What Are Some Easy Opposition Schools for Wizard

• #1

In reading through my 2e AD&D PHB, I was struck by how arbitrary some of the opposition spell schools are. Illusion and Necromancy are opposites? Divination and conjuring?

If you were establishing which schools stood in opposition, how would you list them?

• #2

What's the problem with illusion and necromancy as opposition schools? They seem to make as much sense any other set.

Schools weren't designed as opposites. So the opposition school concept is imposing a rigid order on a pre-existing and fairly loosely defined set of groups. And since magic doesn't actually exist, it's imposing order using symbolic associations instead of underlying truths. So it's incredibly arbitrary, and depending on how you massage the symbols it's trivial to justify any two schools in opposition.

• #3

Schools weren't designed as opposites. So the opposition school concept is imposing a rigid order on a pre-existing and fairly loosely defined set of groups. And since magic doesn't actually exist, it's imposing order using symbolic associations instead of underlying truths. So it's incredibly arbitrary, and depending on how you massage the symbols it's trivial to justify any two schools in opposition.

Right.

In my own campaigns back in the day, I rewrote the spell school wheel by not so much focussing on opposition schools, but identifying natural "sister schools" and seeing where that took me. E.g. Illusion connects to Enchantment (the "mind manipulation" schools) and to Conjuration (the "poof, there it is" schools); Conjuration relates to Abjuration (the classical pentagram-summoner tools), which relates to Necromancy (the other serious "don't step out of the circle" tradition), which relates to Invocation (drawing power from other planes). At that point, I only have two schools left to 'bend the chain' around.; I can internally justify connecting Divination to Invocation (cf. "Contact Other Planes") and Alteration to Enchantment sorta feels right though I can't verbally justify it so neatly.

Now, that gave me a ring I was satisfied with ... but just reflecting my biases. Someone out there is undoubtedly going to look at that pattern and think I'm bonkers. So 3e was on the right track to (IIRC) just have specialists pick for themselves which schools they can't use.

• #4

For what it's worth, here's the 2e ring:

		Illusion
	Alteration		Enchantment
Divination				Conjuration
	Evocation		Abjuration
		Necromancy

I abbreviated a couple schools to make the table easier to read: The full names are greater divination (everyone can use the low-level divinations), enchantment/charm, conjuration/summoning, and invocation/evocation.

While the school on the direct opposite side of the ring is always an opposition school, the schools to the left and right of the directly opposing school are sometimes opposition schools as well (each school has 1 to 3 opposition schools, presumably for game balance). Here's the full list, using the same abbreviations and visually showing whether the opposition schools are 1 step counterclockwise from being directly opposite (3rd from last column), directly opposing (2nd fron last column), or 1 step clockwise from being directly opposite (last column).

School	#	Opposition
Illusion	3	Abjuration	Necromancy	Evocation
Enchantment	2	Necromancy	Evocation
Conjuration	2	Evocation	Divination
Abjuration	2		Alteration	Illusion
Necromancy	2		Illusion	Enchantment
Evocation	2		Enchantment	Conjuration
Divination	1		Conjuration
Alteration	2		Abjuration	Necromancy

• #5

The 2e opposition ring was mostly set up with 2e Illusion specialists in mind, to shut out use of the same effects that 1e Illusionists (with their completely bespoke spell list) had basically no access to. Everything else cascaded from there. My flip through the 1e PHB includes quite a few alteration effects (utility spells), some specialty enchantments (subtler mind-alterations, complementing the illusions), some divinations including true sight and vision, and some conjurations (of shadows and similar strangeness). Only abjuration effects are the prismatic foozles which dual-school with Conjuration, and no Evocations or Necromancy spells at all.

So there's basically half your ring, with only some futzing around to decide what school is directly opposed to Illusion (and is by definition not going to be casting Illusion spell effects). The rest of it more or less falls into place after that.

• #6

I didn't put schools in opposition. Rather, I gathered interesting combinations of 3-5 schools and called those a guild. I think I only had to rework one of them because I underestimated the power or utility of Alteration.

Last edited: Apr 18, 2017

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Source: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/ad-d-2e-opposition-spell-schools.801905/

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