I currently play in a 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons game. In it, I am running a wizard. It turns out that there are two kinds of spell casting that wizards can do in fourth edition. The first kind consists basically of combat abilities: scorching burst, magic missle, thunderwave, shield and the like. The second kind of casting is called ritual casting and is where all of the real utility powers are. Things in this category include comprehend languages, Tensor's floating disk, enchant item, and resurrection.

Ritual casting is somewhat different than the combat skills. With the combat skills, you're basically stuck using a specific set for the entire game and only learn new ones by either gaining higher levels skills due to the standard leveling process or by retraining away one to replace it with another. Rituals, however, can be accumulated without any real limit. The strange thing about rituals is the set of rules that they operate under. For instance, if you find a ritual book, you cannot use it unless you spend eight uninterrupted hours studying it. This seems like a completely arbitrary number choosen only to limit spell gain to about 1 (maybe 2) per day. Next, if you find a ritual book and want to copy the rituals into your own ritual book (so that you aren't carrying around a library), you have to first master it, and then spend another 8 hours copying it into your own ritual book. I should note that the act of copying the ritual book requires an expenditure of gold equal to the cost of buy the ritual book outright. This rule leads to some interesting fridge logic. Firstly, it means that there is really no reason for anyone to ever go into the business of selling spell books: the books require the expediture of the ritual's base cost to make, plus the cost of the ritual book itself, plus time. Add to this the fact that the PHB specifically says that (PC created, at least) spellbooks sell for 10% of base cost and one quickly discovers that being in the business of making ritual books is a losing proposition. Apparently, there is someone out there flooding the market with ritual books at under cost. Also, it means that finding a book with rituals in it is a bit of a booby prize (I'm not complaing too much, Greg) because it basically gives you the options of lugging around another book or just having the opportunity to pay for all of the spells in it. It is, in a sense, an items with value that is difficult to adequately determine. Yes, you have access to new spells, but at the same time, you have some serious expenditure required to use them.

It seems like the only way any of this makes even the slightest bit of sense is in the context of the RPGA. My thinking is that the only reason to make copying spell books no cheaper than buying them is to prevent a specific kind of behavior which otherwise applies to information exchanges: ease of copyability. In the context of RPGA, characters are meeting and parting all of the time. Since at least two different roles are both ritual casters (Wizard/Controller and Cleric/Leader), there would be a decent chance of ritual casters appearing in the same game. If the copy cost were free, or even merely reduced, every RPGA game would begin with all of the ritual casters exchanging spells and spending a few pre-session days of game time copying the spells them. Ritual casters would quickly reach a critical mass wherein every ritual caster knew every ritual spell that they could cast at their level. A reduced cost case instead of a free case would lead to similar trouble insofar as it would reduce the effective cost of spells to whatever the reduced cost was so long as one could find another player with the appropriate spell and land in a game with them.

I don't think that the RPGA is a good enough reason to introduce such a glaring economic problem into a game system, but I doubt that Wizards of the Coast particularly care about my opinion.

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