Wizards 5e character builder how to#
Why would you write a book about how to do X when everyone you know already knows how? Books that include the application of these skills will usually be journals, and will either gloss over the details so no knowledge is necessary, or simply use sufficient explanation for someone who already knows how to understand what is being described.ģ) Information in books may be highly localized to a specific place and/or time.
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This is especially true for things that are basic day-to-day skills for a decent segment of the population. Nobody writes a book explaining the basics of sailing, because that would be a massive waste of effort it would be far easier to teach people how to sail by actually taking them sailing. There are no printing presses everything is written by hand.
Wizards 5e character builder full#
There's tons of sensory information that simply can't be reduced to words and absorbed, to say nothing of muscle memory.Ģ) Fantasy settings are not usually full of technical manuals. You can read all the books in the world about riding a bicycle, and you'll still fall off the first time you actually try to do it. There are also a number of reasons why the character's knowledge wouldn't be as extensive as your player seems to think.ġ) Book knowledge isn't practical experience. There are a number of reasons why the character's book knowledge may not be useful at a given time. I'm stumped and I can't think of a legit argument or reason that makes sense with the whole elf character being a brand new adventurer at level 1 (wizard) but has lived for hundreds of years and knows everything but just hasn't has the actual experiences yet. It makes the other PCs feel undervalued as well and I've had more than one ask why he can do that. I get that characters may have done something a while back and want to recall something, but just reading about them and saying that your character has read basically 90% of the books in Faerun doesn't work for me. Wizard: Then I do my best to recall everything. (the best thing I could come up with was:) You may have read something about boats in more than one book even but you've never had experience and you more than likely would not be able to retain all of that information to be able to efficiently sail a ship. Wizard: I've probably read about them in a book at some point so I would know how to steer a ship, the names of the ship parts and what commands to give. Me: You don't know how to work the ship or any aspect of giving out commands to do so (neither do any of the other PCs) and you've never been on a ship before now.
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Wizard: I'll steer the boat back to Waterdeep. Setting - Party has taken over a pirate ship and the party's original crew has all died.
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How can I allow him to keep the mega bookworm aspect from his character's past without having to appease him by basically allowing him to know everything like lore or city info or what-have-you? He also claims (even though he knows I won't allow it) that his character should be learning spells much faster since he's already studied them and read about them and so on.Īn example from a session a few weeks back:
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That's cool and I can skirt around some of that using homebrew lore, enemies, and locations but he continually argues with me and other players that his character would just, "know that already" since he spent hundreds of years reading books from all over the place. He made his elf well over 200 years old and claims that his character has read a massive amount of books (pretty much reading since his elf character could read and hasn't stopped) and that's all his player apparently has ever done. I have a player who is an elf wizard and his entire backstory and goal is knowledge related.