[RPG] How to find out what spells would be useless to a blind NPC spellcaster

blinddnd-5espells

This question: What are the drawbacks of a blind spellcaster? doesn't really touch on all the spells that are off-limits to a blind spellcaster.

As established in this question (Do you need line of sight to cast spells on someone?), you do not need to see the target unless it is a spell that states "that you can see".

I want to make a list of all such spells, but the only comprehensive online resource I know of, dndbeyond, has no "filter by spell text" option. What is a way to find out, short of reading through every spell in every book I own, what spell options are off-limits?

I'm not looking for ways to circumvent the blindness, such as magic items or spells like darkvision (whether or not that works).

Best Answer

Two routes for you to find this, each with their respective drawbacks.

Search dndbeyond

dndbeyond does have free-text searching that can be filtered down. If you go to this link: https://www.dndbeyond.com/search?q=you%20can%20see&f=spells&c=spells it provides for you a list of all spells that includes the words 'you can see.' However, dndbeyond does not do phrase filtering, so you're going to get some extra results in there.

Personally, I wouldn't trust this option to catch everything. Dndbeyond's full-site-search is honestly a bit rubbish. I've had a experiences where it just doesn't find what I'm looking for, or leaves out relevant results. It's a good start, but I wouldn't count on it to be all-encompassing.

Google-fu

A bit of creative Google-fu can help you here as well. If you go to google and use the following search phrase...

"you can see" site:https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells

It will exclusively search through all spells in dndbeyond for the exact phrase "you can see." As a downside, this also includes homebrew spells...and adding a -homebrew to the search takes everything out, because the word 'homebrew' appears on every page on dndbeyond.

Alternately, if you're okay with limiting the list to publicly available data (i.e. spells covered by the OGL) and don't mind the risk of it being slightly inaccurate, you can refine your google search to target roll20's archive of spells instead. Make the search term...

"you can see" site:https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e

A quick look at the google results looks a lot cleaner...no homebrew. It might pick up a few class features in the process (since it isn't filtered on spells), but that should be the minority.

Conclusion

Neither of these options are perfect...but both are significantly better than manual perusal of the entire spell list.