Rant: I hate new spell lists

As a pretty active collector of third party products I have plenty of books on spells. Between huge collections like Kobold Press' Deep Magic, Rite Publishing's 1001 spells, and four 110 Variant Spells from Rogue Genius Games along with Fire Magic, Ice Magic, Earth Magic and Air Magic, I am up to my ears in spells. And that's not including spells scattered throughout all kinds of smaller books. So the absolute worst thing for me to see, whether its from Paizo or from a third party publisher, is a new spellcaster with it's own spell list.

I get it. You have a new caster that probably has it's own themes and goals to give it flavor and it's own identity. Also the way spells work, starting from the Core Rulebook does not make things easy. But new spell lists are always an inconvenience. Within a month a new spell list is outdated as new spells will come out that don't account for spellcasters outside of Paizo's classes. I could settle for assigning spells myself but from the list of books above alone I'm talking about 3000 spells, and as I mentioned before I absolutely hate doing that kind of work. It doesn't help that third party classes and spells don't account for each other so new spell lists just compound the problem.

So how do I handle it? The short answer is that I don't. Sometimes I'll blanket in one spell list to work with another class; for example, I assign all new Druid spells to the Shaman, but only if I feel like the theme matches up. For the most part this empowers core classes with a lot of variety and keeps third party classes stagnant in their spells lists. I avoid this to some extent by hiding large collections of spells from my players, instead opting to introduce new spells in the form of loot gained, powers granted from creatures or NPCs or other factors. That way it doesn't matter who the spell was designed for as I can just GM fiat it into a class on a campaign by campaign basis, and only have to deal with them at those points.

But it would help if developers, both Paizo and 3pp recognized the problem and just stopped making new spell lists. There are plenty of ways to go about this. The core and base classes all have their own fairly well documented lists with a variety of themes so a new class can co-opt one of those. The Wizard spell list is more convienient for this as it's further divided into several schools. That way a spell list can be quickly themed by allowing all the wizard spells within a few schools. The Hunter from the Advanced Class Guide shows that its also easy to combine lists. Its times like these that I really wish that there were only a few spell lists and theme spells were procured by class features. As it stands the spell lists could be divided into; Divine, Arcane, Nature, Alchemy and Psychic, with variation covered by class features such as Domains, Schools, or Bloodlines. But that ship sailed 15 years ago so the best we can do is try to press forward and streamline things as much as we can. I just wanted to make this rant as a general plea for third party developers to seriously consider the ramifications of making a class that has it's own spell list before making one. It just produces more work for the GM and that is one of the worst things to me.