D&D 5E Anyone else feel like the distinction between conjuration and evocation is really muddy?

[PnPgamer]

I think 3E reshuffled a ton of things. In 1e, healing was necromancy, for instance. I think the "conjuration for creating matter" thing was a 3E change.

Healing as necromancy made more sense, imo. Necromancy is manipulation of life energy, be it taking it or giving it.

Guess they wanted necromancy have pure evil tone.

 

[Jeff Albertson]

Healing as necromancy made more sense, imo. Necromancy is manipulation of life energy, be it taking it or giving it.

Me too; and ha, there is one school that never made the transition from 1st Ed to 2nd Ed: Possession.

 

[Hussar]

I do miss summoning in 5e. My favorite school.

 

[Minigiant]

Healing as necromancy made more sense, imo. Necromancy is manipulation of life energy, be it taking it or giving it.

Guess they wanted necromancy have pure evil tone.

I liked the idea that all life energy was necromancy.


But I guess it makes sense in the "Only deities and the divine can evoke healing energy and can grant this to their clerics. Mortals can only use necromancy and wizards haven't figured out that spell yet." sense.

 

[PnPgamer]

I liked the idea that all life energy was necromancy.


But I guess it makes sense in the "Only deities and the divine can evoke healing energy and can grant this to their clerics. Mortals can only use necromancy and wizards haven't figured out that spell yet." sense.

Both arcane and divine do contain all schools of magic. It is sort of odd that they dont matter anything to the divine casters.

 

[Minigiant]

Both arcane and divine do contain all schools of magic. It is sort of odd that they dont matter anything to the divine casters.

Not at all.
Divine casters get their magic from gods and divine spirits.

Thor can cast mortal magic whatever way he wants. He doesn't care about school restrictions. He just gives his clerics whatever he feels.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I would suspect that whether direct attack spells were conjuration or evocation comes down to making sure each school had some rather evenly, split up amongst the different energy types. The same way they've tried to make sure there were spells of all the different energy types at as many of the levels as possible (to help accommodate balance amongst the different Draconic Sorcerer bloodlines for example), they also seem to want to make sure Evocation doesn't get overpowered by assigning it every single direct damage spell, as would normally seem to be the case if you were to do a more scientific reclassification of where spells fell into which schools.

I mean truth be told... if wizards in-game truly did a "scientific" classification of all the spells they know into certain "schools"... I'm pretty sure there would end up being much more than the eight the D&D game uses. We're talking real life animal and plant levels of classification-- high level Kingdoms down through Phylum, Domain, Genus, Species and the like. Magic would be classified that same way. Spells that grant positive life energy would be split off from spells that attack with negative energy... spells that use a particular energy type would be grouped together... conjurations would be separate from summonings... illusions that directly affect a person's mind would be separate from graphic illusions in the environment... etc. etc. etc.

At the end of the day, I think WotC did what they did just so that they could maintain consistency with the tropes of the past, while also keeping schools relatively balanced whenever possible. They wanted to allow for players to play an "Illusionist" like they could back in the AD&D days... so they continued the school system and fudged things so that it could remain useful and worthwhile.

 

[Nellisir]

Spell schools were weird in 1e, but the justification for spells got really bizarre in 2e, when suddenly spell schools mattered. 1e had spells that belonged to multiple schools; 2e didn't do that. The line between evocation and conjuration became really blurry (to refer back to OP: flaming sphere is a conjuration, while fireball is an evocation? From what realm are you bringing beach balls of fire from?), but there were other intrusions (as a hypothetical example, conjuring a pair of glasses that would allow you to detect secret doors, and thus getting around a restriction on divination spells.)

 

[Beleriphon]

But create or destroy water is BAM, look, a bunch of water; and it's conjuration. Meanwhile, Bigby's hand and forcecage are evocations that create temporary but persistent effects.

I always thought create/destroy water was transporting the water to/from the Elemental Plane of water, thus a Conjurgation.

I agree with the OP, it's pretty incoherent. The problem can be summed up simply by observing that acid splash is conjuration but Melf's acid arrow is evocation. What gives?

Summon a bit of acid from someplace else and splash it vs creating acid whole cloth?

 

[Fralex]

Create or destroy water is actually a transmutation, oddly enough. I guess you're not really creating or destroying anything, and are just condensing moisture out of the air or vaporizing liquid water?