Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Metaphysics of Bless Scroll

The interaction between Bless scrolls and wizards poses interesting questions as to the nature of the divine in BG3.

Canonically, clerics gain their spells from the diety they worship. So when Shadowheart casts Bless on the party, she is manifesting will. Objects can also be blessed, so I have no problem with a Bless scroll manifesting the power of a god.

But Gale can learn that spell and cast it at leisure, even though he is explicitly unattached to any god. When he blesses the party, who’s will is he manifesting? Does Gale become linked to a god by the mere fact of learning the spell? Or is Bless purely mechanical, just the result of clever manipulation of the Weave with no divine intent behind it?

Whichever option is correct, the implications are staggering.

If Gale is bound to a god by learning his bless spell, then worship is meaningless. It is only a form of control by deities over their followers. Gods withhold power by obfuscating its essence and reward the obedient with scraps they might have acquired through study alone.

If Bless is merely a trick of the Weave, then that spell holds no divine essence. Furthermore, if the magically gifted can cast any cleric spell, which are ostensibly granted by the the Gods, then there are no Gods. There are only powerful beings bound by the same laws as mortals.

In conclusion, religions in BG3 are an elaborate sham.

I think it's an oversight. Divine spells should not be castable by arcane casters.

Hopefully they'll change that to conform to 5e soon. It's also a balance issue and it kind of takes the fun out of Clerics when Gale has all your stuff and more.

Another thing.. Clerics of Selûne can cast Bless from a scroll (which I am assuming is in prayer form) created by Clerics of Shar. That doesn't really match the concept of channeled magic. The whole idea of Divine spell scrolls is rather shaky as it is the Cleric herself who is the conduit for the god's power, not a piece of paper. I think if I was DM'ing I wouldn't allow divine spells on scrolls, or would make them faith specific.

Then there are Cleric spells that make you wonder why they are only available to Divine spellcasters. Create Water? An elemental spell which is the Wizard's bread and butter more than anyone else but Wizards can't do it at all. It's especially apparent now in BG3 where you need it to combo with Lightning Spells. Would be cool to have two Wizards comboing off of eachother, but you need a Cleric for that. Probably that's why they created Rain Dancer. That would actually be a welcome homebrew spell, or just add it to the Arcane list. No one would get mad.

Think of scrolls as a requisition form; a Shar cleric might produce a spell scroll for a particular spell, and thus needs to expend the energy required to open the conduit to her deity and draw that power - but she doesn't actually evoke the effect, just imbues the form of the 'request' onto a prepared scroll. The scroll itself doesn't contain any essence of Shar, and it doesn't link directly to Shar either - a non-cleric, or someone without a divine connection, couldn't do anything with it (in 5e rules). It's just the magically formed structure of a particular divine request, reprepared so that it doesn't drain the user at all to open their channel in that way.

If the scroll gets stolen by a Selunite, it's not a scroll asking Shar for magic, it's just a scroll pre-prepared to allow a cleric to open their divine connection in a particular way, and make a particular request, without putting any strain or drain on their mind/body. So the Selunite can use this scroll to open her divine connection to Selune, in the form that the scroll describes, and request a Bless from her own deity, without taxing her mind or body in the process, and without preparing in advance to ask for it.

A scroll can carry a divination and be cast by non believers, it cannot however be learned, since it isn't a spell.

You're talking about a magic scroll, Equinox... different thing.

In 5e, a Spell Scroll can only be cast and used by someone who has the spell it holds on their spell list (they don't need to know the spell personally, just have it on their spell list). To anyone else, the scroll is incomprehensible and unusable.

Magic Scrolls are a different thing, and they are specifically designed to be cast and used by laypeople - they rarely contain actual spells, however, and usually hold specific enchantments or individual tailored magical effects.

In this case, we're talking specifically about Spell Scrolls.

I mean i agree that this is most probably oversight ...
Or at least i hope so. :-/

But if you really, and i mean REALLY wanted to make this work somehow ...
Aka what people around here call make some headcanon over mechanic:

You could simply say that while Clerics are getting their blessin out of Deity, Wizards are simply mimicing the effect ... i mean the way Deity gives its power to Cleric is through the Weave, since its working like conduit ... therefore Wizard that will be able to mimic the same effect on Weave should theoreticaly be able to recreate same effect without Deity at its Origin.

What puzzles me more is how is that possible that Life Cleric of Baal is (even able to exist in the first place) able to deliver Blessing from his Deity to help some injured weakling. :-/

Well... A cleric of Baal healing someone, would only happen so they could torture/murder him slower? xD the Lord of Murder and pastries, according to Larian? xD

You know looking through both the 5e player and DM guide just now, it occurred to me that there is no real description of how scrolls work, other than the concept of magical items and the weave.

Is there some companion book that goes into this? I have not been using 5e rules for long myself so perhaps I'm missing something important.

There is, it's in the DMG, one second... let me find you the page....

Okay, so: DMG Pg 139, 'Section Magic Item Categories', sub section 'Scrolls'


Then we have the separate entry for spell scroll, which is a different category of item.

DMG pg 200, "Spell Scroll"


The distinction is made clearly enough, but for one not used to 5e style, it would be easy to not check and just stop reading at the entry on Scrolls, without checking what spell scrolls were for comparison. In case of confusion, though, you default to the core ruling philosophy for 5e, which is that specific beats general - in this case, scrolls are generally defined a certain way, but spell scrolls are defined as a specific case within that, and follow their own rules.

To be honest, I expect this issue to be resolved maybe at full release? Something tells me that they will fix it, or maybe already have, on the full build and only once wizard has all of its subclasses in place. Just like how we will probably not know whom the good aligned companions will be untill release is a lot closer. Just my 2 cents anyway.

Awesome, thank you, I looked through all the indexes and couldn't find it!

I would expect them to get the basic rules and gameplay right in the EA. It's different from saving actual content for full release. If the rules are wrong in EA it will only create unnecessary confusion and makes giving feedback harder.

Maybe so. But it's been known for a while and we keep referring to it as a bug or an issue when there's no evidence Larian consider it as such. Case in point, here are the threads I could find in the Suggestions & Feedback forum which mention Wizards learning any spell :


Keep in mind, this doesn't include the General or the Technical & Gameplay forums, though the topic has been brought up there as well.

Larian are aware. They've been aware from the first day of early access. It seems to be such an easy fix for an issue that's hung around so long that it may just be one of Larian's homebrews. After all, Larian haven't been shy about adding more power to existing classes.

Maybe they feel wizards need some help because enemies have more hp but their saving throws haven't been nerfed, or because all the spell ranges have been shortened. Maybe they don't want to explain spell lists to new players. Maybe they like the fact that players have a second option as a healer besides Shadowheart. They've actually said their data shows players want their spells to make fireworks rather than do boring stuff like Bless. So maybe they believe players don't care and in turn don't care themselves.

That's a lot of maybes and in truth I don't know what will happen. In the meantime, I find it fun to think about the in-game implications of Gale giving atheistic blessings to the party. Perhaps he's secretly a cleric of Mystra. Perhaps everyone in your party is secretly a cleric of Shar, and Shadowheart is just there for misdirection.

Or perhaps religions are fake and Gods are a lie. All hail the Absolute!

I can see him using a scroll because well, back in the day Use Magic Device was a thing, but scribing them? No. Wrong on a number of levels. Why bring a divine caster, then?

One thing that I didn’t like about the Elders Scrolls universe was that there were really no true clerics. Just mages that knew restoration magic and no gods needed. D&D made clerics and those devoted to a divine, etc feel unique in the world. Apparently 5e is moving away from this somewhat (power doesn’t come from a god, but from within some how as explained in to me in another post). With this homebrew, it feels even more so…

Assuming the EA system would be the final itteration, I would agree with this, but seeing how many subclasses of wizard are still missing, I seriously doubt they will keep it this way. I mean I never thought they would alter height advantage, but here we are in patch 6. Instead of being all pessimistic and assuming this aspect is set in stone, let us just continue to mention that we would like wizards unable to learn cleric spells from scrolls.

I doubt Larian will please us on all levels with the final product, but it does seem, despite their lacklustre communications between patched, that they do pay attention to what we say. If they say they will add the PHB classes, I want them to follow the class restrictions to the letter. I sincerely doubt 5e allows you to homebrew class mechanics in the tabletop. Else you would get people doing: my barbarian is always enraged due to being molested as a child, so the daily rage limits do not apply to him, teehee.

Sorry if I'm a bit trusting on this issue maybe, but I shall keep mention it in my posts: LARIAN, PLEASE STOP MAKING WIZARDS LEARNING CLERIC SPELLS LIKE HEALING AND GUIDING BOLT FROM SCROLLS PLEASEC:3

Mods fix that.

But there are priests, and only magical capable individuals can use the restoration magics. Most of your common, average people cannot really use magic. Player character can because they're always special somehow(and mechanics reasons). Otherwise we couldn't have people dying of injuries and diseases.

There's also plenty of gods. Including Magnus, the source of all magic.

But anyway...

Allow wizards to use the scrolls, but not scribe them to their spellbook. It makes having a cleric in your group for buffs redundant. Scrolls are finite(you'll eventually run out and have to acquire more), making having a cleric in your group pretty advantageous. Having Gale able to cast them is just... ugh.

Divine and arcane magics are totally different. Divine magics are drawn from a deity using their cleric as a conduit, the closer the cleric is to their god (higher the level) the more magic can be drawn. A divine scroll may contain the magic required to cast the spell but you would at least need to be a cleric to read it. As such, a mage would simply be unable to read a divine scroll. It would be completely alien just like a mage scroll would be to a cleric.

There are two exceptions to the rule. (I am aware of)

1) Multiclassed characters (obviously)
2) Scrolls of projection (extremely rare)

Scrolls of projection can be used by anyone with the ability to read the language the scroll is written.

It occurs to me that wizards scribing any spell only feels like an issue for clerics, though druids are in the same boat. It could be because cleric spells (like Bless) feel more intimately tied to their class than druid spells (like Flaming Sphere). Or it could be because shapeshifting gives the druid class a strong identity, while clerics' ability to channel divinity doesn't feel all that special.

Though removing wizards' omni-scribing ability would help make clerics feel unique, I do wish their distinctions extended beyond just their spell list.