D&D Spell Writing Guide

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]What you're seeing is my system for how I write spells in D&D. I've made a whole load of short videos talking about it and I thought it's finally time we had a long-form video discussing how this works. So, in this video, I'm going to try and explain everything from the ground up of how I developed this system. And my hope is that you will look at it, see what I've done, understand things, and then be able to take it and make it your own. Because I am under no illusion that this is the best system that could possibly be. But hopefully, if you understand why I made the decisions I did, you might be able to modify it to make it even better. One more final thing before we move on, I just want to say a huge thank you to my patrons who make videos like these possible, but I'll talk more about that at the end. The first thing when trying to design a system is to set out some clear goals of what we want this thing to do. The first thing we want from a spell writing system is something that will tell us all of the information relevant to that spell. Ideally, this will mean that every spell has a unique symbol, though as I'll discuss in a little bit, we can kind of accept that most of them have a unique symbol.

[00:01:06]Another really key thing I think is that this system should be very customizable.

[00:01:10]No two D&D characters are going to be the same. There's so many different wizard sub-classes or vibes of wizard, so I want to make something that you can take and make your own. Another really useful feature would be something that is expandable and can handle a lot of the weird edge [music] cases of magic, as well as being able to expand for things like new damage types or new levels of spell. And then the final thing we want is something that looks like magic. We want something that when we see it, we go, "Oh, yeah, that looks like a magic rune." So, with these in mind, the first thing we had to look at is how can we describe a spell in as little information as possible. In some of my earlier work in the theory of magic, we found that the spell level, school, damage type, area of effect, and range were really useful for identifying damage spells. In that with this information alone, we were able to separate out most spells. And then later in the Spell Saying Guide, we included the duration of the spell as well. This allows us to identify almost every single spell in D&D uniquely without any overlap. Though there are a couple of cases where spells do overlap. With these six attributes of level, school, damage type, area of effect, range, and duration, we get 93% of all spells uniquely identified. And then of those that are left, there are some really cool similarities. For example, Wall of Force and Wall of Stone have the exact same six attributes. Similarly, so do Bane, Bless, and Hideous Laughter. Now, I could pontificate on the whole idea that maybe this means that they're actually the same spell just put into different terminology, but for the time being, we will take this as a shortcoming of our system. And this is something if you want to take it and improve it that people should be looking at. But later on in the video, I'll talk about a couple ways we could modify these things to make it clear which we're talking about. So, for the time being, we're going to try and describe all of our spells using these six attributes. So, let's take Fireball for instance. And here are the six attributes of Fireball. What we need now is a system to talk about these as numbers. And the way I've decided to do this is to list out all the possible values this could have taken in alphabetical order and then assign them a number for their position in this list. I know, it's not very complicated, but things don't have to be complicated, they just have to work. And so now we can describe our spell as six numbers in this attribute space. If you want to see the full list of attributes, I'll try and remember to put the link down below.

[00:03:37]You can get them in the Spell Saying Guide, which is pay-what-you-want, which means you can get it for free. Shout to me if I forget to put it in the description. I almost always forget to put things in the description. So, we have our spells and we have numbers that we can use to describe them. But regular numbers like this aren't very useful for creating instructions. And so instead, we're going to represent them as binary numbers. The reason binary numbers are called that is because all the digits can either be zero or one. And this can be really useful in things like computers where the zero can represent off and the one can represent on. And so often on the very low level of computers, we're actually only dealing with zeros and ones. But in maths, we might instead call this base two. And we would call the regular number system base 10. So, what do we mean by that?

[00:04:25]What do we mean by base 10? Well, if we take any number that we'd normally deal with, so here I'm going to use 157 as my example. Each digit represents a different amount of powers of 10. So, the seven tells us there are seven ones, the five tells us there's five 10s, and the one tells us there's 100. And we can think of those as 10 to the power of something. So, every digit is telling us how much we have of each power of 10.

[00:04:53]And as an interesting note, when you have a decimal point, that's where that power goes negative. And so the reason why we add on extra as we add on more and more numbers is because we can only have values between zero and nine in any one digit. If we go over nine, then we're just adding one to the next digit to the left. And then if that digit is going over nine, then it carries on to the next one and so on and so on. I don't know why I'm explaining counting.

[00:05:20]I'm assuming you're good at counting.

[00:05:22]And binary follows the same idea except all the 10s become twos. So, the first digit represents two to the power of zero, the second two to the power of one, and the third two to the power of two, and so on and so on. And so, we get a number system where all the digits are going to be zero or one. And using this, we can represent any number we want in just ones and zeros. So, if we return to our Fireball example, we can now represent each of these numbers as just binary. And this is where things are going to get a little bit more interesting mathematically. So, I said the reason we want binary is so that we can turn these numbers into instructions. So, let's make a simple algorithm for turning binary numbers into a picture of some sorts. So, let's say we have two dots. Now, at the end, we will have as many dots as we have digits, but for now, we'll just worry about these two. And for the rest of this video, I'm going to use a hollow circle for our starting point and a filled dot for any of the ones that come after. Later on, this is going to become redundant, but for now, it's just going to help us keep our bearings. The algorithm is as follows. If the digit is a one, we draw the line. If it's a zero, we don't draw the line. So, in this example of 10010, the first digit is a one and so we draw the line. Then the next two digits are zero, so I'm going to do a dashed line, but you just wouldn't draw these. And then we have a one, so we draw a line.

[00:06:46]And then to make things just a little bit neater and look a bit more magical, which was one of our original goals, I'm going to wrap these dots around and so the last digit will be the line between the last dot and the original starting one. So, we can write a binary number onto a shape with this very simple algorithm. And in fact, we can write more than one number on the same series of dots. And we do this by drawing on lines that are connecting different dots. And I call this the K value, where K is just an integer that tells you how many dots along the line is connecting.

[00:07:19]And so here, K equals one means you're just connecting to the next dot along going clockwise, and K equals two means you're going to the second dot clockwise. And this allows us to draw multiple binary numbers onto the same shape without them overlapping with each other. The maximum number of K value you can have is equal to the number of dots minus one, since each dot only has the number of dots minus one other dots to connect to. But if we were to plot out K equals one through to K equals four for our pentagon, you can see that K equals three is just the same as K equals two, and K equals four is the same as K equals one. And so, the number of dots you need any number of attributes is equal to twice the number of attributes plus one. The two times the number of attributes is to make sure you have enough dots that you can write down these binary numbers without overlapping. And then the plus one is to make sure that none of the lines pass through the very center of our polygon, just so that it's never ambiguous when we're reading this which dot is connecting to the other. So, for our D&D spell, since we have six attributes, we will need 13 dots to accurately be able to write down all of our spell information. As a side note, in the original Spell Writing Guide when I wasn't including duration, you'll notice that we used 11 dots. This is why. We were using five attributes and so we only needed 11 dots. But as we said earlier, we need duration so that we can describe as many spells as possible, and so now we use 13. So, let's start drawing some numbers on this and seeing how it looks. There, we're drawing the number one, very lovely, more or less as expected. And then if we add one and go to the binary number for two, we can write that down as well. But the issue is if you don't know the starting point when someone was writing down these spells, the number two and the number one could look identical on this polygon. And we call this rotational symmetry. In that rotating one shape will give us the other. So, instead of counting up normally when we're doing our spell writing, we're going to count up using only rotationally asymmetric binary numbers. There's some really interesting stuff about how you can derive these and I might make a future video about them, but the simplest and slowest algorithm for finding what these numbers are is to start counting up as you normally would. So, here we have the binary for zero and one. And then we just go up. We check the next number along, which is two, and then we rotate the number, with rotate in inverted commas. What I mean when I say rotate is to move every digit to the the and then the rightmost digit, we're going to put on the very left. We then compare this to our list of accepted values and if that number is in the list, we reject it and we move on to the next one only accepting a new number if they can't be rotated to equal any of the numbers that are already in our accepted list. As I say, this is actually very computationally slow and there's some really nuanced and very interesting ways of generating this list really really quickly. If you go to the spell writing GitHub page which I'll also try and link below again shout out me if I forget, you can see that we've been playing with a lot of different methods and Arnesti who's been in the community for ages has been doing a lot of really cool work on this. But with this, we eventually build up a list of rotationally asymmetric binary numbers and it's with these binary numbers we're going to write down our spells. So let's go back to our fireball example. The first attribute is the spell level. Fireball is a level three spell so it's the fourth level that you can get since we start at zero for cantrips and in this case I intentionally leave the all zero case as just blank. So we take our fifth entry in our rotationally asymmetric binary numbers and write this onto our polygon as we did before where we read left to right and where there's a zero we don't write and where there's a one we do. And what's cool about this rotational asymmetry is now if we were to rotate this value around, it will always be recognizable as a level three spell. And actually from this point on noting that starting point is really only for convenience but it's not necessary. We can then do the same for our school and our damage type where I encode these on different K values and then do the same for the area of effect, range and duration. And you'll notice that for duration where we have instantaneous, I have actually chosen to use the blank case here. There are only three cases where I've decided to use the blank which is when we don't have an area of effect or a damage type or any real duration. And the fact I don't do this for cantrips has been controversial but I stand by my decision even if the gods damn me for it. And so with all of these different components all at different K values, we can write them all on the same shape without any overlap. And then if you were to do this in reverse, you could look at the shape on the left and then from the different K values extract the different symbols and decode what they mean for the different attributes of the spell. Another thing we do is we draw a dot in the center if it's a concentration spell and a circle if it's ritual. So now we have the basic system but one thing I said I wanted was a system that was really customizable. And for this next section I'm going to be coloring the different K values just so that you can keep a track of it. So how customizable is this system? Well, there's some variation you could put in like you can make the polygon a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller but all you need to decode the binary numbers and then decode the spell is to know the order of the dots so you know what the different K values are. So so long as you know the order of the dots and can clearly tell which lines are going to which dot, you can decode the shape. So the first thing we can do to start making this feel a bit more free is we can stop using straight lines.

[00:13:14]There's no reason the lines have to be straight, they just have to be legible.

[00:13:18]We can then just start moving the dots around as well. For example, we have this spiral pattern here or maybe we have this semicircle which is actually going from right to left. I really like this one well done if you recognize it.

[00:13:31]This is the Einstein tile which is a 13-sided shape that can tile a plane. So what I mean when I say tile a plane is you can fill an entire 2D space with this shape without any gaps. But even cooler, with the Einstein tile it's aperiodic which means the pattern never repeats. I've actually made a spell city map out of this. I just think they're so neat. Another alternative of course is you could use something like stellar constellations. Something that might appear random but then you could use some sort of system like maybe their magnitude to tell you the order of the dots. Or maybe you have a key for the order of the dots hidden somewhere so that only you can read your spell book.

[00:14:13]There is a huge amount of variation in this >> [music] >> and we're only discussing the options that use dots and lines. I bet there's a whole load of variations and ideas that you could have like maybe something that's more akin to an image where you have boxes that are either on or off, you know, like pixel data. I think there's a lot of room for customization here. And earlier we were talking about spells which overlap. One solution for this is to use different arrangements of dots. Although personally I've always preferred that if you're going to write down two spells and they have the same shapes, underline them and you know, have one line below, one line above kind of like the way you do sixes and nines.

[00:14:52]But in all of my work, I tend to just use the very boring regular 13-sided polygon and straight lines. Mostly because my goal is to try and communicate the system to you so you can take it and make it your own. And that's it. That's the system. I think it hits all of my original goals very nicely. A lot of time people will ask me questions like how do you deal with spells that have multiple damages? My answer in that case would be to assign a new binary number for that combination. So in our case you just go to the next one on the list. I should also say that this is a notation system. This doesn't actually cast any of the spells, it just tells you all the information about the spell that you would need. And so I think this fits really nicely into that idea of how wizards learn and remember and prepare spells. But one really important note about all of this, we're playing a game, we're playing D&D to have fun. And so in my games, I tend to be like yes, writing the spell won't cast the spell but then I'll make a map that's a spell city where it is the street design is the spell shape from this book and the city will have some major effect related to that spell and that's fine. There are ways of justifying it like maybe the street layout is just a note from someone else and some other mechanism is actually casting the spell, the streets don't really make any difference. But that's way less fun than the idea that if a street suddenly got blocked or built or demolished that you would change the spell. Another criticism of this and I think this is a very fair one is that it just doesn't look that pretty. I think it achieves the goal I set out of something that looks magical but I do think we could do better. And so quickly I want to talk about some of the other spell writing systems I've developed since I first made my spell writing guide which most of this is taken from. For druids and sorcerers, we took the basic idea that you have six attributes, why not just have six symbols where every attribute gets some symbol made that everyone knows what that means. And right off the bat, these look so pretty. I love these so much.

[00:17:01]Sorcerer and druid spell companion out now. All you need to do is follow the links in this video's description.

[00:17:07]Sorry, shameless plug aside, I think these systems are really pretty but they do have a flaw that the wizard system doesn't. You can't really customize these as much as you can with the wizard one and still have them be legible to someone else. Maybe that's not a problem for you and that's totally fine. I think it even makes sense for sorcerers. If they want to write down spells, honestly they're probably not going to be making it in a way that's legible to other people. They probably don't care. It's not like they learned this somewhere, you know. Whereas for druids, I think we took the writing system as more of a symbolic version of the many variations you could have. So one example was that this written form is actually just representative of the different kind of knots you could tie in a six-stringed thing or where traveling merchants might carve these symbols into the spokes of their wheel. And so while the symbols aren't very customizable, the application absolutely is. But because of all this foundational work from the wizard system, it's much easier for you to customize the system without having any drawbacks from its understandability as well as being far more expansive as we add in new information or you know, we discover a new damage type or something like that. Similar to the sorcerers and druids, we've recently come out with the warlock spell writing system where every attribute is defined by four smaller aspects. There are 10 possible aspects and then in the book I go into huge amount of detail about the implications this has in my world for magic theory and understanding. But I guess this is just to say that this is one system, right? That this wizard system is one option but it doesn't need to be the final word on writing systems.

[00:18:48]You can make one that's a bit more rigid but really pretty. I bet you could refine what I've presented here and make a better and even stronger, more flexible version of the wizard system.

[00:18:59]For example, one thing that would be really cool is since we're using binary numbers, would there be some way of defining a system where like if you were combining two damage types, could you add the two binary numbers together and that gives you the new binary number you use for writing? My hope is that in this video I've explained myself well enough that you can take this system and make it your own. I certainly have a few new ideas up my own sleeve that I hope I will be presenting soon enough. And if you want to see that, make sure to like and subscribe and comment and all that usual garb. And if you really like the work I'm doing, you can find more of it.

[00:19:35]I've written quite a few D&D spell writing or D&D science books. You can find the links to them in the description or on my website which is in my bio. And if you really really like what I'm doing, you can also sign up to my Patreon which is an absolutely amazing way of supporting me and the work I do. And it is these lovely patrons you see on your screen here who have made this possible so far. Thank you very much to them and thank you to you for watching. Have a lovely day.

[00:20:01]Okay, thank you. Bye.