The school descriptions from 3e are lopsided, cryptic, and a squandered opportunity to consolidate rules and make magic accessible for newbies.
Necromancy is a particularly hard hit, and transmution is a joke. The largest school of all is summed up in a single, ambiguous sentence that IIRC was something like : "Transmutation does stuff."
Mr. Bulmahn has already agreed that transmutation should not be the "catch all" school of pathfinder, which gives me great hope.
I would like to see a breakdown of the various schools that includes useful subschools for each school. These would serve as an easy reference for many spells that share rules. For instance, all the conjuration spells that create a fog could have those shared rules as a Conjuration subschool— and the spells belonging to that subschool could be listed there (with page number), so that a new player needn't read through the entire spells chapter to gain a basic understanding of the rules.
Subschools would also make a nice home for the new rule that had been discussed: elemental damage spells bypassing SR. I love that rule, and I hope it gets adopted.
A stronger schools section should provide guidelines for what spells belong in which schools, to assist players and 3rd party publishers who add new spells, and to increase the consistency of the existing spells. If paizo redefines necromancy (or reverts to it's better-liked 2e definition) then I have no problem with certain spells changing school if it makes things internally consistent. Each school must have a simple rule for determining if a spell belongs in that school— even if it resorts to metaphysical concepts like the outer and inner planes (in fact, that's a plus AFAIC).
For example: If it was up to me, Necromancy would be defined as "magic of life, death, and the soul, positive and negative energy." Therefore healing spells would be Necro. as they were in days of old. Conjuration transports creatures or materials from other planes. I would favor conjuration drawing from the outer and evocation drawing from the inner planes. Frankly, I don't care what Pathfinder RPG defines these schools as, so long as they are defined consistently, because that stops me from having to look up schools! And it helps the newbies learn.
Each school description should be equally interesting, and contain shared rules from that school... but not tacked on stuff like 3e abjuration! They should explain "spell upgrade chains" like Fireball to Delayed Blast Fireball, Charm Person to charm monster, etc, so that a newbie will have some concept of how spells relate to eachother without having to flip around to each individual spell.
*gasp for air*
I clearly feel very strongly about this. What do you all think?
A caveat regarding School Changes and Specialist wizards:
One unpleasant memory of the switch from 3.0 to 3.5 was that specialists could lose or gain spells based on seemingly arbitrary school changes. The best way (IMO) to avoid this is to fix the specialization penalty once and for all. This has been much discussed in earlier legs of the playtest. I personally believe that Specialists should cast penalized schools using spell slots one level higher than the spell's level, like a metamagic feat. This is a different topic, but relevant to the issue of schools, and I think that is the best solution I have yet heard.
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<snippage>
I think the sentence you're referring to is "Transmutation spells change the properties of some creature, thing, or condition."
I've actually been playing around with this for an alternate magic system I'm struggling to design, and it's quite complicated...there are many corner and edge case spells in the SRD that defy simple classification...and many of them are in Transmutation...
I suspect that it would be beyond the scope of what Jason can accomplish in Pathfinder, between now and when the HC has to go to production, for this edition, while maintaining some level of 3.X compatibility, due to the dramatic impact on specialist wizards that this could have.. like having the specialists who chose Transmutation as their forbidden school losing Teleport spells in the 3.5 changeover (h/t to OOTS).
<snippage>
I think the sentence you're referring to is "Transmutation spells change the properties of some creature, thing, or condition."
Aye, that's the culprit.
There can be no question that this description is the reason Transmutation is the largest school. In fact, those words might describe any spell.
If I were king, I would change the description to : "Transmutation spells can turn physical matter of one form into another." (only much longer...) This would immediately eliminate or at least change the logic of many transmutations, such as Fly. Good. It ought to, IMO.
I understand what I ask is extremely complicated, but I think it is the only way to correct the flaws of the classic magic system without changing its behavior drastically. I defer to the judgment of the designer(s) on this — but I believe the merits are self-evident when it comes to consolidating shared rules, creating guidelines for spell/school associations, and providing a primer for related spells over many levels.
The most important thing to realize is that a strong foundation of magic rules will allow for a more easily extended system. The clearer the domain of each School, the easier it will be to fit new spells in be they GM creations or third party publications.