D&D 5E D&D 5E and Spell Schools

[Ellington]

Spell schools and Wizard specializations have been a part of D&D for a very long time. I've got a love/hate relationship with them myself. On the love hand, they give magic a feeling of depth. It becomes sort of like a science, with various subjects and different approaches. Reading about a spell and seeing which school and sub-school it belongs to feels like reading the ingredients of some sort of chemical composite, and it makes it all seem like complicated stuff. The kind of stuff only the smartest bunch, i.e wizards, would ever master. It sort of sets them apart from the rest of the world and explains their nerdy obsession. Most importantly, it's a good way to organize the endless repertoire of spells into a somewhat approachable library. If you want to learn a spell that goes boom, you go into the evocation department.

On the other hand, the hate hand, I don't think all magic should be sorted by schools. When a cleric casts Raise Dead it shouldn't be because he mastered conjuration or necromancy or whatever. It should be because his bond with his faith has become so strong he can perform this miraculous deed. He doesn't care about a spell school, and I don't think divine magic should be sorted that way either. It detracts from the wizard's niche, too, which I don't like.

I may just be rambling, but what do you guys think? Should spell schools be a part of all magic? Or only for the wizard? Or are they pointless and shouldn't be there in the first place?

 

[dkyle]

Spells should have have keywords, and the traditional schools could be among those keywords, in addition to things like Fire or Fear. It wouldn't be necessary to give every spell a school keyword, and some spells might even have two or more schools keywords.

Like Healing spells might not have a school (and just have the Healing keyword), and a Phantasmal Killer might be both Illusion and Necromancy.

 

[Janaxstrus]

Voted for, and think that all arcane spells should have a school.

Clerical spells come from a deity, so unless they plan to restrict certain schools from certain religions, there's no need (imo) to separate those.

 

[Yora]

Schools as in 2nd and 3rd Edition are just fine.

As long as stick to the rules they created for them. Cure spells are perfectly at home with the other Necromancy spells and the Orb spells are just plain cheating to allow wizards who banned evocations to cast the best evocations. You can't juggle balls of nonmagical magic force. There are no [force] conjurations. And that goes for mage armor as well.

 

[Doug McCrae]

What about the sorcerer? He takes an unscientific, intuitive approach to arcane magic.

 

[Ellington]

What about the sorcerer? He takes an unscientific, intuitive approach to arcane magic.

True.

I don't think the sorcerer should have spells in the sense that a wizard does, either. The wizard spells seem like something designed to do a very specific purpose, like Mordenkainen's Faithful Watchdog or Rope Trick.To me, that's not the sorcerer. They shouldn't write down their magic into specific formulas like the wizard does, so their magic shouldn't be as specific and as a result it could be a lot more fluid in application. They should have fewer spells that encompass a very broad spectrum of situations, imo. As for schools and the sorcerer, I think I'd prefer them without schools. It just feels like it all comes from the same source, the sorcerer himself, and I don't think it'd need to be divided, at least not by school.

Maybe by bloodline instead, Pathfinder style? That way the sorcerer with a draconic lineage different spells than sorcerers of other lineages, or use the same few spells in a drastically different way.

 

[Doug McCrae]

True.

I don't think the sorcerer should have spells in the sense that a wizard does, either. The wizard spells seem like something designed to do a very specific purpose, like Mordenkainen's Faithful Watchdog or Rope Trick.To me, that's not the sorcerer. They shouldn't write down their magic into specific formulas like the wizard does, so their magic shouldn't be as specific and as a result it could be a lot more fluid in application. They should have fewer spells that encompass a very broad spectrum of situations, imo. As for schools and the sorcerer, I think I'd prefer them without schools. It just feels like it all comes from the same source, the sorcerer himself, and I don't think it'd need to be divided, at least not by school. Maybe by bloodline instead, Pathfinder style?

Those are good ideas. I guess the same would apply to monsters' spell-like abilities.

Clerical spell-casting always seemed far too similar to wizard spell-casting. Both Vancian, both restored after a night's rest, both have VSM components. The only differences were that the cleric knew all his spells to begin with, and the wizard had his in a spellbook.

 

[Falling Icicle]

I think wizards should have spell schools, but not other classes. Sorcerers, Bards, Clerics, etc. should have other ways of specializing and thinking about their magic.

I also think they could just make spell schools generalized groupings of certain spell effects in the wizard class rules, rather than having to specify the school in the desription of every single spell. For example, the necromancy school could include any spell with the necrotic, fear or undead keywords. Some spells could even belong to more than one school.

I also very much approve of the idea of sorcerers having their own spell list that includes a smaller number of very versatile spells. These spells could include a variety of metamagic-like options. Instead of having fireball or wall of fire, a sorcerer might have "invoking the flames" which they could cast as a cone, line, ball, etc. I've always thought sorcerers should have the flexibility to shape their magic on the fly, rather than being bound by the strict, pre-determined formula type spells that wizards use.

 

[Sunseeker]

Yes, because it enables greater level of control in terms of effects and protection from them. Kinda like how MTG cards work.

 

[Yora]

I don't think the sorcerer should have spells in the sense that a wizard does, either. The wizard spells seem like something designed to do a very specific purpose, like Mordenkainen's Faithful Watchdog or Rope Trick.To me, that's not the sorcerer. They shouldn't write down their magic into specific formulas like the wizard does, so their magic shouldn't be as specific and as a result it could be a lot more fluid in application. They should have fewer spells that encompass a very broad spectrum of situations, imo. As for schools and the sorcerer, I think I'd prefer them without schools. It just feels like it all comes from the same source, the sorcerer himself, and I don't think it'd need to be divided, at least not by school.

Refluffed psionics!

A renamed psion is the best way to play a sorcerer.
Bruce Cordell is on the design team. Please have him bring his great work on psionics to the creation of the new sorcerer.