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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5845943" data-attributes="member: 52073">1) Mechanically, it doesn't fix the problem of overpoweredness because, as you noted, Conjuration and Transmutation (and to a lesser extent Illusion) have tons of powerful spells and a good variety of effects whereas schools like Evocation, Divination, and Enchantment can't do much on their own.2) Logistically, if you restrict wizards to a single school, you remove much of the appeal of being a wizard.  Much of the benefit of playing a wizard instead of a sorcerer, beguiler, warmage, dread necromancer, or other focused caster comes from his versatility, both in build (being able to pick a wide variety of spells) and in play (being able to re-prepare spells to fit the situation).  If you restrict wizards to one school, suddenly the abovementioned focused casters can be just plain better in their area of expertise without having to bother with spell preparation and such.3) Flavor-wise, the restriction is too narrow.  Summoners can't planar bind creatures very well without dimensional anchor and magic circle against X, which are Abjuration.  Pyromancers can't heat metal (Transmutation) or summon fire elementals (Conjuration).  And so forth.  Because schools are organized either by method (Abjuration protects things, Conjuration moves things, Evocation creates things, Transmutation changes things) or by effect (Divination produces knowledge, Enchantment alters the mind, Illusion fools people, Necromancy deals with the soul) rather than by theme (fire mage, sneaky mage, fighter/mage, etc.), restricting wizards to certain schools will prevent many archetypes from being built.A better solution to the problem addresses the spell list before anything else.  Banning or altering problem spells, re-categorizing spells to more appropriate and more balanced schools ("balanced" in the sense of having roughly the same number of spells, not necessarily power level), and ensuring that popular themes can be represented is a good first step.  Then you can talk about limiting the wizard to 1-3 primary schools, hopefully with an option to grab other thematically-appropriate spells from other schools, and have it actually work out well.</blockquote>

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