I was surprised to see that everyone could use every scroll initially, then I felt that it made sense given how DOS2 worked, and that this is a mainstream AAA title. The example of the fighter having access to gold and being able to out-wizard a wizard gives me pause.
Scrolls for classes that don't include your class (or subclass in the case of EK and AT) should not be useable as a core rule. I would not be opposed to this being optional in easy mode games, but this unbalances the game tremendously to favor fighters specifically, and probably rogues a bit too, with their two bonus actions a turn.
I would encourage Larian not to be afraid of forcing players to make thoughtful decisions about their party, but I don't have any hopes that they will. It's normal for every game developer, both pen and paper and video game, to remove all consequence from player decisions and allow them to do anything. I would be happy to see a player punished for failing to have a healer among his party, or enough gold to pay an NPC for an expensive raise dead spell.
Either way though. A Core rules mode shouldn't feature universal magic item usage.
Another issue with scrolls for everyone and in such an enormous amount (since I've played more of the game and found litteraly dozens and dozens of scrolls everywhere)...
As it is designed right now, you get absolutely NO benefits from learning a spell from a scroll with your mage / cleric. Here's why :
- You loose the ability to use that scroll with anyone else on the party, making it much more powerful and flexible,
- More importantly, given how D&D works, your wizard or cleric comes with a limited amount of spells of each level they can use before a long rest. Now, if you learn a spell from a scroll, it will eventually make your spell list grow larger and you'll end up with more spells competing with each other for those precious slots. Meanwhile, if it stays as a parchment, you can always use this spell whenever you want, and it does not use one of your slots. Meaning, more choices available to you, and more importantly more spells you can use of the same level.
So basically, you can for example slot 4 fireballs on your level 3 spell list and that's all you'll ever need : for other spells, you'd rather use scroll versions. This way, you'll be able to throw 4 fireballs a day + a huge number of 3rd level spells through scrolls.
It definitely doesn't feel like the tabletop version AT ALL. It does feel like DOS though, but a cheap version of DOS where the rules get limited by D&D own ruleset.
Larian should make a choice : this game is either a DOS based game, or a D&D based one. But those two worlds can't merge that well.
