I tend to play in campaigns where our spell casters are not Wizards and quite often the party is rewarded by finding a spell book or grimoire; and I all I can think is "how can we make this a benefit to the party?"
From my understanding, this won't allow the party to scribe scrolls. In order to scribe a scroll the scriber must have the spell prepared or know the spell; which, again, eliminates anyone who is not a Wizard from profiting form this find. I guess the party can find an NPC who they employ to scribe scrolls based on the book; but there is a good chance that NPC would have access to the spell already so they only need to buy the scroll from them in the first place.
Players that have a feature that allows them a ritual book can copy the spells provided they qualify under the features description; but that will only allow spells with the ritual tag. And not all players want to burn the cost for this feature.
I have asked on the board about possibly multi-classing to leverage this, and got great responses that tend to state it is not worth it, and I agree with that. You end up compromising your growth in a primary class to get access to this limited resource (and there is no guarantee you will reaching the levels to use some of the spells in the book). I am not agains MC, I am just saying your reasons for investing in an additional class should be more than being able to take advantage of items that may be found during an adventure.
So the best option I can think of is selling or bartering the book when you get to city. And if so, what is a fair way to calculate a good price? Or am I missing something and the Bard, Sorcerer, or Warlock should be doing cool things upon discovery of these books.
A way to calculate a good price? Well, let's consider...
Spellbooks vs Spell Scrolls: Copying Spells Spell scrolls can be copied from; however, copying from a scroll carries the risk of destroying the scroll without gaining any benefit, going by the rule for copying from them in the Spell Scroll magic item. So if your campaign follows that rule, spellbooks are a more reliable method of copying spells.
Downsides of Selling a Spellbook If you choose to sell a spellbook to a wizard in a city, odds are they'll have some of the spells listed already. They're not going to want to pay for those, they have no need for them. Additionally, if you try to price the book the same as you would spell scrolls for every spell listed inside, it's going to get expensive fast and they still need to copy those spells in order to use them at all.
Ways to Sell the Spellbook You could sell the spellbook as a whole item. This may run into the problems listed above. Alternately, you could try to sell it in pieces, tearing out the necessary pages as you sell them. But this requires finding multiple buyers and there's a possibility something important gets damaged during the act if you aren't careful.
Pricing the Spellbook My advice, if you're a player looking to price the book: Be willing to haggle, and offer a bulk deal for the book to a wizard that can use a large number of the higher-level spells within. Don't worry about the low-level stuff, they won't be relevant to the price, or will do very little. But spells of 4th level and higher may be rarer to find, and could be upsold a bit if you manage to persuade the wizard. I'd personally price it like a magic item. The DMG has guidance on pricing those, but I'd look at rarity like this: 1st-2nd level spells are Common, 3rd-4th are Uncommon, 5th-6th are Rare, 7th-8th are Very Rare, and 9th-level spells are Legendary.
My Final Advice Have fun roleplaying the interaction. Involve the DM with the planning process, of course, to make sure they're on the same page about doing this. Maybe it even turns into a little sidequest.
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I tend to play in campaigns where our spell casters are not Wizards and quite often the party is rewarded by finding a spell book or grimoire; and I all I can think is "how can we make this a benefit to the party?"
From my understanding, this won't allow the party to scribe scrolls. In order to scribe a scroll the scriber must have the spell prepared or know the spell; which, again, eliminates anyone who is not a Wizard from profiting form this find. I guess the party can find an NPC who they employ to scribe scrolls based on the book; but there is a good chance that NPC would have access to the spell already so they only need to buy the scroll from them in the first place.
Players that have a feature that allows them a ritual book can copy the spells provided they qualify under the features description; but that will only allow spells with the ritual tag. And not all players want to burn the cost for this feature.
I have asked on the board about possibly multi-classing to leverage this, and got great responses that tend to state it is not worth it, and I agree with that. You end up compromising your growth in a primary class to get access to this limited resource (and there is no guarantee you will reaching the levels to use some of the spells in the book). I am not agains MC, I am just saying your reasons for investing in an additional class should be more than being able to take advantage of items that may be found during an adventure.
So the best option I can think of is selling or bartering the book when you get to city. And if so, what is a fair way to calculate a good price? Or am I missing something and the Bard, Sorcerer, or Warlock should be doing cool things upon discovery of these books.
A way to calculate a good price? Well, let's consider...
Spellbooks vs Spell Scrolls: Copying Spells
Spell scrolls can be copied from; however, copying from a scroll carries the risk of destroying the scroll without gaining any benefit, going by the rule for copying from them in the Spell Scroll magic item. So if your campaign follows that rule, spellbooks are a more reliable method of copying spells.
Downsides of Selling a Spellbook
If you choose to sell a spellbook to a wizard in a city, odds are they'll have some of the spells listed already. They're not going to want to pay for those, they have no need for them. Additionally, if you try to price the book the same as you would spell scrolls for every spell listed inside, it's going to get expensive fast and they still need to copy those spells in order to use them at all.
Ways to Sell the Spellbook
You could sell the spellbook as a whole item. This may run into the problems listed above. Alternately, you could try to sell it in pieces, tearing out the necessary pages as you sell them. But this requires finding multiple buyers and there's a possibility something important gets damaged during the act if you aren't careful.
Pricing the Spellbook
My advice, if you're a player looking to price the book: Be willing to haggle, and offer a bulk deal for the book to a wizard that can use a large number of the higher-level spells within. Don't worry about the low-level stuff, they won't be relevant to the price, or will do very little. But spells of 4th level and higher may be rarer to find, and could be upsold a bit if you manage to persuade the wizard. I'd personally price it like a magic item. The DMG has guidance on pricing those, but I'd look at rarity like this: 1st-2nd level spells are Common, 3rd-4th are Uncommon, 5th-6th are Rare, 7th-8th are Very Rare, and 9th-level spells are Legendary.
My Final Advice
Have fun roleplaying the interaction. Involve the DM with the planning process, of course, to make sure they're on the same page about doing this. Maybe it even turns into a little sidequest.