Sorry for the delay! A bit of work, a bit of other activities, and an unplanned binge of Haikyuu! got in the way of this, our look at the
Specialist Wizards and the
Illusionist.
I will cover both of these at the same time, since the illusionist is a pretty straightforward implementation of the rules for specialist wizards.
The book first explains the
Schools of Magic, noting that these are not organized places to go to study, but rather magical disciplines, each of which has their own special methods practices depending on the type of magical energy they utilize. The nine schools are
Abjuration,
Alteration,
Conjuration/Summoning,
Enchantment/Charm,
Greater Divination,
Illusion,
Invocation/Evocation,
Necromancy, and
Lesser Divination. Note that these schools are actually slightly different in the spell descriptions: "Invocation/Evocation" is uniformly referred to as "Evocation", while "Illusion" is uniformly referred to as "lllusion/Phantasm." Unfortunately, they do not provide any particular explanation of what the individual schools
do, which is obvious for some schools from their names, but not necessarily all. It is only by looking at the spells that one sees that Abjuration deals with protection, banishing, and the dispelling or canceling of magic. The differences between Evocation and Conjuration seems to be that Evocation deals with short term magical effects, while Conjuration deals with magic that sustains for longer periods.
Lesser Divination is minor school that all wizards have access to. The other eight make up the "greater schools," which are opposed to each other in various degrees. Illusion opposes Necromancy, Alteration opposes Abjuration, Greater Divination opposes Conjuration/Summoning, and Invocation/Evocation opposes Enchantment Charm. This is important because a specialist cannot cast spells in the school opposing the one they specialize in, and sometimes one or both of the schools next to the the opposition school.
For no good reason other than that specialty wizards are a "non-standard" class, there is an additional ability minimum requirement to specialize in each of the schools. Furthermore, there are race restrictions as well, though no particular reason is giving other than a vague hand-wave towards "natural tendency or quirk of fate."
This is how it breaks down:
| Specialist | School | Race | Min. Ability Score | Opposition School(s) |
| Abjurer | Abjuration | Human | WIS 15 | Alteration & Illusion |
| Conjurer | Conj./Summoning | Human, Half-elf | CON 15 | Gr. Divin. & Illusion |
| Diviner | Greater Divination | Any | WIS 16 | Conj./Summoning |
| Enchanter | Enchantment/Charm | Human, Half-elf, Elf | CHA 16 | Evoc. & Necromancy |
| Illusionist | Illusion | Human, Gnome | DEX 16 | Necro., Evoc., Illusion |
| Invoker | Invocation/Evocation | Human | CON 16 | Ench./Charm & Conj. |
| Necromancer | Necromancy | Human | WIS 16 | Illusion & Ench./Charm |
| Transmuter | Alteration | Human, Half-elf | DEX 15 | Abjuration & Necro. |
Specialty wizards with an INT of 16 or more get the +10% bonus to XP, since their other prime requisite is already fulfilled by the minimum requirement to be that specialty.
So what does a specialty wizard gain for fulfilling their race and ability requirements, and for being unable to cast spells of their opposition schools?
- An additional spell slot per spell level in their specialty. So a 1st level specialty wizard gets two first level spell slots, instead of just one, but one of them must be in their specialty.
- A +1 bonus to saves against spells in their specialty, while other characters get a -1 penalty to saving throws against spells in their specialty. These cancel out in the case of two wizards of the same specialty casting spells on each other.
- A +15% bonus to their chance of learning spells in their specialty, and a -15% penalty to their chance of learning spells outside of their specialty.
- An additional spell in their specialty is added to their spell book whenever they reach a new spell level, with no need to find it or roll for chance of learning.
- When researching new spells in their specialty, the spells is counted as one level lower for purposes of determining difficulty.
The 2nd Edition illusionist is then merely an example of the above put into effect. How does it compare to the 1st Edition Illusionist, which was its own dedicated class?
1st Ed. illusionists did not get any of the above bonuses, rather they got an expanded list of magic items that they could use, and their own dedicated spell progression table and spell list. The Illusionist spell levels only went to Level 7, and as character levels get higher, illusionists have fewer spells than their magic-user counterparts. So on the whole, the 2nd Edition illusionist loses some of their uniqueness in return for a class-wide buff. They get more spells, more spells slots, access to 8th and 9th level spells, and still have access to almost all the spells that were on the 1st Ed. Illusionist spell list.
This set-up of being either a generalist with access to all spell schools or a specialist that forewent some schools in return for bonuses in their specialty school, would continue in both 3rd Edition and 3.5. The idea of schools as a whole would be initially abandoned in 4th Edition, until brought back in a limited form with the Essentials line's Mage subclass. Here, the schools were presented as simply providing bonuses to particular spell powers, rather than something that hard restricted access to other schools of magic. Only four of the original schools were included, joined by Nethermancy and Pyomancy. In 5th Edition, the original 8 greater schools of magic would make a comeback, and the generalist wizard was abandoned in favor of every wizard specializing in a school as their subclass.
Earlier in the thread,
@Mannahnin mentioned seeing specialists being preferred to generalist mages. This makes sense to me, as it seems to me that the specialist wizard was a nice way to "raise the floor" of the wizard class, so to speak, without excessively raising the ceiling. It makes sense to see it tweaked a bit and used in 5th Edition.
Next up, we look at the
Priest group and the
Cleric.
