Feature Request: Add prepared spell marker to spell list

[Noah Schweser]

This is not necessarily an issue by the mechanics of the game, but one of my players (a druid) was complaining that for prepared casters like clerics and druids who prepare from their whole known spell list, switching out spells can be cumbersome. We switch out spells VERY often in our games, so the ability to keep a list of our favorite spells ready to go and just mark which ones are prepared would be a massive QoL improvement. The default sheet does this on the right:

Tidy5e sheets does it as well, including highlighting the prepared spells:

Roll20 does it as well:

Of course, none of these have the spell compendium at the ready like obsidian does, so it serves more then a cosmetic purpose in these cases. But still, for swap-happy parties, clicking once vs clicking several times to indicate that a spell listed in the Spells tab is prepared would be a massive UX improvement, IMO.

[Kim Mantas]

I definitely recognise the value in having a sort of ‘favourites’ list of spells to quickly change between. Unfortunately it’s not really a use case that was considered when designing the current spell UI, which assumes that the only spells that appear in the spells tab are those that are available to cast. There are enough technical hurdles in unpicking these assumptions that I would not expect to see this implemented any time soon.

[Noah Schweser]

In my mind it wouldn’t even need to be as complicated as needing to undo or modify any assumptions. In the case of Roll20 and I think the other examples, it’s essentially just a checkbox that has no mechanical purpose and is purely cosmetic. So as far as the application is concerned, it would only exist in markup and any logic would remain essentially untouched, barring any need to store which ones are checked somewhere. Buuut I also don’t want to oversimplify someone else’s application for them cause I definitely know that feel so if it is more trouble than it’s worth then it is what it is.

[Kim Mantas]

I was vague about the technical hurdles since I don’t really have time to go into an in-depth explanation of how the module handles spells. Suffice it to say that you’re making assumptions about the underlying architecture that are just not true.

I do recognise that it is a useful time-saving feature for certain players, but it is of little value to me and is involved enough to implement that it’s low priority for now.

The code is of course open source, however, so other people are welcome to make the necessary changes and submit a pull request for review. I would recommend waiting until the 0.7.x branch is merged in (or branching off from there) though as that contains some fairly significant changes to spell preparation logic.

[Noah Schweser]

Understood, didn’t mean to be presumptive. I’m not super familiar with the foundry API just yet, so all I’ve got is assumptions. That said, I can take a look into it once 0.7.x is out and I’ll familiarize myself in the meantime.

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[Kim Mantas]

So I’ve had a bit of time to think about this, and a purely cosmetic icon that can be toggled like you suggested would indeed be fairly trivial to implement. The initial issue I had was the idea that this icon represented a ‘prepared’ spell. Clicking ‘prepare’ in the ‘Manage Spells’ dialog is actually what creates the spell item on the character (and similarly ‘unprepare’ deletes it) and so I was imagining having to change this to better represent just ‘adding’ a spell, and then actually ‘preparing’ it by toggling the icon on the sheet. This idea runs into all sorts of issues when you then want to also preserve the current way of preparing spells for people who prefer that.

However (and I think this is what you have been trying to convey all along), the icon doesn’t have to represent ‘prepared’ and can instead be much more abstract. Players can use it to represent whatever they want. So long as your players are OK with clicking ‘prepare’ on all of their favourite spells and going well over the ‘limit’ shown in the dialog, then they should be able to use the extra icon in the same way they might on roll20 or the default sheet.

[Noah Schweser]

Yes, that’s exactly what I meant; apologies if I didn’t get that across very well. I can see how the other interpretation would be a long-shot (and why me suggesting that it would be so simple would be frustrating). But yes, a purely cosmetic checkbox (or however else you’d prefer to implement it) that players could use at their own discretion.

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[Kim Mantas]

In case you were thinking of implementing this yourself, this work has actually been completed now on the 0.7.x branch. I’ve added the ability to click the spell school icon to highlight it, which hopefully will cover your use case here.

It will be available once a stable foundry 0.7 version releases. Please don’t try to use the 0.7.x branch manually before then.

[Kim Mantas]

Added in 4.0.0.