D&D 5E Domains and Tags
 

Looking through the system-specific tags for 5E, I've noticed that there are a few more I'd like to see:

• Spell Level (1st, 2nd, etc.)
• Spell School (Abjuration, Conjuration, etc.)
• Spell Components (V, S, M)
• Missing PC races from published 5E books (Genasi, Goliath, Aasimar, Firbolg, Tabaxi, Triton, Bugbear, Yuan-ti)

I'm hoping these can be added by the December update so they'll be available for users making use of the Game System Conversion feature.

I'm assuming the races won't be available because they aren't in the SRD.

*shrug* Could be, though given that we're just talking about Tags and not anything like an actual Topic or stat block, WotC might have a hard time making a good faith argument that LWD couldn't use half of those words anywhere in its product.

Adding tags to a domain is pretty easy. No reason you can't if you need or use them.

Adding whole tag domains isn't much harder, although doing all the data entry of adding tags to ever spell is tedious.

I'm waiting for the content market and import/export functionality to come into place to see what can and can't be achieved via those methods. But for sure, the ability to import mass data would make some of the tediousness less .... tedious :P

Correct, but I think you're missing the point of global system structures as defined by LWD, which is to set a common framework for realms using a particular game system along with the Content Market.

The 5E structures appear to be a little undercooked when compared with the Pathfinder structures (which would make sense, assuming the team has spent more brainpower nailing these down for the upcoming Paizo content). It could be that the team might still want to tweak them, and I'd just as soon not add my own custom tags only to have LWD later add redundant global tags.

@DrAutomaton is correct. The goal is to get everything in place that should be considered a "baseline" definition.

To that end, adding tags for the spell schools, spell levels, and missing races is something we should get into place. I'm not sure about the spell components, since we don't currently do that for the Pathfinder material. I'll have to talk to the team about that on this end.

If there are other things that anyone spots that should be added, please let us know. Yes, it is easy for users to add that stuff, but it should already be in place as part of the shared game system definition. :)

Thanks!

The spell components seem tricky. They could potentially be useful, but any spell article with a "material" tag would also need to list somewhere what those components actually are. The way the category would be presumably defined, it would seem to either necessitate an optional text snippet or entering that data in the annotation field. I'm not sure how the latter would affect data entry if hybrid snippets were used.

I just remembered why we didn't do spell components for Pathfinder either. The values are a single character in length (V/S/M). Our auto-detection mechanism requires at least two characters in a name to match. So we can't auto-detect the spell components without lots of work to revamp the detection engine. [Note: For the armchair programmers out there, yes, we could change the constant to match a single character, but that has ramifications elsewhere, which are the real issue.] The only benefit to having the tags would be to filter spells and identify which ones have a verbal component (for example). While admittedly useful in specific situations, there's not a lot of general utility in having that available. So we determined that the amount of work required didn't justify the limited benefits for the typical user, which resulted in no tagging for spell components.

The other three are all valid items that I've flagged for the team to address.

Below is a comparison of how I have spells entered in my 5e realm that I created before the 5e structure was available followed by how the same spell in the new 5e structure.

Personally, I like mine. I like having the attributes broken out for easy sorting rather than typing them into a text field. I guess the later approach makes it easier to cut and past content into RW, but the former approach is much more useful in game prep and play.

Not sure I understand the one-character limitation. Why can't you just use the whole word (M=Material, S=Somatic, V=Verbal)? The printed materials use the one-character abbreviations to save space, something that is less of a concern in RW.

Oh, BTW, in case anyone asks, the reason I put "spell" as the suffix of all spells is so that I differentiate them from non-spell topics in the auto-link dialog. In hindsight, I'm thinking I should have the word spell in the name of every spell article and get in the habit of typing in spell if I want to autolink spells. E.g. "sleep spell" to avoid having RW try to link the word sleep to the spell article every time it appears but to still autolink when I write "the mage casts sleep spell."

My current spell article:

Attachment 4816

Same spell using the new official format:

Attachment 4817