Should Cure Spells really be Conjuration?

[Aotrs Commander]

(While this question ultimately pertains to something I'm looking at for my 3.5//PF hybrid rules, I'm placing it here, rather than there as a more open question, especially as AD&D in particular has relevance to the discussion, and also because the quesion is a bit more thematic than mechanical.)



When 3.0 was written, the cure spells were moved from Necromancy, where they had been in AD&D and earlier, to Conjuration. It's been so long since this adjustment has been made, I had forgotten about it entirely until someone mentioned it in another thread. But now, with 3.5/PF as expanded (sans 3rd psrty support) as they are going to get, I feel like it might be time, with twenty years to look back on, to say "but should they be, really?" Now that we have all the extra stuff that wasn't there in 3.0 core.

There has never been a good reason why this was, aside from they had to go somewhere once once moved out of Necromancy. (Presumably as part of 3./3.5's somewhat half-hearted tendancy to try to reclassify Undead as being "always Evil" - which they consistently undermined with stuff like the Pale Master and Dread Necromancer (the former as far back as 3.0).) So Necromancy, formerly the "life and death" school, just became the "death" school, and Conjuration (along with Transmutation) became largely the dumping ground for any effect the writers couldn't think of a better school for. Conjuration and Transmutation are pretty much a wastebasket taxon school (a species under which you put anything else you can't find a better place for, such as Megalosaurus has served). (Which is why they are so bloated.)

So healing spells (and the literal raising-from-the-dead) spells got placed into conjuration, presumably there because it was ascribed that they were "making" new flesh and blood and you had to put them somewhere once you took them out of Necromancy.

But it doesn't fit WELL. Okay, you can make an arguement about you are "summoning" the dead spirit for the res spells - but the problem is you can make that arguement about summoning the spirit to create an intelligent Undead with Create Undead, can't you? And here's the problem: it would be VERY possible, would it not, to boiling down ALL the spells down to Conjuration or Transmutation, because they are as applied, so incredibly broad being "making things" and "changing things" and when "making things" also includes "energy" - you could nearly drop all the schools entirely and have conjuration be the ONLY school. (Teleportation being conjuration is sort of dubious, to be honest, but again, the best arguement could make is just to move them to further bloat Transmutation; but's that's perhaps a debate for another thread!)

So the idea that a 0th level cantrip (or a 1st level spell if PF...) can "create" something that is complex as a living creature, given the SHARP restrictions on what you can create with Conjuration (Minor Creation is level 4) is a bit dubious when you think about it. "But Bleakbane," I here you cry "what about the spells for repairing constructs and items?" They? Are, in both 3.5 (the Repair [light] Damage line) and in PF (Make Whole line) TRANSMUTATION. So that doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Additionally ,disease spells (which also create things as complex as real, persistent micro-organisms which are the same ones as created by entirely nonmagical means) are Necromancy, not conjuration, but why?

The "making new flesh" idea further starts to fall apart a bit when you consider that the SPELL is not actually doing that. All a cure (or inflict) spell basically is fundementally Shocking Grasp, but with positive or negative energy. The spell is not fixing or damaging the creature; that's an inherent property of the energy itself. So the problem with healing-as-conjuration is that it is, essentially, using the wastebasket-taxon approach to classifying it by school. Itt's there because having taken it OUT of necromancy (where it had the thematic point of being death AND life) but without really anywhere else to put it.

So. If not conjuration, where ought (Healing) spells to go?

You could put it back to necromancy, obviously, which would likely be the simpliest solution and would also match up with the Inflict spells.

It doesn't really fit with illusion, divination, enchantment and it's not really defensive so it's not ideal for abjuration (though you mght be able to make a case).

You could put it in Transmutation, one the basis that it would at least be consistent with the repair spells.

You could argue that BOTH inflict and cure spells (and arguably all negative level spells) ought to be moved to EVOCATION, since they are all about energy (though one feels that would denude Necromancy significantly). Edit: I note, on checking, that 5 did in fact move cure wounds to Evocation, so that's worth noting. (I don't recall - nor can I find with a google search - Cure wounds being a thing in 4E, where you had healinh words and the like instead; I confess, i've only played 4E with one party and my cleric there was all about FiRIN HER LAZORS, so I could be wrong. (Actually, not even sure schools were a thing in 4E.))



Now, I admit, for most lesser mortals, it's probably not worth the effort of going through the spells just to annotate them from Conjuration to something else. I, however, am just anal-retentive/OCD-adjacent enough to consider doing so. Especially as I have been already considering re-naming "negative energy damage" to "necrotic damage" (because "necrotic" does sound cooler like "Thunder" does to "Sonic¹") and the one thing that has stopped me so far is that I haven't gotten a good idea of what to call positive energy damage (since "radiant" has already been swiped for light damage, i.e. literal EM radiation (e.g. MAH LAZORS and the FIRIN' thereof).

Thread topic corollary: If anyone has any good suggestions on that latter point, I'm all open!




¹The first bit of 4E in actual play that made me go "[excrement], that's good," was when the DM read out something that dealt Thunder damage. It's just taken me this long to actually implement it.

[gkathellar]

It really comes down to how you define the schools. I'd argue healing should've stayed necromancy, for two reasons: (a) it gives necromancy something to do other than raise the dead and drain people's life force, and (b) it's thematically consistent for necromancy to be the school that governs positive and negative energy alike.

[Psyren]

I'd be fine with necromancy, conjuration, or evocation.

I'd lean towards necromancy simply because (in 3.5/PF anyway) conjuration has so much utility crammed into it as it is, not to mention other ways to get healing anyway (e.g. summoning an angel). Not that adding healing back to necro would redress that balance much, since the only class that has to worry about banning schools has to jump through hoops to get healing anyway...

[Rater202]

Healing spells(and likewise inflict spells, and everything that involves positive and negative energy) should either be Necromancy, becuase they conjure up and manipulate the energies of life and death, or evocation becuase they conjure up and manipulate energy in general.

In 3.5 one supplement(I want to say Complete Mage) introduced spells that fit under two or more schools of magic at the same time, counting as both or either as needed. Probably that.

Considering that most actual conjugation spells work on either moving something or creating something physical out of nothing, the school should probably be renamed as "Summoning" with things that can't be argued as summoning, like healing, relocated to more appropriate schools.

Unrelated to D&D: In the online Single Player RPG Adventure Quest, healing spells and anti-evil/undead effects, such as are used by Paladins, and Necromancy effects are explicitly the same school of magic. When the lay lines responsible for that magic were overstressed by a massive war between them(Which, incidentally, the writers said that the necromancers were the good guys in,) both groups turned to using souls as an alternative source of power. The Founder of the Paladin Order and the High Priest of the Goddess of Light are both undead, and the Undead are considered to be 'alive,' not dead, they're just a different form of life. I honestly think that that's a good model to go on.

[Lord Torath]

Is it possible to have the spells be in both schools? That was a thing back in 2E. If you had access to either of the schools it was in you could cast it. It comes from the idea that you can accomplish the same thing with different methods.

[AvatarVecna]

Very generally speaking, what school healing should be is largely a matter of how you think it works. If healing magic is direct manipulation of the energies that govern life and death present in every living creature, then it should be Necromancy - that's just how it works out. If healing magic is channeling positive energy via magic (the way one might channel fire), it could be argued that it should be Evocation - or, if the channeling is tapping into an elemental plane the way Fire Orb and similar spells do, Conjuration).

Any of these three answers are fine. What really gets me is that Cure is a different school from Inflict - however it is that Cure works, Inflict works the same way just with opposite results. They are literally designed as mirror spells in 3e, putting them in different schools is purposeless, unless you are trying to make it so all the Necromancy spells are icky death nonsense.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Healing should 100% be Necromancy. I've been arguing (and ruling in my games) since 3e came out that Conjuration (Healing) stuff was stolen from Necromancy and Conjuration (Creation) stuff was stolen from Evocation and those effects should be put back where they came from.

(Teleportation being conjuration is sort of dubious, to be honest, but again, the best arguement could make is just to move them to further bloat Transmutation; but's that's perhaps a debate for another thread!)

Teleportation effects were Transmutation originally, but Conjuration is a better fit for teleportation than Transmutation ever was, I feel. The "transmuting your location" or "warping space" arguments fell flat given that teleportation explicitly moved you through the Astral Plane even in AD&D, so if summoning and calling (the other "move a thing through the Astral Plane" effects) are Conjuration, then teleportation should be as well.

The solution to Transmutation bloat that I've settled on lately is splitting it into Alteration and Transmutation, where the former school deals with changes to creatures (iron body, fins to feet, polymorph, etc.) while the latter deals with changes to objects and substances (control water, fabricate, stone shape, etc.). There's more to it than that (dual-schooling animate X effects with Necromancy, moving mental Alterations and Transmutations to Enchantment, moving "energy aura"-type effects like balor nimbus to Evocation, etc.), but even just forcing specialists to choose between Alteration's buffing focus and Transmutation's BFC focus helps a lot.

You could argue that BOTH inflict and cure spells (and arguably all negative level spells) ought to be moved to EVOCATION, since they are all about energy (though one feels that would denude Necromancy significantly). Edit: I note, on checking, that 5 did in fact move cure wounds to Evocation, so that's worth noting.

Healing spells(and likewise inflict spells, and everything that involves positive and negative energy) should either be Necromancy, becuase they conjure up and manipulate the energies of life and death, or evocation becuase they conjure up and manipulate energy in general.

If healing magic is channeling positive energy via magic (the way one might channel fire), it could be argued that it should be Evocation - or, if the channeling is tapping into an elemental plane the way Fire Orb and similar spells do, Conjuration).

One could argue that healing is Evocation because it evokes positive energy, but I think it doesn't really fit. Evocation sometimes involves creating light and sound out of nothing (or, more properly, out of the Inner Planes) with e.g. sunbeam and shout, but Illusion, with its figments and patterns that also manipulate light and sound, is explicitly a separate school from Evocation because Evocation generally deals with matter and energy broadly but in a simple or raw form--walls, blasts, beams, blocky shapes, etc.--while Illusion is limited in scope but can handle much more complex effects.

Necromancy has the same relationship regarding positive and negative energy, able to perform fine/complex manipulation of what Evocation can/should only do in broad strokes, which describes healing precisely.

[Zarrgon]

Healing spells should be necromancy. Moving the cure spells in 3.0 was something I never did.


Way, way, way back in 1E or maybe 0E all divine magic was "Invocation/Evocation" as the idea was your deity was sending you the spell power. Though it did not take long to break up all the divine magic in to separate schools.


In my view Necromancy magic taps the Positive and Negative material planes. So it's specialized evocation and conjuration as all the magic comes from only two planes. And Life and Death are Special, after all.

[NotASpiderSwarm]

Clearly, the magic schools in 3.5 are poorly thought-out or completely wrong. The real question is how much time do you want to spend fixing that? Easy option: Cure spells are Necromancy, Orbs are Evocation, move on with your life.
Harder options recognize that the schools are inconsistent and wildly imbalanced, and addresses that from the ground up. You've already pointed this problem out. Conjuration and Transmutation are identified by how they do things, and the way they do things means the two of them can do anything. Abjuration, Illusion, Necromancy, Divination, Enchantment, are all identified by what they do and are therefore sharply limited in comparison. I see two basic solutions:

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Identify schools by how they do things:
Conjuration (Most Conjuration spells, some Necromancy)
Transmutation
Energy (Evocation, Illusion, some Necromancy/Abjuration, a little Conjuration)
Mental (Divination, Enchantment, some Abjuration, possibly time shenanigans)

You still need to go through and check every spell, there's some Conjuration and Transmutation spells that are probably misfiled under even this, but it's fast, mostly easy to explain, makes sense in-universe. You also need to rework specialization under this, make Wizards only ban one school, make Read Magic universal, but it probably does weaken Wizards, since if you treat Energy properly, any specialist will be forced to ban a decent chunk of good spells.

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Identify spells by what they do:
Buff
Blast
Battlefield Control
Debuff (all save-or-X go here)
Information
Utility
Minions
Transport
Warp Reality (all time shenanigans go here. Also anything that affects spells)

(I'm not sold on these specific categories, but you get the idea)

The point here is obvious, categorizing spells will take 2 seconds thought for most spells. Banning a school means that you are absolutely sacrificing something, since there are no workarounds. All damage spells are Blasting, so if you ban that, your options for damage are just "Summon a monster to hit him". It does mean that you'd have to physically reassign every single spell, and there will still be edge cases(Are AoE Save-or-Sucks like Stinking Cloud/Grease Battlefield Control or Debuffs? Is Dominate Person minions or debuff?) And it makes no sense in-universe, since in all likelihood MOST spellcasters don't spend their days blowing people up, so like 90% of the NPCs should be specialized in like 3 schools of magic, which seems weird. But it's definitely a viable option.

Depends on what you want to do. I think most people vastly prefer just reassigning the obviously badly-categorized spells(Cure, Orbs, etc), and leaving the rest of it, but given how much work you've put into your ruleset already, reworking the schools from the ground up doesn't seem any more excessive.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Conjuration and Transmutation are identified by how they do things, and the way they do things means the two of them can do anything. Abjuration, Illusion, Necromancy, Divination, Enchantment, are all identified by what they do and are therefore sharply limited in comparison.

Actually, it's a bit more half-and-half than that. Yes, Conjuration and Transmutation are defined by their methods, being the "transport stuff" and "change stuff" schools, but only two other schools are really method-defined, Abjuration being the "negate/prevent stuff" school and Divination being the "reveal/discover stuff" school. Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, and Necromancy are more defined by the subjects that they act upon, which are, respectively, the mind, raw energy and matter, perceptions, and life force.

If you do the mandatory first step of taking the borderline spells out of Conjuration and Transmutation and giving them back to the schools where they make more sense, the other schools are actually pretty unambiguous and logical in-universe and can essentially remain unchanged. Which isn't to say you can't or shouldn't do any further shuffling of spells within schools or of schools themselves, just that boiling things down to just 4 or so schools doesn't necessarily provide a flavor benefit over keeping roughly 8 and definitely is worse mechanically (broader wizard specializations, fewer feat/PrC/item "hooks" to use, etc.).

[Aotrs Commander]

Okay, pretty much overwhelmingly leaning towards putting them back into necromancy.

(Notably, no-one has come out and particularly defended them being in Conjuration specifcally (as opposed to Conj just being as one option among others).)

Is it possible to have the spells be in both schools? That was a thing back in 2E. If you had access to either of the schools it was in you could cast it. It comes from the idea that you can accomplish the same thing with different methods.

In 3.5 one supplement(I want to say Complete Mage) introduced spells that fit under two or more schools of magic at the same time, counting as both or either as needed. Probably that.

As all THAT succeeded in doing was bloating my Wizrd spell list by having two lines for each such spell (so it's sortable by scholl), I am not in favour of that. (Actually, I have a good mind to go through those and assign the to one school; there's not many, and I will bet without looking most of them will have conjuration as school...)



I did, before I revised the cosmology, not have a Shadow Plane in the D&D sense on Dreemaehyll (because darkness-i.e.-the-privative-of-light was an element and has its own plane), which entailed changing and dual-schooling basically ALL of the Shadow spells. This revision (wherein the job of the D&D Shadow Plane was instead given to a region of the Plane of Ice (more properly the plane of Entropy) near the Negative Energy Plane) has entailed deleting all that and compressing them back.


(Because after the much more complex work I did on elements not come up in thre past ten years or so Dree has been in use and the size of the documents grows, it's been a lot easier to compress any Dree-specific modifications down (and, for example, compressing the class spell lists so there doesn't need to be a Dree-specific one for most classes). A process which has lead, actually, to some interesting lore developments - notably the revalation that the Dark Lord's known evil general Skalegor the Shadow Drake (because dragons are sorted by element, not by colour) who developed Breath/Exhalation of the Black Dragon was PSIONIC, because they're POWERS) and the categorisation of the the god Rurtuthoroesh's divine servitors into a new subtype (ala Azata/Eladrin et al) as Bogeymen to encompass (as a start) the existing Rabisu and hitherto-unmentioned Babau (yes, it' a mythological creature, not a D&D creation) so I didn't have to rename (or mark as not existing on Dree) the Babau Slime spell.

Clearly, the magic schools in 3.5 are poorly thought-out or completely wrong. The real question is how much time do you want to spend fixing that? Easy option: Cure spells are Necromancy, Orbs are Evocation, move on with your life.

Depends on what you want to do. I think most people vastly prefer just reassigning the obviously badly-categorized spells(Cure, Orbs, etc), and leaving the rest of it, but given how much work you've put into your ruleset already, reworking the schools from the ground up doesn't seem any more excessive.

(For the record, I don't have a problem with the Orb spells, as I simple view them as a very complicated magical way to obtain the same effect from a scifi flame /electroblaster/cold beam/ acid/ sonic pistol; the energy they create is nonmagical, rather than magical (like Fireball), the only meaningful difference in D&D on which that has is the effect of Spell Resistance.)

That would require me to copy across EVER. SINGLE. Spell and not just the nearly 2200 spells already in the spells document - would postulate proably on the order of another thousand spells or so (a full count of all spells would take a lot of time and effort, but by comparison, wizard/sorcerer spells account for just over 1900 spells) - which would not take hyperbolically two seconds each to deal with - that would be looking at months more work, realistically. I WOULD actually like to get this project done before the lock-down ends, so it's actually printed and ready for play as soon as the club's open again. (In that single respect, the lock-down has been of benefit, as it bought me time and it has taken pretty much the lcok-down period for me to finish up what I foolishly thought would be the last bit I could do in a couple of weeks...!) And it's about 900 pages already, which will pose some challenges¹.

(For the same reasons, I've not looked at adpating in Path of War. That would require me to go through all existant ToB stuff and revisie it (since the majority of existant parties have an adept) and more pertintently, print out all the maneuvvre cards again, which I REALLY can't be arsed to do! A job for the next big pass!)

Simply changing Conjuration (Healing) to Necromancy (Healing) is a job I can do mostly with a Find/Replace (and only more complicated is I do decide to futz around with the "damage" phrasing and look at changing the name of positive energy) and something I can likely get done this evening - if I dont spend half the day writing forum replies! - before moving on to the next phase of the stuff (which is at this point, merely porting over Witch and Shaman, compiling their spell lists (specifically looking for any shaman or witch-only spells that will not have already made the cut) and the bulk of the work is fundementally DONE.



(I still have to do the majority of the domains, but I have now gone through all the PF domains to port any spells which weren't in the list (or to mark them as not being carried across in some cases), so it's just a case of adding PF-style domain powers and/or amalgamating 3.5/PF domains, but there's not anything left there that will generate more spells. There's the Summon Bestiary to finish (but I got ahead of myself just before the lockdown and printed a version out, but that has all the stuff, pretty much, that the current Druid character needs, it's mostly just a few cleric summons and Summon Monster to deal with). And at some point I need to look at making a new file to deal with Prestidge Classes, but those are elements that I can deal with on a case-by-case basis, especially as they will be in seperate documents to the rest of it, which won't require tons of printing out.. (Hell, I've not even attempted to do anything with races; for Dree, they're in a Dree document, and at the moment, the only other place we're likely to be generating characters in Golarion, so we can just use 'em straight off PFSRD for the sake of a small sample size like that. It's not like I need to do anything, since favoured classes don't exist as a concept, because I ditched that whole mess when we just removed all the multiclassing YEARS ago and I don't see the need to ass Pathfinder's; I explictly don't WANT anything other than soft flavour guidelines on class choices; stat bonuses alone are enough to do that, honestly.))



¹Hilariously, the initial impetus that did all the groundwork for this over the past umpteen years was to reduce the amount of books/paper I needed to physically take down to the club, or to have to look through. (It's bad enough chasing through four sources (PHBII/SpC CR1, 3.A spells) to find something if you don't have the page reference from the spell list!). So the PREVIOUS versions (nothing has been this extensive before) had already strip-mined and compiled all the spells/feats from the splats we use except for PHBII and SpC (and the psionic books) into the various 3.A documents and thus cut-down on a lot of wasted space/paper work for stuff we don't use. (It has meant, for instance, I only had to look through three sources outside the document itself to find sonic spells to change the damage to Thunder.)

I do fully expect that eventually, everything WILL be copied up to 3.Aotrs - as for one thing, it's all digital and some of my books as looking worse for where (core especially, after nearly twenty years of mostly weekly use) - though that would be a task beyond comprehension without various websties (D&D Tools, Therafim) and of course Paizo's masterstroke of Nethys/PFSRD. (The other impetus for a lot of this was to conform more to PF, so that when I use their adventure paths, I have to do minimal conversion work. (I support them by buying the world source-books and previously by APs (not only have thy now stopped PF1 APs, but realistically, we likely have more APs that we will actually be able to use, given that it takes approximately 6 months per book (so three years/path) and even if we did nothing but play APs and nothing else, ten paths is thirty years and by that time, given I'm in the middle of the group age-wise and I'm 40...)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

As all THAT succeeded in doing was bloating my Wizrd spell list by having two lines for each such spell (so it's sortable by scholl), I am not in favour of that. (Actually, I have a good mind to go through those and assign the to one school; there's not many, and I will bet without looking most of them will have conjuration as school...)

Conceptually, dual-school spells are actually a great idea. With the stronger options like Focused Specialist and Red Wizard forcing the prohibition of extra schools and dual-school spells being inaccessible if either school is prohibited, making some of the more complex and/or stronger spells dual-school can do wonders for limiting wizard spell access.

Imagine if, to pick some examples arbitrarily, polymorph and similar spells were Enchantment/Transmutation (because they change both mind and body), planar binding and similar spells were Conjuration/Enchantment (because they have a built-in control effect, as opposed to e.g. planar ally), shadow conjuration and shadow evocation were Conjuration/Illusion and Evocation/Illusion respectively (for obvious reasons), mind blank was Abjuration/Illusion (because of its blanket anti-Divination effects), and so on. Suddenly the default advice of "Specialize Conjuration or Transmutation, dump Enchantment/Evocation/Necromancy" is no longer such an easy choice.

The problem, of course, is that for this setup to work well you have to (A) have roughly balanced schools to start, (B) have been doing the dual-school thing in every book instead of adding it partway, and (C) assign multiple schools to those spells carefully with respect to both balance and flavor. Alas, the actual implementation in PHB2 and later didn't do any of the three, so unless you want to invest in a full overhaul then removing dual-school spells is the better approach.

I did, before I revised the cosmology, not have a Shadow Plane in the D&D sense on Dreemaehyll (because darkness-i.e.-the-privative-of-light was an element and has its own plane), which entailed changing and dual-schooling basically ALL of the Shadow spells. This revision (wherein the job of the D&D Shadow Plane was instead given to a region of the Plane of Ice (more properly the plane of Entropy) near the Negative Energy Plane) has entailed deleting all that and compressing them back.

Shadow being an Inner Plane makes sense, given that the Plane of Shadow started off as the Para-Energy Plane between the Positive and Negative Energy Planes, but making the Plane of Ice a Transitive Plane in its place is an interesting option that I've never seen used before. Could you expound a bit on how your planar setup works and how this Plane of Entropy fits into things?

(For the record, I don't have a problem with the Orb spells, as I simple view them as a very complicated magical way to obtain the same effect from a scifi flame /electroblaster/cold beam/ acid/ sonic pistol; the energy they create is nonmagical, rather than magical (like Fireball), the only meaningful difference in D&D on which that has is the effect of Spell Resistance.)

The reason that the orbs are viewed as an issue is that Evocation blasting traditionally has two major issues--basically all of its spells allow SR (not a huge issue, with low SR values overall and SR-penetrating spells and all, but a killer issue if you run into golems or SR-optimized enemies), and most of its spells either do good damage with no rider effect or poor damage with a rider effect--and the orb spells overcome both of those issues in a single spell line while going to Conjuration instead of Evocation on very shaky thematic grounds.

If Evocation had more and better damage-with-rider spells and no-SR spells the mechanical complaints would be solved, and if all of Conjuration (Creation) were moved into Evocation the thematic complaints would be solved as well.

[Nifft]

I liked the 1e convention, whereby Cure spells were Necromancy.

That meant both the basic spell and the "reversed" version were the same school.

[Aotrs Commander]

Conceptually, dual-school spells are actually a great idea. With the stronger options like Focused Specialist and Red Wizard forcing the prohibition of extra schools and dual-school spells being inaccessible if either school is prohibited, making some of the more complex and/or stronger spells dual-school can do wonders for limiting wizard spell access.

Imagine if, to pick some examples arbitrarily, polymorph and similar spells were Enchantment/Transmutation (because they change both mind and body), planar binding and similar spells were Conjuration/Enchantment (because they have a built-in control effect, as opposed to e.g. planar ally), shadow conjuration and shadow evocation were Conjuration/Illusion and Evocation/Illusion respectively (for obvious reasons), mind blank was Abjuration/Illusion (because of its blanket anti-Divination effects), and so on. Suddenly the default advice of "Specialize Conjuration or Transmutation, dump Enchantment/Evocation/Necromancy" is no longer such an easy choice.

The problem, of course, is that for this setup to work well you have to (A) have roughly balanced schools to start, (B) have been doing the dual-school thing in every book instead of adding it partway, and (C) assign multiple schools to those spells carefully with respect to both balance and flavor. Alas, the actual implementation in PHB2 and later didn't do any of the three, so unless you want to invest in a full overhaul then removing dual-school spells is the better approach.



Shadow being an Inner Plane makes sense, given that the Plane of Shadow started off as the Para-Energy Plane between the Positive and Negative Energy Planes, but making the Plane of Ice a Transitive Plane in its place is an interesting option that I've never seen used before. Could you expound a bit on how your planar setup works and how this Plane of Entropy fits into things?

Sure.

For efficiency, I'll just quote myself (as I posted this in the random banter thread):

Might as well dump it here, for the sake of arguement, so see what I did in the end...

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General Note on Planes and planets: Planes are found in cosmologies, which may though of (incorrectly, but illustratively) as akin to planets in solar systems. A cosmology is a cluster of planes “local” to one or more solar systems. Some solar systems (despite being disparate in material space) share a “local” set of planes (e.g. Toril and Faerun), where as others (e.g. Golarion or Dreemaenhyll) have a different set of “local” planes. A given cosmology may have a different composition of planes, not unlike a planetary systems have different planets.

Despite what is popularly believed (often even by the gods themselves), most planes are not actually infinite, but merely extremely large. The “true” physical size of an “infinite” plane is usually no more than about half a light-year radius at most (often smaller, though nearly incomprehensibly still massive), before they peter out into the void. In the case of some planes (e.g. elemental planes), it is theorhetically possible to travel through the void to another “local” cluster of planes in the same way as travelling between star-systems in regular space. (I..e, if one took a starship into the Elemental Plane of Fire in Faerun’s Great Wheel cosmology, one might be able to travel via FTL methods to the Elemental Plane of Fire in Golarion’s Great Beyond.)

Note that while the Ethereal and Astral planes are truly coterminous with all points of the prime material plane (and as massively finite in size), they are still subject to the limitations of intersystem distances and thus descriptions of “anywhere on the plane” should be treated as “anywhere on the ‘local’ plane.”



DREEMEANHYLL COSMOLOGY

During the late 28th century, the planar scholars of Dreemaenhyll depicted the cosmology as something they termed the Great Pillar. The following is taken from Introduction to the Planes, 37th edition, a technical manual widely available in the Dark Lands.

THE GREAT PILLAR

In this current model of the universe, the Great Pillar is thought of as a akin to a tree-trunk, where the inner, Elemental planes are nested together like the rings of the wood, each ring being of a lower density and phase of matter the further from the core. Classical studies only considered the planes of Earth, Water and Air (more correctly, Solid, Liquid and Gas), but later scholars determined the existence of planes of Plasma – formerly incorrectly known as Lightning (”above” the Plane of Air) – and even more recently, Nether (“below” the Plane of Earth). It is now understood that the true “core” of this model is the Nether Plane, hidden “within/beneath” the deepest depths of the Plane of Earth, and “outside/above” the Plane of Air lays the Plane of Plasma. These five planes are coterminous with their inner and outer neighbours, but there are places where the borders extend between non-neighbouring planes. Notably, however, the Nether plane is particularly difficult to access due to its nature (being comprised predominantly of “Dark Matter.”)

The planes of Fire and Ice are conterminous to all of the places on the pillar. The former is typically depicted as being located to the “left” of the pillar and the Plane of Entropy to the “right.” Strictly speaking, these common names are inaccurate; they are more correctly the Planes of Enthalpy (heat) and Entropy (cold), though they take their names from the most common materials which comprise the make-up of the areas of these planes closest to the Prime material plane and the inner planes.

The Astral (psychic) Plane surrounds and permeates the Great Pillar and is thought of as a “sea” which surrounds are encompasses all the remaining planes.

The Prime material plane is thought off as being situated out from the Pillar (in the “sea”, but close to the Pillar). The view point of the Great Pillar depicted (and shown in basic form below) is seen as if the viewer is looking at the pillar from a distance, where all the planes can be seen. This is where the material plane is located, looking as it were, into the page. The existence of alternate dimensions similar to the prime are assumed to be located here. Alternate Realities (as opposed to just other dimensions) are usually only accessible from the prime.

The Ethereal Plane is closely coexistent with the elemental planes and the Prime.

The aligned outer planes tend to be depicted surrounding the great pillar. At “top” of the Pillar, lie the Good aligned planes; at the “bottom” lie the Evil planes. As entropy is the reduction of disorder, the Planes of Law are usually shown to the right, and chaotic to the left of the Pillar. This is a subjective but illustrative viewpoint.

Further to the “left” of the Plane of Fire is the Positive Energy Plane, and to the “right” of the Plane of Cold the Negative Energy Plane is located.

The theoretical planes of Time and Creation are not usually depicted, but when they are, they are situated further outside and surrounding the aligned planes. Time is placed at the lower right, because of its attributed lawful (entropic) and evil (i.e. destructive) traits; Creation is placed in the upper left, as it is attributed chaotic (enthalpic) and good (i.e. new life) traits.



From the elemental planes come the elemental energies: the central physical elements: Air, Earth, Water; the positive elements Electricity, Fire (more accurately heat) and Light (a coherent form of heat) and the privative elements Cold and Shadow (a coherent from of cold) and the relatively new and poorly understood Nether. Finally, there is Sonic (more properly vibration, and related to heat) and Acid (more properly corrosion).

Acid is a difficult element to entirely quantify, since the effect of strong acids from chemical forms and magical corrosion are extremely similar and largely interchangeable.

Nether is a form of “dark energy” found on the Nether plane amid the “dark matter.” Its properties are not understood well, and it has been known by several different names (including “darkning” or “vovcity” both proposed names following the (not strictly accurate) idea that nether is antithesis to electricity), but “nether” has become the most commonly excepted usage. One of the major discoveries is that Nether energy, when applied as a current or stream through dense matter such as stone produces gravitic effects like electricity through metal produces magnetic effects.


It is theorised by some sages that the prevalence of the positive, enthalpic energies (heat, light) in nature and the fact their antithesis only occur in their absence (cold, shadow) without the presence of magic suggests there is another ‘prime’ plane, on the opposite side of the Pillar. In this ‘prime’ everything would not tend to entropy as it our universe, but to enthalpy. Thus, their ‘suns’ would throw out cold and darkness into a brightly-lit and superheated void
¹.

What was formerly believed to be the plane of Shadow, later reclassified and the elemental Plane of Gloom is now confirmed to be a region of the Plane of Ice (more strictly accurately, a region of the Plane of Enthalpy where ice is not the prevalent factor) by the borders of the Negative Energy Plane. This is now believed to be an entropic echo of the Prime Material plane. It has been described not inaccurately – but also not strictly correctly - as a shadow of the Prime material plane, though exactly what is causing the Prime to cast a “shadow” remains unknown.




¹This theory has been disproved by the more technological advanced civilisations of the modern era. The lack of functional ‘opposites’ save for magical or technological intervention is more to do with the laws of the universe. Each element has its own rules and in the same way that two chemical elements next to each other in the periodic table do not always react the same way or even in similar ways, so do the elements.

The reason that the orbs are viewed as an issue is that Evocation blasting traditionally has two major issues--basically all of its spells allow SR (not a huge issue, with low SR values overall and SR-penetrating spells and all, but a killer issue if you run into golems or SR-optimized enemies), and most of its spells either do good damage with no rider effect or poor damage with a rider effect--and the orb spells overcome both of those issues in a single spell line while going to Conjuration instead of Evocation on very shaky thematic grounds.

If Evocation had more and better damage-with-rider spells and no-SR spells the mechanical complaints would be solved, and if all of Conjuration (Creation) were moved into Evocation the thematic complaints would be solved as well.

Hmm... Now that I think of it in the context of what I'm doing...

I have added COPIOUS amounts of damage spells over the years¹; one of the reasons light Radiant and Shadow damage have been trivial to integrate into the 3.Aotrs rules proper is that all the spells that should concievably deal that damage already were dealing that, just only in the Dree-specific rules, so it was just a case of removing some grey text shading and adding a few resistances/immunities to the bestiary, and there are a good few now-Nether offensive spells as well. All three damage types are also, a bit like Force, not supposed to be commonly resisted - it's frickin' LASER, dude! (Just don't shoot Shadow (i.e. priviative laser) at Undead, as they tend to absorb it, the price you pay for a lot of radiant spells (e.g. Searing Light) doing extra damage to Undead and/or bypassing Spirit-Bound Lich rejuvenation on the flip side).

But, on having a solid look, the only SR: Nos are conjuration, and all the others are almost all SR: Yes Evocations. While I have no conceptual problems in conjuration having offense (especially with spells that shoot, like, showers of knives and crap), I ought to maybe look into making the Orbs (and said knife-shooting spells, though they are affected by DR of course) be not literally the ONLY attack spells which ignore SR, with very few exceptions.

Hmm. Perhaps a little tweaking is in order, so that, for example, all the spells that just do damage either have an attack roll and no save and they can either exceed the nominal damage cap (like Scorching Ray) and be subject to SR or be SR: No. And automatic hit spells (save or half or not) ought to automatically be SR:Yes, because it's not the damage the SR affects, it's the magical target lock. (Spell which are automatic hit, no save and no SR should generally be avoided, of course; that's no fun to be on the receiving end of on either side of the screen.)




¹For funsies, let's name some! Absolute Zero, Eternal Darkness, Lightning Net, Electro-Coil, Shock Blast, Shock Pulse, Laser Beam, Wraith Bomb, Wind Blades, Daggerfall, Blade Shower, the ten Scatter Bolt spells - one for each level, Enchanted Torpedo/Arcane Rocket/Thaumaterical Bomb (I was in the TIE Fighter phase), Shadow Bolt, Nether Wave, Dying Star, Word of Power (because DK1 is ALSO one of my top games of all time - this is notable for being an existant Evocation with no SR, but it's 8th level and very close range.)

[GrayDeath]

The obvious thing would have been to elave i8t in Necromancy, and then go over all the Spells and divide them into Postivie and negative "Life/Death" Manipulation, as they obviously couldnt make the whole school alignment neutral.

But if one does not want that, I for one would go with either Evocation (as youa re manipulationg positive Energy, for msot healing) or Transmutation before I even start to think about conjuration...

[Segev]

Chiming in to agree they should have stayed Necromancy, and should be moved back into Necromancy. Necromancy probably should have some stuff shuffled OUT of it, too; all the [fear] related effects really more appropriately belong to Enchantment. But for some reason, Necromancy got redefined as "the spooky one" rather than one that happened to have a number of spooky effects.

[Jay R]

Change it, run game like that, and ask your players if it mattered and how they liked it. That's the only way to get any real information.

But for some reason, Necromancy got redefined as "the spooky one" rather than one that happened to have a number of spooky effects.

Necromancy literally means "black magic". It was defined as the spooky one hundreds of years ago.

[Nifft]

Even in core, Illusion has some [Fear] effects, so it's not like fear is exclusively Necromantic.

I don't mind Necromancy taking some of the [Fear] effects, but I agree that Enchantment should also get access to the descriptor.

Another related idea: depending on your local planar cosmology, the Outer Planes might be the afterlife for dead souls, in which case (Lesser|Greater) Planar Binding could arguably become Necromancy.

[Ravens_cry]

I liked it in the Necromancy school myself. One, it opened it up as more than the school of 'evil' magic, and, for me, I liked the flavour of it being a school of the manipulation of forces of life and death.

[Aotrs Commander]

Well, I moved it all across to Necromancy. Took a lot longer than I thought (there was quite a few spell to grab from Spc/PHBII - but I ALSO found at least a couple of those had 3.A errata I'd pencilled in but not added to the digital version, that that was worth doing).



Also trekked back through ALL the Evocation spells in my spells document (which is basically all the offensive ones) and carefully assessed them on SR terms and made a modest number SR no, especially if the did nothing other than damage and the damage was below the cap. (So not Scorching Ray, since that gets up to 12D6, but if anyone wants to make me an arguement that Scorching Ray should not be subject to SR, I'm willing to listen!)

[Rater202]

Change it, run game like that, and ask your players if it mattered and how they liked it. That's the only way to get any real information.



Necromancy literally means "black magic". It was defined as the spooky one hundreds of years ago.

No it doesn't. There was some crossover with the French phrase for black Magic which changed the meaning somewhat, but it comes from the Greek "Nekros" meaning "corpse" and "manteia," divination.

The original/purest form of Necromancy is talking to the dead to learn things, either extracting knowledge from the corpse or calling up the spirit.

[NotASpiderSwarm]

Even in core, Illusion has some [Fear] effects, so it's not like fear is exclusively Necromantic.

I don't mind Necromancy taking some of the [Fear] effects, but I agree that Enchantment should also get access to the descriptor.

Another related idea: depending on your local planar cosmology, the Outer Planes might be the afterlife for dead souls, in which case (Lesser|Greater) Planar Binding could arguably become Necromancy.

This right here is why I was saying "Either rebuild from the ground up or make ~3 obvious changes and stop before you get too deep". There's a good argument to be made that everything Necromancy does could be done better by someone else(Evocation for cold/negative energy, Enchantment for fear), and eliminating the school is the way to boost two underused schools while making the school system actually more consistent. Don't go down that road, it's neverending. There's so many semi-obvious problems with the school system that any fix larger than the most basic will turn into a massive rebuild, and if you're doing that, it's easier to start over than to try to build your tower on sand.

[Segev]

This right here is why I was saying "Either rebuild from the ground up or make ~3 obvious changes and stop before you get too deep". There's a good argument to be made that everything Necromancy does could be done better by someone else(Evocation for cold/negative energy, Enchantment for fear), and eliminating the school is the way to boost two underused schools while making the school system actually more consistent. Don't go down that road, it's neverending. There's so many semi-obvious problems with the school system that any fix larger than the most basic will turn into a massive rebuild, and if you're doing that, it's easier to start over than to try to build your tower on sand.

Not everything. There is something fundamentally unsatisfying about moving the undead control into Enchantment, because there's...a difference in FEEL between compelling the undead and dominating the living. Which may just be a sort of lingering inertia, but... well, did you know that undead in 5e are only MOSTLY immune to [I]charm monster[i] and dominate monster? Each one that is immune to the Charmed condition says so, because it's not innate to being undead. This is also the only way to control undead via spell; Necromancers have a limited ability to assert control after level 14, and certain spells that make them let you control them, usually for a day or so unless you keep recasting them. But shadows and a few others can be affected by Enchantment spells, which just feels weird.

And MAKING undead could be pushed into another school, but would be as much a stretch as healing was in conjuration, if not moreso.

Necromancy does fill a specific niche. It's just that stuff has been taken out of it that does fit there and other stuff has been shoveled in, all, seemingly, in the name of making it "the badguy school."

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Chiming in to agree they should have stayed Necromancy, and should be moved back into Necromancy. Necromancy probably should have some stuff shuffled OUT of it, too; all the [fear] related effects really more appropriately belong to Enchantment. But for some reason, Necromancy got redefined as "the spooky one" rather than one that happened to have a number of spooky effects.

Necromancy includes fear effects not so much because Necromancy is "the spooky school" (though there were definitely efforts in that direction in early 3e) but because curses, diseases, and similar afflictions are associated with negative energy and vitality, so things like fear and insanity (as afflictions or diseases of the mind) fit in Necromancy's wheelhouse just as much as they do in Enchantment's. And Illusion's as well, as Nifft mentioned, with the (Phantasm) subschool; if dual-school spells were more of a thing early on, phantasmal killer would be the poster child for Illusion/Necromancy spells.

I think multiple schools having access to similar effects is a good thing--Enchantment, Illusion, and Necromancy sharing fear effects is similar to how Conjuration, Evocation, and Transmutation can all deal with elemental effects or how Abjuration, Illusion, and Transmutation could reasonably have disguise/camouflage/illusion effects--so long as (A) the way a given effect is used differs between schools and (B) no effect is spread beyond three schools, or ideally two.

Another related idea: depending on your local planar cosmology, the Outer Planes might be the afterlife for dead souls, in which case (Lesser|Greater) Planar Binding could arguably become Necromancy.

If you're going to do that, it would make more sense to give (Summoning) to Necromancy and leave (Calling) to Conjuration, as summoning spells are all about calling up or projecting a spiritual copy or imprint of a creature (which Necromancy already does with astral projection, speak with dead, and the actual summon undead line) where calling spells are all about physically moving a creature through the Astral Plane (which Conjuration already does with teleportation spells).

Necromancy does fill a specific niche. It's just that stuff has been taken out of it that does fit there and other stuff has been shoveled in, all, seemingly, in the name of making it "the badguy school."

Indeed. The issue with Necromancy, and its fellow grab-bag school Abjuration, is that they do have fairly distinct themes and valuable mechanical niches which have been ignored or twisted by some of the developers when assigning spells to schools. Most of the "semi-obvious problems with the school system" NotASpiderSwarm mentioned have nothing to do with the schools themselves, just the spell allocation, and can be entirely fixed by moving spells around while leaving the schools themselves alone.

Which isn't to say one can't or shouldn't change the schools--I often remove Abjuration in my own campaigns in favor of other schools--but the idea that that's a necessary first step to fixing school balance is wrong.

[Nifft]

If you're going to do that, it would make more sense to give (Summoning) to Necromancy and leave (Calling) to Conjuration, as summoning spells are all about calling up or projecting a spiritual copy or imprint of a creature (which Necromancy already does with astral projection, speak with dead, and the actual summon undead line) where calling spells are all about physically moving a creature through the Astral Plane (which Conjuration already does with teleportation spells).

Hmm. Moving the Summon Undead chain into Necromancy would make sense, that's a clear misplacement as-is.

For the other (Summoning) spells, if they're just imprints, then I feel like Evocation might cover them.

As long as every schools has something compelling, something to build a PC around.

[Aotrs Commander]

This right here is why I was saying "Either rebuild from the ground up or make ~3 obvious changes and stop before you get too deep". There's a good argument to be made that everything Necromancy does could be done better by someone else(Evocation for cold/negative energy, Enchantment for fear), and eliminating the school is the way to boost two underused schools while making the school system actually more consistent. Don't go down that road, it's neverending. There's so many semi-obvious problems with the school system that any fix larger than the most basic will turn into a massive rebuild, and if you're doing that, it's easier to start over than to try to build your tower on sand.

I think multiple schools having access to similar effects is a good thing--Enchantment, Illusion, and Necromancy sharing fear effects is similar to how Conjuration, Evocation, and Transmutation can all deal with elemental effects or how Abjuration, Illusion, and Transmutation could reasonably have disguise/camouflage/illusion effects--so long as (A) the way a given effect is used differs between schools and (B) no effect is spread beyond three schools, or ideally two.

The other things to bear in mind is hwo comparitively small the effect on schools is. There are only five classes which care about schools - Wizards the most, and then only specialist wizards and they generally only about what spells they DON'T have access to; spellthives a little bit (because they lose access to Evocation/Conjuration/Necromancy); and beguilers/dread necromancers¹/warmages for advanced learning for their one school. And for Spell Focus: Conjuration feat chain.

That's pretty much it. It's not trivial, but it's also not that massively far reaching. Divine casters are still mostly not going to give a crap, for example, save those taking a feat (though clerics might be more inclined to take Spell Focus (necromancy) now, since it is more solidly in their general wheelhouse). (Admittedly conjuration healing => necromancy (healing) was more spells than I first thought, but not THAT many.) So you could spend a lot of effort for not much gain.

(Yes, you could definitely say sonic => thunder damage was a change like that (as was about half of acid to corrosion damage for Dree, especially since I reverted it this pass through...!) and you'd be entirely right of course, but re-sorting the schools would be a job of another magnitude entirely. These changes affect a subset of all availble spells, meaning there are still plenty of spells in the three books apart from my spells document.

I COULD, due to adding the PF [Emotion] descriptor and therefore having it all in one place I could find/replace on, potentially change some Fear spells - but really, aside from robbing the Dred Necro to pay the beguiler (and you can probably guess which of those two classes is going to get favouritism from me!) and maybe letting the one illusionist character undr another DM who uses 3.Aotrs have some more spells that probably won't work on much, it's not really worth the evaluation time.)

Hmm. Moving the Summon Undead chain into Necromancy would make sense, that's a clear misplacement as-is.

For the other (Summoning) spells, if they're just imprints, then I feel like Evocation might cover them.

As long as every schools has something compelling, something to build a PC around.

I thought about that, but it IS still a Summon spell, just with a different set of summons. (Though, again, if it was worth the list bloat for double schools (and it really, REALLY isn't, as mention above), it would be a candidate for Conj/Necro.)

(Which have been expanded, adding in PF's nice Skeleton Champion and a likewise-templated sorcerer (to give you something ala skeleton mage from Diablo 2) among others and I may well consider adding VI-IX as well at a later point when I'm "Done." Also)

Leaving them in conjuration also means I don't have to check adjust all the summon-buffing feats and effect's wordings.



¹Interesting point about the change to necromancy; dread necromancers can now pick up healing spells with Advanced Learning.

...

Crap, when I've been adding spells to their spell list (as I have a "dread necromancer spells" section and a "necromancy spells" section for ease of reference) as I've been going through, I think I was only paying attention to wizards spells and the gets cleric or wizard. (Actually, no, 3.A Dread Necromancers get "Necromancy" so on ANYONE's list. Note to self: make sure beguiler/warmage alot delete "sor/wiz" from their "must be from school" line and remember that when doing their lsist properly...)

...

That'll be why the seperate section exists, dumbass, because you wouldn't have bothered if it was just wizard spells, would you, because you can search them by school.

*skullpalm*

Sod, I'll have to got through my entire document!

One step forwards...



Also, Dread Necromancer may be one of the classes 3.Aotrs may have over-tuned slightly. *cough* (Hexblade - yes HEXBLADE - might be another, on account of them not only stealing all the PF Witch's hexes, but also becoming the first fixed-list half-caster with a considerably bigger spell list...! We will see how "broken" that is in actual play. I honestly don't foresee it being that big a deal, given how few spells they actually get per day.)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Hmm. Moving the Summon Undead chain into Necromancy would make sense, that's a clear misplacement as-is.

For the other (Summoning) spells, if they're just imprints, then I feel like Evocation might cover them.

Summoning physical creatures and things is still more the domain of Conjuration than either Necromancy (which could plausibly summon incorporeal undead, but not skeletons and such) or Evocation (which doesn't usually deal in the kind of complexity involved in summoning), but dual-school Conjuration/Necromancy undead-summoning spells and Conjuration/Evocation elemental-summoning spells could make sense if you're writing up new spells to fill in some gaps.

The other things to bear in mind is hwo comparitively small the effect on schools is. There are only five classes which care about schools - Wizards the most, and then only specialist wizards and they generally only about what spells they DON'T have access to; spellthives a little bit (because they lose access to Evocation/Conjuration/Necromancy); and beguilers/dread necromancers¹/warmages for advanced learning for their one school. And for Spell Focus: Conjuration feat chain.

That's pretty much it. It's not trivial, but it's also not that massively far reaching. Divine casters are still mostly not going to give a crap, for example, save those taking a feat (though clerics might be more inclined to take Spell Focus (necromancy) now, since it is more solidly in their general wheelhouse). (Admittedly conjuration healing => necromancy (healing) was more spells than I first thought, but not THAT many.) So you could spend a lot of effort for not much gain.

"Only wizards, full-list casters, and spellthieves" can still be a pretty major impact depending on your group; my last group was a 6-person group that loved arcane casters, so basically every party of PCs had 3+ arcanists and changes to wizardly stuff would have had a big impact on them. And there's also a bunch of stuff scattered around that can make PCs of other classes care about which effects belong to which school, like school-focused PrCs (e.g. a Sorcerer/Abjurant Champion cares a lot about what spells are in Abjuration) or examining magic traps (e.g. the school of the magical aura you detect can tell you about what effects the trap might have, so a rogue with a wand of detect magic might care what kinds of effects that Transmutation aura he detected can cover).

But you're right, spell schools aren't as far-reaching in 3e-as-written as wizard specialization debates can sometimes make it seem. The real impact is in the context of larger rewrites like the one you're doing, where you might e.g. give bards an Advanced Learning-type feature for Evocation (Sonic)/Enchantment/Illusion spells, write up new fixed-list casters for different sets of spell schools, or the like. So basically, the spell school classification issue scales proportionally with the amount of revision effort you're putting in--the more you diverge from base 3e/PF the more impact it might potentially have.

[Nifft]

Summoning physical creatures and things is still more the domain of Conjuration than either Necromancy (which could plausibly summon incorporeal undead, but not skeletons and such) or Evocation (which doesn't usually deal in the kind of complexity involved in summoning), but dual-school Conjuration/Necromancy undead-summoning spells and Conjuration/Evocation elemental-summoning spells could make sense if you're writing up new spells to fill in some gaps.

Just make the corporeal parts ectoplasmic, similar to an Astral Construct, except generated and controlled by the spirits / souls / ghosts / echoes which the Necromancy spell actually summoned.

(Summoned) monsters aren't much like physical creatures, they're more like stereotypes of creatures. They don't die, they don't have individual personalities, quirks, or variations. They are like evoking the image of a creature.

Dual-school might be cool, too.

[LibraryOgre]

Conjuration is basically the second to last school they should have been in (aside from divination).

Necromancy? Manipulating life and death?
Alteration? Physically knitting up wounds?
Evocation? Dealing with energy?
Illusion? Making you feel better? Given the non-physical nature of many HP wounds, sure.
Enchantment? A little bit of luck, a little bit of post-hypnotic suggestion.
Abjuration? A protective ward that absorbs HP damage, which, in effect, raises your HP.
Then Conjuration, I guess, because it makes a small portal to the positive energy plane? Which can be done a lot easier by other spells? Better off summoning a creature to heal you.

So, yeah, the only way conjuration works is if you don't pay attention to what the schools are.

[Dimers]

I don't recall - nor can I find with a google search - Cure wounds being a thing in 4E, where you had healing words and the like instead; I confess, i've only played 4E with one party and my cleric there was all about FiRIN HER LAZORS, so I could be wrong. (Actually, not even sure schools were a thing in 4E.)

Tiny schools were added to a late version of Wizard class only, and affected one class mechanic, so no, not really. There were actually a couple Cure X Wounds spells in the cleric's list -- surgeless healing, but not fantastic.

Thread topic corollary: If anyone has any good suggestions on that latter point, I'm all open!

Vibrant damage?

As to the main topic, I favor necromancy for curative spells, evocation as a distant second. Conjuration would never have crossed my mind. You're, what, teleporting in new flesh? C'mon.