I have never allowed any spellcaster to automatically know every spell in the Game Multiverse. That is just silly. A player can know the spell of any offical book used in the game.If for example I start out as a 1st-level wizard in year 1, then two years later someone in-setting develops this flashy new spell that in hindsight I could have built my career around, well tough for me.
I limit each spellcasting character to ones the player knows, local spells of where they came from, and spells from their background and or affiliations. And give the player a handout of selected spells. All the other spells are "treasure". The character has to find them somehow.
And I use the ancient 1E FR rules for unique, very rare, rare, uncommon and common spells.
It comes out to like 500-700 of spells per school. But often less then 100 spells per "type".Does seem like a lot, doesn't it?
But you can't play a game with everything out in the open? You can't tell the players "ok, up ahead behind the rocks on the left are some goblins" and expect the players to just have their characters keep walking as the characters don't know that. You can't even have an adventure if you just say "the Sword of Power" is right over there....so the player has a character just go get it and...game over.Fair enough. I tend not to put too much stock into the whole player/dm divide. We’re all playing the same game. Why wouldn’t we all have equal access to the rules of that game? Having DMs get creative with the rules in order to artificially inflate “challenge “ is far too common to be ignored.
Yea, but they have too....unless they are going to check everything in the game all the time?Plus lots of DMs don’t have a firm grasp on the rules in the first place so expecting your players to automatically trust that you do might be a bridge too far for players who have been burned by this in the past.