Make scrolls useful to the writer

[Ferretman]

Originally Posted by Axly Suregrip

Steve,
Really good points. I too have been playing since the beginning and I cannot remember scrolls being used. Scrolls are found and nearly always immediately sold.

That's what I recall. I think maybe (been a bit) there were a couple of scrolls you could gather from Tollenkar's Lair and a couple more were collected during some of the Death Tests? I don't recall them being kept for very long; they were either used near immediately or sold when we got back to base.


Ferret

[Axly Suregrip]

I like what we have come up with. In my game, I will cut the price in half and also make scrolls a lot more common (since cheaper...). Maybe they will get used more.

I nearly always have scrolls in native languages. Dwarf wizards carry scrolls in Dwarvish, etc. It makes it less likely to be used against owner/their kind. But for my players, getting scrolls in Orcish doesn't seem to inspire their wizards to learn Orcish. They just sell the scroll.

[Axly Suregrip]

So, back to Henry's original post.

I am now starting to see the merit to allowing scrolls to be made from spellbooks, without knowing the spell.

Yes, they basically get access to a lot more spells, but using the scroll itself has enough hurdles to limit it. Plus with only 6 items "on the belt" (encumbrance rules), a wizard at the most will have 6 scrolls that they can use... at the cost of 2 turns each.

Makes a scroll writing wizard interesting. Assuming he has a silver dagger and a healing potion flask on his belt, realistically we are looking at 3 or 4 scrolls.

Of course the wizard can make scrolls for the other wizards in the party, thus not requiring a rule change.

I think I will try the rule change and see if my players go for it. (Right now only 2 wizards being played).

Thanks Henry!

[EKB]

In my house rules, the user doesn't have to roll against his Dx to cast a spell from a scroll, but instead rolls against the scroll's Dx - a measure of how neat and clear the writing is. This will have a bonus over the base Dx of the wizard who wrote the scroll, since the wizard will be working under better conditions when writing the scroll.

So if a wizard writes a scroll of a spell from a spell book, he'll get +2 Dx over his own Dx when using the scroll. And if the wizard writes a scroll of a spell he knows, this bonus increases to +6 Dx.

This falls out of my general re-write of the item creation rules. I wanted to do away with the whole "teams of wizards and platoons of apprentices" system. That meant more Dx rolls by an enchanting wizard who might not be a high-Dx hotshot, and so to compensate I skewed the weekly Dx roll for item enchantment to normally having bonuses.

I've also greatly shortened the time required to write scrolls, along with their cost, since they are one-shot items like potions.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by EKB

This falls out of my general re-write of the item creation rules. I wanted to do away with the whole "teams of wizards and platoons of apprentices" system. That meant more Dx rolls by an enchanting wizard who might not be a high-Dx hotshot, and so to compensate I skewed the weekly Dx roll for item enchantment to normally having bonuses.

I've also greatly shortened the time required to write scrolls, along with their cost, since they are one-shot items like potions.

Cool - my re-write is nearly identical, also with the enchanter working alone. I only simplified the dice rolling down to two rolls for a continuous project, one half-way through, and one at the very end. Fail either and it's start all over or abandon the project. As the enchantment might take weeks to months or even years depending on the spell, I allowed for taking breaks to do other things, but for each week away from the project I'd make them make that many extra DX rolls to successfully resume where they left off. Again, miss one of those rolls and it must be started all over.