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up vote 7 down vote favorite

While commenting on: this answer I tried to give an exact number of all sorcerer-wizard spells in D&D 3.5.

Trivial searching didn't produce any results.

Therefore, how many spells are there, by level and class?

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Which books are you including in this? The more splatbooks, the more spells. :) – Rob Jan 24 at 9:31
All valid 3.5 splatbooks. I'm currently doing some awking on crystalkeep's list. – Brian Ballsun-Stanton♦ Jan 24 at 9:40
All valid books? Holy hand grenades... – Rob Jan 24 at 9:41
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This is what AWK is for :) – Brian Ballsun-Stanton♦ Jan 24 at 9:50
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Given that there is at least a nod towards PC and GM created spells in the core rules, the number of all possible spells is theoretically infinite. In practice, yeah, most groups won't use more than a few outside of the published ones, but I thought it was worth mentioning. – GMJoe Jan 25 at 4:03

3 Answers

up vote 12 down vote

1017 spells, as of 2005. This significantly does not include spell compendium updates or the latter complete books.

Operating over this list of sor/wis spells, without filtering for sorcerer specific or wizard specific, for all books from 2005 indexed, we get:

0th Level
    Abjuration      1
    Conjuration     2
    Divination      4
    Enchantment     2
    Evocation       6
    Illusion        5
    Necromancy      3
    Transmutation   10
    Universal       2
    Total:          35

1st Level
    Abjuration      10
    Conjuration     19
    Divination      24
    Enchantment     8
    Evocation       13
    Illusion        11
    Necromancy      8
    Transmutation   29
    Hybrid          1
    Total:          123

2nd Level
    Abjuration      10
    Conjuration     15
    Divination      13
    Enchantment     10
    Evocation       26
    Illusion        22
    Necromancy      13
    Transmutation   41
    Universal       1
    Combination     3
    Total:          154

3rd Level
    Abjuration      20
    Conjuration     16
    Divination      10
    Enchantment     11
    Evocation       21
    Illusion        15
    Necromancy      20
    Transmutation   35
    Universal       1
    Combination     1
    Total:          150

4th Level
    Abjuration      15
    Conjuration     25
    Divination      11
    Enchantment     6
    Evocation       20
    Illusion        12
    Necromancy      10
    Transmutation   30
    Universal       2
    Combination     3
    Total:          134

5th Level
    Abjuration      17
    Conjuration     24
    Divination      3
    Enchantment     9
    Evocation       23
    Illusion        11
    Necromancy      11
    Transmutation   27
    Universal       1
    Total:          126

6th Level
    Abjuration      11
    Conjuration     8
    Divination      5
    Enchantment     8
    Evocation       12
    Illusion        9
    Necromancy      10
    Transmutation   30
    Universal       1
    Hybrid          1
    Total:          95

7th Level
    Abjuration      9
    Conjuration     11
    Divination      3
    Enchantment     8
    Evocation       12
    Illusion        4
    Necromancy      11
    Transmutation   19
    Universal       1
    Total:          78

8th Level
    Abjuration      9
    Conjuration     8
    Divination      3
    Enchantment     11
    Evocation       8
    Illusion        3
    Necromancy      11
    Transmutation   13
    Total:          66

9th Level
    Abjuration      10
    Conjuration     14
    Divination      2
    Enchantment     4
    Evocation       5
    Illusion        3
    Necromancy      5
    Transmutation   12
    Universal       1
    Total:          56

This gets us a total cost to learn of (renting access) 50*spell level = 210625 + 4230 pages or 5 blessed books for 12500*5 for 273125 gp, A sizeable chunk of a level 20 wizard's cash and a seriously non-trivial amount versus the 340k gp a level 17 wizard starts with.

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Nice, all hail awk! – Rob Jan 24 at 9:53
I will just point out that you didn't write anywhere the actual number of spells :) – Scrollmaster Jan 24 at 15:32
That list amounts to 1017 spells. – Ernir Jan 24 at 15:50
Wow, the only level for which there aren't more transmutation spells than anything else is 9th - and even then it gets 2nd place. – Tacroy Jan 24 at 17:09
up vote 6 down vote

While Chet's indexes are clear and useful, they are unfortunately not very complete. Notably, since the spell list's last update was in 2005, it is missing such important works as the Spell Compendium and the latter part of the Complete series (Complete Champion, Complete Mage, Complete Scoundrel).

The most complete database I know of is IMarvinTPA's database. In addition to being searchable, it is available in CSV format.

Naively looking through the CSV sorted by Sor/Wiz levels, I get:

  • 76 level 9 spells
  • 89 level 8 spells
  • 107 level 7 spells
  • 148 level 6 spells
  • 193 level 5 spells
  • 201 level 4 spells
  • 230 level 3 spells
  • 280 level 2 spells
  • 195 level 1 spells
  • 64 level 0 spells

For 1483 spells, covering 6011 pages of a spellbook.

However, the accuracy of this obviously depends on IMarvinTPA's accuracy. While it does grab from a greater number of sources than Chet's index, it

  • A) Includes some less than official d20 sources
  • B) Appears to be one man's hand-written list (!), with all the errors and omissions that come with that. Just in the process of counting this, I noticed that the DB doesn't seem to have Surge of Fortune, even though it does include other spells from Complete Champion.
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Assuming that list includes the Spell Compendium, which is almost entirely reprints, how does the list handle duplicates? And how does it handle spells that were reprinted with different (usually nerfed) effects in Spell Compendium? – Oblivious Sage Jan 24 at 15:17
Looks to me like it handles it the way additional sources and errrata in 3.5 are supposed to work - a spell overrides spells in earlier printed versions if it shares the name. – Ernir Jan 24 at 15:28
up vote 6 down vote

From only the core spell lists for Wizards and Sorcerers in the SRD and some tedious counting...

Level 0: 19
Level 1: 39
Level 2: 50
Level 3: 42
Level 4: Wizards 42 Sorcerers 41 (Mnemonic Enhancer)
Level 5: 43
Level 6: Wizards 43 Sorcerers 42 (Mages Lubrication)
Level 7: 35
Level 8: 35
Level 9: 24

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I admire your patience, mate. – Brian Ballsun-Stanton♦ Jan 24 at 9:44

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