[ABJURATION] Killing the Sacred Cows

Well, I'm going to annoy everyone. I hate D&D's 8 schools. They seem arbitrary and silly. At one point, they were rational, but now?

Abjuration I get, and necromancy makes sense, although that one's more a "type" of magic than a school like the others.

Evocations do energy damage. But so do conjurations, sometimes.

Conjuration produces real objects and creatures that don't last very long, but Illusion can produce fake objects and creatures that are temporarily tangible.

Transmutation makes thinks different. At least I think that's the theory. Except that I think some things are altered with enchantments. Or something.

And divination is the only one that procures information, right? Or are there illusion spells that are effectively a weird kind of spying?

Someone make them make sense again. Please.

JohnSnow said:

Well, I'm going to annoy everyone. I hate D&D's 8 schools. They seem arbitrary and silly. At one point, they were rational, but now?

Click to expand...

Hey John, I hear you.

Quite honestly I don't think the D&D designers have enough discipline when it comes to schools.

There should be rules for which schools can do what, and they need to be adhered to.

The biggest culprit is this constant need to duplicate-- nay, "steal"-- the effects from Evocation and turn them into Conjuration spells. I f----ing hate it.

It seems almost blatantly designed to circumvent prohibited schools.

(Stop watering them down. You know who you are.)

Wulf Ratbane said:

Hey John, I hear you.

Quite honestly I don't think the D&D designers have enough discipline when it comes to schools.

There should be rules for which schools can do what, and they need to be adhered to.

The biggest culprit is this constant need to duplicate-- nay, "steal"-- the effects from Evocation and turn them into Conjuration spells. I f----ing hate it.

It seems almost blatantly designed to circumvent prohibited schools.

(Stop watering them down. You know who you are.)

Click to expand...

*NOD*

But to me, one excellent fix would be to eliminate the stupid and somewhat arbitrary division of the eight schools, and go back to defining spells by effect. A couple of the schools do this anyway, and the Epic Spell Seeds (which also get used for Incantations) follow the same rules.

The Spell Seeds are:

Afflict
Animate
Animate Dead
Armor
Banish
Compel
Conceal
Conjure
Contact
Delude
Destroy
Dispel
Energy
Foresee
Fortify
Heal
Life
Reflect
Reveal
Slay
Summon
Transform
Transport
Ward

Simplify those a bit. For instance, Slay is a really potent Afflict. Life is a really potent Heal. Reflect and Dispel are pretty Ward-y. Individual spells then get defined by how they combine the seeds. A simple spell might use one seed, a more complex one 2, and so forth. Now you've got something you can actually work with.

But that's just my opinion.

Wulf Ratbane said:

It seems almost blatantly designed to circumvent prohibited schools.

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Personally, I don't really like the idea of prohibited schools myself. I'd rather have a system in which the benefits from specialization depended on and increased with the number of spells you know in your area of specialty. If 90% of the spells you know are from a single school, you don't need to prohibit anything - you will have effectively prohibited the schools by choice. Of course, there will need to be more restrictions on the number of spells known by wizards to prevent this from getting out of hand.

This post expands further on this idea. You can also read the rest of the thread to see what I've done with evocation (Fire spells in particular).