Why I Made 5.5e Spellbook Builder

I’m Derek. I’ve been a web geek forever and love building stuff.

I also love Dungeons & Dragons.

But funny enough, I hate using digital tools for D&D. I’m very much a pen-and-paper, theatre-of-the-mind type person. For me, it’s the game’s greatest strength.

A bad day at work on the computer? A pencil, a character sheet, and some D&D sourcebooks is the perfect medicine. If I wanted screens I’d play a video game.

So why did I build a digital tool when I’m trying to log off for my table top gaming?

Well let me share with you how I like to play D&D.

Spell-casting is the best D&D experience

Wizards are my jam.

While my group has had to force me to finally branch out and play other classes as our campaigns come and go, Wizard is what I will always love coming back to.

Because spell casters are the best. Everyone knows this.

You own the battlefield. You alter movements and defenses. You can control outcomes. I’ve played literally hundreds of sessions across a slew of campaigns and I’m still surprised at the novel ways I can apply magic to a situation.

But it can be a lot to manage. There’s a lot of spells to consider — 391 spells in the 2024 Players’ Handbook alone. And as the levels go by, and you add more and more spells, a Wizard’s spellbook becomes a weighty tome to sort through indeed.

5e had a somewhat elegant solution for the pen and paper crowd

I liked using spell cards.

At some expense, you could buy up spell cards for nearly every 5e spell in the game.

The spell card sets weren’t perfect.

There isn’t one big set, but several individual ones. Some sets are grouped awkwardly by class, while others attempt to encapsulate several classes of spells. The classes also have a lot of overlap in spells available to them, so if you buy all the sets some spell cards will have many duplicates.

Yet despite all that, you never could get all the official spells as cards. Some are missing. While more cards were released for the new spells in Xanathar’s Guide To Everything, by Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, they gave up continuing the cards.

For completionists like myself, this pained me.

But I filled the holes by making custom cards for spells I was missing and this system still allowed me to do something neat: I had a binder of all the spell cards, and I purchased “spellbooks” — little mini-binders for spell cards — and assembled them for all my characters.

These spellbooks were a blast. Quick to use. Fun to hold and flip through.

But the dream fully died when 5.5e was released and we began our first campaign with the new rules and adjusted spells.

5.5e doesn’t have spell cards

At least, not yet. So until then, what are the options?

• I don’t have the patience to write out all my own physical cards.
• My friends certainly don’t have the patience for me to look up every spell in the Players’ Handbook as I play.
• I cannot stand Googling up each and every spell I’m thinking about using and flipping through browser tabs.
• And while there are other digital services for putting together spell lists, they're clunky and slow and not really designed for use right at the table.

So that's what led me to develop the 5.5e Spellbook builder.

I wanted to build a spellbook like I used to have in 5e with cards and I set out to make the best tool to recreate that experience.

So why is 5.5e Spellbook builder a digital experience worth using?

Well I’m biased because I made it, but not only does it solve a need I have that others might have too, I focused on making it feel really good to use.

It’s low friction

There’s no app to download. No registering an account. No remembering your password to log in. No subscriptions. No being inundated with a ton of links to other services.

It’s a throwback to days of the good old web.

You just go the website and immediately start building a spell book, with a complete 5.5e spell list.

It’s fun to use

You pick spells right from the get go, dragging and dropping them into a list.

It’s fast. Filtering and selecting spells is instant in the browser.

With out any effort you build spellbooks that will persist on your device and can be shared with others.

It feels physical

For now, your spell books are represented by cards like the D&D 5e spell cards you could buy. I say “for now” because I’d love to have different representations of your spellbook in the future, shhh.

You build a deck, and then you get to flip through it. You can fidget with your cards as you mull your next move on the battlefield.

In lieu of actual physical cards in your hand, this is close as it gets.

But it takes advantage of digital

If I’m going to make a digital tool I might as well lean into the strengths of the medium, right?

Quick filtering of your spell book can bring a spellbook of 20 spells down to the 5 or 6 you actually need in that moment.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve unintentionally broken my concentration on a current spell by forgetting about it and casting another concentration spell. Well now there’s a spellbook filter for that™.

Creating multiple spellbooks. Sharing them with friends. Tapping on cards to quickly pull up the full spell description. All those conveniences are there.

I hope you have fun with it

I built this for how I like to play the game, but I hope others get a kick out of it at their table too. I’d love to hear any feedback you might have, and if you like using it, please share it with your friends.

Good luck out there fellow spellcasters. Not that you’ll need it.

-Derek