AD&D Rule Spotlight: Casting Spells Directly from Books

Today we look at page 80 of the Unearthed Arcana book where there is an optional rule that lets a magic user cast straight from a spellbook as if it were a scroll. It is powerful, costly, and risky. I cover the exact risks, how to rule edge cases, and a table story where a player tried to game it.

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Episode Transcript

(00:17):
Hey, welcome back to the podcastEvil Dungeon Master AD the
Universe Podcast. I'm your host Diem Vince.
Hopefully you're doing well out there today.
It is Wednesday. It's time for the podcast.
Today we're going to talk a little bit about Advanced
Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition.
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(00:39):
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(01:03):
Zombie apocalypse type game. It was a must have for most
people in the early 2000s. It is still a relevant game
today. Anyway, today we're going to
turn to the Unearthed Arcana book, page 80, and we're going
to talk about the rule in here that you can use called casting

(01:23):
spells directly from books. Now before we had this rule, we
had the ability to cast from thebook directly.
When we did that in our games. And I remember when the great
Joe DM was running games before we had this book out or he was

(01:45):
using this book, he would allow us to read from the actual book.
We didn't have travelling. Well, we had travelling books,
we just didn't kind of, you know, designate it as such.
He would always rule that if youread from the book, the spell
would just, well, just vanish from the book and be a blank

(02:09):
page afterwards. You'd also have a He'd also give
you a percent chance for castingit directly from the book,
especially if you were in a diresituation such as you were in
the middle of a combat or you were pressured.
Now if it was just that you're casting the spell and there was
no pressure or anything, he wouldn't give you the chance to
fail, it would just fade away. But the chance to fail was the

(02:34):
spell level itself percentage wise, and I think he based it a
minimum of 10%. So there was always a chance
that the spell would fail or something.
I forget his exact rules becauseI've never used them ever since
then because I they had this book with this ruling in it.
But he gave a minimum of 10% chance of failure during a

(02:56):
combat situation only because ofthe way combat worked and you
were stressed out or if someone was chasing you or something
like that. So I mean, it's interesting how
we did that. But in Page 80, they have an
extreme. The DM may allow a magic user to
cast a spell directly from any sort of spell book, just as it
were a scroll. The book must be the appropriate

(03:18):
sorts of spell matches the profession of the caster.
Magic user book, obviously. Magic user spell book.
The caster must be able to know and use the spell in question.
Note that in regard reading directly from the spell book
differs from the use of a scrollspells, so you have to know the

(03:38):
spell and use the spell in question.
When it comes to scrolls, you don't have to exactly know it,
you can just cast it by doing itif you're a lower level and
that's when the percentage chance of failure would go up,
obviously if you were too low. Lower levels when it came to
Joe's rules. So if you were like second level

(04:01):
and you were casting A6 level spell, he would add that 6% on
to the failure of the 10% that he always used.
So direct casting of a spell from a spell book automatically
destroys that spell. There's also a 1% chance per
level the spell that the spells immediately preceding and

(04:22):
following the spell cast will likewise be destroyed.
Now that's an important thing tonote there, because I have
something to talk about when this is over.
There's an additional 1% chance that the casting of the spell
directly from the spell book will destroy the entire book.
A permanency spell, for example,would not prevent the spell from

(04:42):
disappearing when cast in this manner.
Even though the writing might remain on the page, the writing
will no longer be magical in nature.
These strictures apply whether casting a spell is using his or
her personal book or the book ofanother read.
Magic is required for one magic user to read another magic
user's spell book, and a magic user can learn a spell by

(05:05):
reading it from another's book. This learning process requires 2
to 8 hours of study per level ofthe spell, after which time the
spell is learned and they're immediately usable by the magic
user who did the studying. So I've always said that when it
comes to books for magic users, every magic user writes it

(05:27):
differently. And here is exactly what
supports that. I've always said now a lot of
DM's will allow magic users to immediately read magic user
books. Like it's just, you know, hey,
you're a magic user. You're like, hi, you're English,
you know, you speak English, youcould read an English book or
you're Italian, you could read Italian books.

(05:48):
No, it doesn't work that way. Magic users are taught to write
things in certain ways by their master who teaches them.
And every master has a differentway of teaching them so that
every student learns a differentway.
And then kind of makes their ownmethod of writing notes in the
book so only they can read it and read magic is where that

(06:09):
spell comes in that they, I think they mostly got rid of
later on when it came to this whole situation.
But I like that they have this whole process set out here for
you. Now, what I wanted to talk about
was when we were talking about, let's see here, there's 1%
chance. No, no, there's also 1% chance
per spell per level of the spellthat the spells immediately

(06:32):
proceeding and following the cast a spell like also be
destroyed. Now I brought that up for a
reason because I had a player ina game a while back that built
AI. Guess he called it a sacrifice
book. Or you know, just a screw book.
Whatever, it didn't matter. With one spell per section.
He padded spells by spells with blank pages.

(06:55):
His plan was to cast from the book daily and argued that there
were no adjacent spells to lose.So he was constantly casting
from this book in hopes that youknow he get around the rule when
it came to when it came to. I'm trying to look at the

(07:16):
wording here. When it came to casting the
spell, he would not succumb to the 1% and if he did it was a
blank page because it says preceding it now.
That's not how it works. I had to make a ruling on that
with the group and say listen, it says the next prepared spells
in the book, the previous prepared spells in the book.
It doesn't matter if there is a blank page or not because that

(07:41):
doesn't count as a spell. A blank page is not a spell, so
you can't pad the pages with, you know, a blank spell to try
to get around this whole process.
It's just going to skip that blank page and go to the next
one, you know, And he argued about this for some time with me
and I finally had to say I it was the in the middle of the

(08:01):
game too. So I finally had to say, all
right, you know what? This is the ruling for now in
this game. We'll go with that because I
want to play the game and not argue with you afterwards.
We'll talk about this with the group and I will make a decision
on that. And he was like, all right,
cool. Because he thought he was, you

(08:21):
know, he's going to get away with this whole clever plan.
After the game where we sat around, usually back when I was
living in Connecticut, we would after the game, we would go to
the sandwich stop or the, the sub shop, as I think they called
it, the sub shop there. And we would all like kind of

(08:42):
have, you know, lunch or dinner,depending on what day we were
playing. And this was all of us would go.
So we'd sit around and we'd talkabout the game and people would
ask me questions, things like that, tell me what they thought
about the game. It was a great feedback slash,
you know, bullshit session that we have with friends.
That's what friends do. Usually after games, they would
generally, you know, hang out for a little while and chat or

(09:05):
something like that. So we discussed this whole
thing. And I said to them, the ruling
does state this. It says the next prepared spells
in the book. I said, I'm not usually a
stickler for things in the book,but this is pretty cut and dry.
And what you're doing is kind oftrying to get around it by like,

(09:26):
I don't know, screwing the rules.
I don't know how what you call it.
But and he was just like, well, I think it's fair.
I mean, but think I said, think about the next prepared spells
before and after. A blank page is not a prepared
spell or a spell. It's a blank page.
Now, if you want to pad spells in this book with spells that

(09:53):
you don't care about, like lesser spells, so then you can
keep the good spells in between,then by all means write it that
way. And then those spells, if they
happen to go away, they go away.And he, you know, he thought
about it and he argued a little bit more.
And then I had, I got the group consensus about it.
And I said, well, let's, let's see what the group says, because

(10:13):
I'm, I'm generally for asking the group.
And if you've ever listened to any of my actual play podcast
that I do it roll higher.die.com.
You can see that a lot of times you'll hear in the recording is
this I'll, I'll ask the group. What does the group thing then?
Is this fair? And they will answer and then
we'll make, I'll make a decision.
So I asked the group and the group was just like, dude, yeah,

(10:39):
that's not fair that they even even I who are pro player, you
know, want to make sure the player gets an edge.
And one of the guys like, no, that doesn't work.
It says spells, not blank pages.And another guy's like, yeah,
unfortunately it does say spellsand not blank pages.
So the consensus of the group was the guy was being an idiot.

(11:00):
So I made the ruling going forward that, you know, blank
pages do not shield spells and it's the next one going forward.
But I told them write, organize your spells on a piece of paper
how you want it in the book. I said write down how you want

(11:20):
it. Like if you want to put like
first level spells in between these high level spells that you
want to cast so that if you screw it up, it'll burn those
things and you don't really carebecause you already know those
and have those and they're not really that useful.
I say put put spells in between there that you don't ever really
use. So you know, it's a good tip for
there. So other ways I thought about

(11:41):
how Adm can kind of incorporate distance of the game and and
maybe use it as something other than just the ruling itself.
Like you could place a book thatthey find in the dungeon and
maybe, you know, the magic user is like, Oh my God, he reads it
and he's just like, this is great spells.
But maybe they have to use one of the spells in there later on

(12:06):
directly from the book to survive.
And they have to risk reading itright directly out of there so
that there's a chance that, you know, either they die or they
risk the chance of burning the spells that might be really
useful in the future. So it's kind of a dilemma
situation there. You can also do like this kind
of situation where 2 magic usersdo it out and they would win the

(12:30):
prize of whatever may be some treasure of some sort of magical
weapon, magical item. But they get a book and they
have to burn the spells in a certain amount of time and, and,
and burn the book and got the book pretty much out.
But the spells have to be used in a way that's useful at the

(12:53):
time, so it can't be just like running around casting on our
random people just to end the book.
So the first person that went onthis 30 day journey for example,
casting the spells in a useful situation and brought the book
back empty or completely blank with all no pages of spells
would be the winner. So it might be an interesting
idea to do that. Maybe a patron loans the book to

(13:18):
a magic user and the magic user is paying it off.
Every time he uses a spell, he has to pay a certain amount as
it fades out of the book and he's not allowed to copy it.
Not that he probably will not, but every time he uses a spell
from the book, it fades out of the book and that adds to how

(13:38):
much of debt that he has to actually pay when he brings the
book back because it's a loan tobook.
There's little things like that you can do, but I don't know,
tell me what you think in the comments about this ruling.
How do you use it in your games?I kind of use it rules written.
I don't really do the whole percentage that it might blow
the other spells around it. I just do a percentage failure

(13:59):
for the spell since you're you're reading it directly with
the spell from the book and percentage chance for spell over
your level. I kind of like that in the sense
I don't know, we'll see, but tell me what you think of the
comments. Just want to say don't forget to
go to my website theevildm.com, go to my YouTube channel,

(14:21):
youtube.com/evil DM, support me patreon.com/the evil DM
hopefully. Have a great day.
Keep it original, keep it old school.
Goodnight and God bless everybody.