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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8830775" data-attributes="member: 6790260">If this is true, then the Wizard needs the 13th Age Druid treatment.That is, what you have said is effectively, "Wizards are supposed to be able to do EVERYTHING. So if Wizards can't do everything, they're bad Wizards and that shouldn't be allowed." That's a serious design fault, because a class that does everything is a class that destroys the game it's built into.But if we make one little change, one small tweak, we can have our cake and eat it too. We can have a Wizard class that can "do everything" without having Wizard characters who "do everything."We force them to specialize. And I don't just mean 3e-style specialist Wizards. I mean actually specializing, as in giving up the potential to do X and Y by picking up the potential to do Z.In 13th Age, the Druid gets three talents at first level. You can spend those talents on six different fields: Terrain Caster, Elemental Caster, Wild Healer, Warrior Druid, Shifter, Animal Companion. Within these, you may spend one talent to be an Initiate or two talents to be an Adept. Adepts get the full range of a given talent's abilities, while Initiates get about half of that. So you can focus on one thing and get a second as a partial thing, or get partial advancement in three things. You can go broad-spectrum mystic (Terrain Caster, Elemental Caster, Wild Healer), warrior of the wild (Warrior Druid, Animal Companion, Shifter), or any number of other options. But even though the class collectively can "do everything," any individual Druid must do only two or three things--at most half the class's potential, and that only to a partial degree, not as a master.Make the spell schools work that way, or at least something like that way, for the Wizard. The Wizard CAN do anything--as in, has the potential to do anything--but any given Wizard has only the things they've learned, which may be quite powerful, but cannot be ALL things to ALL people.Edit:To that end, I would propose the following schools.Abjuration+War: The school of defense and the "fighting" wizard (not to be confused with a weapon-using wizard.)Illusion+Enchantment: The school of trickery, deceit, and confusion, altering senses or the mind perceiving them.Evocation+Conjuration: The school of creating, destroying, or moving energies and objects.Transmutation+Artifice: The school of altering what already is, whether by magic alone or through tools and techniques.Divination+Scribes: The school of knowledge itself, whether acquired through magical or mundane observation.Necromancy+Chirurgy*: The school of undeath and of life, of manipulating the essence of beings alive and dead.Bladesinging: The school that dabbles in a variety of niche magic for supporting its physical combat.This reduces the veritable avalanche of subclasses down to a smooth, functional set of seven disciplines, which is nice because 7 is traditionally a magic number (outside of Discworld, anyway.) Then, give players 4 talents to distribute amongst these: one talent gets you Bachelor training, two gets you Master's training. So you could have a Wizard who covers nearly everything a classic Wizard can do (e.g. the first four schools) but who must necessarily lose out on some things (in this case, Divination and Necromancy; Chirurgy would be a new school dedicated to doing many things Wizards don't traditionally do, like limited forms of healing/resting/aiding, stuff like catnap that never made sense as "enchantments" to me.) Or you could go full-bore War Wizard with Abjuration+War x2 and Evocation+Conjuration x2, or a tricksy manipulator with Illusion+Echantment x2 and Divination+Scribes x2, or a variety of other choices.</blockquote>

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