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."

 

[Fralex]

I've always seen the schools of magic as an in-world attempt to classify spells. It's only fitting that there would be some weirdness and dissagreement. Like, necromancy is just a combination of divination, evocation, transmutation, and conjuration. But nobody wanted all that "evil" sounding magic associated with their school, so it was lumped together in an eighth school. I think it's really cool that one of the schools you can specialize in is basically a collection of magical taboos; says a lot about the people who choose it.

But yeah, scientifically, it's really messy. How is conjuring a wall of stone not conjuration? It's like when the scientific community was fighting over how to classify Pluto.

 

[MoutonRustique]

I've always seen the schools of magic as an in-world attempt to classify spells. It's only fitting that there would be some weirdness and dissagreement. Like, necromancy is just a combination of divination, evocation, transmutation, and conjuration. But nobody wanted all that "evil" sounding magic associated with their school, so it was lumped together in an eighth school. I think it's really cool that one of the schools you can specialize in is basically a collection of magical taboos; says a lot about the people who choose it.

But yeah, scientifically, it's really messy. How is conjuring a wall of stone not conjuration? It's like when the scientific community was fighting over how to classify Pluto.

That would be a most excellent interpretation if the schools had a lesser bearing on mechanics...

As it now stands, the schools try to do both and kind of fail at both. It is not a ridiculous, total mess, it still kinda works - but, yeah, could be better.

 

[aramis erak]

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.

It's not like it's hard to strip down to an RTF or even Text... but they've stuck with PDF as their sole electronic format so far, why should that change?

Besides, most modern PDF readers can reflow the text anyway.