Okay so I'm trying to bring the Sha'ir from 2E into 5E via homebrew. How I'm having it so far is that they player has a little helper called a Gen, a mini genie who gives them a bunch of neat benefits.

The key benefit is, depending on which elemental plane their Gen is from, they get a different series of spells as a part of their expanded spell list. Problem is, not matter what I do, the spells are being automatically added to the warlocks sheet and I KNOW that that is not how they are supposed to work. Going off of the Fiend, the expanded spell list doesn't add them to your list automatically. It just gives you more options to choose from when picking your spells. But, because I had to add these not in that little box under the main description of the subclass and instead in the area where you give a class extra spells, I can't seem to find a way to word these spells mechanically so they aren't added to the warlocks spell list and messing up their numbers for "known spells"

Please, for the love of all the patrons and beings of unfathomable power, how does one fix this problem?

Hi Okashido, adding the spells to the "Additional Specific Spells" field under the "Basic Information" section should be all you need to do. That's what I've done with my warlock subclasses. When you create the Expanded Spell List class feature, just include a description. You shouldn't need to add any modifiers to your class feature.

I'm wondering if perhaps this is a content sharing issue. Is this subclass shared with the community? Or are you sharing this privately in a campaign? If you're adding licensed content to the subclass and you don't have content sharing enabled for your campaign, I'm guessing anyone using the class that doesn't have access to licensed content wouldn't be able to access the spells. What sources are your spells coming from?

I understand that's what the computers wanted me to do, but what I don't understand is why it kept automatically adding the spells and not giving the option to not learn them if you add them in any other way other than the Additional Specific Spells. None of the spells were really odd spells, The subclass didn't even have a problem if I had decided to publish it as it didn't tell me I couldn't. The only problem was that it wasn't behaving like a normal warlock subclass should have.

In the end I got rid of the ambitious method of handling the patron spells and simply made a generalist spell list with 2 thematic spells and 2 spells for each element. I don't like that I had to do this as I really enjoyed the idea of your spells changing and adapting as a Sha'ir would to their surroundings, but I had to change it if I wanted to make any progress at all. It is more of a problem with the mechanics that DNDBeyond has baked into it rather than anything I could have fixed.