I find the "spells" section of the PHB poorly organized

[Svata]

The class spell lists (specifically wizard because of Arcane Trickster/Eldritch Knight) no longer divide the spells at each level into their schools, no longer give a short (1 sentence) description of what the spell does, and the spell descriptions don't list which classes can take it. (Also, all spells are the same level for every class that can learn them, but that's a different issue.)

I find this makes it difficult to do spell selection when levelling up, as you have to keep flipping back and forth for every spell at that level from your list until you have them memorized. And with an AT/EK you have to check to see if each spell is from one of the two schools you can learn spells from, instead of being able to see it right there.

[Rogue Shadows]

I too dislike the organization, or essential lack thereof. I also dislike how spells that can be cast as rituals aren't tagged as such in the list.

Hang on, I think Imma go and properly organize it now. I don't have much else to do...

[Alucard2099]

Using
http://asmor.com/5e/spellbook/#/list/Ranger?level=1&school=
and
http://dnd.andreasavancini.com/
You can kinda solve this. However, you need computer access.

[pibby]

I believe they did that on purpose to make you buy Spell Decks which they are selling now. Otherwise, you can look up organized spell lists through a search engine and find what you're looking for.

[Rogue Shadows]

Actually, yeah, I'm just going to second this site. (http://asmor.com/5e/spellbook/#/list?level=&school=) Less work. Just have the Interwebs handy.

Hmm...kind of depressed by the spells I am learning are not rituals...

[AstralFire]

It is a giant pain in the ass. The spells are organized worse than in 3E, and that says something.

[Theodoxus]

LOL - yeah, been homebrewing retcons on rituals for a while now.

I've got a pretty sweet excel file going on that does all that you're asking about. Less web intensive, more office intensive - but it's just a basic spreadsheet, so it could be incorporated into freeware/IOS without problems.

Between spells having incomplete information and the Index being a Fool's Errand for finding where something lives (Seriously, "Paralyzed: see Conditions" really? 'see conditions' is 14 characters long. 'Page 316' is 8...) I want to kick the layout editor in the jimmy every time I go to reference the index.

More is less, here WotC... sheesh.

[AstralFire]

"see Conditions" is most likely an artifact of the editing process. The copy is typically not written by the people who do the final arrangement of layouts, layouts often shifting right up to the last minute before going to the printer. This can make direct page numbers unreliable.

4E's Character Creation tool was really great and I wish we'd gotten something like it for this edition. Or a hypertext SRD. Those are really useful.

[Tvtyrant]

I just made my own and glued it to the book. Organized by class, suborganized by spell level, alphabetically but with rituals also a seperate list by class in the back.

[Feldarove]

The spell list for each class should definitely have a ritual Tag to help out. It looks nice how clean the list it, but you could also add things like Bonus spell tags as well.

I really don't understand why in the description of the spell doesn't include which class can cast it (at what level).

There seems to be a lot of small things missing from the PHB, I think possibly to make room.

[Yagyujubei]

yeah its pretty garbage. I use http://salty-ridge-7989.herokuapp.com/ in conjunction with the book though and it works out well.

[archaeo]

I believe they did that on purpose to make you buy Spell Decks which they are selling now. Otherwise, you can look up organized spell lists through a search engine and find what you're looking for.

If this was their goal, why did they just license the cards out to Gale Force Nine? Why wouldn't they do it as a first-party product?

I doubt very much that WotC is playing some kind of slick game. I find it far more likely that they just wanted to stuff the PHB with content, which left little room for indexes. Most of the suggestions in the OP seem like they'd be simple enough -- why not say "Wizard spell" next to the spells Wizards can take, or label the school of spells in the list -- but while each addition would be pretty minor on its own, they'd probably add up and really extend the page count.

This isn't to say that the PHB is at all perfect. But I think that choosing content over a perfect index wasn't a dumb decision, especially given that WotC knows full well that online tools will fill any gap, a fact borne out by evidence in this thread.

[Myzz]

yeah its pretty garbage. I use http://salty-ridge-7989.herokuapp.com/ in conjunction with the book though and it works out well.

Yeah I have it on my phone... If you dont want a laptop at the table... phone/kindle/Ipad...

[Abithrios]

If this was their goal, why did they just license the cards out to Gale Force Nine? Why wouldn't they do it as a first-party product?

I doubt very much that WotC is playing some kind of slick game. I find it far more likely that they just wanted to stuff the PHB with content, which left little room for indexes. Most of the suggestions in the OP seem like they'd be simple enough -- why not say "Wizard spell" next to the spells Wizards can take, or label the school of spells in the list -- but while each addition would be pretty minor on its own, they'd probably add up and really extend the page count.

This isn't to say that the PHB is at all perfect. But I think that choosing content over a perfect index wasn't a dumb decision, especially given that WotC knows full well that online tools will fill any gap, a fact borne out by evidence in this thread.

I did some back of the envelope calculations. I estimated page counts for features requested:

5 pages for one line descriptions of spells--the short list of spells is about four and a half pages with four columns, adding descriptions does not take up vertical space but would probably only allow two columns per page. The extra half a page is because writers are not always great at limiting themselves to a single line.

~3-3.5 pages for who can cast each spell as part of the long description if it comes in the form of a single line of text in each spell (e.g. "EK, SOR, WIZ"). I estimate there are 60 some lines per column of text (in my calculation I assume 1 additional column of text per 64 added lines) and most pages have two columns. Ignoring art, large tables, and anything else that may take up only part of a page, that would mean about 2.8 additional pages, but the partial pages (e.g. page 217) increase that amount.

<<1 page for marking ritual, EK, and AT spells. Use superscripts (e.g. R,AT or EK) The space used by that is only nonzero if you include a paragraph explaining what they mean. I am not sure if I would--anyone smart enough to play the game is probably smart enough to figure out the letters. While you are at it, you might as well mark spells that have expensive components, etc.

0 pages for marking schools of spells, assuming that they care about page count. They could sort spells by school first then alphabetically, then add an additional column to the left of each existing column. The new column would have a three letter abbreviation of the school name (e.g. "Abj."). With the rules as-is, people would probably be fine with just sorting the wizard list like that (as in the 3.5 PHB). Multiclassing and new subclasses may make it prudent to apply such a format to all spell lists, however.


I am not sure what the costs are in publishing a book. Would it be very expensive to add an additional 8 pages?

[Raimun]

Isn't it more fun, empowering and fast when all those cumbersome and dull rule thingies got taken away.

I always thought books shouldn't use so many words about the subjects they are about.

BTW, I heard there's an optional rule in DMG that removes spells entirely. It's right after the one that removes class abilities and different hit dice from the classes. Yes, irony. All of it.

[AstralFire]

Isn't it more fun, empowering and fast when all those cumbersome and dull rule thingies got taken away.

I always thought books shouldn't use so many words about the subjects they are about.

BTW, I heard there's an optional rule in DMG that removes spells entirely. It's right after the one that removes class abilities and different hit dice from the classes. Yes, irony. All of it.

Uh, I'd say 'cute', but you're not even close to on the mark with the complaints. This has nothing to do with rules or lack thereof, and everything to do with layout and organization.

[Iolo Morganwg]

... I also dislike how spells that can be cast as rituals aren't tagged as such in the list....

I literally, (cue Chris Trager,) just finished going through and adding an "r" by each ritual spell in its respective list.

[Svata]

Glad to know Im not the only one who it annoyed. The 3.5 PHB's spell section is a lot better, and honestly, if they could do that twelve years ago, why did they give us this crap now?

[archaeo]

I am not sure what the costs are in publishing a book. Would it be very expensive to add an additional 8 pages?

I've looked around a bit; it's surprisingly hard to find out firm numbers about publishing with just cursory googling. I did find this interesting apologia for WotC's prices in the 3e era from none other than Sean Reynolds (http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/rants/rpgsaretooexpensive.html), but nothing that talks much about printing costs. My guess is that it would be more expensive to fill the rest of the "signature" (or bundle of pages) than it would be to print it; for, say, a 32-page signature, if you only have 8 extra pages, you now have 24 blank pages to deal with. It's possible that they just ran out of room; I think it's more likely that a more robust index solution was discarded in favor of more content elsewhere in the system, if it even really came up.

I think you could honestly solve most of the main issues without adding to the page count, but it would definitely contribute to more clutter, which, to wit,


Glad to know Im not the only one who it annoyed. The 3.5 PHB's spell section is a lot better, and honestly, if they could do that twelve years ago, why did they give us this crap now?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like the only real difference in 3.5 is that the list of classes' spells all get short descriptions and are organized by school as well. Flipping through it, it certainly isn't a model of great indexing. If anything, the spell lists are harder to read because they're so crammed with those descriptions (which are mostly useless, since the spell name will generally tell you the summary and you'll end up needing to read the full description anyway).

I imagine that WotC decided to avoid repeating the same content and figured that class lists followed by an alphabetical list of spells really wouldn't be a big problem. Seems easy enough to believe that WotC figured that time spent building characters, especially after the first level, would mostly be spent away from the table, and thus didn't need to really be "fast." They figured that most players would be using a pen/pencil/computer to keep notes about their character and about the spell selection process, and figured that a bit of flipping back and forth really wasn't so slow. And, finally, they figured that a bare alphabetical list would probably be the most useful solution at the actual table.

I can see disagreeing with their decision as a matter of taste or editing sensibility, but it's not hard to follow their logic, and it seems like a reasonable decision.

[Feddlefew]

I am not sure what the costs are in publishing a book. Would it be very expensive to add an additional 8 pages?

It depends on how the book is bound. When you get a big book, it's bound by printing the sheets in sections of N pages, stacking them, folding them in half and binding them to each other (like a magazine), and then binding all the sections to the cover. Having a page total not in a multiple of N, where N is the number of pages in one of the smaller sections, means it's either a lot more expensive to have a non- N number of pages, or you need to come up with content to fill the extra pages. If that makes sense.

Edit: Swordsage'd. But I can add that one of my professors published a textbook, and it's crazy expensive to go off that multiple. So a lot of niche textbooks have appendices where they cram unused images, facts, stories, and practice questions.

[Cybren]

I too found it really annoying to use the spell section, both in play to reference a spell as you cast it, and to check spells when you are levelling up. My solution was to make a hyperlinked googledoc with all class spell lists linked to their descriptions. Obviously I can't share it for copyright reasons.

[Talderas]

My ideal spell list arrangement in a PHB would be for a spell list by level at the start of the chapter, containing a brief description of the spell and relevant tags like [Ritual], [Bonus Action], and [Reaction] followed by the page it is located on. In addition to this, I would like the long descriptions to be layed out by class in alphabetical order. Admittedly, that is not a feasible solution as it would increase the number of necessary pages to be printed, but one can dream.