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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imban" data-source="post: 4010198" data-attributes="member: 29206">This is true, but I can't think of any spells that would not have a place in a game world or homebrew because of this, when I look at the current list of spells in 3e D&D.If you mean this in the Forge sense, I'm going to have to respectfully note that I've yet to play a "coherent" game design that I've liked. All of them seem to be about strong support of a playstyle that's not mine and no support for what I actually want to do, whereas D&D has always been broad enough to accomodate many (but not all, of course) playstyles.Conceptually, transmuters turn stuff into stuff, abjurers cast protective spells, diviners do divination, illusionists work with illusions and things not wholly real, evokers create energy effects, conjurers summon or create physical objects, enchanters mess with minds, etc. Practically, because D&D is wide enough to admit a thousand or more reasonable concepts for spells, not all of them are going to fit nicely into eight classifications and you're going to get some wonky results, such as Mage Armor being Conjuration and Shield being Abjuration. I maintain that at their core, the majority of the eight schools have solid concepts, whereas "lightning and force" and "cold and acid" are disparate, and raise the questions of "Why not fire and lightning" or "why are force blasting spells seemingly randomly distributed among the "lightning and force" and "thunder and force" mages" where the typical questions the 3e schools raised were for individual spells. (Well, okay, Conjuration picked up the ability to create energy effects in splatbooks and that was stupid, and Necromancy admittedly can be accused of combining disparate fields, but the majority of them...)Well, yeah. It suggests that this is the default, and that's quite tolerable - I mean, if you don't like it in your setting, blam, you rewrite Dwarves and it's all well and good. In typical play, I don't think the choice to play a dwarf was contingent on the AC buff vs. Giants.It's more tolerable so long as it's vocabulary, but once you get into a cascading series of effects, it can be a right pain to work out - Dragonborn making good choices for Warlords because they get unique access to a power called "For Lost Arkhosia!" that has effects which only make sense within the context of the setting would be a lot more of a mess than just editing a race's statblock alone.The Conan RPG, I will note, is *based on D&D.* If anything, doesn't that reinforce my point by showing how much 3e D&D is a game system rather than a specific game, since I'm not just throwing it out the window and playing RuneQuest or what have you?---In addition, the latest Design & Development article on magic items is another thing that's difficult, if not functionally impossible, to reconcile with the sort of homebrews I've seen. By heavily constraining the available design space for magic items and putting ill-explained and hardcoded restrictions on some and not others - for instance, only cloaks can give a primary benefit, while only rings are restricted by character level, they've made one of the heaviest blows against my ability to use 4e as a toolkit-esque system so far. While it's still possible that it's not as constrained as I fear, that single article essentially unsold me on 4e - I no longer really even wish to try it out.</blockquote>

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