A party I DM for is temporarily travelling with an NPC wizard. Naturally, the party’s wizard would like to learn some new spells from the other wizard. For regular level 1+ spells, I have no problem with using the normal rules. However, he also wants to learn cantrips. According to the spellbook rules for wizards, only level 1+ spells are stored in the spellbook. Thus, there are no rules for learning cantrips aside from levelling up. What would be a good way to go about this? Or should I just say that you can’t learn cantrips from an outside source?
Wizards already have access to an optional 3rd level feature called "Cantrip Formulas" that let you swap out a Cantrip after every long rest. Basically, you already have all of the cantrips written into your book, you just need to commit them to memory for the day.
If you want to give the wizard access to a new cantrip, go for it, but keep their number of prepared cantrips constant.
You could combine the optional rule with your campaign if you haven’t brought in the optional rule. You can learn the other Wizard’s cantrip, but you can still only prepare the normal amount of cantrips per day. This represents the wizard’s limit of magical competence. They aren’t able to deploy all their tricks instantaneously without rehearsing it and putting energy and effort into a small set of those tricks.
This might be similar to how a musician prepares their set and probably a small extra set of alternative music and encores. They can’t just bust out whatever, even if they had the skill to do so with enough prep. There may be a few select musicians who have enough natural aptitude to just perfectly play anything that comes to their mind, but this generally comes at the price of other skills.
A party I DM for is temporarily travelling with an NPC wizard. Naturally, the party’s wizard would like to learn some new spells from the other wizard. For regular level 1+ spells, I have no problem with using the normal rules. However, he also wants to learn cantrips. According to the spellbook rules for wizards, only level 1+ spells are stored in the spellbook. Thus, there are no rules for learning cantrips aside from levelling up. What would be a good way to go about this? Or should I just say that you can’t learn cantrips from an outside source?
Wizards already have access to an optional 3rd level feature called "Cantrip Formulas" that let you swap out a Cantrip after every long rest. Basically, you already have all of the cantrips written into your book, you just need to commit them to memory for the day.
If you want to give the wizard access to a new cantrip, go for it, but keep their number of prepared cantrips constant.
You could combine the optional rule with your campaign if you haven’t brought in the optional rule. You can learn the other Wizard’s cantrip, but you can still only prepare the normal amount of cantrips per day. This represents the wizard’s limit of magical competence. They aren’t able to deploy all their tricks instantaneously without rehearsing it and putting energy and effort into a small set of those tricks.
This might be similar to how a musician prepares their set and probably a small extra set of alternative music and encores. They can’t just bust out whatever, even if they had the skill to do so with enough prep. There may be a few select musicians who have enough natural aptitude to just perfectly play anything that comes to their mind, but this generally comes at the price of other skills.