Originally Posted by
dllewell
Svandal,
My concern with having effect entries as 'reminders' of what the spell does is that this causes unnecessary clutter and, in my mind, a level of confusion.
When I see an effect I expect that is will be applied to something. Having an effect that doesn't actually get applied to anything would, I believe, be confusing for people.
If it is not applied to something then in order to view it the player would need to expand the Effects and read it from the spell sheet, while trying to decipher what the effect actually does (something that is obvious for us but may not be for a player). At that point I think it would be easier to just open the spell (which can be done from the character sheet) and read the effect there (in plain english :))
If you are going to go to the effort of creating an NPC to represent the wall wouldn't it be easier to just put those HPs and effects on the NPC sheet? The HPs would need to change, based on caster level, but that is a fairly quick thing for the DM to do. The other items remain the same. I realize you would need to create separate creatures for each wall but once they are created it would be easier to just grab the specific wall NPC rather than having to grab a generic wall NPC and then apply different effects to it.
Note that if this route is used you would need to add multiple NPCs for the wall as the HPs are per 5 foot section so each of those 5 foot sections would need to be a different NPC.
I understand where you are coming from and what you are trying to accomplish but I don't think that the spellbook is the place to do that.