timemrick wrote: ↑Tue Jun 12, 2018 10:03 pm
I've seen some discussion of this in a Pathfinder product that was introducing new divine spells ("Pathfinder Short Cuts: Inquisitor Spells of Freeport" by Owen K.C. Stephens, Green Ronin) but the basic idea should work for D&D 5E, too.
As Owen points out, whenever a new rulebook with new spells is introduced into the campaign, there is some potential for imbalance between divine and arcane casters: if clerics and druids get free access to all the new spells for their classes, that suddenly gives them a lot more options and flexibility than the wizard, who must invest time and money in acquiring any new spells for his class. (This issue is more pressing in Pathfinder, which has a much higher volume of releases than D&D 5E.)
Owen's fix is to treat all non-core spells as "uncommon spells") which means divine casters must expand some time and money finding and learning them. However, the cost is a fraction of what a wizard pays to learn new spells.
Casters with a set number of spells known (ranger, IIRC?) don't pay extra for acquiring spells from new sources, because they are already limited in how many they can learn.
I've done this whenever a spellcaster finds a book of spells that their class can cast using the Downtime rules.
My players are a little baffled when I introduce a book of magic written in magical script; they assume the language can be chosen from the list of languages in the PHB, even if its an exotic language.
But I have to explain that magical script is only readable by the spellcaster who scribed the book, and this rule reaches back to 1e; you can't learn "Magic" as a language, you have to study each new book in order to read it.
If 5e had Read Magic as a spell, then they wouldn't need to spend several weeks of downtime learning each new spellbook, but it balances out as far as letting new spells loose in the campaign - even for clerics!
From a divine point of view, this could be seen as the deity requiring a cleric to prove his/her faith and spend the time learning the new spells in the book. The upside is that the cleric gains access to those spells, much like the additional domain spells in the PHB, except these are accessible only through downtime study.
The downside of this is that the DM & player must keep track of which lists of spells they have access to, instead of only relying on the PHB 'official core' lists, but it shouldn't be too much of a bother.
