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Hello Folks,
Now, I don't want to carve up my precious magazines, and photocopying all these pages isn't the answer either. So I was wondering if there was some form of application, like a database, that would allow me to insert the new spells and items, etc every month? Thus I would have a complete list of all the new spells and magic, etc. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I'd also like to posit a theoretical question. Suppose someone wrote the spell description of every spell published by WotC, Dragon Magazine, and the Wizards website, alphabetized them, and collected them in MS Word format, in a single document. Say then that said person made this document, a complete collection of all spells sanctioned by either WotC or Paizo, available via the internet at no charge to D&D players. Would copywright law have been broken? Any lawyers, members of the publishing community, or Paizo staff are much encouraged to respond.
I'd also like to posit a theoretical question. Suppose someone wrote the spell description of every spell published by WotC, Dragon Magazine, and the Wizards website, alphabetized them, and collected them in MS Word format, in a single document. Say then that said person made this document, a complete collection of all spells sanctioned by either WotC or Paizo, available via the internet at no charge to D&D players. Would copywright law have been broken? Any lawyers, members of the publishing community, or Paizo staff are much encouraged to respond.
I would say a "listing" of the spells would be okay - example "Bigby's Crushing Tactical Nuke - Sor/Wiz 8; Massive big boom affects x area, dealing xd6 points of fire damage." But a verbatim copy of the entire text wouldn't be good.
FWIW, many of the Dragon spells have made it into the Spell Compendium.
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I would say a "listing" of the spells would be okay - example "Bigby's Crushing Tactical Nuke - Sor/Wiz 8; Massive big boom affects x area, dealing xd6 points of fire damage." But a verbatim copy of the entire text wouldn't be good.
FWIW, many of the Dragon spells have made it into the Spell Compendium.
Bummer.
For as much as that WotC rep who did the interview with Wizards when the Spell Compendium came out whined about how hard it would be to compose a listing of all spell descriptions, and how it would be outdated every month as new material came out, I think it would be relatively easy to publish this material online as a compendium PDF. People could pay a small amount to receive updates, and they wouldn't have to cart around even one book anymore to hold all their spells. But, I'm sure WotC would have some excuse as to why this idea to help gamers (but not necessarily produce big profits) isn't a great idea, or even feasible. Sorry about that little rant.
I've started cataloguing all the info I can from all the books I have. I've just opened an excel spreadsheet and entered all the data into it. So far, I've started a feats, spells, magic items and weapons tables. This is going to take me forever but I know it will be worth it.
I just use it in the spreadsheet format and sort it alphabetically. That way, if there are any duplicates in different source books (which there usually is) they will be listed together and I can just list the reference of the most recent source. I will e-mail you a copy of what I've done so far in the next couple of days.
I've done something similar to Sehanine. Used Excel, only have magic items "done" so far (done is funny because of constant updates). I've added d100 assignments to all tables, including minor, medium and major breakdowns to aid in random treasure generation. Plan to do Feats next, spells I'm less concerned with. If my players can't find a spell they can't use it.
I use DM's Familiar (my program). The database has dedicated screesn for spells, creatures, rules, weapons, items, etc. There's an advanced search on it so you can go find Wiz 3 spells or Wonderous Items costing 1000-3000gp, etc.
So if I see a spell I like I just make an entry with name, issue, and maybe a short description. For monsters I do name, issue, CR, and type. I have a "rules" entry where I put all the ecology articles (issue #, creature covered) and other things.
www.paladinpgm.com/dmf
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I've started cataloguing all the info I can from all the books I have. I've just opened an excel spreadsheet and entered all the data into it. So far, I've started a feats, spells, magic items and weapons tables. This is going to take me forever but I know it will be worth it.
Before you get too involved in your "project" you should take a look at what I have done. Check out the generators at:
http://mikehost.homeip.net/dload.php?action=category&cat_id=3I have created an art and gemstone generator, a scroll generator and a magic item generator. These generators use magic items and spells from nearly every official D&D book from 3.X. I am currently creating a list of magic items from the Dungeon and Dragon magazines and I am around 2/3 done with that. Once I have finished that, I will send out a separate post, but for now, you should take a look at what is done and let me know what you think.
Bill
There's also an online index of spells, magic items, and so on put out by Dragon Magazine.
It will tell you the issue, page number, and article name where whatever it is you're looking for is found. The spell list also has what game system the spell was made for (since Dragon also does/did articles for Gamma World, Marvel, etc).
Wotc has done a consolidated list of things like spells monsters and feats that have appeared in their books. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/lists/spells that is for the spells.