Update Wizard Spell School Specialization
Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 4:39 pm
Currently, school specialization for wizards works under something akin to 2e/Baldur's Gate rules: Pick a school to specialize in, and you automatically lose the "opposed" school. The problem with this is it limits the decision to specialize (Since not all the schools are represented, and the majority of schools ban the same school: conjuration), and it makes all specialists the same: All specialist necromancers, for example, ban divination - which means that the choice isn't what school you want to specialize in, but what school you want to ban (Conjuration, illusion, divination, transmutation or enchantment).
This isn't how it works in PnP, and as a consequence basically no one takes specializations.
Suggestion: Change the specialization rules to allow wizards to pick which school to ban, rather than having the choice forced upon them. This creates more variety among wizards when you can pick what school you want to ban, because there's more reason to want to specialize.
In the future, you could also change specialization to work according to the Pathfinder rules (You don't lose access to your banned school, but it costs double slots to prepare any spells from it. This would help make certain banned schools feasible, given NWN's significantly lower number of spells). You also could bring in some of the specialization bonuses from Pathfinder or 3.5's Complete Arcana, to encourage more wizards to take a specialist school.
This isn't how it works in PnP, and as a consequence basically no one takes specializations.
Suggestion: Change the specialization rules to allow wizards to pick which school to ban, rather than having the choice forced upon them. This creates more variety among wizards when you can pick what school you want to ban, because there's more reason to want to specialize.
In the future, you could also change specialization to work according to the Pathfinder rules (You don't lose access to your banned school, but it costs double slots to prepare any spells from it. This would help make certain banned schools feasible, given NWN's significantly lower number of spells). You also could bring in some of the specialization bonuses from Pathfinder or 3.5's Complete Arcana, to encourage more wizards to take a specialist school.