Never Let Your Friend Copy Your Magic Homework

My magic-user player found his first scroll a few sessions ago. I knew that Old-School Essentials - by the book - does not have rules for copying spells. The magic-user receives one spell per level, and that's that. If they want more, they must spend money and time on research.

However, the new Advanced Fantasy rules contain optional rules for spell books, including a rule that allows a magic-user to attempt to copy a spell scroll with a chance of success dependent upon their INT score:

A very advanced table (from the OSE Advanced Fantasy Player's Tome)

I like this table. It has a good B/X "mechanically unrelated to other parts of the game but feels right anyway" quality to it. I didn't love the price of failure, though. If the M-U fails their roll to copy the spell, they can never learn it again.

It's ok, but it also doesn't present much of a choice. I guess for spells that you really want the choice is "do I risk it or wait to level up and use my class benefit to obtain it?" But, for most spells, the choice is do I risk trying to copy the spell and fail or ... never get the spell at all? Wait until I research it? I think there is an even better way.

Treat the price of failure as the scroll itself. If you fail your roll, it doesn't copy to your spell book and the spell scroll crumbles to dust. Now your choice becomes "do I risk losing the scroll to possibly copy the spell and get to use the scroll later, or do I refrain and guarantee that I have the scroll for my next adventure?"

This has the added benefit of explaining why magic-users don't lend out their spell books for others to copy very often, besides the hand-wavey "because magic-users are selfish and greedy." If you lend out your spell book and your pal fails their roll, the spell gets erased from your book. Not good!