It's all in the name I think... maybe if you just renamed Necromancy things would look less bleak (all those nice folks raising the dead could obviously still be called necromancers). How about Vitamancy? or maybe someone can come up with a better name
Libamancy/libemancy would be the logical one to use, going by greek etymological routes.
As for schools of magic: most of the time in my own games, I ignore them. For the convenience of mechanics, specialized wizards exist and use the established rules, but when I'm actually building or thinking about magic systems, my delineation of schools breaks down more along lines of simple questions about what they actually *do*. The most recent iteration of these efforts looks something like the following:
(a note - the answers to these questions suggest the introduction of new schools of magic, and the elimination of old ones. Consider my adjusted/new names as placeholders for more descriptive or appropriate terms to suit)
1) Is energy being created?
If yes - effect is evocation.
2) Is energy being unmade?
If yes - effect is negation.
3) Is existing energy being manipulated?
If yes - effect is alteration.
4) Is mass being created?
If yes - effect is conjuration.
5) Is mass being unmade?
If yes - effect is annihilation.
6) Is existing mass being manipulated?
If yes - effect is transmutation.
7) Is data being acquired? (for our purposes, pretty much everything housed in the brain is 'data')
If yes - effect is divination.
8) Is data being lost?
If yes - effect is nullification.
9) Is data being manipulated?
If yes - effect is enchantment.
10) Is the comparative passage of time being manipulated between points of reference?
If yes - effect is temporal.
So as I figure it, you can build magic to have about 10 very broad, flexible schools. If I'm missing any prominent effects, do mention it, but everything that comes to mind is falling into one or more of these categories.
One could be reductivist and lump the 'data' category in with energy and matter manipulation (since that's what it finally amounts to), but that's not especially informative from a school of magic standpoint. Moreover, it becomes difficult to justify a lot of very conventional magic if it needs to be explained through pure infractions against physical law.
Running existing spells through these, you need to make some (many) judgement calls as to what's actually happening when a spell goes off. For instance - does an illusion-type effect manipulate existing light patterns, or create an entirely new one? Does a charm spell manipulate a targets existing affections, or does it cause new ones to manifest? Does resist energy cause fire to bounce off of you or just abate?
Also fun is the need to account for multiple effects coming from different schools, or being from different schools when cast by different classes. For instance, clerical healing suggests the introduction of divine energy to living tissue - it would be evocation (new energy for damaged cells to heal) and transmutation (to stitch everything back together). OTOH, druid healing is implicitly more 'natural', and so I'd be inclined to call it temporal (accelerated passage of normal healing processes).
I've avoided reference to other planes because, well, they're just impossible to police. Anything could come from anywhere and do anything, which is completely uninformative.
Final point: to have much game utility, these schools would have to have their limits pretty sharply defined, and a lot of spells rewritten to fit within boundaries... so I suppose I'm a bit off topic here. Still, too intriguing of a discussion to just leave laying around.
|
I think this misses the whole point.
This is a game - a game which reflects fantasy literature.
The place to start, if one is going to rewrite the schools, is "how does one best capture the feel of magic in fantasy stories?" And breaking it down with this Linnaean scheme doesn't do that.
As soon as someone bases a short-story on the idea, it will...
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
|
It's all in the name I think... maybe if you just renamed Necromancy things would look less bleak (all those nice folks raising the dead could obviously still be called necromancers). How about Vitamancy? or maybe someone can come up with a better name
Well when I read 'Vitamancy' all I could think of was "How much damage does Seoni's blast of B-12 do?"
It's all in the name I think... maybe if you just renamed Necromancy things would look less bleak (all those nice folks raising the dead could obviously still be called necromancers). How about Vitamancy? or maybe someone can come up with a better nameWell when I read 'Vitamancy' all I could think of was "How much damage does Seoni's blast of B-12 do?"
"GET READY TO GO BEYOND YOUR RECOMMENDED DAILY DOSAGE, B%&#!"
This is the system I use for determining what should go where:
-Evocation: Spells that create temporary magical forces to manipulate the environment. These spells cannot create anything permanent by themselves, but instead work as triggers that can then cascade through natural means. Nothing these spells do can change the properties of something beyond from what they could naturally do (so they can make a man fly by holding him aloft with force, but not grant him wings nor the innate ability to levitate; they can move air to create a storm, but not *create* a storm out of nowhere).
-Conjuration: Spells that bring things from somewhere else. Everything these spells do involves picking something from one place and putting it in another. Sometimes they directly move things between physical locations (such as in Teleportation or Calling spells), while others they draw from "idealized planes" -as per the Platonic thought of a "world of shapes" where everything comes from- (such as with Creation or Summoning spells).
-Necromancy: Spells that manipulate Positive and Negative energy. These spells are about life and death (which are manifestations of Positive and Negative energies), both giving them or taking them away. Since true healing can only be done through positive energy, healing spells go here (you could potentially "heal" a wound through Transmutation, but it would only be a temporary modification of the body, not actually healing).
-Transmutation: Spells that grant things properties that they could not naturally have. Turning/changing things through states they can naturally experience (such as turning a stone into dust) are not Transmutation, but Evocations (in the case of the stone, you use magical force to grind it, thus being an Evocation. If you changed the stone into gold, now that would be Transmutation, since that stone would not be able to naturally become that -all this using medieval understanding of sciences, of course. In the real...
I really like the direction this would take it. I think the another reason this was never changed was the amount of time and effort it would take to make all the schools balanced. In 3.5 everyone I knew wanted to play eiter an Evoker or a Conjurer if specialized. I think some of these issues were solved in Pathfinder.
I personally don't think paizo will tackle this with the 3.5 backward compatibility, but perhaps a third party publisher will overhaul this if the interest is great enough.
The other issue is that most of us who played 3.5 have a lot of the spell basics memorized. We can quickly strategize what spell to use when, and changing the spells may slow down games with changes.
That said, I would love to see a grimoire so to speak with all the base spells of PFRPG and open content paizo stuff balanced with each school, while still making each specialized school have viable use in both roleplaying and otherwise.
Just my 2 CP, I've found this a very interesting read and look intently to where this goes next... :D
I think this misses the whole point.
This is a game - a game which reflects fantasy literature.The place to start, if one is going to rewrite the schools, is "how does one best capture the feel of magic in fantasy stories?" And breaking it down with this Linnaean scheme doesn't do that.
There are a few ways you could go with redescribing the magic system:
1) We go all in for a descriptive system, merge all "life magic" into necromancy, all "energy magic" into evocation, and so forth. Thankfully, this idea seems unpopular here.2) We take the existing 8 schools (plus their dozen-odd subcategories) and attempt to redescribe the trappings of each spell so it fits the hole it's been packed into. Thats what most people have been doing in the thread, but there are so many pitfalls to deal with - Have fun with disintegrate...
3) We come up with some new categories that are actually precise about what they do.
You talk about describing the magic that's already been used in different stories, and I'll grant that plenty of stories want just that treatment. They aren't concerned with any sort of causal or operational justification for magic, and descriptive categorization works just fine - "Oh, it feels like bad magic so it must be necromancy". That'd be the Harry Potter school of magecraft, where there's no time or thought spent on how exactly magic does what it does - it just works, you know? And spells that sorta do similar things get sorta grouped together.
That method is all well and good, but it has it's weaknesses when applied to a system that at least purports to be a bit more rigorous. It's clear that PF has at least *tried* to technically separate the different schools based on the types of effects they can produce. Their troubles come from having so many artifacts embedded from earlier phases of d&d rules evolution.
Me, I like logical systems. I look at the core PF spell list and see that 80 percent of what makes a spell 'necromantic' could just as easily be rewritten as evocation, or transmutation, or illusion, or enchantment, and it bothers me. The various school spell lists amount to being fairly arbitrary, without the justification of being balanced with respect to power or utility, because they aren't.
Now, its true that structurally prescriptive systems modeled for real life tend to break down in the advent of inevitable exceptions to rules, but... we're talking about magic. In a game. Magic can do whatever we want it to do, including filter into very clean, clear, informative categories of effects. If you accept "transmutation changes matter" and "evocation creates energy" then why not apply similarly consistent rules to a few new categories? "Nullification destroys information" "Temporal manipulates time".
All high-minded discussion of this stuff aside, I like the notion of magic where you have to think about how you're actually doing what you do. When you freak out a goblin with a fear spell, is it because you made it see a monster? Did you dredge up some primal terror from it's infancy? Or did you just electrically prod the fear center of it's little brain?
Well, by "fantasy stories" I'm presuming classic fantasy lit - ie. Tolkien, Howard, etc., not somebody's fanfic written in the backwaters of the Internet where Drizzt and Elminster are gay lovers with a thing for black tentacles and plushy abolith.
Believe it or not, there's a very heavily populated continuum of fiction between Tolkein and fetish fanfic. In these stories, magic runs the gamut from total nonsense to very clear, scientifically principled systems. Since our presence on this board suggests an already-existing commitment to a certain degree of structure, I'm inclined to push magic that way.
One thing I believe we should keep in mind when discussing this topic:
Do we want to organize magic from a rules system perspective, or do we want to do so from an in-character perspective? While hopefully both things will end up combined, choosing where to start from can ease some of the work.
Let me expand my point.
Rules System Perspective: Here, we care about organizing spells accoridng to how they interact with the mechanics of the game. Spells that "buff the character" go in one place, spells that "attack targets" in another, spells that "protect the character" there, and spells that "alter the environment" here. This method has the advantage of easy balance, organization and rules equalization. On the other hand, it has the disadvantage of promoting metagaming and sounding artificial inside a game.
In-Character Perspective: Here, we care about organizing spells according to what spellcasters inside the gameworld would do. So a long-bearded wizard that manipulates wind currents to extract their innate force and do things like fly, break down a wall, breathe underwater and make his hair stand up with electricity would call a rather disorganized variety of spells "Wind Magic", while a the local priests would accuse the hunchback witch living in the swamp of using "Black magic", regardless of whether she cursed/poisoned/healed/brought/back to life/made dance until feet broke down/turned into a frog a misguided peasant. The advantage of this method is that it makes magic come to life and gives it panache. On the other hand, it has the disadvantage of being very hard to organize and prone to heavy imbalances.
Personally, I think one should start from the "In-Character Perspective" and strive to the "Rules System Perspective", but trying to remain within the boundaries of the former. I see the current system we have as something like that, but which has, through the years, given space to classifications that seem to follow more a "Rules System Perspective" than an "In-Character Perspective", without the appropriate justifications on both sides (as most seem to have been done for the sake of balance, yet without enough "lore backing" to sustain it in both fields).
As for using a more scientific approach to magic, you can always fall back to the fact that mages and wizards are, in a way, the scientists of fantasy worlds. They spend years sniffing mercury vapours and burning their eyebrows among dangerous laboratories and dusty grimoires trying to figure out magic, how it works and how to classify it. If we are going to allow these kind of characters, then we cannot scoff at the suggestion of giving a logical structure to magic. Of course, nothing has to be absolute: Just like real world theories, magic theories are just that, theories, and they don't necessarily cover all aspects of magic.
It's all in the name I think... maybe if you just renamed Necromancy things would look less bleak (all those nice folks raising the dead could obviously still be called necromancers). How about Vitamancy? or maybe someone can come up with a better name
Its not so much the 'nerco' part of the word as the 'mancy' part of the word that is ill suited for the term to describe 'life and death magic'.
It's all in the name I think... maybe if you just renamed Necromancy things would look less bleak (all those nice folks raising the dead could obviously still be called necromancers). How about Vitamancy? or maybe someone can come up with a better nameIts not so much the 'nerco' part of the word as the 'mancy' part of the word that is ill suited for the term to describe 'life and death magic'.
"-mancy" comes from the greek "Manteia", which means roughly "Knowledge/Divination". Understood in the context that magic is the "knowledge of the mysterious forces", I think you can use that suffix to indicate "Something-magic" without much hassle. After all, the term Nigromancy (though not Necromancy; Nigro- means "Black" in Latin, while Necro- means "Corpse" in Greek), was widely used in centuries past to classify just about anything short of Theurgy and Thaumaturgy that sounded like magic (since Theurgy -Divineworking- and Thaumaturgy -Miracleworking- where often related to Saints).
The problem here is mostly the word "Necro-" or "Nigro-", since in both cases they deal with stuff related to death (and physical death specifically, not life and death. The pr) and darkness. While I treat the school of Necromancy as something that deals with life and death, this is mostly out of old school D&D tradition. But I agree the name should be changed if we are to make it more coherent.
Let's see what I can dig from my books here:
-The Greek word for Life is "Bios", but I think Biomancy/Biourgy sound rather sci-fi, because of the context in which Bio is often used. "Thatatos" is the word for "Death" in a broad sense.
-"Hugiene" is Greek for "Health" (we use it as Hygiene), but the word sound pretty bad by itself already .
-"Erythos" means "Red", which in turn was used to refer to things like flowers and blood. "Erythromancy" would be an alternative if we want to focus on "bodystuff", taken from a "blood" perspective.
-The actual Greek word for Blood is "Haima". That would leave us with "Haimomancy".
-"Analeptikos" means literally "Restorative". So if you wanted a school specifically for healing, you could call it "Analeptomancy". Though it sounds like some kind of mental disorder too.
-"Gloutos" is Greek for "Buttocks", while "Cephalos" means "Head". So now you can call someone "Butthead" and sound intelligent at the same time, with "Gloutocephalos".
-"Goetia" means "Witchcraft". That's a word that can come handy.
-"Didumoi" means "Twins". Since Positive and Negative Energy are rather twins, another option could be "Didumancy", "Didurgy".
-"Dunamis" means "Force". Maybe it can be used to represent the different energies, as in "Dunomancy", "Thanadurgy", et cetera.
-A healer in Greek is called "Iatros", so "Iatromancy" would be "Knowledge of Healing". An "Aiatros" would be someone who "de-healths", so "Aiatromancy" would be the "Knowledge of Reversing Health".
-"Kata" means "Downward". "Katamancy" could be used as the magic of "bringing stuff down" with Negative Energy, though one could also take it as "dragging it to Hell" (not "Katamari". We're not rolling things here).
Well, those are some propositions. Later I'll look through the Latin books and see what I can find.
I've been thinking about the real-world concept of Entropy, and how it is probably the best way to interpret the Necromancy school. This is most useful because it distinguishes "Positive" and "Negative" energy from the actual "energy" types you would evoke or conjure.
Klaus, your mastery of etymology trumps mine. Also your thinking on the issue is highly appealing to me. What would you call a school of entropy, where both "white" and "black" varieties can advance or retract the state of order in a system? Basically, positive energy "puts things back together" and negative energy "tears things apart".
By the way, I am loving this thread!
EDIT: I have a name I am happy with describing the above concept. As already discussed, the majority of people in the game world still call it "Necromancy" — but true practitioners of magic know that speaking with the dead and gleaning their knowledge of the afterlife is but one aspect of the school that deals with positive and negative energy. The school that can put things back in order or throw them into chaos: Composition. (or if you want to be old school "composition/decomposition.) Note that putting a soul back into a skeleton or making it behave as though it were alive is in fact a "generative" act, even if it derives from negative energy.
EDIT 2: In case you're wondering where all this Entropy stuff is coming from, Planescape love, of course.
I just had a moment of inspiration. Now, I'll put it forward and see if it's insight or insanity.
We don't need magic schools. We really don't. We haven't needed them since 3.0.
I actually like the schools. There are number of good magic systems out there if you're more interested in skill-driven magic. Shadowrun is a favorite of mine. I use them and I like them, but I honestly appreciate the byzantine weirdness of the schools system. Sometimes I wish that the spells matched up with the schools more accurately, and that's what this thread is about.
I'm interested in your ideas, I love alternative magic systems (and if you look at the beta threads from about a year ago, you'll see I've dabbled with them myself), but it's not really on topic for this thread. Maybe start a new thread and link back here?
If you can help me understand why you like that byzantine weirdness, then I'll be in a better position to make suggestions which play on byzantine weirdness.
I've played lots of games with different systems over the years. When you go into a system like Shadowrun (3e at least) that's wholly skill-driven, it is nice how clean and effective and open-ended it is. But over time, you start to miss how wizardlike the old Vancian stuff is. It is full of quirks and eccentricities and traditions — that last one being the thing it is hard to reproduce by design.
So I have those other games for when I want things to make sense, and one game for when I want to read spells from a huge tome in front of a fireplace with a beer and feel like a wizard. Pathfinder is largely a game of tradition, and it is the last game in print where I can really get my fix of this type of system.
All of this in no way invalidates your design goals, and I'm curious to see what you cook up.
I honestly appreciate the byzantine weirdness of the schools system.If you can help me understand why you like that byzantine weirdness, then I'll be in a better position to make suggestions which play on byzantine weirdness.
It isn't all that difficult to create a set of idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and illogical magic rules, but to truly gain the most benefit from such rules, one must first know what one's goals and motives really are.
I agree with Evil Lincoln on the quaintness of the magic system we already have: Not only I like it, but I think it has to be preserved (it can be enhanced and perfected, of course, and that's why we're here discussing). The reason, at least for me, is that it gives magic a certain style, partially conveying what magic would feel inside the game to a character: The result of a raw, almost bestial entity that mages and sages try to contain within logical patterns and theories, which for the most part *seem* to work, but always with the looming sense that they could break down in the blink of an eye.
Besides, I see the schools as an intrinsic part of D&D/Pathfinder, that if taken away would, well, make it feel less like it. And really, I don't think it gets in the way; much on the other hand, I believe it helps. I know at least my players would get lost if there were no longer able to tell what school an aura belongs to.
Sometimes, complexity itself can be seen as a form of beauty. It captivates some people.
Abjuration seems like a hard school to reconcile. It seems like it does double duty as the "protection/ward" school and the "dispel" school.
I wonder what kind of tortured logic we could cook up that would unify the two. I notice under Klaus's definition, be basically leaves off the whole "protective" thing, and sticks just to dispelling.
So how does it work? What does Protection from Arrows have in common with Dispel Magic?
I treat Abjuration as the school that interferes with magic. So spells that grant you protection from other spells, disenchants, dispellings, antimagic and all that would fall into that school.
Spells that give you protections that don't relate to magic (such as Protection From Arrows), would have to go into different schools, in my opinion, depending on how they work. Spells that create temporary defenses of force would be Evocations; spells that create/shape physical barriers of some kind would be Conjurations; spells that repel life/death would be Necromancy; spells that grant the ability to sustain types of damage/energy/elements they would not naturally be able to would be Transmutations.
Of course, this means Abjuration is stripped of a lot of useful spells. This would have to go in hand with the creation of new spells to fill that void.
For instance, some examples of spells from Abjuration that I would switch around would be the following:
-Resistance > Transmutation
-Hold Portal > Evocation
-Explosive Runes > Evocation
-Stoneskin > Transmutation
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
|
I really oughta write a script which prepends "If you'll go back and read my post again, " to every post I write on this message board.
Or you could resign yourself to the fact that your posts either (a) are not being contradicted as directly as you imagine, (b) are simply not sufficiently important to justify a careful reading and reply, or (c) are not nearly as definitive or clear on the particular point as you may imagine.
But, hey, a script works too...
|
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
|
Thank you for identifying yourself. Now, I can ignore you.
I really oughta write a script which prepends "If you'll go back and read my post again, " to every post I write on this message board.Or you could resign yourself to the fact that your posts either (a) are not being contradicted as directly as you imagine, (b) are simply not sufficiently important to justify a careful reading and reply, or (c) are not nearly as definitive or clear on the particular point as you may imagine.
But, hey, a script works too...
Noooo!!! I'll cry!!! Say it ain't so!!!
Good luck with that.
i'd like to cast another vote for klaus doing some great work in this thread!
some ways that magic can be classified:
d&d 3.0- abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy, transmutation, universal.
final fantasy- white, black.
wizardry series- air, earth, fire, water, mental, divine.
my homebrew (work in progress), air, earth, fire, water, enchantment, illusion, nature, necromancy, general.
another idea- body, mind, soul.
|
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
|
I've always liked the Ars Magica magic system, though it would be a pretty bad port over to D&D. One thing though that could map well onto D&D is the concept that, although Ars Magica has well defined categories of magic, those categories are merely one framework for approaching magic. It's the most common framework, and likely the one most easy to teach, but it's not the only framework. Magical effects do exist outside of the Hermetic tradition which could not be reproduced within it. And, sometimes spells are translated into the Hermetic tradition and don't quite fit in.
So, in D&D, maybe the schools are used for understanding the magic and are part of how it is taught and passed down rather than an actual metaphysical distinction. Thus, Protection from Arrows is an abjuration spell because the school known as abjuration happens to contain the formula, invocations, etc. that best produce that effect.
Abjuration seems like a hard school to reconcile. It seems like it does double duty as the "protection/ward" school and the "dispel" school.
I wonder what kind of tortured logic we could cook up that would unify the two. I notice under Klaus's definition, be basically leaves off the whole "protective" thing, and sticks just to dispelling.
So how does it work? What does Protection from Arrows have in common with Dispel Magic?
Dispel Magic can be used as defensively, it just takes alot more effort to set up Dispel Magic counterspelling. Protection from Arrows counters arrows. Dispel Magic counters magic. Same thing, different target.
As abstract as necromancy was, at least we could tie it into Positive/Negative energy without throwing out half the spells.
Abjuration takes a serious hit when you throw out the abstract "protection/ward" element. Too serious a hit actually. I'd be pleased to hear a metaphysical explanation for why (at least most) of the current abjurations hang out together at the abjuration table.
"Negation" came up earlier in someone's treatment. I think that's a good start. To say that abjuration spells negate force and energy goes a long way toward unifying Protection from Arrows, Hold Portal, and Dispel Magic.
Sebastian, what you said about the Ars Magica philosophy, and multiple frameworks of explanation is dear to my heart. I welcome obscure explanations, multiple-school-spells, alternative mechanics for spells in non-standard schools, and all that. I love this stuff.
In fact, the the vast majority of spells are best addressed by not swapping schools at all, but rather coming up with elaborate bats**t reasons that they belong where they are. To say that hold portal is abjuration because it negates the physical force of kicking in a door — just as dispel magic negates the magical energy of a spell... well, that sounds cool to me.
lilith'sThrall:
Let's switch to an elemental based system. That ought to drive some people to the brink of sanity.
Let's switch to an elemental based system. That ought to drive some people to the brink of sanity.
I don't want your "sanity". Give me my arcane nomenclatures and dusty tomes, kthnxbae.
Yeah, Stoneskin pretty much has to be a Transmutation, any way you slice it (or fail to slice, I suppose).
That's okay — Abjuration as the school of Negation would preserve most of its existing list, and pick up a few others to boot. Hello mage armor!
Mage Armor was seemingly supposed to be abjuration, see Abjurant Champion examples.
Disclaimer: All the things I say in the following post are born out from self-determined conclusions and not from canon sources, and I might as well be mistaken. So take it as a grain of salt.
I think the reason that made Abjuration "absorb" so many spells that apparently don't correspond is that they wanted the school to become the "Protection School". While I understand this reasoning, my problem is the following:
Schools have always been the way Arcane Magic is grouped. These Schools are -theoretically- organized based on the way spells work, not based on what spells do.
Spheres (or their current counterpart, Domains), on the other hand, are the traditional system for categorization of Divine Spells. Unlike Schools, Spheres/Domain group spells not based on how they work, but based on what they do.
Let me use an example:
-Let us take a spell that creates a momentary bolt of freezing energy, and in a fit of originality, let us call it Ray of Frost.
-A Mage and a Cleric are walking through the wilderness, when they see a goblin cast Ray of Frost on another goblin. Since both are well-learned scholars, they sit to debate about what they just saw.
Mage: "That sorcery produced an instantaneous shock of energy that lowered the temperature of the targeted goblin to such a degree that it froze him. The ray we saw could be attributed to the fact that the cold energy also momentarily froze the air as it travelled. Since we are speaking of a sudden, non-lasting release of energy, it was clearly an Evocation"
Cleric: "While I partly agree on your explanation, what we saw was a demonstration of the power of the Freezius, the God of Ice, Frost and Cold Beer. Or perhaps the little green man channeled the very essence of the Paraelemental Plane of Ice. Whatever the source, this was clearly a spell from the Sphere of Ice, as that was what it produced"
So, expanding this, Arcane Schools ought to categorize spells depending on process rather than result, while Divine Spheres ought to do so based on results rather than process (this stands true also for Domains. The reason I prefer to speak of Domains here is because they were broader and not limited to one spell per level, thus making the comparison to Schools easier. But the principle is the same for both Domains and Spheres). Thus, we can have the following case (using made-up spells for argument's sake):
-Mithrilskin: This spell turns the target's skin into mithril, making it immune to most hits. School: Transmutation (because it gives the target properties it cannot naturally have -> Process). Sphere: Protection (because it protects the target -> Result)
-Sphere of Magical Immunity: This spell creates a field around the target that makes it immune to most spells. School: Abjuration (because it interferes with magic -> Process). Sphere: Protection (because it protects the target -> Result)
-Form of Air: This spell makes turns the target's body into mist, thus allowing it to pass through small spaces. School: Transmutation (because it gives the target properties it cannot naturally have). Sphere: Air (because it turns the target into something related to air -> Result).
So, what we get here is that two spells from the same Sphere (Mithrilskin and Sphere of Magical Immunity) would fall in two different Schools, while two spells from the same School (Form of Air and Mithrilskin) would fall into two different Spheres (of course the Spheres could be adjusted, and Mithrilskin fall in the Sphere of Metal, Form of Air in the Sphere of Can't Touch This, and so on, but the principle remains).
Now, where am I going with this? That nowadays, it seems that both processes of classification are mixing, thus ending with situations like Healing Spells being in a different School than Raise the Dead and Abjuration having spells that have very little in common with each other. This is because the criteria being used is not consistent through all spells, with some being classified according to the Process (like Raise the Dead, which involves manipulating life-force, and thus is properly placed within Necromancy), while other are being classified according to the Result (like most Abjuration spells, which are all lumped together because "they protect the target", not considering *how*¨they protect the target).
This is why I think we are finding some spells that don't seem to fit: Because Schools were created to classify spells in a specific way that is not being properly applied in all cases (using classifications that are more fitting to Spheres/Domains).
Right Klaus, a good explanation to be sure.
I was positing that if "magic" is a physical phenomenon (and Vancian magic especially seems to be) then a school that negates magical action could also negate any number of physical actions. To say that abjurations dampen or negate action and energy is not exactly akin to "The school of protecty-seeming things" that you would ascribe to divine magic.
It all depends on how "separate" from physical phenomena that you hold magic to be. Since it's all made up, I can reconcile the two. Under my negation proposition, Abjuration would be able to hang on to a number of its most iconic spells, so it meets my criteria for a good school tweak.
I'll start. I'd put healing, especially life-restoring magic, back into necromancy. Old school. "Conjuration (Healing)" my butt. Where is the Plane of Unmarred Flesh located again? And what happens to its denizens when you heal someone on the Prime Material?
I agree in a way that healing could be necromancy, but I always assumed that you were conjuring direct energy from the positive energy plane, which makes sense to me.
With flavoring and description, you could probably make almost any spell into another school.
|
|
I dont think that necromancy should still be a school of magic. It is the best defined in terms of roleplaying, but i think it needs to be better defined in terms of mechanics, (a prize i give to evocation.) I think that the big problem with the school system is that they arent all given equal weighting, conjuration and transmutation get most of the spells followd by evo, but the rest are either overspecialized focused on one thing (Divination, enchantment and illusion) , tiny (Divination and abjuration), or have no focus at all (necromancy). The solution is what always has been the solution; more spells. More spells (that are as well designed and flavourful as existing ones, tall order i know, ) would help correct the imbalance between schools.
I've been playing the same non-evil, non-undead oriented, incredibly non-optimized necromancer character on and off since 3.0. She stays relevant largely through Fear spells, which probably don't belong in the school at all. I strongly disagreed with the designers' decision to restrict spells to a single school (up until PHII, anyway) and their obvious intent to make Necromancy the school of squick. Not that it shouldn't have room for that sort of thing, but they claimed that it was the school of life and death (true) and then focused almost exclusively on the death aspect, with a minor focus on curses (?) and fear (?) thrown in for good measure. Later they decided to add cold. Yay.
So they removed spells like Reincarnate (admittedly not a particularly useful spell) and explained a spell like False Life as granting positive hit points to a living caster by manipulating the "power of unlife" as if that actually made any sense. I was glad that Pathfinder gave a few new options to necromancer specialists (Turn Undead, the Life replacement powers in the Advanced Player's Guide) that were not completely restricted to the Dark Side, but they didn't change the spell set-up at all. Bring balance back to the Force!
I'd say that healing should be Transmutation. Raise dead, resurection, true resurection should be conjuration (bringing the soul back from a different plane) or necromancy (manipulating positive and negative energy) Reincarnation would be almost wholly Conjuration (you create a new body, and call the soul back to it).
Evocation doesn't make a lot of since seeing as it is described as "creating something out of nothing" which isn't that much different then the [Creation] subschool of Conjuration.