Spell List (Rant)

[VoxRationis]

So I decided, having some free time, to go through the whole 3.5 spell list as part of an exhaustive overhaul of the d20 system. Normally, I mostly look at the sorcerer/wizard spell list, and then mostly at the first few levels, so I haven't ever really taken a look at the whole picture in any sort of systematic way before. Having gone over them, I am left wondering what in the world was in the heads of these people when they came up with that list! Numerous spells are the same as other ones but higher-level or with increased stats of some kind (which is strange, since they allow plenty of other spells to just scale within themselves). Other spells share the same thematic territory but do so in unnecessarily different ways (as OotS pointed out, "How many ways to make a cloud does one magic system really need?"). The designers also felt it was extremely important for some reason to keep separate the enchantments for affecting animals and humanoids, even though the effects seem similar in principle and the separation implies a very odd point somewhere where a spell stops working as you go from one related organism to the next (i.e., affecting gorillas, chimpanzees, and primitive hominins but stopping at some arbitrary point on the road to humans, or affecting awakened frogs but not grippli).
Some of this is legacy stuff, I understand, but the 3e designers came up with a whole magical item pricing scheme, carefully attempted to calibrate access to magical effects players would have at a certain level, completely revamped saving throws, attack stats, stat modifiers, and XP progression (compared to 2e), but they never went through the spell list to make sure everything made sense. They clearly paid attention to it—enough mechanics were different between 2e and 3e that most of the spells would have had to be altered, and certain spells (Gaze Reflection, Glassee, et al.) were removed for no particular reason—but didn't actually make it halfway logical or consistent. They did things like give a summon monster spell to every level so conjurors can have minions from level 1, but necromancers have to wait until they're mid-level to make the 1-HD, could-very-well-lose-to-a-peasant skeletons that level 1 characters have a fine old time bashing. It's irritating, I tell you.

[Fizban]

Yup, welcome to 3.5, one of the many places where logic goes to die. The magic system is divided up the way it is because that's what the classes are supposed to do, and not because the system has any good reason for it. Wizards can't charm animals because druids are supposed to charm animals. Animate Dead is a 3rd level spell and there's no lower level versions most likely because players weren't even supposed to use it because its EEEEEvil so why would they need to do it at 1st level when your Necromancer boss is 5th?

You want a fun time, take a look at WBL. Go ahead, try to find a formula that matches that progression. You won't, because it's not based on any sort of intelligent formula: it's based on the average results of rolling on the random treasure tables, because rolling on random tables was considered a good idea for a very long time. One of the most important and well-grounded rules of 3.5 uses numbers based on one of the worst. It's almost blind luck that the various pricing formulas they assigned to the items ended up producing a useable curve after being randomly thrown at random tables.

[Mordaedil]

Regarding necromancers, they got an entire book dedicated to making them a little better, and there's alternative wizard variants that make them certainly far more thematic.

I do agree that it is a bit weird that they removed Gaze Reflection, but I think one of the expanded supplements adds it back in anyway.

As for clouds, well they really wanted the conjuration (creation) stuff to have a ton to do, so making fogs that do various debuffs, as well as making walls move waqs made into a large part of that class.

Regarding the difference between charm person/animal, that was more a flavor variant, to give the druids *something* they could do that wizards and clerics could not. It's quite honestly not that bad, charm monster essentially bridges the two.