How Should Specialist Wizards be handled?

[Consonant Dude]

Let specialization grow organically from the spells themselves.

Interaction: Make spells that augment each other in interesting ways. A mage might specialize in movement with FLY and SPEED but than he might not have offensive spells.

Requirements: I know they want to get away from components but they are an excellent way to have a mage specializing.If it takes a titan's hand to have all those Bigby's spells... then maybe it's not worth it. Unless you get the Titan hand. Likewise, some darker spells might backfire on good alignments.

Let the spells tell the story.

 

[Ratskinner]

I realized YMMV and all, but my experience is opposite; specialists were rare because PCs rather have access to the best of all schools than get hamstrung by the loss of 2 or more schools. I honestly rarely saw anything but mages/generalists in 2e or 3e, the only specialist that I ever saw go the distance was a necromancer (opp: Illusion and Ench) and a shadow mage. In fact, it took Player's Option: Spells and Magic giving specialists added boons and then the Master Specialist PrC in Complete Mage to see specialists in the short run again.

(The opposite, btw, held true of clerics/specialty priests; I never saw clerics in 2e because people went for the most broken priesthoods they could find. Generic clerics were literally nonexistent in my 2e days).

This matches my experience as well. Although even after the Player's Option, I still didn't see specialist wizards because it was just sooo much better to be a tweaked specialty priest.

 

[1Mac]

So here's a question: If the core wizard is no longer a generalist, what sort of specialist should he be?

I always think "force mage" when I consider that question. Magic missle, mage armor, telekinesis, hold person, flight, arcane lock. Maybe even a little bit of enchantment and divination. Throwing around fire just seems too tawdry and obvious for the archetypal scholarly mage (though there are plenty of fireball-happy wizards in fiction, like at Unseen University).

An elementalist type should be highly destructive, but blatant, and it should be easy to describe what he does: "He rained fire upon us!" Wizard spells should be a bit more subtle, and it should be harder to explain for the average commoner.

 

[Ratskinner]

specialists should be special

I feel that specialists should be really unique, as in different class unique, but I'm not sure enough of 5e's mechanics to say that with a lot of confidence.

I thought that the "grand unified spell list" of 3e was a great mistake. The bennies that were there for specialists just didn't measure up to the loss of spell access and the bookkeeping that went with it. My spells being slightly harder to resist doesn't cut it. I mean, if I want a pyromancer, I want those fire spells to be really "pow zap!" and forget the rest.

That being said, I'm okay with the idea of going without specialists in the first book. I'm fine with the Complete Magic User's Guide being the place I find out about X-mancers.

To be clear, I'm perfectly fine with a generalist mage being able to choose advancements (feats, talents, ?'s) that enhance his abilities with a spell or two. If you really want to trick out your wizard for invisibility, I figure why not? Nonetheless, if you're an X-mancer, you really should be dishing out the X.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

I'd like to see specialization handled as a mix of the way the 1e illusionist and 3.5 psion handled their specialties: there's a base list of spells of all schools that a wizard can access, then there's a list of 1-3 spells per spell level of each school that only specialists can access. So the 5e Illusion list might have phantasmal killer, the shadow X line, and the other cool and unique spells the 1e illusionist had that weren't on the general list, and only an illusionist can learn those spells. The illusionist would also have class features that would modify all his spells or all his illusion spells, of course, but there are certain spells that really scream "That guy is an illusionist!" if someone knows them. On top of that, spells from other schools (whether all other schools, certain "prohibited schools," or something else) would count as 1 level higher, like how the 1e illusionist learned detect magic as a 2nd-level spell instead of a 1st level spell.

If you want to have the option for a generalist wizard (and I think you should, the generalist has been around for a while and 5e is trying to be inclusive), a generalist wizard could be someone who doesn't take the 1-level penalty on any of his spells, so he would be slightly better with all schools than someone who had prohibited them, but not as good as someone who hadn't, and he'll never be able to cast the best spells of each school.

 

[Oni]

I'm going to go beyond just the specialist wizards so bear with me as wander slightly off topic.

If it were up to me, this is what I would like to see.

For all wizard classes there would be a general core of spells they all had access to, just enough to drive home the idea that they are all variations on the same class. Specialist would have their own specialty list that is available only to them, though there may be some cross over in the spells on each list, as well as powers and abilities specifically related to their specialty. Generalist would have access to powers or a meta school of spells specifically for altering others' and their own magic. They would also be a a little more capable with the basic universal spell list, and maybe have the ability to learn a very limited selection of specialist spells, but at a cost (maybe they require higher level slots or whatever). Specialist might be able to do the same, but even less efficiently than the Generalist.

Priest of various domains/spheres could be handled in pretty much the same way, except I would make the domains/spheres more limited that schools of magic, but allow the priest access to two or three of them.

Druids might be a variation on the priest above, or start from it's own core spell list with variations for elements, plants, animals and shape-shifting for instance.

Sorcerers would be able to draw from all the spell list, as their power essentially can come from anywhere, though maybe they have to focus on Arcane, Divine, or Natural.

[edit: Upon farther thought, the shared general spell list is an unnecessary complication, just give each specialty its own spell list and whatever spells happen to be generally known appear on all list, that way if a general spell happens to be particularly inappropriate for a certain type of specialist then you don't have to make any weird exceptions to drop it.]

 

[Kynn]

I just hope the specialists wizards are not based on the "schools of magic" (evocation, conjuration/summoning, divination, etc.) that were a bad adaptation of 1e's categories of spells into 2e's specialist class.

They took something that was very flavorful (the illusionist as a separate subclass from magic-user) and made it into a very bland and ugly set of 8 generic, flavorless subclasses in 2e.

A better idea would be to look at some of the alternate types of magic-users which have been used. For example, in the 2e Player's Option: Spells & Magic, they list several types of mages in addition to the normal set of specialists ("schools of philosophy"):

Schools of Effect
Air
Earth
Fire
Water
Dimensional Magic
Force
Shadow

Schools of Thaumaturgy
Alchemy
Artifice
Geometry
Song
Wild Magic

4e wisely chose to dump the "Schools of Philosophy" specialists and choose more flavorful options. I hope 5e continues this and doesn't go back to 2e's mistakes.

 

[The Shadow]

I always think "force mage" when I consider that question. Magic missle, mage armor, telekinesis, hold person, flight, arcane lock.

That's... actually quite interesting. I have to agree those are all very classic D&D wizard spells. It works at least as well as what I came up with. (Though I still think that 'thaumaturge' would be an effective specialist.)

Maybe even a little bit of enchantment and divination.

Some basic divinations and abjurations should be common to all wizard-types. I mean, everyone can Detect Magic and Dispel Magic, to name two obvious ones.

Enchantments, I'm not so sure. I don't see how it fits into the 'force mage' theme.

...The more I think about it, the more I think I like the 'force mage' idea. There's plenty of spells - Tenser's Floating Disk, Shield, the Bigby spells, Wall of Force, Otiluke's spheres... Depending on your theory of where the force comes from, you could maybe introduce some dimensional stuff too. Teleportation, etherealness, etc.

 

[Jack99]

I'd like to see something like talent trees that focus on the various schools. A "specialist wizard" would simply be someone who took alot of talents and learned alot of spells from a particular school as opposed to choosing a wider variety of things. It really doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

I am pretty sure that specialist wizards will be handled like a theme. One you slap on top of your generalist mage and that gives you certain bonuses and/or abilities/powers/spells at certain levels.

 

[Mircoles]

I like how they did it in 2e.

Though, using themes to achieve it would be interesting.