How do you organize spells and feats?

[Empyreus]

Hi there, publishers forum!

I'm about to undertake a big project for my gaming group. I'm going to try to create a PHB-style player's guide for my players that includes the SRD stuff with all of our house rules. For the most part, I'll be creating a Word document that details the races and classes (adding a few homebrew ones), but I'm sure what the best way to handle feats and spells would be... I could type them all out plain old Word document-style too, but that doesn't seem to be very efficient, especially when I start adding spells to it later as we "discover" them in the game world. That'd be a heck of a lot of manual updating.

I'd rather have a way to cross reference the spells and tie them to each class's spell lists, for example like the beginning of the spells chapter that gives a spell list and brief description of each spell for each class. It'd be much easier if I had a spreadsheet of all the spell data and did a form feed to create the spell chapter every time I printed it so I wouldn't miss anything, and that'd give me a data set other than a huge, huge laundry list of spells.

So, long story short, how do you professionals organize the spells and/or feats when you're putting together a book? How do you keep track of each one, and make sure it's reflected on all of the applicable class lists?

Any feedback or suggestions on organizing all that stuff would be great. Thank you!!

Empyreus

 

[arwink]

Alphabetically, with lots of cross checking.

 

[afstanton]

I haven't put this into production use, but I have done work in the past with an Access database that delivers reports that spits a lot of stuff into the right groups in alphabetical order. Mostly spells tied to domains, which then get tied to gods, which then go to pantheons...but that porject sort of died and I can't find it right now...

But it spat it out as an rtf report. I didn't include tags for index/ToC, but now that I think about it, that would be cool, too...hmmm...

Anyway, I'm a geek. A database is what I'd use. YMMV - it might be too tedious to set up.

 

[Nellisir]

Since I'm slowly compiling spells & feats from what feels like half-a-hundred sources, I've got the exact same question. Right now I'm doing plain old alphabetical in Word, but that's gonna get old pretty quick.

Unfortunately, I know squat about spreadsheets and databases. Where's the best place to start?

Cheers
Nell.

 

[jmucchiello]

Since I'm slowly compiling spells & feats from what feels like half-a-hundred sources, I've got the exact same question. Right now I'm doing plain old alphabetical in Word, but that's gonna get old pretty quick.

In Word, make the spell title a heading style (2 or 3 is good). Then go into Outline mode and reduce the outline level to the same heading level. Select all the spells. Go to Table | Sort and sort the paragraphs. Viola, instantly sorted spells.

Without the heading style, it will sort ALL the paragraphs instead of sorting the spells.

 

[Nellisir]

In Word, make the spell title a heading style (2 or 3 is good). Then go into Outline mode and reduce the outline level to the same heading level. Select all the spells. Go to Table | Sort and sort the paragraphs. Viola, instantly sorted spells.

Without the heading style, it will sort ALL the paragraphs instead of sorting the spells.

Oh, THAT's good. I've already got the heading styles set.

Much happier!
Nell.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

Alphabetically, with lots of cross checking.

Ditto.

 

[IanEHewitt]

I also just do it the old fashioned way - Word, edit and re-edit, and use of Headers.

Arcana Evolved's magic system is easier though as you don't have to cross-check to individual class spells.

Cheers
Ian

 

[Bihor]

I did a book of four 400 pages of spells in the same format as the PHB.
I used all the spells of spellbooks I oned, and passed them through the OCR.

did the same fo the feats, next is the Prc.

 

[Mark CMG]

Surf around the Internet and find the various Netbooks. That should give you plenty of free ideas for layout of gaming materials.