Breaking Down and Building Up: Spell Schools

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    Today, I am about to engage in what I know is bad design, but also hopefully good design. Spell Schools are a method of categorizing spells and they have a long history in D&D. The bad design I will be committing today is that I will not be looking at why they exist, how they are integrated, nor what messing with them will do. I am just going to be messing with them because the way they are now annoys me. The good design for today is that, hopefully, I will make a set of Spell Schools which make more sense.


A Brief History

    Now, before I really get into tearing apart spell schools and putting them back together, I will take a moment to look back through the history of D&D and their place within it. Originally, in OD&D, there weren't even spell schools, unless one considers the different spell lists of Magic-Users and Clerics different spell lists.. Holmes' Basic and BECMI also do not have spell schools while AD&D 1E finally introduces something similar to them.

    In the first version of AD&D, spells get a special note of the "type of magic it involves." Examples include:

  • Abjuration
  • Alteration 
  • Conjuration/Summoning
  • Divination
  • Enchantment/Charm
  • Evocation
  • Illusion/Phantasm
  • Necromantic

    From these 8 magic types, all of the spells are categorized. Yet, even at the beginning, there is a lot that is confusing about these. For example, it is a bit strange that a Druid spell like Snare (which creates and hides a magical trap) would be under Enchantment/Charm. Many spells which deal with elements like Burning Hands, Create Water, and Produce Flame are all Alteration spells instead of Evocation or Conjuration/Summoning. In fact, Evocation includes a strange mix of spells like Fireball or Lightning Bolt along with Blade Barrier, Floating Disc, and even Shield. Another notable thing that has fallen to the wayside is that spells used to be able to fit into multiple categories, such as Glyph of Warding which was an Abjuration-Evocation spell.

    Moving forward, AD&D 2nd Edition actually includes spell schools, and discusses them. The schools presented here are:

  • Abjuration
  • Alteration
  • Conjuration/Summoning
  • Enchantment/Charm
  • Greater Divinations
  • Illusions
  • Invocation/Evocation
  • Lesser Divination
  • Necromancy

    While there is some reshuffling and divisions of the schools, they are remarkably similar to those of the original version in AD&D 1E. 

    As we keep moving forward, we reach 3rd Edition, which had more in-depth mechanics relating to the spell schools. Here is what is found there:
  • Abjuration
  • Conjuration
  • Divination
  • Enchantment
  • Evocation
  • Illusion
  • Necromancy
  • Transmutation

    These same schools are also used in later editions of D&D, so I won't bother listing them out again. Throughout all of the different editions of D&D it is clear that spell schools (if they even existed) were a bit of a mess. Their meanings were not always clear and where a spell would fall in any of them seems arbitrary at the best of times. This really annoys me, and is something I intend to correct--for better or worse.


Breaking things Down

    Now, to start things off I am going to try and break down the schools and spell effects they cover into more discrete parts. Now this is going to be decently subjective, but it should also make sense. After all, there are a lot of Necromancy spells that do things other than raise the dead. So, without further ado, here is my breakdown of different spell effects:

  • Ward
  • Purify
  • Spoil
  • Banish
  • Anti-magic
  • Summon Creature
  • Summon Object
  • Force Construct
  • Teleportation
  • Detection
  • Knowledge
  • Mental Manipulation
  • Elemental Creation
  • Light
  • Sensory Tricks (Really one for each of the 5 senses)
  • Healing
  • Harming
  • Soul Control
  • Boons
  • Hexes/Banes
  • Elemental Manipulation
  • Transformation
  • Object Control
  • Communication
  • Miracles

    Now that is a pretty long list, and certainly includes categories that could likely be broken down further (or are missing because of my poor note-taking ability), but I am satisfied with this breakdown. Further, you should be able to see roughly where from the original schools I got these because of the order they are placed in.


Building things Up

    Now, let me be the first to say this, but some of the original schools are quite well distinguished. Abjuration, Divination, and Illusion are all solid categories that do not seem to have a lot of overlap with any of the other schools. The other schools, however, are the problem. For example, take Enchantment and Transmutation. It should be fairly simple to deduce from the names alone that something like Charm Person is an enchantment and Transmutation would be something like turning lead into gold. But then there are spells like Jump, which grant the ability to jump really high.

    Jump is a Transmutation spell. This just feels wrong to me. Jump feels like a spell that some local witch or wizard would cast as an enchantment on a plucky young hero or some boots or something. They do not feel like something an alchemist would be dabbling in. Spells like these are what I have dubbed Boons, and they are something I do not feel fits at all under Transmutation, even if I can sort of see the logic (modifying people to grant them abilities). 

    Taking ideas like that, I have grouped the abilities into what I believe would be better groups:

  • Elemental Creation
  • Elemental Manipulation
  • Light

  • Ward
  • Purify
  • Spoil
  • Banish
  • Anti-Magic

  • Boon
  • Hex/Bane
  • Mental Manipulation

  • Summon Creature
  • Summon Object
  • Force Construct
  • Teleportation

  • Detection
  • Knowledge
  • Communication

  • Sensory Tricks

  • Healing
  • Harming
  • Soul Control
  • Transformation

  • Object Control
  • Miracles
  • Everything Else

    Now, that is quite a lot and you might notice that many of these new schools are quite similar to the old ones. I won't deny that they have their similarities, but there are also some important differences. For example, I completely disassembled the Transmutation school of magic, splitting most of its effects between the former Enchantment School and the former Necromancy School. 

    I actually had quite a bit of difficulty even getting this arrangement, since for my own personal RPG system I was debating removing Healing and Harming spells, since they feel particularly lazy. This, however, left me with 7 schools which felt so viscerally wrong to me that I gave up on the idea entirely. I could have tried to rearrange to get 6 schools, but my attempts did not go well and I decided to just accept Healing and Harming back into the fold instead of forcing myself to make everything worse.

    Now, to help make how I imagine these schools more clear, allow me to give them some temporary names:

  • Elementalism
  • Abjuration
  • Enchantment
  • Arcane Construction
  • Divination
  • Illusion
  • Occultism
  • Thaumaturgy

    This is already after doing some workshopping of the names (Occultism used to be Theurgy for example but that wasn't biological enough for me), but I am fairly happy with them. I sort of wish Arcane Construction had a different title, but at the same time I wanted to emphasize how the school is about magical constructs and that even the summoned creatures are just duplicates. 

    Despite my quibbles with the names, these schools make a lot more sense to me personally and hopefully you as well, considering you can see what categories of spells I would put in them. For anyone else to really get this system, however, I will probably need to do a decent writeup in the rules for them. Still, as I tested out some spells in old editions of D&D I didn't really come across any that made me pause on where they belonged.

    Until next time. let me know your thoughts in the comments below! And especially, let me know if there are any spells you think break the neat categories I have laid out.

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