Remastered Wizard reveals and speculation


Pathfinder Second Edition General Discussion

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Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:
Temperans wrote:
Also universal used to be a school, so it and illusion being the only ones that stay is just off.

I swear I'm not trying to follow you, this is just a conversation I happen to be interested in:

It would be very weird if illusion was being kept as a school completely distinct from every other school having specific themes. I don't believe this is going to be the case. Rather, the explicit reason why 'illusion' is still a tag that matters is because the illusion school tag is the only one that had any mechanical text tied to it.

What is more likely to happen is that the illusion tag will remain to denote the mechanics of disbelief, and some kind of School of Imaginary Things will collect the most iconic illusory spells into a curriculum themed around using figments and glamours to alter one's perception of reality.

Meanwhile, while calling Universal a school of magic is technically correct, it's a bit misleading as it had less than a dozen spells, and the Universalist wizards were known as those who do not specialize in any school of magic. The concept of a non-specialist wizard school continuing to exist is a feature, not a bug.

Nope, Illusion was originally not the only one that had mechanical text.

Enchantment had it so all enchantment spells were mind-affecting. Which is why Fear was Necromancy since you can fear undear.
Conjuration had the rules for what the different subschools did.
Abjuration had rules for how multiple abjuration effects act when overlapping.
Divination had rules on how to run the area and how you could maybe get extra info from multiple passes.
Transmutation had the rules on Polymorph.

The ones with the least rules were Evocation and Necromancy.


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You couldn't cast fear on undead. You might be thinking of chill touch?


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Temperans wrote:
Which is why Fear was Necromancy since you can fear undear.

Fear was also mind effecting though, so it did not work against Undead regardless.

And to be clear, Fear was a Necromancy spell because WOTC made a conscious decision to make Necromancy the evil-themed school of magic after acquiring the game, which is why in third edition spells like Fear and Ray of Enfeeblement became Necromancy spells and why Cure spells became Conjuration (while Inflict remained necromancy).

It was entirely an executive level decision.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Homebrewers and GMs should love this change. You don’t have to wrestle with whole systems to have wizards that fit in your setting or campaign. Making your own school of magic is going to be really simple and hard to “get wrong”. It would be great if GM core had advice on making/tweaking focus spells to be useful to your party, since they are going to be such an important part of so many class’s identities moving forward, but even if Paizo doesn’t do it, I am sure homebrewers will figure it out and there will be lots of examples of alternative options for home games.


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Think he means in pf2e. Illusions have that whole page on how to disbelieve them and such. The others have basically nothing in particular in this system.


Kobold Catgirl wrote:
You couldn't cast fear on undead. You might be thinking of chill touch?

Yeah, I still had that spell in mind from the Magus conversation in the PF1 forum.

The reason it was necromancy is that it only affected living creatures. So it would not work on undead or constructs.


Yeah, chill touch is fine. I was talking about fear, scare and symbol of fear, which are clearly better fits for the enchantment school.


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AnimatedPaper wrote:
Unicore wrote:
It was very clear from the remaster panel that this was not a "every wizard must have attended one of x number of starting schools in the game that are all unique physical spaces and if your character didn't start there, they can't be a disciple of this school" but that it will eventually include regional and probably famous magic schools in the setting as additional options, options that are not nearly as restrictive to characters as the old schools of magic were in past editions of the game, and have been become much less relevant in PF2.
I genuinely hope that they write something like "Lost Omens: Academies" as an eventual title in the LO line. Just seems like a "duh" for highlighting the emphasis various regions place on different mode of thought, magic, and combat, along with an easy way to introduce outre player options that might not necessarily fit into a strongly thematic book like Rage of Elements, or even Dark Archive (which was itself a bit of a grab bag).

I've been hoping for something like a Lost Omens: Acedemies since back when Impossible Lands released, and at this point it's honestly one of my dream books. I really loved the contrast between the Ebon Mausoleum in Mechitar's much more theory and "liberal arts" based aesthetic whilst the various academies in Yled had a much more practical focus which echos the two city's differing aesthetics. Plus, there's of course the academies in Nex.

Personally, I'd love the book to be just a nice 128 page book with each metaregion getting 6-10 pages on them (plus a 15-20 page section on "beyond the inner sea") covering the biggest academies there, maybe chucking in a sidebar on "other academies" and some fitting player options in there (nothing major, maybe 2 pages for places like Impossible Lands or Mwangi, but as little as less than half a page if it doesn't really seem needed).


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I love magic having "in-world" fundamental mechanics, having a sciency feel to it. However, I've felt for a long time that the existing spell schools were poorly defined and really should have been overhauled into a much more robust set of categories based on what spells fundamentally are affecting. These changes instead go the entirely opposite direction to what I'd prefer - quite frustrating! In-world schools that teach buckets of spells just does nothing for me thematically (all wizards I've played in the past were either self-taught or studied under an individual mentor).

I'm particularly concerned that the new schools will significantly limit your "school" slot. Since the school lists can't be easily expanded as future books come out, you can be stuck with unimpressive or disliked options for your school slot. Sorcerer already has this problem with their bloodlines, where bad spells are taking up space in your repertoire. It'd be worse with wizards if your school slot is locked in to accept one of these spells.


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Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

I love the fix to weapon proficiencies. Love the change to schools. Long overdue. I have played since early AD&D and schools were always a bit arbitrary and even back then there was a 'universal school' for spells that didn't fit in anywhere. AD&D schools were a lot more thematic than mechanical, Cause Fear was a necromancy spell and it works great with 'spooky dead stuff' as a flavour rather than I am an enchanter which was a lot more about charming and deceiving people. Illusion and Enchantment had a lot of confusing overlap, why are phantasms (a mind affecting effect) not enchantments? 3e tried to fix it with the concept of subschools and it all became a mess. Also lots of spells have swapped schools between editions which

I have seen the evolution of divine spheres to divine domains and it is for the better. This feels a bit similar. No one talks about going back to divine spheres.

Colleges of Magic seems like a step forward over arcane schools. Now I can group spells on thematic or purpose flavours and I like it.

We have no idea how spell slots will work for the wizard remaster but I doubt it will be all your +1 spells have to go to a very small set of spells that feels like a large nerf. What I would rather and would probably be the most elegant and long lasting solution is the ability to spend a focus point to swap a prepared spell to a spell from your 'school/college' on the fly or maybe drain your bonded item to cast a spell from your school/college will be the thing.

The downside to new colleges is its harder to keep up feats based on a specific college unless the number of colleges is small or the feats could belong to a lot of different colleges based on tags or traits.

I could see a lot of the spell trickster type feats folded in to wizard maybe on college lines like Civic college having the ability to modify any wall spell in a certain way.

The wizard update wasn't everything I wanted but it does sound like a step in the right direction. I hope the new colleges don't become the same as domains (2 focus spells + a handful of spells) unless 4 spells per level becomes the standard and there are just a few feats which grant you something for casting a 'college/domain' spell like clerics get.

I don't get the fear mongering and doom-saying about the change when we haven't really seen how it interacts with the class spell slots or what is happening with Wizard focus spells.

Liberty's Edge

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I get why the only DnD school trait they will be keeping is Illusion. The spells with this trait do need an explanation for how the mechanics work. And BTW I hope we will get some clarification there.

The only other school where I regularly checked the rules was Transmutation, but TBT everything was actually in the Morph and Polymorph traits and those are not going anywhere AFAIK.


Temperans wrote:
Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:
Temperans wrote:
Also universal used to be a school, so it and illusion being the only ones that stay is just off.

I swear I'm not trying to follow you, this is just a conversation I happen to be interested in:

It would be very weird if illusion was being kept as a school completely distinct from every other school having specific themes. I don't believe this is going to be the case. Rather, the explicit reason why 'illusion' is still a tag that matters is because the illusion school tag is the only one that had any mechanical text tied to it.

What is more likely to happen is that the illusion tag will remain to denote the mechanics of disbelief, and some kind of School of Imaginary Things will collect the most iconic illusory spells into a curriculum themed around using figments and glamours to alter one's perception of reality.

Meanwhile, while calling Universal a school of magic is technically correct, it's a bit misleading as it had less than a dozen spells, and the Universalist wizards were known as those who do not specialize in any school of magic. The concept of a non-specialist wizard school continuing to exist is a feature, not a bug.

Nope, Illusion was originally not the only one that had mechanical text.

Enchantment had it so all enchantment spells were mind-affecting. Which is why Fear was Necromancy since you can fear undear.
Conjuration had the rules for what the different subschools did.
Abjuration had rules for how multiple abjuration effects act when overlapping.
Divination had rules on how to run the area and how you could maybe get extra info from multiple passes.
Transmutation had the rules on Polymorph.

The ones with the least rules were Evocation and Necromancy.

We were talking about the transition from 2e vanilla to 2e remastered, not the transition from D&D 3.5e legacy content, or even 1e to 2e remastered. Even so, the valuable rules text you cite have either been folded into the traits--which still exist--that became the modern version of those subschools (the mental trait stands in for mind-affecting effects, the polymorph trait stands in for the polymorph subschool), or been elided for irrelevance. I move that your argument only lends support to the transition of belief mechanics from the illusion school to an illusion trait.

The thing is, schools have never really been objective truths in the setting, but more just collections of spells that have similar design in a system founded thousands of years before.

Dark Archive

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Squiggit wrote:
in 3.5 a ball of fire was evocation but an orb of fire was conjuration. Probably my favorite.

The difference did kinda matter in some instances, namely those around anti-magic effects.

A fireball would wink out upon entering an anti-magic zone, for instance. Whereas any non-duration conjuration spell (instantaneous conjurations) would still function.

I can’t recall if orb of fire was an instantaneous conjuration, but something like Snowball was.

So an enemy could be sitting pretty in an anti-magic zone, thinking themselves safe from your 3.0 era powers, and the clever wizard could still crush them with a ball of snow and ice they’d summoned from deep space. Just so long as the caster themselves was outside of the zone.


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Lucas Yew wrote:
Alaryth wrote:
Looking at how people are analyzing the traditional schools, I am beginning to think that the Mage the Ascension sphere division is better.
Was it like Energy, Matter, Life, Mind, Soul, Space, Time, and 2 more? As I never played MtA before, the names should be incorrect... Anyway said classification solely based on WHAT(subject) your magic meddles with is at least way more consistent than D&D-ist spell classifications...

Sorry for the late reply. I quite like the division on Mage Ascension. The spheres are...

- Matter: Any kind of magic that basically involves matter
- Forces: Any kind of magic that involves energy
- Time: Time manipulation magic, including preparing other magic to activate on specific times.
- Space: Space manipulation magic, including far reaching magic.
- Life: Any kind of magic that manipulates life
- Spirit: Any kind of magic that manipulates spirit stuff.
- Mind: Mind manipulation and mind improving.
- Entropy: Decay and luck
- Cardinal (on spanish, on English it goes by other name...Prime maybe?): manipulation of raw magic energies.

The real fun was that if you have various spheres, you can combine the effects.


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Alaryth wrote:
Lucas Yew wrote:
Alaryth wrote:
Looking at how people are analyzing the traditional schools, I am beginning to think that the Mage the Ascension sphere division is better.
Was it like Energy, Matter, Life, Mind, Soul, Space, Time, and 2 more? As I never played MtA before, the names should be incorrect... Anyway said classification solely based on WHAT(subject) your magic meddles with is at least way more consistent than D&D-ist spell classifications...

Sorry for the late reply. I quite like the division on Mage Ascension. The spheres are...

- Matter: Any kind of magic that basically involves matter
- Forces: Any kind of magic that involves energy
- Time: Time manipulation magic, including preparing other magic to activate on specific times.
- Space: Space manipulation magic, including far reaching magic.
- Life: Any kind of magic that manipulates life
- Spirit: Any kind of magic that manipulates spirit stuff.
- Mind: Mind manipulation and mind improving.
- Entropy: Decay and luck
- Cardinal (on spanish, on English it goes by other name...Prime maybe?): manipulation of raw magic energies.

The real fun was that if you have various spheres, you can combine the effects.

Can confirm on Prime in English.


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Cyder wrote:
I love the fix to weapon proficiencies. Love the change to schools. Long overdue. I have played since early AD&D and schools were always a bit arbitrary and even back then there was a 'universal school' for spells that didn't fit in anywhere. AD&D schools were a lot more thematic than mechanical, Cause Fear was a necromancy spell and it works great with 'spooky dead stuff' as a flavour rather than I am an enchanter which was a lot more about charming and deceiving people.

Just to set the record straight, I opened my ad&d books and the spell Cause Fear is Abjuration in 1st and 2nd edition ad&d. It is also not available to the magic-user

The spells available to the magic-user/wizard are scare, which is enchantment, and fear, which is illusion. Scare is 2nd level, fear is forth level


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*blink* You ever get the sense those of us in modern day are arguing about the will of ancient creators who dedicated a fraction of the attention to their decisions?

Thank you for checking!

(I say "ancient" in the cultural sense of those games having been mostly moved on from or sent into the nostalgia cycle, of course.)


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Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber
Kobold Catgirl wrote:

It's Abjuration because it's a protection spell.

It's Transmutation because it's turning my skin into bark.
It's Evocation or Conjuration because it's manifesting bark around me, and wood is an element.
Heck, you could half-ass an argument about it being Necromancy because it's fundamentally manipulating life. Giving someone a disease is Necromancy, why wouldn't giving someone a symbiotic plant growth?

Attempting to objectively categorize these spells under their physical properties was always a fool's errand. I like the idea of a system that acknowledges this impossibility.

In Harnmaster,a spell description describes game mechanics. Mages invent their own spells through in game spell research, but first you need a spell description. If the description doesn’t already exist, the player has to invent it. This involves negotiation with the GM. There’s an example of this in the book where the GM sends the description back to the player because the description doesn’t match the school of the spell (it was supposed to be a spell that manipulates light, but was described as affecting the mind of the target).


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Cellion wrote:

I love magic having "in-world" fundamental mechanics, having a sciency feel to it. However, I've felt for a long time that the existing spell schools were poorly defined and really should have been overhauled into a much more robust set of categories based on what spells fundamentally are affecting. These changes instead go the entirely opposite direction to what I'd prefer - quite frustrating! In-world schools that teach buckets of spells just does nothing for me thematically (all wizards I've played in the past were either self-taught or studied under an individual mentor).

I'm particularly concerned that the new schools will significantly limit your "school" slot. Since the school lists can't be easily expanded as future books come out, you can be stuck with unimpressive or disliked options for your school slot. Sorcerer already has this problem with their bloodlines, where bad spells are taking up space in your repertoire. It'd be worse with wizards if your school slot is locked in to accept one of these spells.

Given that Strength of Thousands is probably the only thing in 2E that has been established with having substantiative lore behind spellcasting academies, it seems the popularity of that AP is going to be the norm for Wizards going forward, which again, I don't much care for, since not all Wizards are mere attendees or graduates from "Ye Olde Magicke College."

I also don't know how these colleges just let these Wizards go out into the world unprepared and unattending within their listed curriculum; don't they have classes that they have to teach them with which? Where's Necromancy 101? Even if there is an explanation, it limits the concept to being "I'm still a wizard in training," unless we want to say that a Wizard character is considered a graduate, in which case it's still a forced roleplay hook, because maybe some people want to roleplay the "amateur Wizard growing up to be a true master" type of character, or some other, more self-sufficient character.

It's also hard to say how their new slots will work from the current implementation. I think they should simply be a straight 4 slot class and not have to prepare spells with certain schools if they don't want to, since they are changing how schools work to the point that it's at-best a vestigial restriction.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I mean the PF2 wizard already added in the concept that your character has developed and written a thesis within the field of arcane magical knowledge by the time they are level 1. The academic study stuff was already written into the class from the start of the edition. This is only doubling down on the direction the class was already being taken in.


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
because maybe some people want to roleplay the "amateur Wizard growing up to be a true master" type of character, or some other, more self-sufficient character

Then do that? Literally the only person saying you can't do that is you.


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Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Given that Strength of Thousands is probably the only thing in 2E that has been established with having substantiative lore behind spellcasting academies, it seems the popularity of that AP is going to be the norm for Wizards going forward, which again, I don't much care for, since not all Wizards are mere attendees or graduates from "Ye Olde Magicke College."

Well, the Magaambya is canonically the oldest, largest, and most prestigious magic college on Golarion so if we start asserting there is its like all over, then that sort of undermines the lore.

But Wizard magic was always supposed to be the sort of magic you learned the way people learn Calculus or Quantum Electrodynamics. There are certainly people who read a book and learn it that way, but they're rare or people who already have a considerable theoretical basis from prior education.

Probably the most common way is "practicing wizards take apprentices because they need people for household tasks."


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

And what Darksol is proposing is beyond learning form reading in a book, since every book that could teach you how to master arcane magic was written either within the context of an academic discipline or in response to one. It is insisting on learning astrophysics by trying to conduct your own self invented hypotheses, and experimentation without consulting the existing literature. Having another wizard with books in their library teach you magic is attending a kind of school of magic. You might not be aware of the discursive history of that school, but what is known is determined by an academic framework.


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Unicore wrote:
I mean the PF2 wizard already added in the concept that your character has developed and written a thesis within the field of arcane magical knowledge by the time they are level 1. The academic study stuff was already written into the class from the start of the edition. This is only doubling down on the direction the class was already being taken in.

This had no mechanical impact on a character though, and could basically be handwaved away. You didn't really have to make a character who wrote a thesis and used it as a means of preparing spells. Making it now have mechanical weight means you can't handwave it to tell the story you want; it's hard-baked into the class that now you must be a character that has come from a college and wrote a thesis which determines the basis of your spellcasting. You can't be self-taught, you can't be taught from a specific master, etc.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

No one is saying the “college” you attend couldn’t be the local eccentric wizard who lives in a tower and has a library.

But those books came from somewhere. The knowledge has been built up and passed down by scholars contributing their own research. That is all these schools require.


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PossibleCabbage wrote:
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Given that Strength of Thousands is probably the only thing in 2E that has been established with having substantiative lore behind spellcasting academies, it seems the popularity of that AP is going to be the norm for Wizards going forward, which again, I don't much care for, since not all Wizards are mere attendees or graduates from "Ye Olde Magicke College."

Well, the Magaambya is canonically the oldest, largest, and most prestigious magic college on Golarion so if we start asserting there is its like all over, then that sort of undermines the lore.

But Wizard magic was always supposed to be the sort of magic you learned the way people learn Calculus or Quantum Electrodynamics. There are certainly people who read a book and learn it that way, but they're rare or people who already have a considerable theoretical basis from prior education.

Probably the most common way is "practicing wizards take apprentices because they need people for household tasks."

Having spellcasting academies are fine. I can accept that certain regions treat magic as so prevalent and prestigious that it can be common enough for spellcasting professors to work and train upcoming attendees. I can't accept that it's the only way for people to learn Arcane magic, though, and as it stands, that's what the current Wizard lore is extrapolating, which is that the only way Arcane magic can be learned is from that.

As for "it's rare, so the idea that people are self-taught isn't really a valid story to tell" kind of goes out the window when we consider that the PCs are expressly considered to be those rare special "snowflake" types, and it invalidates the concept of people being able to teach people when it was never inherently learned by someone. Unless the lore established that Nethys invented Arcane magic and taught the first inhabitants of Golarion how to cast Arcane magic.

I would expect NPCs to function that way, but I'm pretty sure most players don't want to play a PC that is a glorified "Ye Olde Magicke Secretary."


Kobold Catgirl wrote:

*blink* You ever get the sense those of us in modern day are arguing about the will of ancient creators who dedicated a fraction of the attention to their decisions?

Thank you for checking!

(I say "ancient" in the cultural sense of those games having been mostly moved on from or sent into the nostalgia cycle, of course.)

The views of Gygax are indeed archaic, and I would believe those working with him would be not dissimilar. You can argue that any spell could be any school just about


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Closest comments I could find about bonus slots and curiculum. Sounds like they are not really changing but not 100% clear.

Question - Hmm, you may not answer, but is the way wizards casting spells changing at all? As in will there be options more similar to spont casting? Will they keep their “fourth slot” as one that is exclusive to their spell schools?

Michael Sayer - Rather than answer your question directly, I will say that we covered the vast majority of significant changes in Player Core 1 and GM Core during today's panel.

Question - Do the new spell schools function mechanically the same as the old schools Like if evocation gives you a list of spells you can do certain things with (your “forth” spell slot of each level for example,) does Civic Wizard do the same just with a different list of spells, if that makes sense?

James Case - yep! it's called your curriculum. the school of civic wizardry gives you stuff related to construction/infrastructure and the kind of scry/mobility you might use to run a city, like *wall of stone* or *control water*. Think "what would the fire department / civil engineers / etc need, if they had a wizard on staff"


Unicore wrote:

No one is saying the “college” you attend couldn’t be the local eccentric wizard who lives in a tower and has a library.

But those books came from somewhere. The knowledge has been built up and passed down by scholars contributing their own research. That is all these schools require.

"Crazy mad wizard guy in a tower" is not the same as a school, nor is it enough to justify being able to learn spells from a school of magic; I'd have a hard time justifying that compared to "I'm genetically related to arcane beings and draw upon that power," or "I worship the guy who literally invented arcane magic and he gives me power because of it."

Another problem is that this turns into a "I learned everything from this book, because if it's not written down by some arbitrary resource, I can't figure it out for myself," which is just bad design.


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I mean, in a fantasy setting how do you expect people to learn to be Blacksmiths, or Cabinetmakers, or Bakers? They worked as apprentices to people who had mastered the craft and eventually learned enough to go out on their own. I don't see any reason that Wizards couldn't or shouldn't work the same way.

And though "the guy with the tower in the woods with an extensive library" is probably not a school of magic unto himself, he probably learned from, or his master probably learned from, or someone up the line probably learned from a curriculum at a more established institution.

So it's not like "you learned magic at war magic college" so much as "you learned from a Wizard who learned magic at war magic college".

I mean, even if you found a book in an abandoned home and taught yourself magic that way, it's entirely possible that the book was published by "War Magic College Press". Complete autodidact Wizards have to be pretty rare since, like, it was a big deal when Jatembe did it.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Unicore wrote:

No one is saying the “college” you attend couldn’t be the local eccentric wizard who lives in a tower and has a library.

But those books came from somewhere. The knowledge has been built up and passed down by scholars contributing their own research. That is all these schools require.

"Crazy mad wizard guy in a tower" is not the same as a school, nor is it enough to justify being able to learn spells from a school of magic; I'd have a hard time justifying that compared to "I'm genetically related to arcane beings and draw upon that power," or "I worship the guy who literally invented arcane magic and he gives me power because of it."

Another problem is that this turns into a "I learned everything from this book, because if it's not written down by some arbitrary resource, I can't figure it out for myself," which is just bad design.

None of your conjecture here is based on anything but bad will towards a change you don’t like. The word “school” is applied to very many things that are not formal institutions. There 100% can still be wizards in places where formal colleges of magic don’t exist, but there will be a tradition of how that magic gets passed along. That is all your school has to be as a wizard.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Although it does beg the question -
If you learned magic at a college at lvl 1, why are you still restricted to those spells at lvl 20.

Are you going back to school between levels?


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CaffeinatedNinja wrote:

Although it does beg the question -

If you learned magic at a college at lvl 1, why are you still restricted to those spells at lvl 20.

Are you going back to school between levels?

I have always assumed that Wizards engage in Academic correspondence in parallel to their adventuring careers. Like you learn something while adventuring, and then you submit it to the Wizard journals.


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CaffeinatedNinja wrote:

Although it does beg the question -

If you learned magic at a college at lvl 1, why are you still restricted to those spells at lvl 20.

Are you going back to school between levels?

Who has said you are restricted to only learning the spells of your school? But you do learn spells from a spell book and books have to be written by someone.


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CaffeinatedNinja wrote:

Although it does beg the question -

If you learned magic at a college at lvl 1, why are you still restricted to those spells at lvl 20.

Are you going back to school between levels?

Fairly certain at least one of these games in the past required you return to a trainer to level up. Good ol' Maiden in Black style. If not, I think it is reasonable that there is some contact or continued training here. I always imagined that some of these schools had adventuring as part of the curriculum and you divination'd some of the studies and contact with mentors

Also misread slightly, but unicore's response would be my response. Nothing stops you from learning any and all wizards spells presumably


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Unicore wrote:
CaffeinatedNinja wrote:

Although it does beg the question -

If you learned magic at a college at lvl 1, why are you still restricted to those spells at lvl 20.

Are you going back to school between levels?

Who has said you are restricted to only learning the spells of your school? But you do learn spells from a spell book and books have to be written by someone.

I should have been clearer. Restricted to these spells for bonus slot etc.


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Like assuming the Wizard still has the "Thesis" class feature, that sort of implies that you put in the Academic work (whether at a school, with a master, or with a book) to come across some finding that was sufficiently insightful that you were welcomed into the club of "established arcane academics" as a peer.

They might send you a book with all the "spells of your college" when you join. Some of them probably don't make sense to you until you're further along in your career.

The thing about "magic being arranged by colleges" is probably about "magic is too complex and multifaceted to really be comprehended entirely by one person" (or rather, doing so is how you become Nethys), so each college represents a useful lens to view a thing that is too much for mortals to comprehend.


PossibleCabbage wrote:

I mean, in a fantasy setting how do you expect people to learn to be Blacksmiths, or Cabinetmakers, or Bakers? They worked as apprentices to people who had mastered the craft and eventually learned enough to go out on their own. I don't see any reason that Wizards couldn't or shouldn't work the same way.

And though "the guy with the tower in the woods with an extensive library" is probably not a school of magic unto himself, he probably learned from, or his master probably learned from, or someone up the line probably learned from a curriculum at a more established institution.

So it's not like "you learned magic at war magic college" so much as "you learned from a Wizard who learned magic at war magic college".

I mean, even if you found a book in an abandoned home and taught yourself magic that way, it's entirely possible that the book was published by "War Magic College Press". Complete autodidact Wizards have to be pretty rare since, like, it was a big deal when Jatembe did it.

The big difference is that is 1 on 1 direct training with actual practice, whereas the other one is more of a classroom paradigm, where the professors parrots out information and you write it down to remember and then maybe try out on your own later as homework; they are significantly different, to the point that they are barely even in the same concept.

But that's ultimately the problem: The only source for arcane magic, whether directly or indirectly, is from a collegiate institution publication. There is no individual researching, there's no ancient text from some abandoned ruins; it's all college-affiliated, which hurts flavor options significantly in my opinion, especially since not all Wizards are college attendees or graduates.

I'd need to refresh myself on who Jatembe is; the name sounds familiar, but I could easily be misremembering it, but technically that would probably have to be retconned, since it's apparently impossible to be self-taught or self-learned as a Wizard with the current paradigm.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
PossibleCabbage wrote:

I mean, in a fantasy setting how do you expect people to learn to be Blacksmiths, or Cabinetmakers, or Bakers? They worked as apprentices to people who had mastered the craft and eventually learned enough to go out on their own. I don't see any reason that Wizards couldn't or shouldn't work the same way.

And though "the guy with the tower in the woods with an extensive library" is probably not a school of magic unto himself, he probably learned from, or his master probably learned from, or someone up the line probably learned from a curriculum at a more established institution.

So it's not like "you learned magic at war magic college" so much as "you learned from a Wizard who learned magic at war magic college".

I mean, even if you found a book in an abandoned home and taught yourself magic that way, it's entirely possible that the book was published by "War Magic College Press". Complete autodidact Wizards have to be pretty rare since, like, it was a big deal when Jatembe did it.

The big difference is that is 1 on 1 direct training with actual practice, whereas the other one is more of a classroom paradigm, where the professors parrots out information and you write it down to remember and then maybe try out on your own later as homework; they are significantly different, to the point that they are barely even in the same concept.

But that's ultimately the problem: The only source for arcane magic, whether directly or indirectly, is from a collegiate institution publication. There is no individual researching, there's no ancient text from some abandoned ruins; it's all college-affiliated, which hurts flavor options significantly in my opinion, especially since not all Wizards are college attendees or graduates.

I'd need to refresh myself on who Jatembe is; the name sounds familiar, but I could easily be misremembering it, but technically that would probably have to be retconned, since it's apparently impossible to be self-taught or self-learned as...

As a college professor, I feel very sorry for anyone who has had the experience of classroom learning that is a teacher parroting out information to be memorized for test. But I promise that is not how college has to be, much less how learning from a school of thinking/knowledge needs to work either.


Unicore wrote:
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Unicore wrote:

No one is saying the “college” you attend couldn’t be the local eccentric wizard who lives in a tower and has a library.

But those books came from somewhere. The knowledge has been built up and passed down by scholars contributing their own research. That is all these schools require.

"Crazy mad wizard guy in a tower" is not the same as a school, nor is it enough to justify being able to learn spells from a school of magic; I'd have a hard time justifying that compared to "I'm genetically related to arcane beings and draw upon that power," or "I worship the guy who literally invented arcane magic and he gives me power because of it."

Another problem is that this turns into a "I learned everything from this book, because if it's not written down by some arbitrary resource, I can't figure it out for myself," which is just bad design.

None of your conjecture here is based on anything but bad will towards a change you don’t like. The word “school” is applied to very many things that are not formal institutions. There 100% can still be wizards in places where formal colleges of magic don’t exist, but there will be a tradition of how that magic gets passed along. That is all your school has to be as a wizard.

That's a disingenuous statement. My conjecture is based on the fact that I find the scope of the Wizard class' altered existence too focused in its application and feels more like a PF1 Prestige class or a PF2 Regional Archetype than a core class.

And honestly, that's basically my point: A formal institution shouldn't be required to learn how to cast spells, but the flavor of the class implies that not only is it required, but it's also the only way.

Liberty's Edge

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Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Unicore wrote:
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Unicore wrote:

No one is saying the “college” you attend couldn’t be the local eccentric wizard who lives in a tower and has a library.

But those books came from somewhere. The knowledge has been built up and passed down by scholars contributing their own research. That is all these schools require.

"Crazy mad wizard guy in a tower" is not the same as a school, nor is it enough to justify being able to learn spells from a school of magic; I'd have a hard time justifying that compared to "I'm genetically related to arcane beings and draw upon that power," or "I worship the guy who literally invented arcane magic and he gives me power because of it."

Another problem is that this turns into a "I learned everything from this book, because if it's not written down by some arbitrary resource, I can't figure it out for myself," which is just bad design.

None of your conjecture here is based on anything but bad will towards a change you don’t like. The word “school” is applied to very many things that are not formal institutions. There 100% can still be wizards in places where formal colleges of magic don’t exist, but there will be a tradition of how that magic gets passed along. That is all your school has to be as a wizard.

That's a disingenuous statement. My conjecture is based on the fact that I find the scope of the Wizard class' altered existence too focused in its application and feels more like a PF1 Prestige class or a PF2 Regional Archetype than a core class.

And honestly, that's basically my point: A formal institution shouldn't be required to learn how to cast spells, but the flavor of the class implies that not only is it required, but it's also the only way.

It is not. You seem to be the only one here seeing it that way.

Liberty's Edge

I read the school of magic in the Remastered Wizard as the kind of spells you are interested in learning and studying. Because it is what you specialize in, when you get enough experience and time to advance your understanding of what you can do with magic (aka spells), the spells that come easier to you are of the same kind.


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
The only source for arcane magic, whether directly or indirectly, is from a collegiate institution publication.

And yet you are the only one making this claim and attempting to impose it on others, even as you simultaneously claim that you don't want to be forced to play this way.

It makes the whole train of thought feel awfully performative.


Like one of the basic premises of a roleplaying game is that if a combination of mechanics/rules from your character sheet suggest something, it's your responsibility as a player to make it make sense. There are an essentially unlimited number of ways to make it make sense, but the basic structure of the game suggests that players will make a good faith effort to explain why their character is the way they are and can do the things they do.

Throwing up your hands and saying "I am constrained by the names of these things" is just an alien idea to me.


PossibleCabbage wrote:

Like one of the basic premises of a roleplaying game is that if a combination of mechanics/rules from your character sheet suggest something, it's your responsibility as a player to make it make sense. There are an essentially unlimited number of ways to make it make sense, but the basic structure of the game suggests that players will make a good faith effort to explain why their character is the way they are and can do the things they do.

Throwing up your hands and saying "I am constrained by the names of these things" is just an alien idea to me.

People literally asked to remove alignment because "this 2 letter code is too much a straight jacket".

They reworked ancestries to be generic at level 1 "because species shouldn't determine what I am good at".

The 8 schools/types of magic are being removed because "it is too constrained".

So why are they allowed to complain but not the people who had no issues with the previous rules? Or the people who don't like the new version of the rules?


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to my knowledge wizards still will use the arcane spells

and the subclasses will now just be more...flavorful than mechanical.

instead of, evocation make boom, you battle magic and the options are just more varied. i dunno. thats what i suspect.


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In Pathfinder 1st edition, if you wanted to randomly roll the starting age of your character, you had three categories, Intuitive, Self-Taught, and Trained. Wizard belonged to the third of the categories, meaning they would roll 2d6, resulting in an age (for humans) between 17 and 27 years old, with an average around 22.

Leaving aside the headers of these categories as purely descriptive, this age range has always made me think that the study of wizardry (or alchemy, or druidry) is approximately difficult as completing a university degree. Those on the short end of the age scale probably started young and had intensive training, and possibly had their training end abruptly, while those on the long end taking a few shots at getting their degree or working with challenges. In particular this latter category can include those working on their own from whatever tomes they can get their hands on.

I happen to agree, it should absolutely be possible for, as Painbringer says, a "snowflake" PC wizard to teach themselves from the ground up--though it seems clear to me that none of arcane magic is something intuitive you can pick up on your own. When I imagine attempting to learn for example Japanese without either teacher, a language textbook, or another Japanese speaker, in a world where the Internet doesn't exist for trivial look-up... that would be difficult.

Accepting for a moment the premise that, Old Mage Jatembe needed an epic quest to bring the knowledge of wizardry back to the world which included listening to the whispers of Ydersius' severed head, it seems to me that wizardry is not the kind of magic that happens on its own. with that in mind, I ask myself, what school of magic would a self-taught prodigy wizard who gleaned everything they know from an eclectic assortment of tomes on magic, without the help of a mentor belong to?

It seems clear, the School of A-Little-Bit-of-Everything, or the School of Unified Magical Theory. If you learned magic for the sake of learning magic, and if your training comes in the form of learning any kind of magic you can, that's what the description of UMT seems to suggest.

Of course, if on the other hand you've been learning magic on your own by peeking at books from the library of the nearby war college in your spare time, perhaps the majority of the tomes in there talk about combat applications for magic and you learn a lot more about throwing fireballs than you learn about shapeshifting. School of Battle Magic.

Yet one more example, maybe what inspired you to learn magic was you saw a wizardly architect rebuild a wall with a wave of her hands, and since you never had money to go to real wizard school, you've devoured tome after tome with a focus on constructions, perhaps you got lucky and eventually found just the right tome that would put you on the path of whatever that school of Civic Stuff was called that nobody has dropped the name of yet.

-

In other words, I get the feeling that, unless the designers choose to name each of the schools directly after a specific in-world academy, it shouldn't be a terribly difficult stretch of the imagination to come up with an explanation. On the other hand, if any implication of study is repulsive to a player, perhaps they might be best steered toward a class whose flavour better matches their vision, a class which actually does learn its magic through intuitive practice, such as namely the Sorcerer.


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It is pretty clear that wizardly magic is still largely an academic pursuit, but there are lots of ways towards being academic.

Arcane magic in general though? Still pretty clearly different ways to get at it other than being an academic wizard.


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It's just possible that your "I never read a book or talked to anybody else about this" arcane spellcaster is a Witch or a Sorcerer and not a Wizard.


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PossibleCabbage wrote:
It's just possible that your "I never read a book or talked to anybody else about this" arcane spellcaster is a Witch or a Sorcerer and not a Wizard.

Those have their own specific flavors as well. Sorcerers are inherently magical due to their lineage, and Witches have made pacts with Patrons that give them power in exchange. Wizards aren't really either of these things.

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