yields logic more like this:
A first level spell { takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp }
Instead of: A first level spell takes 2 hours. A first level spell costs 50 gp. As you've stated above.
No, the time and the cost increase together. They are not independent of each other. If you are paying for a certain amount of materials, that indicates that you will be spending a certain amount of time performing experiments.
You said something along the lines of "you should explain to your players how the flavor matches the mechanics," so I raised you that maybe the players should explain that themselves.
Ok, well, I don't remember saying this but if I did then I hereby retract it because that's not what I've been trying to say.
My point about the role of the DM has always been that the DM should explain the outcome if there are two rules affecting a situation that are in direct conflict with each other and somehow did not supersede each other.
Obviously, this should never happen. This is not the best way to arrive at my interpretation of this Feature. This whole thing was a response to faulty logic. I was saying, like, ok, if you're saying that only the total timeframe has changed, but it's changed to the point where there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default, then we now have a new rule that directly conflicts with itself and therefore the DM has to determine what actually happened. At this point, different DMs will make different rulings to explain how 1 hour of experimentation is required at the same time that the total time required for experimentation + transcription is 2 minutes. And some DMs might even try to just ignore it, which is by far the worst option.
Ummm, but . . . the entire point of the example is that the act of traveling has no monetary cost. [ hand swooshing over a head ]
Rather appropriate for the hand to swoosh over your own. I pointed out an example where the method of travel charged money. The mere act has no cost, but the method used does. The same applies to transcription, even if you cut the time down.
Ok, let's back up -- it's like you're not even participating in the same conversation here.
I was speaking specifically of a type of statement where you are specifying how much of two different categories there is -- and if such a statement includes only one category than the other category is implied to be 0 by default. This is actually very straightforward, but I gave an example anyway.
You then quoted my example and then started talking about another example where there are costs stated for both categories. That misses the entire point of what was being explained completely and totally. If you're going to try to mock my statements you need to at least keep up with the discussion.
YES!!! Exactly! Thank you for making my point for me. Now we are getting somewhere.
You seem to think I made your point, but I'm pointing out interactions which are explicitly stated. Ultimately, the "specific" in this Specific Beats General instance applies only to the time, not the gold cost.
You actually made my point extremely well there.
This all goes back to my original statements that sometimes not every word in the text explicitly determines the outcome, and we can't always say that only the words in the text matter. This is because sometimes there are implicit but direct consequences created by what IS stated in the text.
As an example, I pointed out that in fact, the Light spell doesn't explicitly say anything about exposing Hidden creatures, and the rules for Hiding do not explicitly state what happens if there is any change in lighting within an area.
Then, you pointed out:
"[ The Rules for Hiding *do* ] talk about being able to hide in darkness, and that light negates darkness, and that you can't hide in plain sight. All of those spell out an explicit interaction: Lighting an open area where a creature is hiding just in the darkness negates the hide."
First, the underlined part of your quote is not stated anywhere in the rules. This is a conclusion that you drew after making 3 or 4 logical steps beyond what is actually written. And this is my entire point! The conclusion that you drew was correct. But it was not explicitly stated in the text. Instead, it was an implicit direct consequence of what actually IS stated in the text.
Now, of course I can't resist -- but you were incorrect in your starting point. The rules for Hiding do not talk about being able to hide in darkness. So, it actually takes several additional steps in logic before you can actually get to your correct conclusion.
As it turns out, there is a loose definition for being Hidden (being both unseen and unheard) that appears in the Unseen Attackers and Targets section of Chapter 9. This enables a DM, who "decides when circumstances are appropriate for hiding" (Chapter 7) to usually allow you to attempt to Hide within any heavily obscured area. This is because a heavily obscured area "such as darkness" causes an environment where "a creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area." (Chapter 8) Since a blinded creature cannot see (Appendix A), a creature within a heavily obscured area is unseen. Since darkness was used as an example of a heavily obscured area, we can finally determine that a creature can attempt to Hide in darkness -- which was your starting point above.
So that was another example in and of itself which makes my point. The Rules for Hiding do not state that you can Hide in darkness. Does that mean that you cannot Hide in darkness since the Rules for Hiding do not explicitly state that you can? Of course not. Being able to Hide in darkness is an implicit direct consequence of what the rules for Hiding DO say.
The Wizardly Quill provides a more specific rule saying the time you must spend to copy a spell into your spell book equals 2 minutes per spell level . The cost you must spend is not specifically addressed therefore the general rule for it still apply, including what it represent. You can disagree but that's how Specific VS General works.
Naw. Makes no sense.
The quill doesn't require ink. Any, ink. Not regular ink, not fine ink. It says in black and white that it does not need ink. The entire class and categories of items that can be collectively called an "ink"? It doesn't need them.
How is this hard? What is elusive about this?
Needs, no, ink. None. of any kind. Ever.
If you gotta pay money for inks. but then a rule says you don't need inks. Guess what? You don't gotta pay no money. This is really not complicated guys.
If there's a sword, and the sword doesn't require mayonnaise to work, but then you want to spread mayonnaise with the sword, would you argue that the sword would apparate mayonnaise for the purpose of spreading? Or would you argue that swords do require mayonnaise?
Let's say there is a sword that says exactly:
The sword doesn’t require mayonnaise. When you schmear with it, it produces mayonnaise in a color of your choice on the schmeared surface.
Then yeah, the mayo appears during the process of schmearing, right onto the bread's surface. Exactly like it says it does.
This whole thing seem to be down to refusing to believe the magic quill can do what it literally says it can do.
This addition seems irrelevant, since we aren't talking about the second part sentence of the bullet point. What we're talking about is very specifically the way that the quill does not "require" ink. I'm not contesting that the quill can always produce ink, since that's very obviously a part of the feature. I'm contesting the idea that the quill can do absolutely anything that any ink can do in the absence of ink.
There are two questions that I'd like answers to:
Is it or is it not true that swords do not require mayonnaise?
Can swords apparate infinite mayonnaise when they schmear?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
IF (and this "if" is up for debate) the Feature is replacing the clause in the Rule that defines the expenditure (see above) of the process, then the Feature does NOT have to explicitly list a monetary cost if that cost is 0. That's just grammar.
The only reason there could be for the feature replacing the gold cost as well as the time is if it said it replaced the gold cost as well as the time, which it doesn't. So no, the "if" is not up for debate. Well, I suppose it technically is, because we're debating it, but it really shouldn't be.
If the Rule says "The expenditure is 2 hours and 50 gold pieces."
and this gets replaced by "The expenditure is 2 minutes."
Then that is a grammatically correct way to specify that the time cost is 2 minutes and the monetary cost is 0 gp.
You might have a point here if the Wizardly Quill feature replacing text from the transcription section didn't explicitly state that it is talking about time. The fact that it calls out time but not money means it isn't replacing the entire line, it's replacing the time portion.
Ok, this just shows that you guys are both completely missing the point here. Like, there are ways to debate against this idea, but these aren't it. These just show that you aren't getting it.
It's actually tough to explain it more clearly at this point so I'll just go with another example instead:
Suppose you come to locked door and the doorman tells you that in order to get in you need to correctly follow the instructions at a nearby activity. You see an empty basket and next to the basket is a pile of apples and oranges. The sign says, "Put into the basket: 10 apples and 5 oranges." But, just before you get started the doorman yells "Wait!" and pulls away that sign and replaces it with a new sign which says, "Put into the basket: 2 apples".
Now, if you put 2 apples and 5 oranges into the basket, I can guarantee you that the doorman will not let you in. The 5 oranges were not required. The correct answer was to put in 2 apples and 0 oranges. The 0 oranges was not explicitly stated on the sign -- it is implied by the rules for grammar and math.
Now, if instead the doorman had yelled "Wait!" and then broke the sign in half and took away the half that said 10 apples and replaced it with a half of a sign that said 2 apples, then the correct answer would be 2 apples and 5 oranges.
THAT is the debate here. Not whether or not the Feature explicitly refers to oranges or not. It doesn't. We can all read that quite plainly obviously.
Rules don't work with empty space, though. The rules don't walk up to a sign-maker and say, "hey, make me a sign with a 2 and then a bunch of extra space to the right of it." The rules could just as easily walk up to a sign-maker and say, "hey, make me a massive sign with nothing but a small 2 somewhere near the middle," that effectively blocks out the entire rules for spellbooks, except we know that they don't because that's not how rules work. Like I said earlier, there's no reason that we should assume that the sign could have extra space that covers the gold cost, yet not assume that the sign could have extra space that covers the need to scribe spells of a level you could cast. The sign has nothing to say in either case, but it's just as likely for the sign to cover it with blank space. You've very adamantly suggested that the sign won't change the fact that a 1st level Wizard can't scribe a 9th level spell, and yet you're incredibly open to the possibility that the sign could cover the oranges.
The time and the money both independently scale off of the spell level, not off of one another. A 1st level spell takes 2 hours. A 1st level spell costs 50 gp. A 2nd level spell takes 4 hours. A 2nd level spell costs 100 gp. The amount of time it takes does not dictate the amount of gold it costs (nor vice versa), but instead it's very explicitly shown that they are both dictated by the spell level, so changing the proportion of one to the spell level would not change the proportion of the other. For all you know, the "material components" could all be burned in a brazier within the first minute of the process, so there's no reason to believe spending more/less time means using more/fewer material components.
This is all very logical but it's not actually what the Rule says. The rule does NOT say the process takes 2 hours / level and costs 50 gp / level.
Instead, it says this: "For each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp." Yes, it's pedantic. But this yields logic more like this:
A first level spell { takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp }
Instead of: A first level spell takes 2 hours. A first level spell costs 50 gp. As you've stated above.
No, the time and the cost increase together. They are not independent of each other. If you are paying for a certain amount of materials, that indicates that you will be spending a certain amount of time performing experiments.
Please, explain in detail how "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp" does not logically mean that "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours," nor that "for each level of the spell, the process takes 50 gp." Please, explain to me how the former statement and the latter two statements mean anything different at all. Because I'm really not seeing it.
You said something along the lines of "you should explain to your players how the flavor matches the mechanics," so I raised you that maybe the players should explain that themselves.
Ok, well, I don't remember saying this but if I did then I hereby retract it because that's not what I've been trying to say.
My point about the role of the DM has always been that the DM should explain the outcome if there are two rules affecting a situation that are in direct conflict with each other and somehow did not supersede each other.
Obviously, this should never happen. This is not the best way to arrive at my interpretation of this Feature. This whole thing was a response to faulty logic. I was saying, like, ok, if you're saying that only the total timeframe has changed, but it's changed to the point where there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default, then we now have a new rule that directly conflicts with itself and therefore the DM has to determine what actually happened. At this point, different DMs will make different rulings to explain how 1 hour of experimentation is required at the same time that the total time required for experimentation + transcription is 2 minutes. And some DMs might even try to just ignore it, which is by far the worst option.
Your assertion that "there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default" is a decision regarding flavor, not rules. There is no rule that says that 2 minutes is not enough time to perform experiments. Since it's a decision regarding flavor, and we've both decided that decisions regarding the flavor of features fall under the onus of the player, I don't think the DM really has to get involved in this at all.
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
Ok, this just shows that you guys are both completely missing the point here. Like, there are ways to debate against this idea, but these aren't it. These just show that you aren't getting it.
Hard to keep making points with someone who refuses to see how the game works.
Suppose you come to locked door and the doorman tells you that in order to get in you need to correctly follow the instructions at a nearby activity. You see an empty basket and next to the basket is a pile of apples and oranges. The sign says, "Put into the basket: 10 apples and 5 oranges." But, just before you get started the doorman yells "Wait!" and pulls away that sign and replaces it with a new sign which says, "Put into the basket: 2 apples".
Now, if you put 2 apples and 5 oranges into the basket, I can guarantee you that the doorman will not let you in. The 5 oranges were not required. The correct answer was to put in 2 apples and 0 oranges. The 0 oranges was not explicitly stated on the sign -- it is implied by the rules for grammar and math.
Now, if instead the doorman had yelled "Wait!" and then broke the sign in half and took away the half that said 10 apples and replaced it with a half of a sign that said 2 apples, then the correct answer would be 2 apples and 5 oranges.
Interesting scenario. Except in order to keep the scenario in line with what we see with this interaction, instead of pulling the sign away, the doorman adds a sign that says "For you, the apple requirement is 2 apples." That doesn't erase the orange requirement. Both rules simultaneously apply, but one is applied as a replacement to a piece of the first sign.
You then quoted my example and then started talking about another example where there are costs stated for both categories. That misses the entire point of what was being explained completely and totally. If you're going to try to mock my statements you need to at least keep up with the discussion.
I'm keeping to comparable examples to the situation. Keep your unrelated hypotheticals out of here.
This all goes back to my original statements that sometimes not every word in the text explicitly determines the outcome, and we can't always say that only the words in the text matter. This is because sometimes there are implicit but direct consequences created by what IS stated in the text.
As an example, I pointed out that in fact, the Light spell doesn't explicitly say anything about exposing Hidden creatures, and the rules for Hiding do not explicitly state what happens if there is any change in lighting within an area.
Then, you pointed out:
"[ The Rules for Hiding *do* ] talk about being able to hide in darkness, and that light negates darkness, and that you can't hide in plain sight. All of those spell out an explicit interaction: Lighting an open area where a creature is hiding just in the darkness negates the hide."
First, the underlined part of your quote is not stated anywhere in the rules. This is a conclusion that you drew after making 3 or 4 logical steps beyond what is actually written. And this is my entire point! The conclusion that you drew was correct. But it was not explicitly stated in the text. Instead, it was an implicit direct consequence of what actually IS stated in the text.
Now, of course I can't resist -- but you were incorrect in your starting point. The rules for Hiding do not talk about being able to hide in darkness. So, it actually takes several additional steps in logic before you can actually get to your correct conclusion.
As it turns out, there is a loose definition for being Hidden (being both unseen and unheard) that appears in the Unseen Attackers and Targets section of Chapter 9. This enables a DM, who "decides when circumstances are appropriate for hiding" (Chapter 7) to usually allow you to attempt to Hide within any heavily obscured area. This is because a heavily obscured area "such as darkness" causes an environment where "a creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area." (Chapter 8) Since a blinded creature cannot see (Appendix A), a creature within a heavily obscured area is unseen. Since darkness was used as an example of a heavily obscured area, we can finally determine that a creature can attempt to Hide in darkness -- which was your starting point above.
So that was another example in and of itself which makes my point. The Rules for Hiding do not state that you can Hide in darkness. Does that mean that you cannot Hide in darkness since the Rules for Hiding do not explicitly state that you can? Of course not. Being able to Hide in darkness is an implicit direct consequence of what the rules for Hiding DO say.
The fact that:
Darkness is considered Heavily Obscured
Heavily Obscured territory leaves creatures Blinded (assuming they don't have an alternate sense)
"You can’t hide from a creature that can see you clearly" from Chapter 7 is giving a limitation to an action the rules are displaying as a default option one can take, not displaying all the limitations or bounds of the ability
means that one can hide in darkness by default. The fact that all three points are stated clearly in the rules means that this is explicit. None of these things are assumptions.
Rules don't work with empty space, though. The rules don't walk up to a sign-maker and say, "hey, make me a sign with a 2 and then a bunch of extra space to the right of it." The rules could just as easily walk up to a sign-maker and say, "hey, make me a massive sign with nothing but a small 2 somewhere near the middle," that effectively blocks out the entire rules for spellbooks, except we know that they don't because that's not how rules work. Like I said earlier, there's no reason that we should assume that the sign could have extra space that covers the gold cost, yet not assume that the sign could have extra space that covers the need to scribe spells of a level you could cast. The sign has nothing to say in either case, but it's just as likely for the sign to cover it with blank space. You've very adamantly suggested that the sign won't change the fact that a 1st level Wizard can't scribe a 9th level spell, and yet you're incredibly open to the possibility that the sign could cover the oranges.
Hmm, unfortunately the empty space analogy really is going over my head -- I'm not sure what's going on with that.
But somehow you seem to be talking about 9th level spells again. That's just weird and probably just off-topic.
We're talking about a Feature that makes a statement that can reasonably be talking about the time cost of the overall process or the expenditure of the overall process since the exact words that are used in the Feature qualify as a valid statement to describe both of those categories. The words used in the Feature cannot reasonably be talking at all about whether or not "it is of a spell level you can prepare". Therefore, based on the concept of specific vs general, this Feature cannot be superseding that clause. This is a bad argument and you should stop suggesting it.
Instead, you guys should try to find an argument as to why you believe the Feature only supersedes the time cost but not the expenditure in such a way that does NOT mention the fact that the words of the Feature do not mention money. That is not a good enough reason. That is because the statement in the Feature is valid as a time cost and it is also valid as an expenditure. You cannot know which clause is being superseded solely based on the words of the Feature -- otherwise this entire thread would have lasted less than one page. But don't give up -- there may still be other good arguments as to why only the time cost is superseded, but it would be nice to know of a legitimate reason for this.
Please, explain in detail how "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp" does not logically mean that "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours," nor that "for each level of the spell, the process takes 50 gp." Please, explain to me how the former statement and the latter two statements mean anything different at all. Because I'm really not seeing it.
The point is that the two types of costs are not independent of each other. They increase together. For every level of the spell, the expenditure is the combination of these two costs together. Yes, if someone were to ask specifically, "what is the time cost per level", you would reply with "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours". But, this does not exist without the associated cost. For every level there is a time and a cost. You can't change one without changing the other. This only makes sense anyway since the cost represents material components used for experiments. As the levels go up, more time is required to decipher the spell, which requires more experiments and this requires more materials.
Your assertion that "there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default" is a decision regarding flavor, not rules. There is no rule that says that 2 minutes is not enough time to perform experiments. Since it's a decision regarding flavor, and we've both decided that decisions regarding the flavor of features fall under the onus of the player, I don't think the DM really has to get involved in this at all.
I'm not sure what flavor has to do with any of this. The time required to decipher a spell, which involves practicing and experimenting with material components, is 1 hour per level. We know this because the transcription explicitly takes 1 hour per level and deciphering is the only other part of the process, which takes a total of 2 hours per level. 2 - 1 = 1. And 1 hour >> 2 minutes.
Instead, you guys should try to find an argument as to why you believe the Feature only supersedes the time cost but not the expenditure in such a way that does NOT mention the fact that the words of the Feature do not mention money. That is not a good enough reason. That is because the statement in the Feature is valid as a time cost and it is also valid as an expenditure. You cannot know which clause is being superseded solely based on the words of the Feature -- otherwise this entire thread would have lasted less than one page. But don't give up -- there may still be other good arguments as to why only the time cost is superseded, but it would be nice to know of a legitimate reason for this.
Why is the onus of proof falling on us? You should give an example of a feature that exists within the rules that overrules a part of the text that it doesn't say it overrules to show that it's a valid way of reading the rules.
Please, explain in detail how "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp" does not logically mean that "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours," nor that "for each level of the spell, the process takes 50 gp." Please, explain to me how the former statement and the latter two statements mean anything different at all. Because I'm really not seeing it.
The point is that the two types of costs are not independent of each other. They increase together. For every level of the spell, the expenditure is the combination of these two costs together. Yes, if someone were to ask specifically, "what is the time cost per level", you would reply with "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours". But, this does not exist without the associated cost. For every level there is a time and a cost. You can't change one without changing the other. This only makes sense anyway since the cost represents material components used for experiments. As the levels go up, more time is required to decipher the spell, which requires more experiments and this requires more materials.
Explain the statement that "you can't change one without changing the other." This is the core of your argument, and yet you always seem to throw it in as a footnote. What about what you've said proves this? How exactly does the word "and" make the statements "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours" and "for each level of the spell, the process takes 50 gp" inextricably linked? By my understanding of the English language, it doesn't link the time and the cost together directly, it just links them each to the spell level. Use the text and the English language to explain to me why I'm wrong.
Your assertion that "there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default" is a decision regarding flavor, not rules. There is no rule that says that 2 minutes is not enough time to perform experiments. Since it's a decision regarding flavor, and we've both decided that decisions regarding the flavor of features fall under the onus of the player, I don't think the DM really has to get involved in this at all.
I'm not sure what flavor has to do with any of this. The time required to decipher a spell, which involves practicing and experimenting with material components, is 1 hour per level. We know this because the transcription explicitly takes 1 hour per level and deciphering is the only other part of the process, which takes a total of 2 hours per level. 2 - 1 = 1. And 1 hour >> 2 minutes.
The way that 2 hours becomes 2 minutes is flavor. The feature says that it happens, but it leaves it open to the player to describe the flavor of it, and how exactly it happens.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
Interesting scenario. Except in order to keep the scenario in line with what we see with this interaction, instead of pulling the sign away, the doorman adds a sign that says "For you, the apple requirement is 2 apples." That doesn't erase the orange requirement. Both rules simultaneously apply, but one is applied as a replacement to a piece of the first sign.
No no no. This analogy doesn't work. You are still not understanding the concept. This is about how specific rules supersede general rules. You don't just add a sign. That's not what "supersede" means. The word means: take the place of (a person or thing previously in authority or use); supplant. So, either the Feature takes the place of the time cost of the Rule, or it takes the place of the expenditure of the Rule. The wording of the Feature is valid for either substitution. So, the question is, which clause does it supersede? The time cost or the expenditure? And why?
Heavily Obscured territory leaves creatures Blinded (assuming they don't have an alternate sense)
"You can’t hide from a creature that can see you clearly" from Chapter 7 is giving a limitation to an action the rules are displaying as a default option one can take, not displaying all the limitations or bounds of the ability
means that one can hide in darkness by default. The fact that all three points are stated clearly in the rules means that this is explicit. None of these things are assumptions.
What you seem to not be getting is that that is my point. The Rules do not say anywhere that you can hide in darkness. They say all of those other things that imply that you can indeed hide in darkness. Which you can. But not because it says so anywhere.
"The time you must spend to copy a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription."
It specifically calls out that it replaces the time that you spend. It's very explicit in the part of the text that it replaces. It doesn't say "the expenditure for copying a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level."
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
The Wizardly Quill provides a more specific rule saying the time you must spend to copy a spell into your spell book equals 2 minutes per spell level . The cost you must spend is not specifically addressed therefore the general rule for it still apply, including what it represent. You can disagree but that's how Specific VS General works.
Naw. Makes no sense.
The quill doesn't require ink. Any, ink. Not regular ink, not fine ink. It says in black and white that it does not need ink. The entire class and categories of items that can be collectively called an "ink"? It doesn't need them.
How is this hard? What is elusive about this?
Needs, no, ink. None. of any kind. Ever.
If you gotta pay money for inks. but then a rule says you don't need inks. Guess what? You don't gotta pay no money. This is really not complicated guys.
If there's a sword, and the sword doesn't require mayonnaise to work, but then you want to spread mayonnaise with the sword, would you argue that the sword would apparate mayonnaise for the purpose of spreading? Or would you argue that swords do require mayonnaise?
Let's say there is a sword that says exactly:
The sword doesn’t require mayonnaise. When you schmear with it, it produces mayonnaise in a color of your choice on the schmeared surface.
Then yeah, the mayo appears during the process of schmearing, right onto the bread's surface. Exactly like it says it does.
This whole thing seem to be down to refusing to believe the magic quill can do what it literally says it can do.
This addition seems irrelevant, since we aren't talking about the second part sentence of the bullet point. What we're talking about is very specifically the way that the quill does not "require" ink. I'm not contesting that the quill can always produce ink, since that's very obviously a part of the feature. I'm contesting the idea that the quill can do absolutely anything that any ink can do in the absence of ink.
There are two questions that I'd like answers to:
Is it or is it not true that swords do not require mayonnaise?
Can swords apparate infinite mayonnaise when they schmear?
The fact you think part of the rule "is irrelevant" might be a clue where you're going wrong.
Also, another issue isn't that the quill "can" produce ink. It is that the quill "will" produce ink.
To answer your qyestions based on the version I provided that is a direct analog of the quill...
1. This specific magic mayo sword doesn't require mayo to schmear. Most swords would.
2. This particular magic mayo sword does apparate mayo when you schmear with it. Most don't.
This has been repeated many times now. The quill makes the ink. Every time. You write with it. Because that's what it says it does.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Instead, you guys should try to find an argument as to why you believe the Feature only supersedes the time cost but not the expenditure in such a way that does NOT mention the fact that the words of the Feature do not mention money. That is not a good enough reason.
Wait... in a discussion of Rules As Written, you don't think the Rules being Written a certain way is a good enough reason to interpret them that way?
Oh, sure thing, my dude
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Why is the onus of proof falling on us? You should give an example of a feature that exists within the rules that overrules a part of the text that it doesn't say it overrules to show that it's a valid way of reading the rules.
I mean, you don't really have to prove anything if you don't want to. But if you want to be able to justify your stance as to why this Wizard should pay the full cost for material components then you should make a case that is not just some variation of "the Feature doesn't mention monetary cost so it doesn't change anything about the monetary cost". If you've been following my last several posts you should see by now that statements like that don't prove what you think it proves.
As for another example of specific vs general that interacts like this -- I've been trying to come up with examples, such as the Light spell not saying anything about exposing Hidden creatures. But I see that that doesn't quite perfectly align with what you are asking, so I'll have to get back to you on that one.
Explain the statement that "you can't change one without changing the other." This is the core of your argument, and yet you always seem to throw it in as a footnote. What about what you've said proves this? How exactly does the word "and" make the statements "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours" and "for each level of the spell, the process takes 50 gp" inextricably linked? By my understanding of the English language, it doesn't link the time and the cost together directly, it just links them each to the spell level. Use the text and the English language to explain to me why I'm wrong.
The Rule doesn't say what you've written there. It lists the time cost and the monetary cost together:
For each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp
So, this statement is not linking them "each" to the spell level separately. It links them to the spell level together, as one entity that I keep referring to as the expenditure to hopefully reduce confusion. For Level 1 the expenditure is: ___. For Level 2 the expenditure is: ___. And so on. You can't have only one increase and not the other. Or increase at different rates or whatever. The rule is telling you that for each level you have a certain time cost AND monetary cost. Again, if you are answering a question about only the time cost it is valid to write statements that include only the time cost. Such as, For Level 1 the time cost is ___, and so on. But this cannot change without the other. They are linked. In other words, they are both linked with the level in the same way. 2, 4, 6, 8 and 50, 100, 150, 200. The relationship is the same. There is probably a simple algebraic axiom for this that I won't be able to name. Like if A is proportional to C and B is proportional to C then A is proportional to B. Or something. This feels like a super pedantic debate that has no value to the rest of the discussion. I can't even remember why we're talking about it.
Your assertion that "there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default" is a decision regarding flavor, not rules. There is no rule that says that 2 minutes is not enough time to perform experiments. Since it's a decision regarding flavor, and we've both decided that decisions regarding the flavor of features fall under the onus of the player, I don't think the DM really has to get involved in this at all.
I'm not sure what flavor has to do with any of this. The time required to decipher a spell, which involves practicing and experimenting with material components, is 1 hour per level. We know this because the transcription explicitly takes 1 hour per level and deciphering is the only other part of the process, which takes a total of 2 hours per level. 2 - 1 = 1. And 1 hour >> 2 minutes.
The way that 2 hours becomes 2 minutes is flavor. The feature says that it happens, but it leaves it open to the player to describe the flavor of it, and how exactly it happens.
Ok, yes, that sounds right. The way that the change happens can be flavored in various ways that's true. But I'm still not sure why we're talking about flavor here. As I just said, the default cost is for 1 hour of experiments, but now we only have 2 minutes. Requiring the purchase of materials for experiments that cannot be performed seems like a bad Ruling to me, but that's just my opinion. By the time we get to the point where we have a Rule that directly conflicts with itself we have exited RAW territory and are squarely back into requiring a DM Ruling and any DM can make any Ruling they want.
"The time you must spend to copy a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription."
It specifically calls out that it replaces the time that you spend. It's very explicit in the part of the text that it replaces. It doesn't say "the expenditure for copying a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level."
Yep . . . and that's the sort of post I was talking about. This doesn't make your case the way that you imagine it does.
Instead, you guys should try to find an argument as to why you believe the Feature only supersedes the time cost but not the expenditure in such a way that does NOT mention the fact that the words of the Feature do not mention money. That is not a good enough reason.
Wait... in a discussion of Rules As Written, you don't think the Rules being Written a certain way is a good enough reason to interpret them that way?
Oh, sure thing, my dude
Yes. That's exactly correct. You probably are not caught up on all of the posts. This is explained in detail if you actually are interested.
Explain the statement that "you can't change one without changing the other." This is the core of your argument, and yet you always seem to throw it in as a footnote. What about what you've said proves this? How exactly does the word "and" make the statements "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours" and "for each level of the spell, the process takes 50 gp" inextricably linked? By my understanding of the English language, it doesn't link the time and the cost together directly, it just links them each to the spell level. Use the text and the English language to explain to me why I'm wrong.
The Rule doesn't say what you've written there. It lists the time cost and the monetary cost together:
For each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp
So, this statement is not linking them "each" to the spell level separately. It links them to the spell level together, as one entity that I keep referring to as the expenditure to hopefully reduce confusion. For Level 1 the expenditure is: ___. For Level 2 the expenditure is: ___. And so on. You can't have only one increase and not the other. Or increase at different rates or whatever. The rule is telling you that for each level you have a certain time cost AND monetary cost. Again, if you are answering a question about only the time cost it is valid to write statements that include only the time cost. Such as, For Level 1 the time cost is ___, and so on. But this cannot change without the other. They are linked. In other words, they are both linked with the level in the same way. 2, 4, 6, 8 and 50, 100, 150, 200. The relationship is the same. There is probably a simple algebraic axiom for this that I won't be able to name. Like if A is proportional to C and B is proportional to C then A is proportional to B. Or something. This feels like a super pedantic debate that has no value to the rest of the discussion. I can't even remember why we're talking about it.
Fine, let's use algebra. The spell level is l, the time it takes to transcribe in minutes is m, and the cost in gold is g.
The rule tells us that l=120m, and in addition it tells us that l=50g. We can use substitution to say that, so long as both of these statements are true, 120m=50g.
Now, lets apply the feature. The feature makes it so that the statement l=120m is false, and l=2m becomes true. Your argument is that, since l=2m, we could go over to the equation 120m=50g, use the division property of equality to divide both sides by 60 to end up with 2m=(5/6)g, and then use the substitution property to say that l=(5/6)g. This is false, because the statement 120m=50g is based on the axiom of l=120m. Once l=120m became false due to the feature, 120m=50g also became false. With the equations l=2m and l=50g, we can create a new relation of m to g, if we want to for whatever reason. 2m=50g.
Your initial claim that reducing time would necessarily reduce cost is false.
Your assertion that "there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default" is a decision regarding flavor, not rules. There is no rule that says that 2 minutes is not enough time to perform experiments. Since it's a decision regarding flavor, and we've both decided that decisions regarding the flavor of features fall under the onus of the player, I don't think the DM really has to get involved in this at all.
I'm not sure what flavor has to do with any of this. The time required to decipher a spell, which involves practicing and experimenting with material components, is 1 hour per level. We know this because the transcription explicitly takes 1 hour per level and deciphering is the only other part of the process, which takes a total of 2 hours per level. 2 - 1 = 1. And 1 hour >> 2 minutes.
The way that 2 hours becomes 2 minutes is flavor. The feature says that it happens, but it leaves it open to the player to describe the flavor of it, and how exactly it happens.
Ok, yes, that sounds right. The way that the change happens can be flavored in various ways that's true. But I'm still not sure why we're talking about flavor here. As I just said, the default cost is for 1 hour of experiments, but now we only have 2 minutes. Requiring the purchase of materials for experiments that cannot be performed seems like a bad Ruling to me, but that's just my opinion. By the time we get to the point where we have a Rule that directly conflicts with itself we have exited RAW territory and are squarely back into requiring a DM Ruling and any DM can make any Ruling they want.
The idea that you cannot perform the experiments within 2 minutes is a decision that you, the DM, are making, when really it should be the player doing this kind of thing, because it's the player's feature. 1 hour of experiments being fit into 2 minutes is completely possible with certain descriptions of how the feature takes effect.
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Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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Ok, yes, that sounds right. The way that the change happens can be flavored in various ways that's true. But I'm still not sure why we're talking about flavor here. As I just said, the default cost is for 1 hour of experiments, but now we only have 2 minutes. Requiring the purchase of materials for experiments that cannot be performed seems like a bad Ruling to me, but that's just my opinion. By the time we get to the point where we have a Rule that directly conflicts with itself we have exited RAW territory and are squarely back into requiring a DM Ruling and any DM can make any Ruling they want.
The reason for this is still because the things that go into the cost are fluff text. They're an in-game explanation for roleplay purposes, not a mechanical requirement. It's still a game, still goes by game mechanics, and that mechanic requires a gold cost.
Why is the onus of proof falling on us? You should give an example of a feature that exists within the rules that overrules a part of the text that it doesn't say it overrules to show that it's a valid way of reading the rules.
I'm going to mirror this. The conversation can't really even move forward until you answer this. A 1:1 example is all that fits here, because it's the only thing that would support your statement. Because, as has been stated, the feature calls out just the time as being replaced, as opposed to other features reducing the time which also reduce the cost. But just to support this...
Abjuration Savant
Beginning when you select this school at 2nd level, the gold and time you must spend to copy an abjuration spell into your spellbook is halved.
Wizardly Quill
2nd-level Order of Scribes feature
As a bonus action, you can magically create a Tiny quill in your free hand. The magic quill has the following properties:
The quill doesn’t require ink. When you write with it, it produces ink in a color of your choice on the writing surface.
The time you must spend to copy a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription.
You can erase anything you write with the quill if you wave the feather over the text as a bonus action, provided the text is within 5 feet of you.
This quill disappears if you create another one or if you die.
Features that reduce the cost mention it. If this was meant to reduce the cost to 0 gold, it would instead say "The time you must spend to copy a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription, and the gold cost [does not apply]/[is removed]/[is negated]/[does not need to be paid]."
Fine, let's use algebra. The spell level is l, the time it takes to transcribe in minutes is m, and the cost in gold is g.
The rule tells us that l=120m, and in addition it tells us that l=50g. We can use substitution to say that, so long as both of these statements are true, 120m=50g.
Now, lets apply the feature. The feature makes it so that the statement l=120m is false, and l=2m becomes true. Your argument is that, since l=2m, we could go over to the equation 120m=50g, use the division property of equality to divide both sides by 60 to end up with 2m=(5/6)g, and then use the substitution property to say that l=(5/6)g. This is false, because the statement 120m=50g is based on the axiom of l=120m. Once l=120m became false due to the feature, 120m=50g also became false. With the equations l=2m and l=50g, we can create a new relation of m to g, if we want to for whatever reason. 2m=50g.
Your initial claim that reducing time would necessarily reduce cost is false.
Well, it's actually more complicated than this because the 50 gold represents the cost of material components and fine inks. The cost of the fine inks does not change with time because it is based on how much ink is required to actually write the pages of text into our spell book. In the case of the ink, it changes only with level. Higher level spells require more ink. When using the Feature, the magic quill performs the motions of writing faster than we could do it before, but the same amount of writing takes place.
On the other hand, the magic quill does NOT perform the experiments. YOU must perform the experiments. Thus, they take just as long as they did before. If there is no change to the deciphering process when using the Feature then each level of the spell takes 1 hour to decipher which requires 40 gp worth of material components in order to complete that task. If instead we are able to spend less time deciphering (which is seemingly necessary based on the new overall requirements given by the Feature) then that means we are spending less time conducting experiments so we can spend less money on material components.
So, unfortunately your algebra would need a lot of fixes to make sense of it. For example, we can factor out the ink and get back to what we've been discussing which is the material components if we instead say that l=(60m,40g). If we wanted to use the breakdown that suggests the 2 minutes total is divided into 1 minute deciphering and 1 minute transcribing, then we will end up with the alternate, less good solution that I have previously suggested. I=(m,(40/60)g). However, there is no longer any reason to assume that the time to complete deciphering is equal to the time to complete the transcribing as it was before. That is because now the magic quill is doing the transcribing, whereas the Wizard is still doing the deciphering himself. So, the better solution is to simply replace the expenditure clause with the Feature and therefore the monetary cost is given as 0. The consequences of this are much simpler -- the spell did not have to be deciphered, which means no experiments, which means no costs for material components which matches up with the cost given by the Feature of 0. The transcription simply takes up the entire 2 minutes instead of happening in 1 minute. From there, to reconcile with a cost of 0 we can then confirm that the quill used its own ink so there is no cost for material components and no cost for ink.
The idea that you cannot perform the experiments within 2 minutes is a decision that you, the DM, are making, when really it should be the player doing this kind of thing, because it's the player's feature. 1 hour of experiments being fit into 2 minutes is completely possible with certain descriptions of how the feature takes effect.
Not really. The Wizard is still the one performing the experiments so that activity hasn't changed. The ratio of time to cost remains the same for that activity. So, 1 hour of experiments would still take 1 hour. That does not fit into 2 minutes. That's the whole problem with trying to charge the full cost.
The best solution can be arrived at two different ways now. The first way is that we realize that the quill must have made it so that the spell did not need to be deciphered as an implicit direct consequence of the fact that the entire process now takes two minutes. The second way is to replace the entire expenditure clause with the new expenditure in which case the cost is implicitly 0 from the new clause itself and we work backwards from there to determine the time spent deciphering (0) and the fact that the quill used it's own ink.
The Wizardly Quill provides a more specific rule saying the time you must spend to copy a spell into your spell book equals 2 minutes per spell level . The cost you must spend is not specifically addressed therefore the general rule for it still apply, including what it represent. You can disagree but that's how Specific VS General works.
Naw. Makes no sense.
The quill doesn't require ink. Any, ink. Not regular ink, not fine ink. It says in black and white that it does not need ink. The entire class and categories of items that can be collectively called an "ink"? It doesn't need them.
How is this hard? What is elusive about this?
Needs, no, ink. None. of any kind. Ever.
If you gotta pay money for inks. but then a rule says you don't need inks. Guess what? You don't gotta pay no money. This is really not complicated guys.
It was covered already the cost isn't only for fine ink and the Wizardly Quill only discuss the time you must spend to copy a spell into your spell book, not the cost.
Copying a Spell into the Book: The cost represents material components you expend as you experiment with the spell to master it, as well as the fine inks you need to record it.
On the other hand, the magic quill does NOT perform the experiments. YOU must perform the experiments. Thus, they take just as long as they did before. If there is no change to the deciphering process when using the Feature then each level of the spell takes 1 hour to decipher which requires 40 gp worth of material components in order to complete that task. If instead we are able to spend less time deciphering (which is seemingly necessary based on the new overall requirements given by the Feature) then that means we are spending less time conducting experiments so we can spend less money on material components.
Two things:
It's unreasonable to say that the experiments take just as long as they did before applying the quill. That's just an assumption. The quill doesn't actually say it speeds up the writing process, either, but you just assume that it does because you have to use it for the transcription. The feature doesn't actually say the way in which it cuts this time, it just says that it cuts it (provided you use the quill for the transcription).
As I've proven, the assumption that spending less time on conducting experiments automatically means spending less money on experiments is based on logic that is invalidated once the feature is applied. There's no reason to believe that spending more time on experiments means spending more money on them.
So, unfortunately your algebra would need a lot of fixes to make sense of it. For example, we can factor out the ink and get back to what we've been discussing which is the material components if we instead say that l=(60m,40g). If we wanted to use the breakdown that suggests the 2 minutes total is divided into 1 minute deciphering and 1 minute transcribing, then we will end up with the alternate, less good solution that I have previously suggested. I=(m,(40/60)g). However, there is no longer any reason to assume that the time to complete deciphering is equal to the time to complete the transcribing as it was before. That is because now the magic quill is doing the transcribing, whereas the Wizard is still doing the deciphering himself. So, the better solution is to simply replace the expenditure clause with the Feature and therefore the monetary cost is given as 0. The consequences of this are much simpler -- the spell did not have to be deciphered, which means no experiments, which means no costs for material components which matches up with the cost given by the Feature of 0. The transcription simply takes up the entire 2 minutes instead of happening in 1 minute. From there, to reconcile with a cost of 0 we can then confirm that the quill used its own ink so there is no cost for material components and no cost for ink.
I've never seen the notation that you're using before. What exactly does the comma mean in l=(60m,40g)?
The idea that you cannot perform the experiments within 2 minutes is a decision that you, the DM, are making, when really it should be the player doing this kind of thing, because it's the player's feature. 1 hour of experiments being fit into 2 minutes is completely possible with certain descriptions of how the feature takes effect.
Not really. The Wizard is still the one performing the experiments so that activity hasn't changed. The ratio of time to cost remains the same for that activity. So, 1 hour of experiments would still take 1 hour. That does not fit into 2 minutes. That's the whole problem with trying to charge the full cost.
The ration of time to cost is not a rule, it's a structure based on existing rules, so it's faulty logic to apply it once its underlying rules are changed.
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Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
Features that reduce the cost mention it. If this was meant to reduce the cost to 0 gold, it would instead say "The time you must spend to copy a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription, and the gold cost [does not apply]/[is removed]/[is negated]/[does not need to be paid]."
If only Order of Scribes also had another feature that specified that using the Wizardly Quill affected both time and cost of transcription... oh wait
Master Scrivener
10th-level Order of Scribes feature
You are also adept at crafting spell scrolls, which are described in the treasure chapter of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. The gold and time you must spend to make such a scroll are halved if you use your Wizardly Quill.
The Wizardly Quill reducing time but not cost of copying spells into your spellbook is very clearly both RAW and RAI. The arguments to the contrary have been... unpersuasive, but then, I doubt they were intended to be
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
If only Order of Scribes also had another feature that specified that using the Wizardly Quill affected both time and cost of transcription... oh wait
Any feature in the game that has the 1/2, 1/2 structure is irrelevant to the point being made. There is obviously no grammatically correct way to specify a non-zero amount of something without explicitly stating it. That simply is not true when 0 of something is required -- in such cases perfectly valid statements can specify this without referring to the thing at all.
That basket contains apples and oranges. Go put 5 apples into that basket please. OR, go put 5 apples and 0 oranges into that basket please. Both are grammatically correct and have the same meaning.
The Wizardly Quill reducing time but not cost of copying spells into your spellbook is very clearly both RAW and RAI. The arguments to the contrary have been... unpersuasive, but then, I doubt they were intended to be
Honestly, making blanket statements that the Feature is "very clearly" RAI to require the full monetary cost is borderline ridiculous.
It's actually much more likely that the Feature is intended to have no cost since this is the entire flavor and theme and intended function of the subclass. A Scribes Wizard is meant to be able to jot down spells on the fly while diving through a dungeon. It's their whole thing that sets them apart. It's the main reason for them existing. They are "the most bookish. It takes many forms in different worlds, but its primary mission is the same everywhere: recording magical discoveries so that wizardry can flourish ".
But for some reason, a few folks here desperately want to drastically nerf this subclass's core low level Feature instead of just allowing them to exist in the world the way that they are meant to exist. Like, if you don't like the content published by Tasha's Cauldron of Everything then just don't allow this content into your games.
It's unreasonable to say that the experiments take just as long as they did before applying the quill. That's just an assumption. The quill doesn't actually say it speeds up the writing process, either, but you just assume that it does because you have to use it for the transcription. The feature doesn't actually say the way in which it cuts this time, it just says that it cuts it (provided you use the quill for the transcription).
As I've proven, the assumption that spending less time on conducting experiments automatically means spending less money on experiments is based on logic that is invalidated once the feature is applied. There's no reason to believe that spending more time on experiments means spending more money on them.
No, it's unreasonable to NOT assume this. The quill explicitly performs the transcription, not the experimentation. If any of this experimentation is still required, it is still performed by the Wizard just like before. Also, the writing process MUST have been sped up since the entire process now takes 2 minutes. 2 minutes is less than 1 hour.
As for point 2, you've proven no such thing. The time cost and the monetary cost are linked. If the time is reduced, so is the cost. The whole point of spending money on the material components is to perform experiments. If there are less experiments then less materials need to be purchased. This is already established by the fact that higher level spells cost more time and more money simultaneously.
I've never seen the notation that you're using before. What exactly does the comma mean in l=(60m,40g)?
This represents the expenditure needed to scribe a spell of a certain level. The expenditure consists of two different categories (time cost and monetary cost) which are linked together and analyzed as a single entity. The notation I've invented here is similar to what you might see for sets or ordered pairs, but is unlikely to be an official mathematical notation since I am not a professional mathematician by trade. Debating whether or not someone uses exactly precise mathematical notation while discussing general concepts ongoing throughout the conversation is off-topic. Start another thread if you wish to discuss mathematical notation.
The ration of time to cost is not a rule, it's a structure based on existing rules, so it's faulty logic to apply it once its underlying rules are changed.
Incorrect. The relationship is established in the existing rules and that portion of the rules are unaffected by the change created by the Feature under my interpretation and also under your interpretation.
For each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp
Whether or not the feature replaces only the underlined part or the entire bolded part, the italicized portion of the Rule is NOT altered.
The reason for this is still because the things that go into the cost are fluff text. They're an in-game explanation for roleplay purposes, not a mechanical requirement. It's still a game, still goes by game mechanics, and that mechanic requires a gold cost.
Well this is the same sort of reason why I find it frustrating when people cling so heavily to the phrase "fine inks" as if this is something completely different from the ink item which already exists in the tables of items in the Equipment chapter. I consider that little descriptive adjective to be flavor -- so it goes both ways with this.
But in general, no, we cannot ignore large swaths of the Rule in the name of calling it flavor text. The fact that the Rule explicitly specifies that the monetary cost goes towards purchasing actual tangible ingredients that a Wizard needs to be able to physically complete his task is mechanically meaningful. Among other things, this creates an additional reason why a Wizard generally needs to bring an acquired spell scroll all the way back to the safety of civilization where magic shops exist and laboratory environments can be set up before attempting to scribe the scroll. The exception to this of course is meant to be the Scribes Wizard -- that's what makes them unique.
Why is the onus of proof falling on us? You should give an example of a feature that exists within the rules that overrules a part of the text that it doesn't say it overrules to show that it's a valid way of reading the rules.
I'm going to mirror this. The conversation can't really even move forward until you answer this. A 1:1 example is all that fits here, because it's the only thing that would support your statement. Because, as has been stated, the feature calls out just the time as being replaced, as opposed to other features reducing the time which also reduce the cost.
Quite obviously whether or not I complete this research errand to everyone's satisfaction is proof of absolutely nothing related to this discussion, but that should go without saying.
I predict that this conversation will move forward just fine whether or not this happens. But I'll get back to you on this. If I feel like it and I happen to come across a good example in my travels then I will post it.
Next, as explained above, any comparison to features that specifically reduce the cost of something by 1/2 is irrelevant since that is not a proper comparison. It is not possible to list a new non-zero cost for something without actually specifying what that new cost is.
Features that reduce the cost mention it. If this was meant to reduce the cost to 0 gold, it would instead say "The time you must spend to copy a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription, and the gold cost [does not apply]/[is removed]/[is negated]/[does not need to be paid]."
Yeah, the specific vs general concept doesn't work the way those posts implied. Only when the text of two rules conflict with each other does the specific rule take priority over the general rule. Otherwise, both rules coexist. So, in this case, only the 2 hour timeframe from the general rule is replaced by the 2 minute timeframe of the new specific rule presented in the Feature. The rest of the general rule still applies as is.
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Ok, this just shows that you guys are both completely missing the point here. Like, there are ways to debate against this idea, but these aren't it. These just show that you aren't getting it.
It's actually tough to explain it more clearly at this point so I'll just go with another example instead:
Suppose you come to locked door and the doorman tells you that in order to get in you need to correctly follow the instructions at a nearby activity. You see an empty basket and next to the basket is a pile of apples and oranges. The sign says, "Put into the basket: 10 apples and 5 oranges." But, just before you get started the doorman yells "Wait!" and pulls away that sign and replaces it with a new sign which says, "Put into the basket: 2 apples".
Now, if you put 2 apples and 5 oranges into the basket, I can guarantee you that the doorman will not let you in. The 5 oranges were not required. The correct answer was to put in 2 apples and 0 oranges. The 0 oranges was not explicitly stated on the sign -- it is implied by the rules for grammar and math.
Now, if instead the doorman had yelled "Wait!" and then broke the sign in half and took away the half that said 10 apples and replaced it with a half of a sign that said 2 apples, then the correct answer would be 2 apples and 5 oranges.
THAT is the debate here. Not whether or not the Feature explicitly refers to oranges or not. It doesn't. We can all read that quite plainly obviously.
This is all very logical but it's not actually what the Rule says. The rule does NOT say the process takes 2 hours / level and costs 50 gp / level.
Instead, it says this: "For each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp." Yes, it's pedantic. But this yields logic more like this:
A first level spell { takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp }
Instead of: A first level spell takes 2 hours. A first level spell costs 50 gp. As you've stated above.
No, the time and the cost increase together. They are not independent of each other. If you are paying for a certain amount of materials, that indicates that you will be spending a certain amount of time performing experiments.
Ok, well, I don't remember saying this but if I did then I hereby retract it because that's not what I've been trying to say.
My point about the role of the DM has always been that the DM should explain the outcome if there are two rules affecting a situation that are in direct conflict with each other and somehow did not supersede each other.
Obviously, this should never happen. This is not the best way to arrive at my interpretation of this Feature. This whole thing was a response to faulty logic. I was saying, like, ok, if you're saying that only the total timeframe has changed, but it's changed to the point where there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default, then we now have a new rule that directly conflicts with itself and therefore the DM has to determine what actually happened. At this point, different DMs will make different rulings to explain how 1 hour of experimentation is required at the same time that the total time required for experimentation + transcription is 2 minutes. And some DMs might even try to just ignore it, which is by far the worst option.
Ok, let's back up -- it's like you're not even participating in the same conversation here.
I was speaking specifically of a type of statement where you are specifying how much of two different categories there is -- and if such a statement includes only one category than the other category is implied to be 0 by default. This is actually very straightforward, but I gave an example anyway.
You then quoted my example and then started talking about another example where there are costs stated for both categories. That misses the entire point of what was being explained completely and totally. If you're going to try to mock my statements you need to at least keep up with the discussion.
You actually made my point extremely well there.
This all goes back to my original statements that sometimes not every word in the text explicitly determines the outcome, and we can't always say that only the words in the text matter. This is because sometimes there are implicit but direct consequences created by what IS stated in the text.
As an example, I pointed out that in fact, the Light spell doesn't explicitly say anything about exposing Hidden creatures, and the rules for Hiding do not explicitly state what happens if there is any change in lighting within an area.
Then, you pointed out:
"[ The Rules for Hiding *do* ] talk about being able to hide in darkness, and that light negates darkness, and that you can't hide in plain sight. All of those spell out an explicit interaction: Lighting an open area where a creature is hiding just in the darkness negates the hide."
First, the underlined part of your quote is not stated anywhere in the rules. This is a conclusion that you drew after making 3 or 4 logical steps beyond what is actually written. And this is my entire point! The conclusion that you drew was correct. But it was not explicitly stated in the text. Instead, it was an implicit direct consequence of what actually IS stated in the text.
Now, of course I can't resist -- but you were incorrect in your starting point. The rules for Hiding do not talk about being able to hide in darkness. So, it actually takes several additional steps in logic before you can actually get to your correct conclusion.
As it turns out, there is a loose definition for being Hidden (being both unseen and unheard) that appears in the Unseen Attackers and Targets section of Chapter 9. This enables a DM, who "decides when circumstances are appropriate for hiding" (Chapter 7) to usually allow you to attempt to Hide within any heavily obscured area. This is because a heavily obscured area "such as darkness" causes an environment where "a creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area." (Chapter 8) Since a blinded creature cannot see (Appendix A), a creature within a heavily obscured area is unseen. Since darkness was used as an example of a heavily obscured area, we can finally determine that a creature can attempt to Hide in darkness -- which was your starting point above.
So that was another example in and of itself which makes my point. The Rules for Hiding do not state that you can Hide in darkness. Does that mean that you cannot Hide in darkness since the Rules for Hiding do not explicitly state that you can? Of course not. Being able to Hide in darkness is an implicit direct consequence of what the rules for Hiding DO say.
So, thank you for helping me to make my point.
This addition seems irrelevant, since we aren't talking about the second part sentence of the bullet point. What we're talking about is very specifically the way that the quill does not "require" ink. I'm not contesting that the quill can always produce ink, since that's very obviously a part of the feature. I'm contesting the idea that the quill can do absolutely anything that any ink can do in the absence of ink.
There are two questions that I'd like answers to:
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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Rules don't work with empty space, though. The rules don't walk up to a sign-maker and say, "hey, make me a sign with a 2 and then a bunch of extra space to the right of it." The rules could just as easily walk up to a sign-maker and say, "hey, make me a massive sign with nothing but a small 2 somewhere near the middle," that effectively blocks out the entire rules for spellbooks, except we know that they don't because that's not how rules work. Like I said earlier, there's no reason that we should assume that the sign could have extra space that covers the gold cost, yet not assume that the sign could have extra space that covers the need to scribe spells of a level you could cast. The sign has nothing to say in either case, but it's just as likely for the sign to cover it with blank space. You've very adamantly suggested that the sign won't change the fact that a 1st level Wizard can't scribe a 9th level spell, and yet you're incredibly open to the possibility that the sign could cover the oranges.
Please, explain in detail how "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours and costs 50 gp" does not logically mean that "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours," nor that "for each level of the spell, the process takes 50 gp." Please, explain to me how the former statement and the latter two statements mean anything different at all. Because I'm really not seeing it.
Your assertion that "there is no longer enough time to perform the experiments that are required by default" is a decision regarding flavor, not rules. There is no rule that says that 2 minutes is not enough time to perform experiments. Since it's a decision regarding flavor, and we've both decided that decisions regarding the flavor of features fall under the onus of the player, I don't think the DM really has to get involved in this at all.
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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Hard to keep making points with someone who refuses to see how the game works.
Interesting scenario. Except in order to keep the scenario in line with what we see with this interaction, instead of pulling the sign away, the doorman adds a sign that says "For you, the apple requirement is 2 apples." That doesn't erase the orange requirement. Both rules simultaneously apply, but one is applied as a replacement to a piece of the first sign.
I'm keeping to comparable examples to the situation. Keep your unrelated hypotheticals out of here.
The fact that:
means that one can hide in darkness by default. The fact that all three points are stated clearly in the rules means that this is explicit. None of these things are assumptions.
Hmm, unfortunately the empty space analogy really is going over my head -- I'm not sure what's going on with that.
But somehow you seem to be talking about 9th level spells again. That's just weird and probably just off-topic.
We're talking about a Feature that makes a statement that can reasonably be talking about the time cost of the overall process or the expenditure of the overall process since the exact words that are used in the Feature qualify as a valid statement to describe both of those categories. The words used in the Feature cannot reasonably be talking at all about whether or not "it is of a spell level you can prepare". Therefore, based on the concept of specific vs general, this Feature cannot be superseding that clause. This is a bad argument and you should stop suggesting it.
Instead, you guys should try to find an argument as to why you believe the Feature only supersedes the time cost but not the expenditure in such a way that does NOT mention the fact that the words of the Feature do not mention money. That is not a good enough reason. That is because the statement in the Feature is valid as a time cost and it is also valid as an expenditure. You cannot know which clause is being superseded solely based on the words of the Feature -- otherwise this entire thread would have lasted less than one page. But don't give up -- there may still be other good arguments as to why only the time cost is superseded, but it would be nice to know of a legitimate reason for this.
The point is that the two types of costs are not independent of each other. They increase together. For every level of the spell, the expenditure is the combination of these two costs together. Yes, if someone were to ask specifically, "what is the time cost per level", you would reply with "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours". But, this does not exist without the associated cost. For every level there is a time and a cost. You can't change one without changing the other. This only makes sense anyway since the cost represents material components used for experiments. As the levels go up, more time is required to decipher the spell, which requires more experiments and this requires more materials.
I'm not sure what flavor has to do with any of this. The time required to decipher a spell, which involves practicing and experimenting with material components, is 1 hour per level. We know this because the transcription explicitly takes 1 hour per level and deciphering is the only other part of the process, which takes a total of 2 hours per level. 2 - 1 = 1. And 1 hour >> 2 minutes.
Why is the onus of proof falling on us? You should give an example of a feature that exists within the rules that overrules a part of the text that it doesn't say it overrules to show that it's a valid way of reading the rules.
Explain the statement that "you can't change one without changing the other." This is the core of your argument, and yet you always seem to throw it in as a footnote. What about what you've said proves this? How exactly does the word "and" make the statements "for each level of the spell, the process takes 2 hours" and "for each level of the spell, the process takes 50 gp" inextricably linked? By my understanding of the English language, it doesn't link the time and the cost together directly, it just links them each to the spell level. Use the text and the English language to explain to me why I'm wrong.
The way that 2 hours becomes 2 minutes is flavor. The feature says that it happens, but it leaves it open to the player to describe the flavor of it, and how exactly it happens.
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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And yet, two separate times in this very thread I have posted the Rule for How To Play, which comes straight from the Introduction of the PHB.
No no no. This analogy doesn't work. You are still not understanding the concept. This is about how specific rules supersede general rules. You don't just add a sign. That's not what "supersede" means. The word means: take the place of (a person or thing previously in authority or use); supplant. So, either the Feature takes the place of the time cost of the Rule, or it takes the place of the expenditure of the Rule. The wording of the Feature is valid for either substitution. So, the question is, which clause does it supersede? The time cost or the expenditure? And why?
What in the world are you talking about? That's just a bizarre statement.
What you seem to not be getting is that that is my point. The Rules do not say anywhere that you can hide in darkness. They say all of those other things that imply that you can indeed hide in darkness. Which you can. But not because it says so anywhere.
"The time you must spend to copy a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription."
It specifically calls out that it replaces the time that you spend. It's very explicit in the part of the text that it replaces. It doesn't say "the expenditure for copying a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level."
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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The fact you think part of the rule "is irrelevant" might be a clue where you're going wrong.
Also, another issue isn't that the quill "can" produce ink. It is that the quill "will" produce ink.
To answer your qyestions based on the version I provided that is a direct analog of the quill...
1. This specific magic mayo sword doesn't require mayo to schmear. Most swords would.
2. This particular magic mayo sword does apparate mayo when you schmear with it. Most don't.
This has been repeated many times now. The quill makes the ink. Every time. You write with it. Because that's what it says it does.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Wait... in a discussion of Rules As Written, you don't think the Rules being Written a certain way is a good enough reason to interpret them that way?
Oh, sure thing, my dude
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Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I mean, you don't really have to prove anything if you don't want to. But if you want to be able to justify your stance as to why this Wizard should pay the full cost for material components then you should make a case that is not just some variation of "the Feature doesn't mention monetary cost so it doesn't change anything about the monetary cost". If you've been following my last several posts you should see by now that statements like that don't prove what you think it proves.
As for another example of specific vs general that interacts like this -- I've been trying to come up with examples, such as the Light spell not saying anything about exposing Hidden creatures. But I see that that doesn't quite perfectly align with what you are asking, so I'll have to get back to you on that one.
The Rule doesn't say what you've written there. It lists the time cost and the monetary cost together:
So, this statement is not linking them "each" to the spell level separately. It links them to the spell level together, as one entity that I keep referring to as the expenditure to hopefully reduce confusion. For Level 1 the expenditure is: ___. For Level 2 the expenditure is: ___. And so on. You can't have only one increase and not the other. Or increase at different rates or whatever. The rule is telling you that for each level you have a certain time cost AND monetary cost. Again, if you are answering a question about only the time cost it is valid to write statements that include only the time cost. Such as, For Level 1 the time cost is ___, and so on. But this cannot change without the other. They are linked. In other words, they are both linked with the level in the same way. 2, 4, 6, 8 and 50, 100, 150, 200. The relationship is the same. There is probably a simple algebraic axiom for this that I won't be able to name. Like if A is proportional to C and B is proportional to C then A is proportional to B. Or something. This feels like a super pedantic debate that has no value to the rest of the discussion. I can't even remember why we're talking about it.
Ok, yes, that sounds right. The way that the change happens can be flavored in various ways that's true. But I'm still not sure why we're talking about flavor here. As I just said, the default cost is for 1 hour of experiments, but now we only have 2 minutes. Requiring the purchase of materials for experiments that cannot be performed seems like a bad Ruling to me, but that's just my opinion. By the time we get to the point where we have a Rule that directly conflicts with itself we have exited RAW territory and are squarely back into requiring a DM Ruling and any DM can make any Ruling they want.
Yep . . . and that's the sort of post I was talking about. This doesn't make your case the way that you imagine it does.
Yes. That's exactly correct. You probably are not caught up on all of the posts. This is explained in detail if you actually are interested.
Fine, let's use algebra. The spell level is l, the time it takes to transcribe in minutes is m, and the cost in gold is g.
The rule tells us that l=120m, and in addition it tells us that l=50g. We can use substitution to say that, so long as both of these statements are true, 120m=50g.
Now, lets apply the feature. The feature makes it so that the statement l=120m is false, and l=2m becomes true. Your argument is that, since l=2m, we could go over to the equation 120m=50g, use the division property of equality to divide both sides by 60 to end up with 2m=(5/6)g, and then use the substitution property to say that l=(5/6)g. This is false, because the statement 120m=50g is based on the axiom of l=120m. Once l=120m became false due to the feature, 120m=50g also became false. With the equations l=2m and l=50g, we can create a new relation of m to g, if we want to for whatever reason. 2m=50g.
Your initial claim that reducing time would necessarily reduce cost is false.
The idea that you cannot perform the experiments within 2 minutes is a decision that you, the DM, are making, when really it should be the player doing this kind of thing, because it's the player's feature. 1 hour of experiments being fit into 2 minutes is completely possible with certain descriptions of how the feature takes effect.
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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The reason for this is still because the things that go into the cost are fluff text. They're an in-game explanation for roleplay purposes, not a mechanical requirement. It's still a game, still goes by game mechanics, and that mechanic requires a gold cost.
I'm going to mirror this. The conversation can't really even move forward until you answer this. A 1:1 example is all that fits here, because it's the only thing that would support your statement. Because, as has been stated, the feature calls out just the time as being replaced, as opposed to other features reducing the time which also reduce the cost. But just to support this...
Features that reduce the cost mention it. If this was meant to reduce the cost to 0 gold, it would instead say "The time you must spend to copy a spell into your spellbook equals 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription, and the gold cost [does not apply]/[is removed]/[is negated]/[does not need to be paid]."
Well, it's actually more complicated than this because the 50 gold represents the cost of material components and fine inks. The cost of the fine inks does not change with time because it is based on how much ink is required to actually write the pages of text into our spell book. In the case of the ink, it changes only with level. Higher level spells require more ink. When using the Feature, the magic quill performs the motions of writing faster than we could do it before, but the same amount of writing takes place.
On the other hand, the magic quill does NOT perform the experiments. YOU must perform the experiments. Thus, they take just as long as they did before. If there is no change to the deciphering process when using the Feature then each level of the spell takes 1 hour to decipher which requires 40 gp worth of material components in order to complete that task. If instead we are able to spend less time deciphering (which is seemingly necessary based on the new overall requirements given by the Feature) then that means we are spending less time conducting experiments so we can spend less money on material components.
So, unfortunately your algebra would need a lot of fixes to make sense of it. For example, we can factor out the ink and get back to what we've been discussing which is the material components if we instead say that l=(60m,40g). If we wanted to use the breakdown that suggests the 2 minutes total is divided into 1 minute deciphering and 1 minute transcribing, then we will end up with the alternate, less good solution that I have previously suggested. I=(m,(40/60)g). However, there is no longer any reason to assume that the time to complete deciphering is equal to the time to complete the transcribing as it was before. That is because now the magic quill is doing the transcribing, whereas the Wizard is still doing the deciphering himself. So, the better solution is to simply replace the expenditure clause with the Feature and therefore the monetary cost is given as 0. The consequences of this are much simpler -- the spell did not have to be deciphered, which means no experiments, which means no costs for material components which matches up with the cost given by the Feature of 0. The transcription simply takes up the entire 2 minutes instead of happening in 1 minute. From there, to reconcile with a cost of 0 we can then confirm that the quill used its own ink so there is no cost for material components and no cost for ink.
Not really. The Wizard is still the one performing the experiments so that activity hasn't changed. The ratio of time to cost remains the same for that activity. So, 1 hour of experiments would still take 1 hour. That does not fit into 2 minutes. That's the whole problem with trying to charge the full cost.
The best solution can be arrived at two different ways now. The first way is that we realize that the quill must have made it so that the spell did not need to be deciphered as an implicit direct consequence of the fact that the entire process now takes two minutes. The second way is to replace the entire expenditure clause with the new expenditure in which case the cost is implicitly 0 from the new clause itself and we work backwards from there to determine the time spent deciphering (0) and the fact that the quill used it's own ink.
It was covered already the cost isn't only for fine ink and the Wizardly Quill only discuss the time you must spend to copy a spell into your spell book, not the cost.
Two things:
I've never seen the notation that you're using before. What exactly does the comma mean in l=(60m,40g)?
The ration of time to cost is not a rule, it's a structure based on existing rules, so it's faulty logic to apply it once its underlying rules are changed.
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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If only Order of Scribes also had another feature that specified that using the Wizardly Quill affected both time and cost of transcription... oh wait
The Wizardly Quill reducing time but not cost of copying spells into your spellbook is very clearly both RAW and RAI. The arguments to the contrary have been... unpersuasive, but then, I doubt they were intended to be
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Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Any feature in the game that has the 1/2, 1/2 structure is irrelevant to the point being made. There is obviously no grammatically correct way to specify a non-zero amount of something without explicitly stating it. That simply is not true when 0 of something is required -- in such cases perfectly valid statements can specify this without referring to the thing at all.
That basket contains apples and oranges. Go put 5 apples into that basket please. OR, go put 5 apples and 0 oranges into that basket please. Both are grammatically correct and have the same meaning.
Honestly, making blanket statements that the Feature is "very clearly" RAI to require the full monetary cost is borderline ridiculous.
It's actually much more likely that the Feature is intended to have no cost since this is the entire flavor and theme and intended function of the subclass. A Scribes Wizard is meant to be able to jot down spells on the fly while diving through a dungeon. It's their whole thing that sets them apart. It's the main reason for them existing. They are "the most bookish. It takes many forms in different worlds, but its primary mission is the same everywhere: recording magical discoveries so that wizardry can flourish ".
But for some reason, a few folks here desperately want to drastically nerf this subclass's core low level Feature instead of just allowing them to exist in the world the way that they are meant to exist. Like, if you don't like the content published by Tasha's Cauldron of Everything then just don't allow this content into your games.
No, it's unreasonable to NOT assume this. The quill explicitly performs the transcription, not the experimentation. If any of this experimentation is still required, it is still performed by the Wizard just like before. Also, the writing process MUST have been sped up since the entire process now takes 2 minutes. 2 minutes is less than 1 hour.
As for point 2, you've proven no such thing. The time cost and the monetary cost are linked. If the time is reduced, so is the cost. The whole point of spending money on the material components is to perform experiments. If there are less experiments then less materials need to be purchased. This is already established by the fact that higher level spells cost more time and more money simultaneously.
This represents the expenditure needed to scribe a spell of a certain level. The expenditure consists of two different categories (time cost and monetary cost) which are linked together and analyzed as a single entity. The notation I've invented here is similar to what you might see for sets or ordered pairs, but is unlikely to be an official mathematical notation since I am not a professional mathematician by trade. Debating whether or not someone uses exactly precise mathematical notation while discussing general concepts ongoing throughout the conversation is off-topic. Start another thread if you wish to discuss mathematical notation.
Incorrect. The relationship is established in the existing rules and that portion of the rules are unaffected by the change created by the Feature under my interpretation and also under your interpretation.
Whether or not the feature replaces only the underlined part or the entire bolded part, the italicized portion of the Rule is NOT altered.
Well this is the same sort of reason why I find it frustrating when people cling so heavily to the phrase "fine inks" as if this is something completely different from the ink item which already exists in the tables of items in the Equipment chapter. I consider that little descriptive adjective to be flavor -- so it goes both ways with this.
But in general, no, we cannot ignore large swaths of the Rule in the name of calling it flavor text. The fact that the Rule explicitly specifies that the monetary cost goes towards purchasing actual tangible ingredients that a Wizard needs to be able to physically complete his task is mechanically meaningful. Among other things, this creates an additional reason why a Wizard generally needs to bring an acquired spell scroll all the way back to the safety of civilization where magic shops exist and laboratory environments can be set up before attempting to scribe the scroll. The exception to this of course is meant to be the Scribes Wizard -- that's what makes them unique.
Quite obviously whether or not I complete this research errand to everyone's satisfaction is proof of absolutely nothing related to this discussion, but that should go without saying.
I predict that this conversation will move forward just fine whether or not this happens. But I'll get back to you on this. If I feel like it and I happen to come across a good example in my travels then I will post it.
Next, as explained above, any comparison to features that specifically reduce the cost of something by 1/2 is irrelevant since that is not a proper comparison. It is not possible to list a new non-zero cost for something without actually specifying what that new cost is.
No. Not necessarily.