Official SAGE ADVICE Compendium, Spell Lists, & Errata

WotC has just posted three useful documents. The first is a compendium of Jeremy Crawford's Sage Advice questions and answers; the second is a compilation of spells plus new versions of the class spell lists; and the third is the latest version of the Player's Handbook errata document. "Like any heavily used system, the D&D rules undergo ongoing analysis, and occasionally, we like to pause and provide new resources for their current state."

You can find the three documents here.

• Sage Advice Compendium (version 1.0) (4 pages) "The PDF not only collects Sage Advice questions to date, but also lists the sources of the game’s official rules. Even better, we’ll expand that document every time we publish Sage Advice (the questions at the end of this column are also included). The PDF will effectively become the FAQ for the game."
• D&D Spell Lists (version 1.0) (10 pages) "The PDF also includes new versions of the class spell lists, which tell you each spell’s school of magic and whether a spell is a ritual."
• Player's Handbook Errata (version 1.1) (1 page) "The eagle-eyed Sam Simpson, a member of our customer service team, noticed that the document released on June 10 missed a few details that appear in the third printing of the Player’s Handbook. As a result, we’ve updated the document to version 1.1 to be truly comprehensive."

 

[pukunui]

The ritual list has the spell levels messed up.

Care to elaborate? I'm not seeing it.

 

[madrivi]

I guess buying a first (or second) printing might have been a mistake.

Or maybe 20 years in the future, it will be an invaluable treasure of extreme rarity:

- Oh my gosh! you have one of the flawy first printings of the 5e PHB! Look at all this falling pages! it has the incredible faulty spine! And all the errata! You lucky man! -

 

[Noaharkwv]

Care to elaborate? I'm not seeing it.

On Page 6 of the DnD_SpellLists_1.0.pdf document. It reads under the ritual spells:

4th Level
Divination
Commune
Commune with Nature
Contact Other Plane
Rary’s Telepathic Bond

5th Level
Drawmij’s Instant Summons
Forbiddance

It should read as this:

4th Level
Divination

5th Level
Commune
Commune with Nature
Contact Other Plane
Rary’s Telepathic Bond

6th Level
Drawmij’s Instant Summons
Forbiddance


Unless WotC wants to make 6 spells drop 1 to 2 levels...

 

[pukunui]

Ah OK. I haven't memorized the level of every spell yet. I thought you meant the spell levels were out of order or something.

 

[Dausuul]

I suppose this is looking a gift horse in the mouth, but... PDF? Really? I realize some users will want to print this stuff out, but surely for this sort of reference material, most of us will be viewing it online. This is especially relevant for Sage Advice, where a common use case will be "pull out your phone to check SA for resolution of a rules question mid-game."

Don't get me wrong, PDFs are a mile better than nothing, and it's nice to get this. But it'd be a lot nicer to have it in a format that isn't optimized for printing and terrible for everything else.

 

[Rune]

Can anybody list what changes there are between errata 1.0 and 1.1?

 

[nerfherder]

Can anybody list what changes there are between errata 1.0 and 1.1?

"Ranger’s Companion (The document now clarifies that the beast can spend Hit Dice during a short rest.)
Wild Magic Surge (A surge can happen once per turn.)
Pact of the Tome (The chosen cantrips needn’t be from the same spell list.)
Suffocating (The words “or are choking” now appear in the first sentence.)"

 

[Jhaelen]

Which is a funny reversal, since in 3.5 it was conjuration that had no focus (conjuration controlled summoning, teleporting, healing, and even later energy attacks; orb or force was Conjuration?!?). Now, Evocation is the catch-all.

The problem with D&D schools is that they're used in two different ways that don't always align:
- it started out and is still used as a grouping based on 'fluff'
- starting with 2e it was also used to mechanically define a list of spells that is easier to learn/cast/etc. by a specialist caster.
And because of the latter, they started moving spells around to achieve a modicum of 'balance'. New spells were invented just to make sure that each school could do some of the 'basic stuff', e.g. 3e with it's plethora of 'orb' spells to bolster the conjuration school. Too many spells ended up in certain schools, so sub-groups were moved to smaller schools without much regard to the original 'fluff' reason for assigning them to a certain school.

TL;DR: D&D's spell school system is a mess.

The designers should really have a close look at how Ars Magica organizes spells. That's a system that works _and_ makes sense. And the way the different magical traditions are implemented is way ahead of any 'school' system I've ever seen in D&D because they're firmly rooted in the roleplaying aspect of the game and the setting, and _not_ the rules. Specializing in a certain type of spells is an ortogonal concept, so there's no direct correlation between the way spells are organized and the kinds of spells that members of a certain magical tradition are most likely to know and cast.

 

[Dausuul]

The designers should really have a close look at how Ars Magica organizes spells. That's a system that works _and_ makes sense. And the way the different magical traditions are implemented is way ahead of any 'school' system I've ever seen in D&D because they're firmly rooted in the roleplaying aspect of the game and the setting, and _not_ the rules. Specializing in a certain type of spells is an ortogonal concept, so there's no direct correlation between the way spells are organized and the kinds of spells that members of a certain magical tradition are most likely to know and cast.

D&D magic schools are constrained by tradition. 4E tried to do away with a lot of traditions (or sacred cows if you prefer), and it did not turn out well; there was no way 5E was going to not implement the eight schools of magic. Given that, I think they did a pretty good job.

In theory, WotC could create an alternative system of classification for spells and provide it alongside the traditional one, complete with subclasses. In practice, they clearly have very limited resources for D&D development, and I can't see them investing those limited resources in something like that. If they come out with an OGL, I'm sure some enterprising third-party publisher will take a stab at it. Otherwise, I'd say we're stuck with what we got.

 

[Yaarel]

In theory, WotC could create an alternative system of classification for spells and provide it alongside the traditional one, complete with subclasses.

Hopefully, the psionic ‘disciplines’ serves as an opportunity to come up with a more useful taxonomy for spells. The disciplines have a more inconsistent history, thus more leeway about putting together a good system.

Then Wizard specialists and Cleric domains can opt to use the discipline instead of the school.