Thought exercise: More restrictive effects from banning schools.

[ericgrau]

What would happen if when you banned a school not only could you not take spells from that school, but you also couldn't take spells with that school's primary effects?


Abjuration: No more spells that provide a defensive bonus or barrier. So no more wall spells or solid fog for you. Not to mention barrier based BFC in general.
Conjuration: No more spells that makes or brings objects/creatures to you, or works via the planes. No more resist planar effects for you, no shadow walk for you.
Divination: No more spells that reveal information. Honestly couldn't think of much outside the school. There's message and animal messenger I suppose.
Enchantment: No more mind affecting spells for you. Likewise, not much. Poor enchantment is still easy to ban. There's phantasmal killer. Perhaps adding some social transmutations and illusions would help. Not sure how.
Evocation: No more spells that create energy. Specifically no spells that create force, fire, cold, electricity, sonic, light or darkness. Acid is ok. So no more orb spells for you, except acid.
Illusion: No more spells that create false images, sounds or otherwise fool any of the senses or any kind of sensor. So no more mind blank for you.
Necromancy: No more spells that create negative energy or have a particular effect on undead. So no more summon undead, wall of fire or sunburst for you.
Transmutation: No more spells that directly change objects or creatures for you such as with a status effect(harming alone doesn't count). No more of those necromantic debuffs for you. No more glitterdust or other direct AOE debuffs for you (grease ok, stinking cloud not ok). No more invisibility for you.


If you get an ability indirectly, such as through a summon, then the spell works but that particular ability fails to work. The summon can't use SLAs with banned effects, etc.

Would this make it harder to work around the drawbacks of a banned school? Would this be more fun and interesting to play?

What about the reverse? Super specialists that can only use their 1-3 school(s) plus spells with these effects from other schools?

[ZamielVanWeber]

I find that specialists are fun to play because that get even more spells from the school you choose, which you hopefully like. However, if banning schools suddenly began to eat the spells in the school that you chose? It would make specialization painful since now there are precious few combinations that will not result in you weakening yourself.

[Anlashok]

I don't see what positive effects this had. An evocation specialist who bans abjuration can't cast a bunch of evocations signature spells because they vaguely resemble something abjuration does? Why?

From a versimilitudinal standpoint some of them are just strange. Banning necromancy means I can't summon walls of flame? Banning abjuration means I can't make a bunch of rocks rise up from the ground? Why?

on the flipside, usual suspect bans like evocation and necromancy don't have you losing much at all.

Generalists are already awesome anyways, so I don't know why they need the extra buff either.

[Troacctid]

I don't see why banning a school needs to have more of an impact than being unable to cast spells from that school. I mean, that pretty much does it, doesn't it? If the designers wanted you not to be able to conjure walls when you banned abjuration, they would have made all wall spells abjuration.

[LokeyITP]

Your faith in the amount of effort put into design is charming :)

There's a couple options where the cost of getting additional power is giving up a school of magic, i.e. Incantrix. The only cost to several spells as SLAs, higher CL and cooperative metamagic is your familiar missing a few hit dice and that your spell titles are a bit different is a big design failure that welcomes a fix.

I'm also not sure it's the right approach (too open to interpretation), but since spells are such a big mess, no fix will be easy.

[DrMartin]

You could what they did with psionics: single out the most powerful/iconic powers of a school, and allow only a specialist to cast those. "non-specialist" spells keep their school, and when you specialize you ban other school as normal. (a specialist conjurer who bans enchantment and necromancy can cast all Conjuration-specialist spells and all the generalist ones, minus the gneralist spell from those schools he banned)

so the only way your wizard can cast Polymorph is by being a transmutation specialist. Not specializing in Abjuration? no Mind blank. Only Illusionist get the Shadow-line of spells, and so on...Generalist don't get access to any of the school specific spells.

drawback? only the cubic crapton of spell out there to go through and sort into the generalist or the specialist bin :D

[Seto]

I wouldn't play with that. Too complicated for my taste, it would probably cause more problems than it would solve.
I gotta ask : why is Acid, specifically, ok ?

[NichG]

At this point I'd rather just do a massive re-org of all the spells in the game doing away with schools and casting lists, and just using a tag system, then build the caster lists out of providing or denying specific tags. That'd make it much easier to tell at a glance what a particular class with a massive potential spell list will and won't be able to do, unlike the current situation where there's always some spell that can creep around any particular thematic constraints. In turn, it'd make it a lot easier to create in-game explanations about how magic works and why certain approaches are limited to certain things.

For some examples, any spell that can restore hitpoints has the [Healing], any spell that creates a sentient agent has the [Servitor] tag, etc. So a spell that creates a phantasmal monster to fight for you might have [Illusion], [Servitor] whereas a spell that 'summons' a monster by applying a mythic template to unformed magical energy might have the [Conjuration], [Servitor] tag.

Now its very easy to say things like 'in this setting, only deities can grant the ability to magically heal wounds' (all non-divine casters get Banned: [Healing]) or 'This particular PrC studies the inner workings of the mind with the goal of creating true artificial souls, and as its Lv3 ability it grants a +2 Int to the creations of spells with the [Servitor] tag' or things like that.

[ericgrau]

I find that specialists are fun to play because that get even more spells from the school you choose, which you hopefully like. However, if banning schools suddenly began to eat the spells in the school that you chose? It would make specialization painful since now there are precious few combinations that will not result in you weakening yourself.
(& re:other posts)

That's a good point. Perhaps specialty schools could be safe from this effect. Of course that would mean you could overcome some of the drawbacks of your banned school, but thematically it seems ok and mainly I'm going for theme.


I wouldn't play with that. Too complicated for my taste, it would probably cause more problems than it would solve.
I gotta ask : why is Acid, specifically, ok ?
Acid is traditionally a material not a kind of energy, even though it does a certain type of damage. Which is why it's usually put under conjuration rather than evocation. Banning conjuration would likewise keep you from creating acid in other ways as it is creating a material.

If this system was used it would probably require a lot of DM clarification saying this is ok but this isn't. Or a pre-made spell list. "Alarm: abjuration & divination", "Endure Elements: abjuration & transmutation", etc. This is somewhat similar to NichG's tag system, except that only the school tags are relevant.


So if keeping you away from certain schools is too restrictive, what about the reverse idea with super specialists? You can ONLY cast spells in your specialty school(s), but that also includes spells from other schools that share its effects. So using the above example, a Transmuter could also cast Endure Elements. The idea being that you get to be thematic without being overly limited in your spell options. Adding in certain effects for narrower specialty tags like [servitor] might be another idea, such as making those spells slightly stronger will you still have access to the entire conjuration school and related spells outside the conjuration school. Additional bonuses could also be given for being a super specialist, such as more spells per day, so this doesn't have to be a caster nerf. I'm also toying with the idea of a system where schools that have more spells or more decent spells cost more. So you might be a super specialist in one major school or 3 minor schools, or 1 medium + 1 minor.

[ace rooster]

At this point I'd rather just do a massive re-org of all the spells in the game doing away with schools and casting lists, and just using a tag system, then build the caster lists out of providing or denying specific tags. That'd make it much easier to tell at a glance what a particular class with a massive potential spell list will and won't be able to do, unlike the current situation where there's always some spell that can creep around any particular thematic constraints. In turn, it'd make it a lot easier to create in-game explanations about how magic works and why certain approaches are limited to certain things.

For some examples, any spell that can restore hitpoints has the [Healing], any spell that creates a sentient agent has the [Servitor] tag, etc. So a spell that creates a phantasmal monster to fight for you might have [Illusion], [Servitor] whereas a spell that 'summons' a monster by applying a mythic template to unformed magical energy might have the [Conjuration], [Servitor] tag.

Now its very easy to say things like 'in this setting, only deities can grant the ability to magically heal wounds' (all non-divine casters get Banned: [Healing]) or 'This particular PrC studies the inner workings of the mind with the goal of creating true artificial souls, and as its Lv3 ability it grants a +2 Int to the creations of spells with the [Servitor] tag' or things like that.

Oh, that could be fun. You could do things like giving each spell a number of ranks required in particular tags, and putting the tags into the skill system. Some of the tags could even be existing skills, (illusions requiring disguise ranks, knock requiring disable device, rope trick requiring use rope, knowledge the planes for summons, healing for healing). The extent you surpass every tag sets the spell slot required for that particular caster. Sorcerors would be forced into a theme because they don't have enough skill points to be general (they would probably need a few more), and wizards would need their skill points to function. You could even give any character limited access to spellcasting by cross class skill ranks and a feat that gives a couple of spell slots (full round casting only), but you could still prevent some specialist tags from being cross class. UMD could be subed in for skills you don't have at a penalty when dealing with devices. Banning schools would then be more an issue of not having enough skill points to max out everything, and specialisation could be a feat that boosts the cap on a tag by one (though requiring 3 skill points to fill), getting you spells one level early.

It would prevent casters being quite so ecclectic in their spell lists, to an extent binding them to a theme, but with much finer control than simply choosing PRCs.

At this point you would be slightly in danger of rewriting the entire magic system, but with good players you could probably do it lasily (wizard asks when they want a new spell what it will require, and you fit the spell into the system then using the current level as a guide. No need to go through every spell beforehand). The work required to start a game to test this would actually be fairly minimal.


This sounds like it might be playable. It would be a more complicated (Spell levels would be very caster dependent), but all of that complication occurs at build time and spell preperation, so it should not slow down the game too much. Not too hard to build it into a database and let a computer deal with the complications, outputing a list of spells available for each slot for any caster, and from then it would be no more complicated than normal. It would be fairly hellish trying to build a spell list without that tool, but how many people still use just a stack of books for char building these days.

[ericgrau]

From a versimilitudinal standpoint some of them are just strange. Banning necromancy means I can't summon walls of flame? Banning abjuration means I can't make a bunch of rocks rise up from the ground? Why?
Basically because the flames are purple. Many people don't notice this and assume they are orange. Ok, not only the color, but also because those purple flames are extra effective against undead. But I mean there is a theme going on here, and wall of fire is actually a bit necromantic. Making rocks rise up from the ground is to protect you or to block off a passageway; it's a major defensive barrier. That's why it's heavily related to abjuration.

I can see why an evocation specialist who banned necromancy or a conjuration specialist who banned abjuration might be miffed. Allowing exceptions for your specialty school is a consideration. Doing the reverse and allowing an abjurer to cast all abjurations plus spells like wall of stone is also a consideration. Overall the goal is to be more thematic about specialties.

Subcategories do add a bit more detail but they also add a bit more work. Maybe take it one step at a time and see how it goes.