TL;DR: I have a prototype of a search-based 5e Player’s Handbook at https://prestontw.github.io/dindex/

I’ve recently moved from “Player” in Dungeons & Dragons to “Dungeon Master.” This means that I have to know how the game itself flows rather than how I as a character can interact with it. As a specific example, I can never remember exactly how death saving throws work — is rolling a 10 a success?

Normally, I would flip in the player’s handbook to the combat section and thumb through until I found that section. Great! The game just slowed down a little.

Now let’s say that I need to double check that my bard player has access to a given spell and is using it correctly. First, I have to navigate to the first part of chapter 9 to see what spells the bard has access to, and then I have to find that specific spell! Roll20’s compendium is a good alternative to this flow, but I find the layout of their information (alphabetical) unintuitive and their search functionality slow. Again, every time I have to search through a book or navigate to a new website, the game slows down a little.

So, I made my own fast index of Dungeons and Dragons information.

Boom! Spells!

Information is presented all together. You can click on a card for more detail.

Furthermore, you can search for spells for a certain class and level if you’re looking to prepare spells for a new day of adventuring (though I have not included all spells yet).

Got to prepare your bard spells, right?

So far, I’ve focused on spells and topics I find particularly complex.

Besides searching for a specific spell, you can also look up details on certain mechanics, such as our “Death Saving Throws” from earlier.

Since being stable is related to death, it also shows up in this search.

There are links to other sections for related information.

You can click on “critical hit” to go to its card!

This seems more local and faster than Roll20’s Compendium or opening up a new search for each topic. Also, the information is presented in a similar visual style as it is in the book itself, rather than being divided into categories then sorted alphabetically. Hopefully this speeds up the search for information and preserves the flow of the game better.

Initially, this website only had spells. These spells also had images denoting some meaning. However, I decided to reduce the amount of space each card took up and removed the images. I added in information on topics besides spells, separating this information from the spell section by backgrounds. I used drop shadows to differentiate cards and dark card colors to make the text easy to read.

There are still things that I want to do with this site. I want to fill in the remaining spells as well as the details of all of these spells. There are some things I want to work out with related topics and navigating to new topics. I also want to automatically reset the cursor to the search bar if the user hasn’t clicked in a while for easier searching.

However, I’m definitely looking for feedback. This is something that I find useful, but it’s still not exactly what I want. If my design class has taught me anything, it’s that I am not my audience. I was until now, but now that I’m opening this up, please let me know if there are glaring holes in this index.