Saturday, April 9, 2011

Arcane, Divine, or something else?

Having split all of the available magic into the different schools, regardless of originating class, I realize now that I've blurred the Arcane/Divine division regarding the origin of magic. Some of the schools, like Conjuration and Necromancy, have a very definite Divine feel to them, though most of the benedictions Clerics got are now in Enchantment, and almost all their attack spells got dropped into Evocation.

Transmutation, as a school, has the most spells of any of them, with Evocation in second place, but the most expensive schools (in terms of experience cost for leveling) are Conjuration (because it has both summoning and healing) and Necromancy (because it can allow the caster to build an army of undead). These mostly reflect my preferences, I guess, which I picked up from my mother: I don't like messing with temporary pets/creatures, especially ones that can be changed with every casting. This is why I've replaced pretty much all the Conjurer's Summon Monster/Nature's Ally/whatever spells with one-shot, full-round summoning spells, FFTactics style. The entity bamfs in, does its thing, and bamfs out, end of discussion. Since it's summoning, not creation, this works and allows a Conjurer to summon things that do stuff outside the Conjuration school. Necromancy has a couple of modified spells tossed in to make it more like what it should be, in my opinion, but it's creation and not summoning which means I still have the temporary pet issue.

Back on track: the splitting of the schools means that some of my previous information, such as Arcane Spell Failure, is now either defunct or applies to a lot more than it used to. How do I deal with this?

Next up: Armor deterioration - Is it worth the hassle in a pen & paper venue?

1 comment:

The Bard said...

Sometimes I just need to get my thoughts down so I can step back and look at them.

I already had the division of schools into Arcane and Divine, by their placement on my L.U. Course Catalog. However, now I have an idea for incorporating a couple of new caster classes, to take advantage of this...