Magic is (Sorta) Science and Schools are (Sorta) Fields?

[QuintonBeck]

So something just occurred to me as I was discussing Agents of Shield with a friend of mine, we were discussing how one of the scientist characters on the show is a microbiologist yet is perfectly capable of running machines and analyzing computer networks and all manner of things that fall squarely outside what one would consider a "microbiologist's" area of expertise and it got me thinking, magic is kind of the science of D&D and there's even schools of it focusing on different things yet most arcane casters (wizards and sorcerers specifically) have access to all these schools.

Now, I'm aware of the specialist and domain wizard variations but even they don't focus solely and completely on one of the schools and a non-specified wizard seems to be usually superior and it got me thinking, if magic and science are somewhat parallels between D&D worlds and our world why aren't there more specific focused casters to match specific field scientists? I don't really know anyone who goes by the title of "scientist" outside infomercials, it's usually microbiologist, astrophysicist, chemist, etc. so why are there generic wizards?

Now, we all know wizard is an extremely powerful class because of it's versatility but I think this may be a solution. Perhaps it's not possible, perhaps there aren't enough spells of each school at each spell level to make it feasible, but it seems to me that establishing a wizard who can only get spells from X school and no others helps balance the class somewhat. Has this already been thought of before? Is this crazy? Let me know!

[faircoin]

Science is strictly model building. You're thinking more of engineers. Wizards are analogues to engineers. Scientists determine the model (in the D&D spellcasting world, the model is probably a relationship between the physical sciences and formal symbolic systems) and engineers put the model to use.

Source: I've done research in both science and engineering.

[Deca4531]

While it would be an interesting concept it would require a game to be designed around it in the first place to work. like you said the amount of spells per school per level are not equiped to handle a class like that.

i dont play many spell casters, but i have read up on a few. Force Missile Mage is one type of focused school caster, but i have never seen it as being very powerful.

[JoshuaZ]

The analogy doesn't work since Schools are built into the laws of magic (e.g. a spell might only impact illusions). Fields in science are in contrast specific areas of study, constructed out of convenience. This connects with why magic isn't sort of science either. Science is a process: in our universe that's given rise to what we know about physics. If magic of some form existed for real, the scientific method would still find it and investigate it. You might then get specific subspecialties focusing on researching, different aspects of magic, but they'd exist alongside biologists and chemists and others. And they wouldn't need to be wizards: you could have a scientist who spent their entire life becoming an expert on the ins and outs of evocation who was an expert with no personal spellcasting.

[Barstro]

The analogy doesn't work since Schools are built into the laws of magic (e.g. a spell might only impact illusions). Fields in science are in contrast specific areas of study, constructed out of convenience. This connects with why magic isn't sort of science either. Science is a process: in our universe that's given rise to what we know about physics. If magic of some form existed for real, the scientific method would still find it and investigate it. You might then get specific subspecialties focusing on researching, different aspects of magic, but they'd exist alongside biologists and chemists and others. And they wouldn't need to be wizards: you could have a scientist who spent their entire life becoming an expert on the ins and outs of evocation who was an expert with no personal spellcasting.

There was a short series I read many years ago that had an interesting concept related to this (I don't remember enough of it for a web search to yield results). People in our current world found a way to transport to different dimensions. One of the more popular ones was realm where magic existed. The interesting part of it was that physics didn't work. I know that gunpowder and electronics failed. I think that anything more complex than a bow and arrow would not behave the way that math would tend to show.

However, the more people and objects from our mundane world were transported there, and the more grouped together, the more likely physics would work and magic would fail. In this world, engineers could exist only in a mundane city while magic researchers could correctly observe things only away from the mundane zone.

[Deadline]

Have you toured our Homebrew forums? You might like Gramarie (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=252794).

[Urpriest]

You've mentioned specialists, but have you run into the Beguiler, Warmage, and Dread Necromancer? They're casters that focus exclusively on a particular, thematic set of spells (generally a couple schools, since one school by itself is usually not enough for a viable character). It's generally acknowledged that they are the proper model to build balanced casters.

[NichG]

I just want to say that the specialization in the sciences is not an artifact of the actual education a scientist undergoes but more a consequence that if you're pushing forward some boundary of understanding, you aren't likely to be pushing on all boundaries at once.

If you're a modern-day physicist or chemist or (many kinds of) biologist, you're going to have to learn how to program a computer in order to function, for example. But you don't call yourself a computer scientist, even if many of the things that computer scientists have to learn you also benefit from learning. Experimentalists in physics will know how to use a machine shop, design circuits, etc, because thats pretty much necessary for the job. They may also have to learn some chemistry depending what kind of experimentalist they are. But they won't bill themselves as an engineer or a chemist because thats not the core of what they do.

In my case, I'm a physicist but pretty much everything I've done of late has been programming and optimizing simulations to run on GPUs via CUDA - I need to know about octrees, efficient ways to do sorts, parallel programming theory, etc to do my job. I've been involved in projects where I've worked with glaciologists, biologists, and chemists to provide simulation support of this or that, so those were opportunities to pick up a little about those other fields (though nothing like what someone who specifically trained in them would know). One of my colleagues from grad school is now in finance, and another is working in doing bioinformatics for oncology.

Its not nearly transparent as the various schools of magic in D&D of course. I think it'd make sense for example to pick a major school and two minor schools (where you get access to spells one spell level late), and the rest you get access to spells three spell levels late.