What's your favourite School of Magic?

Rik_Kirtaniya

Raduziel

ThacoBell

While enchantment is the most effective, Necromancy is the most fun.

Rik_Kirtaniya

Knowledge... is power.

If only we could use magic in real life...

Contemplative_Hamster

Raduziel said:

In the IE games? You have to kill your new friends to advance the plot, so:

Candy Is Dandy,
But Fireball Is Quicker

DrakeICN

I think the best way to determine the best spell school is to imagine that your mage will be limited to this school and this school only.

The choice was really difficult for me, since conjuration is a REALLY strong contender, especially considering it got chain contingency and melfs acid arrow and lots of summon spells, but in the the end, alteration / transmutation is the best school. Consider this list of spells (from most to least useful);
Slow
Haste / Improved haste
Stone skin
Time stop
Sphere of chaos
Ruby ray of reversal
Tensers transformation
Knock
Vocalise
Otilukes sphere
Strength
Shapechange
Burning hands
Shocking grasp

lroumen

Agreed. Transmutation or evocation are the most versatile and fun for me.

semiticgoddess

Abjuration: the ability to protect people
Conjuration: the ability to summon people
Divination: the ability to spy on people
Enchantment: the ability to control people
Invocation: the ability to explode people
Illusion: the ability to dazzle people
Necromancy: the ability to heal people
Alteration: the ability to petrify people

Kamigoroshi

D&D's take on Necromancy is not really all that exciting. Not a fan of summoning corpses out of thin air to say the least.

Summoning is very handy to have at lower levels. Which arcane caster doesn't love the simplicity of cheap meat shields after all? Downside however is that at mid and high levels summons are just dead weights.

I guess my all time favourite is and always will be Transmutation. It's just so darn handy to modify your own anatomy to meet your needs. Well, that, and I love to roleplay as sorcerers with aberration blood in their veins.

OlvynChuru

All I can say is:

RELEASE THE FIREBALLS!

The point when my wizards or sorcerers get the spell Fireball is the point when my party emerges from DND's classic low-level hell. Now the game will start to get less frustrating.

Fireball spamming is especially fun in the more gameplay-based DND games like Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, and The Temple of Elemental Evil. I tend to gravitate towards the characters that are good at spamming fireballs, like Qara in Neverwinter Nights 2, even if I don't care for them otherwise. Now that specialists' spells are harder to resist in the EEs, Dynaheir is my preferred spellcaster in Baldur's Gate 1, even more than Edwin or Baeloth.

On the other hand, out of all the schools, evocation is the one I have the least desire to use in real life.

Zaghoul

I really like enchantment and necromancy, but without the school of illusion and all the associated magical items and potions (i.e. invisibility) developed from that school I'd be restarting a run more often than not, especially early on. I couldn't begin to count how many times a simple potion of invisibility or spell saved my behind, or made a sneak n peak./scouting mission that much easier.

Abi_Dalzim

Well, duh. My calling card aside, nothing breaks the CR curve of a P&P campaign quite like an undead army does.

mashedtaters

When I play computer based D&D, I always go for fireballs. I love to blow up my enemies with fireballs!

I also adore cloudkill spam. I’ll take those wands of cloudkill you find everywhere and just spam the heck out of bosses.

But when I play tabletop D&D, it depends on the DM. Some DMs are all about combat. In that case, conjuration is generally my favorite choice. Divination can be REALLY fun if you have a smart, creative DM, who gives those obscure prophecies that murky up the situation even more.

Some DMs I’ve played with rule certain enchantment spells as more evil than necromancy spells.

Reasoning:
On one hand, your bending someone’s free will to your own, a pure violation of everything moral.
On the other, your just making use of an old glove someone has no need of anymore.

Abi_Dalzim

mashedtaters said:

Reasoning:
On one hand, your bending someone’s free will to your own, a pure violation of everything moral.
On the other, your just making use of an old glove someone has no need of anymore.

Honestly, that seems like a pretty crude understanding of both schools. Enchantment includes completely benign buffs like Emotion: Hope, whereas Necromancy has far worse tricks up its sleeve than simply raising zombies.

Rik_Kirtaniya

Every school's magic can be used as easily for evil as for good. It's just that the methods are different. Different ways to achieve the same goal. Simply depends on what you want to do.

Abi_Dalzim

Rik_Kirtaniya said:

Every school's magic can be used as easily for evil as for good. It's just that the methods are different. Different ways to achieve the same goal. Simply depends on what you want to do.

Granted, but methods aren't meaningless in and of themselves. Stopping a serial killer by killing them with a gun won't prompt objections from most people. Stopping them by strangling them with their own entrails is far more likely to raise eyebrows. Some schools, and more specifically some spells, have far more resemblance to the strangulation than to the gunshot, if you know what I mean.

Rik_Kirtaniya

Abi_Dalzim said:

Rik_Kirtaniya said:

Every school's magic can be used as easily for evil as for good. It's just that the methods are different. Different ways to achieve the same goal. Simply depends on what you want to do.

Granted, but methods aren't meaningless in and of themselves. Stopping a serial killer by killing them with a gun won't prompt objections from most people. Stopping them by strangling them with their own entrails is far more likely to raise eyebrows. Some schools, and more specifically some spells, have far more resemblance to the strangulation than to the gunshot, if you know what I mean.

@Abi_Dalzim I agree with your point, but what you say is more about how neatly or grotesquely someone is killed, not exactly "good or evil" as I specifically mentioned. The end result is the same, and so is the intent with which it is done.

Irenicus kills someone with a swift petrification spell, followed by disintegrating his statue with a flashing display of sparks and green light (both Alteration spells). Cool, but horrible.

JoenSo

I like the concept of illusion more than I actually like how it's been implemented in most games. I also like the sound of the word itself. Illusion. Say it out loud. Taste it. It's great.

I sometimes think of the psychological stress many spells would have on both casters, onlookers and any surviving victims. I played some mod years ago where a character had been pretty traumatized from killing someone with acid arrow and realizing what a horrible death that actually is. That's the kind of writing I'd like to see more of in a world with things like horrid wilting, vitriolic sphere and burning blood.

Mathsorcerer

The Tolarian Academy.

Chronicler

Within the forgotten realms healing spells are also considered necromancy, it's worth pointing out. It seems to encompass pretty much any manipulation of the flesh or soul.

While classically Necromancy is considered evil or at least taboo in a lot of fiction, I think it would be weird to apply that mentality to The Forgotten Realms.

Maybe certain forms of necromancy could be evil or taboo, but the school of magic as a whole is far too broad for that. Anything that heals is usually viewed pretty positively.

mashedtaters

Abi_Dalzim said:

mashedtaters said:

Reasoning:
On one hand, your bending someone’s free will to your own, a pure violation of everything moral.
On the other, your just making use of an old glove someone has no need of anymore.

Honestly, that seems like a pretty crude understanding of both schools. Enchantment includes completely benign buffs like Emotion: Hope, whereas Necromancy has far worse tricks up its sleeve than simply raising zombies.

@Abi_Dalzim

*shrugs It wasn’t my game. I just found it interesting so I thought I would share.

The rule didn’t include the more benign spells like Hope. But Charm Person and Dominate and the like were definitely evil in this particular DM’s ruling.

And, to be fair, like @Chronicler pointed out, not all necromancy spells are evil in some D&D settings. Cure and Heal are all good necromancy spells in Faerun/Baldur’s Gate, while Animate Dead is an evil spell. This guy seemed to have a similar sort of homebrew ruleser that applied to the Enchantment School, but none of the Enchantment spells were good, if I remember correctly. They were either evil or neutral.

semiticgoddess

That's odd. If I actually could cast enchantment spells, I'd use them to make people happier and more content.

Rik_Kirtaniya

semiticgod said:

That's odd. If I actually could cast enchantment spells, I'd use them to make people happier and more content.

And if we could cast Conjuration spells, we could have conjured infinite food and other such necessities, and end hunger and poverty in this world for ever.

mashedtaters

semiticgod said:

That's odd. If I actually could cast enchantment spells, I'd use them to make people happier and more content.

@semiticgod

So you’d drug people into happiness? Forcibly or non-?

I think I saw a game about that on GOG. We Happy Few, I believe.

Rik_Kirtaniya

mashedtaters said:

So you’d drug people into happiness? Forcibly or non-?

I think that belongs to the school of Alchemy, not Enchantment.

semiticgoddess

mashedtaters said:

semiticgod said:

That's odd. If I actually could cast enchantment spells, I'd use them to make people happier and more content.

@semiticgod

So you’d drug people into happiness? Forcibly or non-?

Come to think of it, I don't think it would be hard to find people who would be willing to be drugged into happiness.

Kamigoroshi

semiticgod said:

mashedtaters said:

semiticgod said:

That's odd. If I actually could cast enchantment spells, I'd use them to make people happier and more content.

@semiticgod

So you’d drug people into happiness? Forcibly or non-?

Come to think of it, I don't think it would be hard to find people who would be willing to be drugged into happiness.

The withdrawal syndromes of that spell drug however will become quite horrendous.

Remember everyone: good little wizard apprentices don't do drugs.

Rik_Kirtaniya

Kamigoroshi said:

semiticgod said:

mashedtaters said:

semiticgod said:

That's odd. If I actually could cast enchantment spells, I'd use them to make people happier and more content.

@semiticgod

So you’d drug people into happiness? Forcibly or non-?

Come to think of it, I don't think it would be hard to find people who would be willing to be drugged into happiness.

The withdrawal syndromes of that spell drug however will become quite horrendous.

Red Wizards and Zhents will be quick to exploit this idea.

On the other hand, we could also use Enchantment spells to cure Drug Addiction, by controlling and alleviating the patient's psychological dependence and withdrawal symptoms. Magic, especially Enchantment and Necromancy (Curing and Healing types only, or as some may say, White Necromancy) spells could have helped us a lot in the field of Medical Science, provided we could bring the Weave into existence here on Earth.

Loremaster

Why isn’t universalist an option? I know, it is not strictly speaking a school, but it’s what I always go for.

Abi_Dalzim

Loremaster said:

Why isn’t universalist an option? I know, it is not strictly speaking a school, but it’s what I always go for.

Because there's a difference between schools and mage types. Universalist is included in the latter, but not the former, and we're strictly discussing the former. If we were talking favorite mage type, I'd have picked Diviner, and Wild Mage would also be here.

Chronicler

"What's your favorite kind of bending?"

"I choose The Avatar, Master of All Four Elements"