D&D (2024) Arcane/Divine/Primal Spell Lists: Are the Benefits Real?

[Mephista]

Look, its a solution that works if the writers insist on going forwards with this whole spell school thing.

The resulting spell list is big, yes, but lets be fair. Most of it is bloated with extremely niche spells that very likely will never see use, or there's significant overlap with other spells already, or have been called trap options or useless. Size isn't everything here, especially when these are considered the four worst of the eight schools.

Would I prefer its own list? Yes. Do I epext them to? No.

Do I see the value in limited spell lists? Yes - it avoids their thrice bedamned wizard bias, giving the bookworms all the good spells and ignoring every who's not a druid, cleric or warlock.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I should certainly hope that the resulting one hundred sixty four spell spell selection "seems to work" when the 2014 phb bard spell list consists of 121 spells if I counted right. By comparison the entire arcane spell list has 230 spells with 105 in Divine & 123 in Primal. Given the list that "seems to work" is significantly larger than the Divine & Primal lists respectively in addition to being quite a bit larger than the 2014 bard list wouldn't it be odd if a list just over 70% the size of the entire arcane list did not "seem to work"?

I ended up saying kind of the same thing in my survey... how even just for 1st and 2nd level spells the Arcane group had almost double the spells at each of those levels as either the Divine or Primal. And thus making the spell group lists only highlighted this disparity and made it more plain that they probably should be balanced out a bit more. Move some spells of of Arcane and over to Divine and/or Primal, remove some Arcane altogether, or else bump up both groups with more spells of their own.

I personally would not expect the removal of Arcane spells, since two of the classes (Wizard and Sorcerer) are much more AoE focused than the classes in Divine and Primal and thus that group ends up needing more attack spells overall to cover single-target adjacent, short range, and long range as well as multi-target adjacent, short range and long range. Divine and Primal traditionally do not have that much spell-based attack spell needs.

 

[tetrasodium]

Look, its a solution that works if the writers insist on going forwards with this whole spell school thing.

The resulting spell list is big, yes, but lets be fair. Most of it is bloated with extremely niche spells that very likely will never see use, or there's significant overlap with other spells already, or have been called trap options or useless. Size isn't everything here, especially when these are considered the four worst of the eight schools.

Would I prefer its own list? Yes. Do I epext them to? No.

Do I see the value in limited spell lists? Yes - it avoids their thrice bedamned wizard bias, giving the bookworms all the good spells and ignoring every who's not a druid, cleric or warlock.

The spell list in the expert packet "works", the level 6-7 bard in my group even thought it was an improvement when we tested things.

I ended up saying kind of the same thing in my survey... how even just for 1st and 2nd level spells the Arcane group had almost double the spells at each of those levels as either the Divine or Primal. And thus making the spell group lists only highlighted this disparity and made it more plain that they probably should be balanced out a bit more. Move some spells of of Arcane and over to Divine and/or Primal, remove some Arcane altogether, or else bump up both groups with more spells of their own.

I personally would not expect the removal of Arcane spells, since two of the classes (Wizard and Sorcerer) are much more AoE focused than the classes in Divine and Primal and thus that group ends up needing more attack spells overall to cover single-target adjacent, short range, and long range as well as multi-target adjacent, short range and long range. Divine and Primal traditionally do not have that much spell-based attack spell needs.

Divine casters have traditionally had more class features(plus armor/hit die size/etc) with a smaller spell list than equivalent arcane casters with less features & more spells. With warrior priest & mage group classes such a blank slate at this point though it's hard to form any conclusions there. Personally I hope that mage group classes go back to being squishy again

 

[Yaarel]

The power sources are more about how one casts spells, rather than which spells one casts.

Psionic uses the mind and aura.
Arcane uses implements and material components.
Primal uses attunement to elements and life.
Divine uses symbols and community.

Each class might use the same power source and its spellcasting method, but for a different spell list.