Quote from: Doom;1073455Yep. If you don't play the game, then listing it all alphabetically is fine but...if you play, grouping them by level saves so much misery. "Oh look, I get a level 2 spell...guess it's time to flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, my way to figuring out what I want." It's annoying, even if I understand how corporate could have made the decision not to organize it the way the older books did.

I honestly forgot they were organized that way.

Quote from: sureshot;1073240I am starting to wonder if Halfrung read the books.

Yep. But I didn't memorize them. I don't have the mind for that anymore. I've learned and played literally hundreds of games in the last 30 years. No way I'm keeping all that in my head.

Quote from: sureshot;1073240It is really not that hard. Like any class with spells their is a chart and they even give an example of telling you how many you can cast on the SRD. INT 16 gives a 3 as a modifier plus third level equals six spells. Unless Halfrung is confusing what spells are in the spellbook vs what one can cast. Even then imo not that hard to figure out.

http://www.5esrd.com/classes/wizard/

I'm talking about spells in spellbook. And no, it's not in the tables. It's buried in a paragraph of text. Which is bad instructional design. Everything about a class can be summarized in a half page of tables or lists. But it's not. It's scattered all over several pages in walls of descriptive text. That's terrible for referencing at a glance. Professional document designers know this. WotC clearly  has professionals working for them, because in a lot of respects their books are well designed. But they seem to be under the dumb misapprehension that it's cool and traditional and creative to put instructional content in walls of text. It's just fucking dumb. The only people who prefer rules content delivered that way are people who read RPG books for fun but don't use them at the table as in-game references.

It's actually a function of WotC statute legalese. Those entire paragraphs of texts are more specific clauses preventing loosey-goosey rulings than otherwise --Specific Beating General and all. Same madness happens for Items Chapter, what with Armor, Weapons, Tools and any keyworded traits or special rules therein. Same with Spells chapter and how spells work. Same for Combat chapter and functions...

I get it. I don't like it. But I get it.

As for Spell organization? Yeah, older format was better. Level > Alphabet > Spell School in parenthesis, alt. Indices in the back. Big pile of Alphabetical, not so hot. Especially the simple indices on offer in the PHB. Thankfully WotC already put out a free .pdf of alternate Spell Indices: by Class Spell List > Level, Ritual > Level, School > Level, etc. But still one of those overdue things...