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D&D (2024) Playtest 6: Spells

Pedantic

Legend
I personally think there are 2 solid choiceS:

1) Conjuration: As you are literally creating new tissue.
2) Necromancy: Bringing that which has partially died and now comes back.
Historically, it's been both. Necromancy used to have a broader life and death focus (which I think is honestly more thematically defensible than "all the spooky stuff") and Conjuration was specifically about summoning the raw force of the Positive Energy plane to invigorate your target (a choice that definitely accelerated the Conjuration/Evocation mashup issue).

Abjuration has waffled between "planes of defensive force" and "magic about magic" for a while now, but I don't think expanding to "anything defensive/non-aggressive" is going to help clarify anything.
 

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Of course it’s not depicted in a rule, it’s thematics.

I’m not making it up, there’s a longstanding mythical and folkloric association between the power of words to enchant and the power of words to define reality.

I mean, conjuring energy from the planes is the literal definition of evocation magic. A good argument could certainly be made that evocation is a redundant category and nearly all evocation spells could be reclassified under conjuration. But, the list of schools is a sacred cow for many, and D&D seems to be allergic to sacred beef.

When I says “all the Power Word spells are Enchantment,” I was speaking of what is, not what I believe ought to be. Heal was the only exception in the 2014 rules, and here they are simply taking the opportunity to fix that oversight.
Of course it is made up. It literally does not match D&D thematics for enchantment magic. It exists only in the school-type line of those spells. Nowhere else in the game. Not even the description of the spells themselves match the theme of the school. "Speaking words of power" does not mean "enchantment." It sounds more like "invocation." Based on existing descriptions of the school, and the lack of explanation within the spells themselves, it appears to literally hole-filling to pad the enchantment school.
 


Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Well, yeah. Schools of magic basically are a tag added to every spell for the benefit of a single class and for inspiration. They don't matter, especially with the new wizard subclasses.

And which school should healing be in? They aren't a clear thing. And I'm with @Charlaquin on the most evocative and inspiring choice.
To be clear, I was specifically arguing that “Power Word X” spells belong in enchantment, which currently they do, and Power Word Heal is just being corrected to go in the same school with the other Power Words, where it belongs. Other healing spells don’t work by speaking the language of creation to make your words into reality, and are IMO obviously not enchantment.

I’m definitely in the “manipulating life force sounds like necromancy” camp. That said, in a game that wasn’t so averse to establishing an implied default setting, I could see a strong case for healing spells, as well as resurrection spells, not being categorized as necromancy for in-universe political reasons. I’ve always been partial to the idea that the schools of magic aren’t really objective qualities, but categories created by scholars of magic. Social constructs, if you will. Under that framework, Necromancy seems like a grab-bag of spooky, evil-flavored magic because that’s literally what it is; much like “witchcraft” in real life, it’s a label that people in power use to vilify practices that challenge the established power structures. Also, under that framework, wizards would probably have exactly the same arguments we do about what school certain spells ought to be filed under, which tickles me.
 

  • Hunter's Mark has concentration, which is a problem, but I think is there to prevent doubling Hex and Hunter's Mark with multiclassing.
Which isn't really a problem in the first place, because it takes 2 rounds to apply both, and then the target is dead so you're back to taking 2 turns to apply them to the next one and then they're dead and you're back to...

It's just, every single Ranger spell has to have Concentration. It's just what they decided. And it makes playing a Ranger absolutely boring... So at least getting access to more Primal spells lets them finally have some more active options.
 

James Gasik

We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Supporter
If you go back to the original definition of hit points as including factors beyond physicality, such as stamina, luck, morale, and divine favor, enchantment makes a little sense as being able to heal hit point damage. However that's not something WotC has done before; even with 5e Heroism, that spell grants temporary hit points, not actual hit point healing.

I'm not convinced that "putting healing spells in the right school" is less important than "putting all power words in the right school", if you want your design to be elegant. It should be noted however, that since their introduction, which spells go into what school is constantly shifting. In 2e, for example, Alteration was huge, as a lot of spells were felt to belong in the "change thing to other thing" category, but even then, there were simply spells that didn't belong (Burning Hands, Color Spray). 3e corrected this, though their real purpose was to make the schools more balanced against one another (Burning Hands became Evocation, Color Spray became Illusion).

5e however, has no real reason to balance schools against one another; most classes simply could care less what school a spell belongs to! And ironically, the subclass that would care about Enchantment the most, only has two benefits with regards to Enchantment spells, making them cheaper to scribe, and giving a single target Enchantment a second target (which wouldn't even affect PW:H even if they somehow got the spell!).

This really strikes me as really making evident the fact that what school a spell resides in really doesn't matter very much, and is an artifact of older game design, like alignment, that has become vestigial, with very little actual use, and only persists because it's one of those elements that makes the game "feel" like D&D. Arguing about Necromancy vs. Conjuration vs. Abjuration for healing magic is academic; if a spell doesn't feel like it belongs to a given school, the DM can simply change it with very little impact on the game.

In fact, I think Wizards should stop worrying about this themselves, because all that's going to happen is, someday they'll give someone an ability to do something with a blanket school of spells and a player will find a spell that was never meant to be used with said ability and, well, use it, which will only force them to say "oh this is a mistake" in some developer tweet, which most DM's will never find out about until they visit a forum or something, lol.

Also, they are definitely going to shoot themselves in the foot over things like this; I highly doubt they're going to update all of the old 5e spells to this new paradigm, but "backwards compatibility" will mean someone is going to find a spell in an old supplement that doesn't match the new paradigm and do something ridiculous with it, lol.
 

Horwath

Legend
Lastly....12d12 is just an awkward roll to make. A lot of tables are not going to have 12 d12s (you often just have 1 or 2), so you are doing a lot of re-rolls, whereas there are plenty of people that have 20 d6s
Good solution that we have is that you roll only 4 or 5 dice max. Rest, that must be even number, you just take average.

12d12 would be 4d12+52.
Saves time with adding 12 dice,
saves you number of dice,
saves you from outlying swingness of that many dice.
 


doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Of course it is made up. It literally does not match D&D thematics for enchantment magic. It exists only in the school-type line of those spells. Nowhere else in the game. Not even the description of the spells themselves match the theme of the school. "Speaking words of power" does not mean "enchantment." It sounds more like "invocation." Based on existing descriptions of the school, and the lack of explanation within the spells themselves, it appears to literally hole-filling to pad the enchantment school.
Invocation refers to calling a Power or being into a space with you.

Evocation is similar, but more external to you.
 

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