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A couple of questions about spellbooks.
#1. The Ultimate Campaign sourcebook says (page 84) that you can add up to eight spells to your spellbook in a day of downtime. Is this intended to indicate that you can add any eight spells you have access to to a spellbook in one day of downtime, regardless of level? Because that pretty directly contradicts CRB page 219.
But if we take the rules in the CRB (page 219) at face value, and assume level 1 spells, you need an hour of study for each spell, followed by an hour of copying, which would take a total of 16 hours for 8 spells. And often, the game assumes that you can't really do something for 16 hours in a day, so it seems like it would be very hard to add eight spells to a spellbook if we are keeping the CRB rules.
#2. Are there intended to be limits on spell studying and copying? Assume you have a ring of sustenance, a supply of fine ink, and a huuuuge enemy spellbook. How many hours a day can you study and copy spells? 22, because the other two are spent sleeping? 8, because everything caps at 8 hours? Some other value?
#3. If you are crafting magic items, you are limited to eight hours a day of crafting time. Can you scribe spells on a day when you also did magic item crafting? The crafting rules say you can use the rest of your time "as you see fit", and gives examples like going out adventuring.
#4. This is more crafting-specific: You can accelerate crafting to 4 hours with a +5 on the crafting DC. You can only work 8 hours a day. Does that mean that, at +5 on the DC, you can work for eight hours, which is two four-hour blocks, each of which produces 1000gp worth of progress, or does it mean that, at +5 on the DC, you can only work 4 hours but you get as much progress as 8 would have taken?
My assumption: If you have a way to handle the sleep shortage, you should definitely be able to both scribe spells and craft a magic item
in the same day, although I would be pretty wary of a character trying to work over 16 hours.
That's a lot for one FAQ request. I especially admire your 4th question; it's a pet issue of mine.
While I'm not official, I'd like to point out that:
#1: You don't always need an hour to study the spells you're copying, such as copying your own spellbook to make a backup book for safekeeping. So mixing the study time with the copy time is a bad idea.
#2: Good question. There seems to be no limit other than your need for sleep.
#3: The rules seem to allow it. Crafting magic items seems to be tiring, thus the 8 hour limit, but with no such limit on scribing spellbooks and the explicit item crafting line that says "as you see fit", it seems perfectly fine by RAW.
#4: I believe the text that explicitly says the item creator "cannot rush the process by working longer each day" includes "rushing the process" by accelerating your work - yes, you can "accelerate" to 4 hours at the cost of a trivial +5 DC, but you still "cannot rush the process by working longer each day". The acceleration ONLY means that, in addition to crafting your item, you have 20 hours of day to do "as you see fit" instead of only 16 hours.
However, I could be wrong about #4 so I'd love a FAQ update on this as well.
I agree with your assumption.
Personally, I set a limit of 8-9 hours for scribing spells in a day, and consider that as crafting time. It's intensive magical work that seems very much of the same caliber. Not RAW, just seems to be the intent (unless I'm wrong and there is a rule specifying).
#4: You can definitely work 8 hours accelerated to get 2000 of price, 1000gp of cost, completed in a day. There are numerous staff examples that include it.
Also..
#1: Perhaps the Ultimate Campaign quote is for 0th-level spells? (1/2 hour study, 1/2 scribing each).
(clarifying: This was a response to DM_Blake)
I think you're right about the study/copying time, but the Ultimate Campaign is talking about adding new spells, so I really do think it's impossible, RAW, to add 8 spells to a book in a day, unless they are intending to make it easier/faster.
The crafting stuff comes from a long backstory.
I have all sorts of crafting problems, some of which involve house-rules or special circumstances. But for instance, if you have a "valet familiar", what impact does that have? My GM's ruling has been that, basically, the four-hour thing represents being able to do a large enough hunk of work not to lose efficiency in four hours, but the cap is still eight hours a day. So I can craft 2kgp of items in a day... But what does the valet familiar do to that? We concluded that it adds the base 1k/day of creation value, so with a valet familiar and a +5 DC, I can do 3k/day.
Note that the crafting rules are heavily broken for mid-to-high-level play, because the amount of time you need to get a statistically-significant boost to your resources goes up dramatically. It's one thing to spend three days turning 3k of materials into a 6k item when your total character wealth is only about 20k. If your total character wealth is 200k, you now need 30 days to get the same impact on wealth, and there's not much you can do to improve this. (Which is why the GM has been making it super-easy to buff those numbers a bit, so the craft wondrous item feat doesn't turn into a total waste of space at higher levels.)
And, of course, add that to a wizard character, whose power is heavily influenced by how much time I have to write down spells...
Oh - the other major reason you can add 8 spells per day is that (so far as I know), you don't have to study/learn the spells at the same time as you scribe them.
For instance, if you've borrowed your friend wizard's spellbook a couple times, learned a few of his spells (possibly to memorize one day), but never got around to scribing the spells. One day you get some downtime and a cheap supply of inks, so you go to town and scribe them all into your own spellbook.
For number question 3, I thought u could only craft 1 magic item a day with the exception being potions?
Also I thought there was a cap on how much u could do a day with 1k being the limit. I was under the assumption that when u beat it by 5, instead of using 8 hours u can do 4 hours get the same results and that extra 4 hours u can use elsewhere doing other things other than crafting since in 4 hours u met the limit?
Redneckdevil wrote: For number question 3, I thought u could only craft 1 magic item a day with the exception being potions? Right. But we are talking only about working on one magic item.
Work on one magic item for eight hours, add to spell book for some amount of time. Adding to your spellbook isn't creating a magic item.
Quote: Also I thought there was a cap on how much u could do a day with 1k being the limit. I was under the assumption that when u beat it by 5, instead of using 8 hours u can do 4 hours get the same results and that extra 4 hours u can use elsewhere doing other things other than crafting since in 4 hours u met the limit? Well, that's the thing. The rules say that you can work for 8 hours, and they say that you can do 1k of work in 4 hours if you use a DC 5 higher. It is not clear how that is intended to work, but apparently there are examples in official stuff of people using it do do 2k of work in a day.
In regards to question #1, have there been any other recent threads on this? The spell craft skill description should be included in any such discussion as there is third set of rules there.
I haven't seen any other threads. My GM has ruled that you can craft up to 8 hours a day, and you can do other things with the rest of your day, and that in practice you can't spend more than 8 hours a day adding spells to a spellbook. But with a ring of sustenance, she doesn't see any obvious reason you couldn't do both.
I might repost this question when I can use my laptop to more easily quote and link what I want to.
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