One List, Two List, Red List, Blue List

About a week or two ago, when I wrote up a spell building table, JDJarvis asked how specific spells would be implemented. I answered, but I admitted, “There’s always the possibility that I stripped too many keywords out of earlier versions of the list”. Because it does kind of seem that way, and I’ve been worrying about it.

See, the original spell building lists I did arranged spell effects by level this way:

1. mind, detect, protect, restrict, scale
2. movement, control, combat ability
3. dispel, cause or avoid (ranged) damage

...Etc.

These were based on examining what the standard spells were able to do at each level. But each time I redid the list, I tried to simplify what was listed for each level, to make it quicker to look stuff up:

1. generic change/sense
2. control
3. dispel

... Etc.

And a side effect was that the clone versions of some spells might wind up at a lower spell level than the original spell, simply because there are no rules in place to force Fireball (for example) to be a 3rd-level spell. I did have some old, tentative rules for increasing the spell level of some spells, where you add +1 to spell level for each of the following conditions:

1. Spell fits two categories of the same level;
2. Fits three or more categories;
3. Adds an additional effect;
4. Removes a limitation or otherwise improves an existing spell.

But that sort of undoes the simplicity I was aiming for.

What I’m thinking I’m going to have to do is more or less add the missing keywords back in, but perhaps as separate spell lists covering broad ranges of effects. I’m thinking Combat, Pre-Combat, Transformed State, and Aid.

But I have to think of this further.