Can I ask what you would take out formatting wise? Or is it just keeping the same information but it appearing different in the page. In which case that feels like a fairly superficial exercises.
After all a small page count isn’t very virtuous if everything is printed at size 6 font to make it so.
I'm not a graphic designer, but I could see spacing and whatnot being valuable to edit. Aside from that, many of the basic features like duration/range/components/casting time are listed in separate lines with the labels restated.
Here's what I'd do for Eldritch Blast.
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Eldritch Blast evocation cantrip
1 Action | 120 ft | V,S | Instantaneous*
Launch a beam of crackling energy. Make a ranged spell attack: on a hit, the target takes 1d10 force damage.
At 5th level, a second bolt is created by the spell, with a third at 11th level and a fourth at 17th level, which can target the same or different creatures. Each bolt requires a separate attack roll.
Warlock, x, y, z...
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*(Each "section" of the above would have been on separate lines, increasing vertical height drastically.)
While I can't account for font changes affecting size, I did noticeably trim the word count and eliminate unnecessary line breaks, so it's smaller however you look at it. I can imagine that other spells might have similar possible reductions, and all together it would equate to a more noticeable reduction in page count at little to no cost. It's not any harder to read.
With that said, I do feel there are some redundancies in spell options
but there'd probably be a way to adjust the way those are listed.
Thunderclap, Sword Burst and one other cantrip are the same spell, other than the damage they do and the save they force the enemy to make- if there were a way to list what they have in common, and merely list the deviation, that would save space and potentially invite home-brew or something. This is a hypothetical, I don't have to make a new system.
In theory it would be something like this:
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(name of this type of cantrip)
1 action / 5 ft / S / Instantaneous
Each creature within range must make succeed on a save or take 1d6 damage. The save and damage types are listed below, as well as additional information for spell affects and requirements.
- (Remaining thunderclap info, like class restriction + damage/save, + the sound)
- (remaining Sword Burst Info, like other components)
- (whatever the third one was)
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If all of this was listed like that, 3 entries (I approximate) would take the space of one and a third, which means that you could fit in even more spells! If we were to move onward, I could see this going for other spells like shape water/control flame + other elements, or Fire Bolt + EB, and maybe other elements.
This is already how things are listed in 5e. You don't see a separate whole-thing for each subclass- you have a class, list what's in common, and then it's more efficient to just show how it narrows from there. Even in the Monster Manual, they just give you a template for shadow dragons and dracoliches, which can be merged with the existing stat blocks of whichever dragon. When you put it like that, you get
way more individual dragon types than you have actual stat blocks for, so this principle could be applied in magic for more flexibility without ballooning listed information.
IMO, the standard character sheet and most monster stat blocks could do with reformatting for space/ease of reference, but that's for another time.