Spellcaster specialties

[Kislath]

I quit buying D&D Books with 3.0, so I'm a little behind on many things.
Here's my question:

Do wizards have any sort of specialties in their areas of research / casting?
I'm not talking about schools, which they've had forever, but specialties in the kinds of things they study the most.

It seems to me that a wizard is a scientist of a sort, and most scientists tend to focus on a narrow field of study.

If they were to specialize, would they get any more bonuses due to it?

For example, I had an NPC wizard once who specialized in jellies, crustaceans, plants, and forces. His lab was full of all sorts of odd things reminiscient of those you might find in some modern college lab. He whipped up all sorts of odd things in his lab and created a few peculiar spells based on them.

My question: what do you think of wizards being able to do this as player characters? Should a "Master of fungus" be able to create some weird fungus-based spells, or is this sort of thing creating a very slippery slope?

[nonsi]

I quit buying D&D Books with 3.0, so I'm a little behind on many things.
Here's my question:

Do wizards have any sort of specialties in their areas of research / casting?
I'm not talking about schools, which they've had forever, but specialties in the kinds of things they study the most.

It seems to me that a wizard is a scientist of a sort, and most scientists tend to focus on a narrow field of study.

If they were to specialize, would they get any more bonuses due to it?

For example, I had an NPC wizard once who specialized in jellies, crustaceans, plants, and forces. His lab was full of all sorts of odd things reminiscient of those you might find in some modern college lab. He whipped up all sorts of odd things in his lab and created a few peculiar spells based on them.

My question: what do you think of wizards being able to do this as player characters? Should a "Master of fungus" be able to create some weird fungus-based spells, or is this sort of thing creating a very slippery slope?

"Master of fungus" seems a bit too specific for me.
The division to 8 schools of magic (plus a handful of universal spells) gives you a lot of stuff to do with each school.
Going for something specific like "Starlight Specialist" or "Root Expert" really narrows down the challenges you're equiped to cope with.

3.5e's official arcane specialists are: Beguiler (PHB II), Dread Necromancer (Heroes of Horror) and Warmage (Complete Arcane).
Personally, I don't like this solution, because it associates spell specialty with specific features. While I see the rationale in this appoach, it means that if I wich to create a conjurer/diviner/trasmotist, I now have to invent a new class, forcing me to conduct a long research to figur out its strengths & weaknesses, and make sure it's not broken in some way.
A better solution is the Master Specialist prestige class (Complete Mage), which makes things a lot more generic, but PrCs are the worst offenders of balance.
From my point of view, this solution is the only one I know of that puts all of the Master Specialist's design advantages into a base class and allows you to role virtualy any arcanist concept that comes to mind.

[Kislath]

Okay, thanks.