In today’s update, our Pathfinder games have been updated with Spell Lists, a new feature which allows us to offer auto-complete options in the spell lists on your character sheet. Thus, if you are entering fourth level bard spells, the auto-complete knows exactly what spells to offer to you.
The Spell List will echo in different places in the near future but before I get into that, let’s take a quick look at how you can control the list of available spells in your campaign, and how spells are used.
In the game system configuration, the new Spells tab shows a number of spell lists for the Core classes. Each spell list represents the list of spells available to a certain class, and upon expanding, allows you to configure the highest and lowest level spell in the list, set the magic type and name the list. Since Psionic powers work in exactly the same way, those can be created here as well.
Below, each level has a series of entries for spells the class has at that level. We have set these such that the auto-complete helps you if you already filled in a certain spell for a different spell list — very convenient if you are adding a class from a new book which has access to spells from the Core Rulebook.
In the Classes tab, you can set the spell list each character class has access to. Simply copy the name of a spell list and enter it as the spell list for this class — here too auto-complete will help you out. Conveniently, this also allows you to let certain classes, such as Sorcerers and Wizards, share a spell list.
In addition, in the Magic tab, you can set special magic options to grant access to spell lists as well. Any character which uses that special option gets access to the spells in the listed spell list. This is used, for example, to add discipline powers for Psions based on their Discipline.
We deliberately chose not to add Domains or Bloodlines to the default configuration at this time. The reason is that these will get some different special handling in future updates as they have some special conditions (Bloodlines add spells known, not spells available in the spell list, while domains affect special slots, not just regular ones).
However, handling for those will have to wait as we have some other plans with the spell lists before then. Pathfinder has a large set of items which are related directly to spells and powers such as Scrolls, Potions and Wands. These items are invariably of the format <Scroll / Potion / Wand> of <Spell> and have set prices based on their level and the minimum level the class requires to cast that spell. We can use the spell lists to automatically create many of these items, and make them available in the character sheet.
Another use — though I mention this very tentatively as we do not have any plans for this right now — is for listing prepared spells. This would be especially useful for classes that prepare spells while having access to their full spell list, such as Cleric or Druid.
However, all those additional uses for the spell lists will not be implemented right away. There are some other things we’ll have to sort out first. Keep an eye on the blog and weekly changelogs for news on this.
And in closing, we want to thank everyone for reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, and being awesome about some of the issues that impede your game. We very much appreciate both the bug reports and feature requests!
For the detailed list of changes be sure to check this week’s changelog. And as always, we’d love to hear your ideas, feedback, and suggestions on the community forum.