Wizard Specialist - what to ban to remain "in Balance" with the Group?

[GrayDeath]

So, we all know that you should not Ban Conjuration, Illusion or Transmutation, because they simply rock. No question.

However if you look at making a Wizard less "I can do everything best" but not criplling him fully, what would you ban under the below Circumstances?


For his World one of our DM`s has ruled that every Wizard IS a Specialist, can become a Focussed Specialist (most do so) up until Level 2, and Wizards banning 3 Schools is almost Common Place (all in the class itself, whenever a new Spell level would be gained you can choose to do that, it retroactively removes Slots/SPells) while banning 4 happens at times (all these Specializations stack, as with Specialist and Focussed Specialist). Banning the third and 4th School also gives you +2 to all Save DC`s of your chosen School.

So, assuming you have to ban 4 Schools, and hence really Specialize on one, but without the usual PrC`s (Incantatrix, master Specialist etc) goodies and are aiming for powerful and moderately versatile but not "doing everything at once", what would you keep, and why?

This is both to help my friends Worldbuilding and to give me some hints on what to play if I should ever play a Wizard there.

Thanks for your Input.

[tyckspoon]

Necromancy is about 80% spells that deal with Undead, both creating/reinforcing and destroying/countering; if you're not concerned about having undead minions, I think it's a pretty safe drop, since the fighting Undead aspects of it are ably covered by the more generalist schools. Normal rules prohibit banning Divination, but if the houserules in play allow for it that would be an interesting character choice (maybe move Read Magic and Detect Magic over into Universal while you're at it so basic magic detection and interpreting scrolls is still available to everybody.) I'd think a person willing to drop Divination would be a very present-in-the-moment, "I'll deal with what's in front of me and what happens happens" sort of personality. You probably *need* to keep one of Transmutation or Conjuration just to maintain access to the breadth of effects those schools offer. Evocation and Abjuration.. hmm. Maybe split the schools up into sort-of opposed pairs, pick one of each pair:

Necromancy/Enchantment: Control the dead/mindless or control the living and aware.
Evocation/Abjuration: Blow stuff up or defend against getting blown up (massively oversimplified, but whatever.)
Illusion/Divination: Hide reality under your spells, or use them to pierce any obfuscation.
Transmutation/Conjuration: ..well, ok, these aren't really opposed in any real sense, but having both of them is about as good as not being limited at all to sufficient optimization. Philosophically, I guess the difference between creating what you need and altering what's there to be what you need?

ehhh.. I wanna ramble, but I think my opinion mostly comes down to 'don't specialize to the degree you have to ban 4 schools, because you're either going to stomp over everything with optimized Transmutation/Conjuration effects to cover the lack of breadth or you're going to feel really sad when your chosen specialty school is completely inapplicable to the situation.'

[ericgrau]

Banning schools won't "fix" a wizard. There are still plenty of ways around it to abuse your wizard. On the flipside mostly just play nice and don't abuse the system and things tend to be fine. That said, you can do one better by being a team player that supports the group. This is mostly what a "Batman" wizard does, except with more bragging. But what you can do is be extra careful to focus on helping your allies instead of directly addressing an encounter.

So let's look at what spells you do want. Most of all you want buffs, because that supports your allies the most while taking the least credit (at least while still doing something). So in spite of your inklings you absolutely need transmutation and should not ban it. If you have a party rogue you might want illusion for invisibility, though it's not essential. Hour/level buffs like GMW and mass buffs like haste are great. Your familiar can also hold the charge and deliver touch range buffs in round 1, then you can cast immediately afterwards. Bull's strength is a good one for example.

Second you want BFC. This is also a big key to a strong wizard so be careful here. Stick to walls and other barriers more than debuffs when possible, to divide the enemy and make them easier for your party to pick off. Area debuffs, area movement hampering and other debuffs can be ok but can appear to give you more credit.

Third you want in combat utility. Not out of combat utility because that only shows off how much you can do at all parts of the game. In combat utility is pretty weak, and something you only use in special circumstances. Like utility in general you may want to scroll it instead of preparing it at times. Levitate is a great example of in-combat utility, and good enough where you might want to prepare it. It is NOT fly-lite. Its range and ability to target both creatures and objects lets you grab the macguffin or get the ally/NPC out of danger. So you can spend your turn getting the key plot element or keep someone out of danger, yet not contribute to removing the enemy threat any faster. See also hold portal, obscuring mist (run away button), feather fall, see invisibility and protection from evil (vs dominate, or as a familiar buff). You may want to scroll some of these instead of preparing. Magic missile is kind of nice too as a sort of utility-damage because it can reliably pick off nearly dead targets and hit various hard to hit/resistant/incorporeal/etc. targets.

So one thing's for sure, I'd keep transmutation no matter what. Conjuration you may want to keep for BFC, but if you're afraid of too much power there are some weaker debuffs/disables to use in transmutation, necromancy and enchantment. There are some amazing barriers in evocation but at least they're barriers not area debuffs, so it's more supporty. If you do keep evocation then avoid fireball, other splatbook area damage and resilient sphere as they're too direct compared to support casting and often too effective. So banning conjuration is possible if you're afraid of it. Abjuration you don't need too much from it except rarely to save allies, and other casters can do that too. But you might keep it for dispel, buffs and so on. Illusion you can usually ban unless there's a rogue. If you aren't using enchantment and necromancy for debuffs and buffs then they can be banned.

Spell compendium has many additional support spells like greater slide, mass snake's swiftness, and benign transposition. Also nerveskitter an ally instead of yourself. Mass snake's swiftness may seem weaker than haste but consider that it lets you do a different opening buff or skip an opening buff while having a greater immediate benefit than haste. Especially round 2-3 when it's too late for haste to be of much use. Or even as a faster alpha strike than haste when you hold until after allies move in round 1.

Also consider crafting for allies. And spell compendium has other good mass spells.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I somewhat disagree with ericgrau's suggestions, or at least I'd take a different approach in this situation. His advice is excellent if you want to try to work around the limitations to be a very powerful and useful member of the party while appearing to be less powerful by downplaying your contributions, à la the traditional God wizard. If you want to actually end up at a more moderate power level and not just appear weaker relative to the rest of the party, the God wizard isn't necessarily the best option.

The traditional AD&D wizard basically boils down to Abjuration/Divination/Evocation/Transmutation: Evocation for combat offense, Abjuration for combat defense, Divination for scouting and planning, and Transmutation for most of the signature utility spells. If you stick to that distribution of spells (mostly; obviously mixing things up with offensive dispel Xs from Abjuration and defensive walls of X from Evocation is fine), then not only can you hit the versatile-but-not-omnicompetent benchmark pretty well, but you don't tend to seem as powerful because you're playing to type.

While ericgrau is right that direct damage spells are directly comparable to martial contributions and fairly flashy on their own, most groups aren't going to be worried about a wizard who casts detect secret doors to find the enemies, pops a shield before battle, hastes the party fighter, and fireballs the enemy back line, because that's how a wizard is "supposed" to be played. So even if you overshoot power levels unintentionally, it's not likely to cause the kind of intra-party issues and resentment that e.g. summoning or animating tons of minions or buffing up and hitting people to render the fighter irrelevant would.

Regarding other compositions, Abjuration, Conjuration, Illusion, and Transmutation are the do-anything schools--Conjuration and Transmutation are grab-bag schools for obvious reasons; Abjuration because it does self-buffs, team buffs, utility, and anti-caster offense well, so while it's not as broad as the first two it covers a lot of bases; Illusion because it combines the spell-duplicating power of the shadow conjuration/evocation line, the social and stealth capabilities of glamers, and the "do whatever you can convince your DM of" potential of figments. As long as you have at least one of those, your other three can be pulled from Divination/Enchantment/Evocation/Necromancy and you'll still be okay (albeit on the weaker end of the spectrum), and if you have two of them you're pretty solid; Abjuration plus Illusion is probably better in this case than either Conjuration or Transmutation, because you're less likely to be tempted to go with the standard win spells.

Assuming you mean that banning the 3rd and 4th school each give a +2 to DCs, for a total of +4, specializing in Enchantment or Necromancy as your primary school might be fairly defensible. Normally, they're not as appealing because they have lots of all-or-nothing offensive/control spells and are fairly easy to defend against, but if you can take Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus and have +6 DCs over a standard full caster, suddenly it becomes much easier to land those spells and easier to pick up minions to deal with those who can defend against your spells. If it's just +2, but each specialization continues to give you more bonus spells, Divination is an excellent choice, since you can then afford to throw another dozen Divinations around every day which both helps you determine how best to use your other spells and is nearly always useful for utility.


Maybe split the schools up into sort-of opposed pairs, pick one of each pair:

Necromancy/Enchantment: Control the dead/mindless or control the living and aware.
Evocation/Abjuration: Blow stuff up or defend against getting blown up (massively oversimplified, but whatever.)
Illusion/Divination: Hide reality under your spells, or use them to pierce any obfuscation.
Transmutation/Conjuration: ..well, ok, these aren't really opposed in any real sense, but having both of them is about as good as not being limited at all to sufficient optimization. Philosophically, I guess the difference between creating what you need and altering what's there to be what you need?

This is similar to 2e, where wizards couldn't pick prohibited schools freely but had to prohibit the school directly opposed to their specialty school in the below diagram as well as possibly one or both adjacent schools:


https://chaosweb.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/chart.gif

(Greater Divination = 3e Divination because "Lesser Divination" = 3e Universal, and Alteration = 3e Transmutation)

The main reasons for this setup were twofold: First, the 1e Illusionist subclass had no access to Abjuration, Evocation, or Necromancy spells so they obviously went on the opposite side of the diagram from Illusion to preserve those characters in the new edition, and second, adjacent schools were intended to be somehow related (Alteration and Illusion can disguise things, Illusion and Enchantment mess with your mind, Enchantment and Conjuration were good for getting minions, etc.), so the diagram neatly fell into place from there.

There were also thematic associations for opposition schools, thusly:
Illusion vs. Necromancy - imagination made real vs. imperceptible but real souls
Evocation vs. Enchantment - blunt power vs. subtle manipulation
Conjuration vs. Divination - rapid allies/movement/assembly/etc. of creatures/things vs. slow and careful planning
Transmutation vs. Abjuration - changing creatures/things vs. preserving them

(Personally, I'd say the Conjuration/Divination association was always the weakest, as they were kinda forced into opposition by the 1e Illusionist thing and weren't as directly opposed as the other pairs. I change up the school associations when I run AD&D so that all of the adjacent and opposed pairs make similar amounts of thematic sense.)

These also work as good pairs of schools for the purposes of this houserule, since if you pick one from each pair you get two of the stronger schools (Abjuration/Conjuration/Divination/Transmutation) and two of the weaker and commonly-prohibited ones, so it evens out, again, to moderate-but-not-overwhelming power. And again, appealing to "This is how wizards are supposed to work" can only help in this kind of environment.

[ericgrau]

@^ To be clear I listed fireball because it's a great spell, not because it's damage. And other high output multi-target damage too. When you have that many targets, 95% of foes are screwed whether they save or not and it is close to a multi no save, just die. Or almost die and soon get picked off. Comparing it to trying to upstage a single target fighter or etc. is a bit of a strawman. Nor do I pay much attention to complaints about special cases; that's what preparing more than 1 spell is for. But you do want it in your utility belt. And there will be several encounters that it single-handedly ends. People may expect it, but those that do expect it are even more likely to complain about the wizard dominating with it. Whereas it should simply be one of multiple strong tricks in your utility belt.

@main topic:
The real way to keep balance is to play nice, period. Whether you play "Batman" or not. That is never the same as being strong but intentionally gimping yourself; that's another strawman. It's about not being abusive. If you want to look at it from the DM's side then you ban the problematic splatbook spells that go over the top. Ditto for certain splatbook ACFs, feats, etc. You ban silly core&splat infinite loops and so forth. Except almost nobody actually attempts these in the first place. Which is why I often say you simply play nice and 98% of offline groups already manage this. The real stinky cheese is too obvious. You ban non-core applications that are over the top for core, such as polymorph forms that are much stronger than MMI forms.

Optionally you might nerf power creep. For example by adding a spell level to hundreds of good but not broken splatbook spells. Or leave them be and simply expect the higher power. But power creep (not stinky cheese) is where most of the real world issues come from to both intentionally and unintentionally play too strong. So it's something to look the closest at if you're a DM who wants to tone down casters in a much more practical way. Ban the really major tricks (if players even attempt them), tack on an extra spell level on stronger spells (compared to unabused core stuff), notify player which of his spells got bumped so he can repick his spells, and done. Eezy peezy.

Otherwise there are very major abusive tricks you can pull in all 8 schools, even the less popular ones.

Taking this from the DM side again since the O.P. asked, let's say you want to limit wizard power further by limiting school access. And you've already stopped abuse. Or, usually, it never started in the first place. While they're not ruining games, you want to make wizards a bit less appealing and hard to use, but without making them unplayable or severely shackled. The most obvious way is to ban the 3 schools that are the easiest to use effectively: conjuration, evocation, and transmutation. But that's more annoying to play than anything, and merely causes the player to work harder to find good spells in the other schools. And the actual goal was to keep wizards from doing everything. That's mostly conjurations. They don't do everything perfectly but they do many things well. Yet there are plenty of ways to BFC and make minions in other schools: sometimes stronger sometimes weaker. So it's bannable. On the flipside is divination, transmutation and maybe illusion. They do almost everything but not necessarily that well, except for a portion of spells or with special tricks. Though spell compendium adds lots of great transmutations compared to core. But I wouldn't want to ban that school for having too much cool, fun and friendly content. I'd mostly watch out for cheese and maybe nerf it with raised splatbook spell levels. Or just watch out for stinky cheese and leave it there. Also on the flipside evocation does a few things very well, but at least it doesn't do everything. Divination is an easy ban because most players don't use it much anyway unless using some powerful trick. Illusion too, because if you aren't specializing it's often just for invisibility and sometimes a little defense.

3 down 1 to go. The 4th one is tough. It's tempting to ban enchantment or necromancy because lots of people don't like to use them anyway. But there are a lot of good and/or interesting spells in those schools once you look closer. Especially for your missing BFC and minions now that conjuration is out. Abjuration is likewise not used much, but it does many things you'd expect a party caster to handle for you. Either the wizard or the cleric. It's an easy choice only if you expect the cleric to handle it. Otherwise IMO it's too thematic to lose. Super-specialists especially work well with enchantment, necromancy and illusion.

Hopefully this is a good starting point at least for the DM to work with. I'll leave it up to him. But an example might be to require all casters to ban conjuration, illusion or divination. And if you pick divination, you need to ban 5 schools instead of 4. Because while there are many abusive tricks with it, from a more practical standpoint it's easiest for casual players to live without it. Or require 2 of the 3. Or whatever the DM wants to do of course, but hopefully this whole thread is food for thought. Regardless I'd be careful about letting wizards make their 4 banned schools abjuration, enchantment, illusion and necromancy. While there all kinds of abusive tricks in all 4, it's so easy for most players to not want to use those 4 schools anyway. And divination too, if allowed. If anything a casual player might miss illusion a little for a handful of spells.

[SLOTHRPG95]

Given that a lot of the above advice has boiled down to, "you don't want to totally eschew these certain schools, but be careful on spell selection," I feel like the best way to not outshine your group might be to play a T2 caster. That way, your locked-in spell selection removes (a) your ability to do everything, and (b) the temptation to use certain spells in non-banned schools.

[AvatarVecna]

Enchantment is problematic for three main reasons: first, most of its effects are extremely powerful and all-or-nothing benefits for social obstacles that might be balanced as combat applications but have enormous benefits when used in a more social encounter/obstacle (which could be better handled via skills and RP than brute-force magic anyway). Secondly, and tying in with that first point, is that influencing the actions of others is very inherently abusable; it's hard to argue that a fireball's volume should extend more than 20 ft down the narrow corridor (best you could do is an appeal to previous editions), but arguing just how much you can ask via a Suggestion is a big grey area, and that potential for abuse is best left completely off the table if you don't wanna be pushing the limits so hard. Thirdly, mind-affecting immunity shuts you down hard, and its one of the only immunities that's basically impossible to get around, so having Enchantment as one of your only schools means accepting that your bag of tricks could get a great deal smaller against broad creature types from encounter to encounter, and essentially puts the decision in the DMs hands of whether you get to be completely effective or very limited-effective this encounter.

Illusion is problematic for many of the same reasons, albeit expressed in different ways. MA immunity screws you up in the same way, and also tends to be all-or-nothing (they're either fooled or they aren't, not really much room for in between). And then, of course, the limits of what an illusion can be is usually whatever you can imagine; it is in many ways the most flexible of magic - and thus, the easiest to abuse with clever ideas. Cutting down on clever spell use is a good way to cut down on versatility/power.

Evocation is a school with a handful of very problematic spells, and a whole lot of blasting that encourages you to solve the problem yourself, or be prepared to whip out a metamagic'd version so that you always have something you can blast no matter what you're facing (because you wouldn't wanna be left unable to assist). Blasting tends to either be incredibly unoptimal or incredibly overpowered, and the line between is very thin (which is part of why rocket tag becomes a thing - the difference between "decent damage" and "overkill" is very fine), and the spells that are actually problems are best avoided.

Necromancy basically only has to do with undead; beyond the favored enemy problem ("you either deal with them a lot and you need this, or you barely ever deal with them and you should drop it"), dealing with undead steps on the toes of the Cleric, Paladin, and Ranger, and the only one that doesn't get to cry about that is the cleric. Let them have their fun, and drop this.

[Nifft]

I feel like intra-party balance is more a matter of tactics than of school choice.

Do you use your magic to buff the party and control the opposition, such that even the party muggles can shine? Then you're balanced while raising the party's overall performance.

Do you use your magic to personally exceed other PCs in their chosen roles? Then you're not in balance.

[GrayDeath]

First of, thank you all for your answers, even if not quoted they have been read and taken into consideration.

Details.



I somewhat disagree with ericgrau's suggestions, or at least I'd take a different approach in this situation. His advice is excellent if you want to try to work around the limitations to be a very powerful and useful member of the party while appearing to be less powerful by downplaying your contributions, à la the traditional God wizard. If you want to actually end up at a more moderate power level and not just appear weaker relative to the rest of the party, the God wizard isn't necessarily the best option.

The traditional AD&D wizard basically boils down to Abjuration/Divination/Evocation/Transmutation: Evocation for combat offense, Abjuration for combat defense, Divination for scouting and planning, and Transmutation for most of the signature utility spells. If you stick to that distribution of spells (mostly; obviously mixing things up with offensive dispel Xs from Abjuration and defensive walls of X from Evocation is fine), then not only can you hit the versatile-but-not-omnicompetent benchmark pretty well, but you don't tend to seem as powerful because you're playing to type.

While ericgrau is right that direct damage spells are directly comparable to martial contributions and fairly flashy on their own, most groups aren't going to be worried about a wizard who casts detect secret doors to find the enemies, pops a shield before battle, hastes the party fighter, and fireballs the enemy back line, because that's how a wizard is "supposed" to be played. So even if you overshoot power levels unintentionally, it's not likely to cause the kind of intra-party issues and resentment that e.g. summoning or animating tons of minions or buffing up and hitting people to render the fighter irrelevant would.

Regarding other compositions, Abjuration, Conjuration, Illusion, and Transmutation are the do-anything schools--Conjuration and Transmutation are grab-bag schools for obvious reasons; Abjuration because it does self-buffs, team buffs, utility, and anti-caster offense well, so while it's not as broad as the first two it covers a lot of bases; Illusion because it combines the spell-duplicating power of the shadow conjuration/evocation line, the social and stealth capabilities of glamers, and the "do whatever you can convince your DM of" potential of figments. As long as you have at least one of those, your other three can be pulled from Divination/Enchantment/Evocation/Necromancy and you'll still be okay (albeit on the weaker end of the spectrum), and if you have two of them you're pretty solid; Abjuration plus Illusion is probably better in this case than either Conjuration or Transmutation, because you're less likely to be tempted to go with the standard win spells.

Assuming you mean that banning the 3rd and 4th school each give a +2 to DCs, for a total of +4, specializing in Enchantment or Necromancy as your primary school might be fairly defensible. Normally, they're not as appealing because they have lots of all-or-nothing offensive/control spells and are fairly easy to defend against, but if you can take Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus and have +6 DCs over a standard full caster, suddenly it becomes much easier to land those spells and easier to pick up minions to deal with those who can defend against your spells. If it's just +2, but each specialization continues to give you more bonus spells, Divination is an excellent choice, since you can then afford to throw another dozen Divinations around every day which both helps you determine how best to use your other spells and is nearly always useful for utility.



This is similar to 2e, where wizards couldn't pick prohibited schools freely but had to prohibit the school directly opposed to their specialty school in the below diagram as well as possibly one or both adjacent schools:


https://chaosweb.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/chart.gif

(Greater Divination = 3e Divination because "Lesser Divination" = 3e Universal, and Alteration = 3e Transmutation)

The main reasons for this setup were twofold: First, the 1e Illusionist subclass had no access to Abjuration, Evocation, or Necromancy spells so they obviously went on the opposite side of the diagram from Illusion to preserve those characters in the new edition, and second, adjacent schools were intended to be somehow related (Alteration and Illusion can disguise things, Illusion and Enchantment mess with your mind, Enchantment and Conjuration were good for getting minions, etc.), so the diagram neatly fell into place from there.

There were also thematic associations for opposition schools, thusly:
Illusion vs. Necromancy - imagination made real vs. imperceptible but real souls
Evocation vs. Enchantment - blunt power vs. subtle manipulation
Conjuration vs. Divination - rapid allies/movement/assembly/etc. of creatures/things vs. slow and careful planning
Transmutation vs. Abjuration - changing creatures/things vs. preserving them

(Personally, I'd say the Conjuration/Divination association was always the weakest, as they were kinda forced into opposition by the 1e Illusionist thing and weren't as directly opposed as the other pairs. I change up the school associations when I run AD&D so that all of the adjacent and opposed pairs make similar amounts of thematic sense.)

These also work as good pairs of schools for the purposes of this houserule, since if you pick one from each pair you get two of the stronger schools (Abjuration/Conjuration/Divination/Transmutation) and two of the weaker and commonly-prohibited ones, so it evens out, again, to moderate-but-not-overwhelming power. And again, appealing to "This is how wizards are supposed to work" can only help in this kind of environment.



Looking at it from both conceptual and power directions, well thought out, detailed.
Fantastic Post, thank you!

I think overall we are likely going to go for a "Wizards as they were supposed to be played" as "as is" and the 3rd and 4th School banners as the Prodigies of their craft.

And yes, they 3rd and 4th ban stack with everything, so you DO end up at +6 CL (but never more than + 1/2 Level to CL).
Illusionists are dangerous with this, necromancers have huge Armies and killing spells hurt, and Enchanters rule Kingdoms.


@^ To be clear I listed fireball because it's a great spell, not because it's damage. And other high output multi-target damage too. When you have that many targets, 95% of foes are screwed whether they save or not and it is close to a multi no save, just die. Or almost die and soon get picked off. Comparing it to trying to upstage a single target fighter or etc. is a bit of a strawman. Nor do I pay much attention to complaints about special cases; that's what preparing more than 1 spell is for. But you do want it in your utility belt. And there will be several encounters that it single-handedly ends. People may expect it, but those that do expect it are even more likely to complain about the wizard dominating with it. Whereas it should simply be one of multiple strong tricks in your utility belt.

@main topic:
The real way to keep balance is to play nice, period. Whether you play "Batman" or not. That is never the same as being strong but intentionally gimping yourself; that's another strawman. It's about not being abusive. If you want to look at it from the DM's side then you ban the problematic splatbook spells that go over the top. Ditto for certain splatbook ACFs, feats, etc. You ban silly core&splat infinite loops and so forth. Except almost nobody actually attempts these in the first place. Which is why I often say you simply play nice and 98% of offline groups already manage this. The real stinky cheese is too obvious. You ban non-core applications that are over the top for core, such as polymorph forms that are much stronger than MMI forms.

Optionally you might nerf power creep. For example by adding a spell level to hundreds of good but not broken splatbook spells. Or leave them be and simply expect the higher power. But power creep (not stinky cheese) is where most of the real world issues come from to both intentionally and unintentionally play too strong. So it's something to look the closest at if you're a DM who wants to tone down casters in a much more practical way. Ban the really major tricks (if players even attempt them), tack on an extra spell level on stronger spells (compared to unabused core stuff), notify player which of his spells got bumped so he can repick his spells, and done. Eezy peezy.

Otherwise there are very major abusive tricks you can pull in all 8 schools, even the less popular ones.

Taking this from the DM side again since the O.P. asked, let's say you want to limit wizard power further by limiting school access. And you've already stopped abuse. Or, usually, it never started in the first place. While they're not ruining games, you want to make wizards a bit less appealing and hard to use, but without making them unplayable or severely shackled. The most obvious way is to ban the 3 schools that are the easiest to use effectively: conjuration, evocation, and transmutation. But that's more annoying to play than anything, and merely causes the player to work harder to find good spells in the other schools. And the actual goal was to keep wizards from doing everything. That's mostly conjurations. They don't do everything perfectly but they do many things well. Yet there are plenty of ways to BFC and make minions in other schools: sometimes stronger sometimes weaker. So it's bannable. On the flipside is divination, transmutation and maybe illusion. They do almost everything but not necessarily that well, except for a portion of spells or with special tricks. Though spell compendium adds lots of great transmutations compared to core. But I wouldn't want to ban that school for having too much cool, fun and friendly content. I'd mostly watch out for cheese and maybe nerf it with raised splatbook spell levels. Or just watch out for stinky cheese and leave it there. Also on the flipside evocation does a few things very well, but at least it doesn't do everything. Divination is an easy ban because most players don't use it much anyway unless using some powerful trick. Illusion too, because if you aren't specializing it's often just for invisibility and sometimes a little defense.

3 down 1 to go. The 4th one is tough. It's tempting to ban enchantment or necromancy because lots of people don't like to use them anyway. But there are a lot of good and/or interesting spells in those schools once you look closer. Especially for your missing BFC and minions now that conjuration is out. Abjuration is likewise not used much, but it does many things you'd expect a party caster to handle for you. Either the wizard or the cleric. It's an easy choice only if you expect the cleric to handle it. Otherwise IMO it's too thematic to lose. Super-specialists especially work well with enchantment, necromancy and illusion.

Hopefully this is a good starting point at least for the DM to work with. I'll leave it up to him. But an example might be to require all casters to ban conjuration, illusion or divination. And if you pick divination, you need to ban 5 schools instead of 4. Because while there are many abusive tricks with it, from a more practical standpoint it's easiest for casual players to live without it. Or require 2 of the 3. Or whatever the DM wants to do of course, but hopefully this whole thread is food for thought. Regardless I'd be careful about letting wizards make their 4 banned schools abjuration, enchantment, illusion and necromancy. While there all kinds of abusive tricks in all 4, it's so easy for most players to not want to use those 4 schools anyway. And divination too, if allowed. If anything a casual player might miss illusion a little for a handful of spells.

Thank you, especiall the last paragraph will help a lot ind esigning the Setting to completion, my friend assuredly can work with that.

And yes, if we go for that route obviously banning at LEAST one of the big 3 will be mandatory, at the moment it looks most likely that there willb e Academies that only have limited Schools to learn available and require you to be a Specialist to learn, and enforce further specializations if the offer the more pwoerful Schools, but it is still early.


Given that a lot of the above advice has boiled down to, "you don't want to totally eschew these certain schools, but be careful on spell selection," I feel like the best way to not outshine your group might be to play a T2 caster. That way, your locked-in spell selection removes (a) your ability to do everything, and (b) the temptation to use certain spells in non-banned schools.

There are Sorcerers, and they are unproblematic.

But Wizards and their Influence are central to the settings history and we want to keep the Scholastic, flexible prepared Caster for it, so thats sadly (as its easy^^) not an option.


@ Nifft: This is not the main problem or direction of the question, as it is also quite focussed on the Setting, not simply nerfing the Wizard.#
In normal Groups/PLay your madvice is of course entirely correct. ;)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

And yes, if we go for that route obviously banning at LEAST one of the big 3 will be mandatory, at the moment it looks most likely that there willb e Academies that only have limited Schools to learn available and require you to be a Specialist to learn, and enforce further specializations if the offer the more pwoerful Schools, but it is still early.

The "academies with limited schools to learn" bit reminded me of something else that you might find helpful. In the Forgotten Realms, the ancient high-magic empire of Netheril had a slightly different approach to magic, where instead of eight (or nine or ten; long story) schools of magic, they grouped spells into three categories: Invention, for spells of creation and destruction; Mentalism, for spells of the mind and perception; and Variation, for spells of change and transformation.

Roughly speaking, Invention maps to Conjuration+Evocation+Necromancy, Mentalism maps to Divination+Enchantment+Illusion, and Variation maps to Abjuration+Transmutation(+Chronomancy; again, long story), but in the Netheril sourcebooks they actually moved some spells around to emphasize the different approach to magic; banishment was Mentalism where Abjuration is otherwise Variation and animating things was Variation where Necromancy is otherwise Invention, for instance. More information can be found here (http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Fields_of_Mythal) and here (https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/classes/prestige/realms/netherese.shtml).


This setup is relevant to your setting in two ways. First, you can come up with different in-game theories of magic for the various wizard groups instead of having every group of wizards follow the same set of eight spell schools, and then require every wizard character to subscribe to one of those philosophies, to justify the prevalence of certain specialization combinations in-character. You can get a lot of flavor mileage out of debates between different philosphies, too, for example:

Wizards from the College of Geometers hypothesize that the true nature of magic can be found in the pure beauty of mathematics, and how the four Fields of magic are Symmetry (Conjuration+Necromancy, which deal in time-reversible changes in location and animation), Entropy (Evocation+Transmutation, which are time-asymmetric), Singularity (Abjuration+lllusion, which deal in real and imaginary boundary conditions), and Theory (Divination+Enchantment, which deal with pure thought and reason), and how anyone who doesn't understand that is basically a primitive shaman with no real scientific training.


Wizards from the Guild of Alchemists insist that clearly magic is about the interplay between the physical and metaphysical world, and how the three Realms of magic are the Elemental (Conjuration+Evocation+Transmutation, which deal with the four elements in all their variety), the Aetherial (Abjuration+Enchantment+Necromancy, which deal with the soul and the mind), and the Mystical (Divination+Illusion, which deal with knowledge and perception), and all this Geometric blather about numbers and triangles and stuff has no relation to reality whatsoever.


Wizards from the Circle of the Great Wheel posit that the structure of the planes reflects the structure of magic, so magic is divided into the Aspects of Order (Conjuration+Divination+Enchantment, associated with the lawful Outer Planes, which deal in controlling other beings and shaping the future), Chaos (Illusion+Transmutation, associated with the chaotic Outer Planes, which deal in change and deception of all sorts), Substance (Evocation+Necromancy, associated with the Inner Planes, which deal in the six elements and energies), and Concordance (Abjuration, associated with the Outer Planes of neutrality, which keep the other sets of planes apart and in their proper places), and their esteemed colleagues in the Academy and the Guild are both partially correct but, alas, barking up the completely wrong tree.
And of course then you can carefully lay out combinations of schools that are balanced to specialize or prohibit together. For instance, Geometers prohibit one or two fields (for two or four schools, never three schools, since they can't break up the fields to prohibit three), and those who have Symmetry must specialize in Necromancy and ban Entropy because the arcane equations for symmetric and asymmetric magic are totally different, while Circle wizards cannot prohibit Concordance (since flavor-wise you need it to deal with the other aspecs and mechanically it's only one school) and those who have Order must specialize in Divination and prohibit Chaos (and those who specialize in Chaos must specialize in Illusion and prohibit Order) because they are fundamentally incompatible worldviews. This gets you the same result as declaring that wizards must prohibit certain schools for balance while giving the reason a grounding in the fiction.


Second, if your DM is up to putting in some extra work, the academies could swap the schools of certain subschools or descriptors, similar to the Spell Versatility transmuter ACF (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/specialistWizardVariants.htm#transmuterVariants), to fit into their conception of magic. One academy of Alchemists reserved for Aetherial specialists might move Conjuration (Summoning) spells to Necromancy, reasoning that instead of pulling creatures from elsewhere they're actually shaping them out of the surrounding elemental matter and then temporarily animating them and giving them souls. An academy for the Circle reserved for Substance specialists might move Transmutation [Air/Earth/Fire/Water] spells to Evocation because they deal with elemental matter rather than chaos. And so forth; they don't all have to involve taking spells away from Conjuration and Transmutation--I could see justifications for moving pure negative energy spells from Necromancy to Evocation in a Circle academy or moving Illusion (Phantasms) to Enchantment in a Geometer academy--but most would probably end up like that simply due to their existing variety.

This not only helps even out the juggernauts of Conjuration and Transmutation with the more neglected schools without having to go through and carefully rebalance the schools spell by spell, but it also gives a concrete mechanical incentive for joining a given wizard academy (as opposed to just subscribing to a certain philosophy and not joining them) if it lets you specialize in the school you want and also get some goodies from other schools--especially if no academy allows specializing in Conjuration or Transmutation and that kind of spell swap is the only way to get specialist benefits with those spells.

[GrayDeath]

I really wish there was a like button.

That is some seriously good Inspiration right there, thank you! :smallcool::smallbiggrin: