Undocumented saving throw bugs/penalties

[DavidW]

What's the methodology for deciding when these count as bugs? (In the case of Colour Spray, for instance).

 

I can see that if the spell has an undocumented save penalty then there's a bug somewhere, but how do you go about deciding if it's a bug in the .SPL file or a mistake in the text?

[CamDawg]

In general, the spell description is regarded as 'accurate' and deviations from it in the spell file are corrected.

[DavidW]

Can I be annoying and question whether that's always sensible?

 

If the description includes a save bonus/penalty and the file doesn't, I can see there's a strong argument that someone just forgot to implement it. But where the spell has an undocumented bonus/penalty, isn't it at least as likely that the designers made a late change and forgot to document it, or indeed forgot to document it in the first place? If we're going on "developer intent" here then it seems harder for them to have introduced an unintended save modifier (in the text or in the .SPL file) than for them to have forgotten to include one.

 

Not that it's crucial - having consistency is the important thing. But in a few cases (notably Colour Spray) it actually makes a significant difference to the efficacy of the spell.

[NiGHTMARE]

That would seem logical, but then you have to factor in that a large proportion of spells were created by taking another spell and modifying it.

[CamDawg]

It's definitely case-by-case, but there are definitely more copy-and-paste type of errors in the effects themselves than in the descriptions (as NM mentions). Particularly in the case of saves, these are well documented by virtue of being in the header of every spell description.