Best Arcane School

bonus points for being that deseptive or that well planned your party either A] has no idea your a necromancer or B] can trick them to your cause eg paladin falling, rouge being bribed, wizard lusting for power ectra
any disputes on this?

fuckin' this. always found that necromancy is best when you keep it in your back pocket. Made a character once that used evocation in combat or when otherwise seen with his allies. Everyone was convinced he was just an evoker, and he was a pretty decent damage dealer too. Used to clean up the battle field and wound up with a pretty sizable chest full of skeletons to toy around with. Saved the day when we were trapped between a rock and a hard place. Who knew six skeletons could turn the tides of battle against a vampire coven.

As a whole, I prefery Necromancy.

Studying life and death and discovering the secret of the soul interest me way more than chunking big ball of fire.

why not both

its also a belief of mine that glass cannons are the most interesting to play. sure its nice to murder a dragon in one hit rolling down a mountin once in a while, but glass character's. that needs smarts

it can be both, just prioritise

Not that guy, but I like necromancy too.

It's less straightforwardly powerful than some of the other schools, which is good! I'd much rather have weird tools and have to think about how to use them than solve every encounter with my godly magic while the other PCs follow me around and coup-de-grace the foes I disable.

Necromancy basically allows you to switch souls around, have minions, and debuff enemies. Magic Jar soul shenanigans are proper wizardly: useful and weird without being so convenient they obviate half the game (a la "I just teleport us away.") Debuffs are good because they help your allies shine while you cackle about it all being part of your cunning plan.

And minions... minions can be a problem. There's bookkeeping, it can take up table time. You have to do extra work as a player to make sure it doesn't: have your minion stats ready, have their actions planned out and easy to resolve. And use them to help the party! Give everyone a skeleton buddy who just uses "aid another" all the time.

And necromancers don't have to be edgy. No one does. Necromancers are likely to seem a little ghoulish and macabre in the way they treat corpses like valuable raw materials, but there's nothing stopping them from having a cheerful disposition.

gotta agree. Wizards especially are my go to for this sort of thing, but I've played a glass canon fighter. High damage and initiative, but it wasn't until around level 3 that I had any survivability.
thank you for the decent answer. Wasn't saying either you or the other guy were wrong, was just looking for some reasoning.

I get where you're coming from; necromancy allows for a pretty unique number of uses and some pretty good resource management, and while I agree they don't have to be edgy, that doesn't stop the average joe from playing them like it. Necromancers seem to be the go to for edge lords, moreso than pretty much any other class or school of magic.

whats your favourite school then, bonus points for story with a good character and best moment

said in the first post, Evocation has the best damage output which comes in handy a lot of the time. divination probably has to be the most important school, and I think any wizard with their salt is going to learn at least one spell in the school. Personally, the most problematic player I've ever had was a divination wizard who pretty much made herself sit outside of reality 24/7, popping out every couple of seconds to nuke something.

huh the worst scum I had was ironicly a necromancer. you know the type "I am better than you all and I am evil and blah blah blah"
the worst was his way to draw power, I use the darkness in mortal souls to use their bodys for my purpose. so what do I do? make a cleric level up and this is a chaotic nutral but alignments weren't to important. I made his charicters life hell, settting fire to his projects, killing his pets and incinirating them to make sure they cant be resurrected. and I convinced him it was a curse and I had the cure, I held out on him for a few weeks until he begged then cast an atonement like thing so he could only do good actions. [to work he had to agree to the spell, I didn't tell him its effects, only that it would stop his misfortune] then when he tried doing his usual bull shit, he was wracked with pain and paralysed for a minute. he didn't figure it out until the DM told him, I still make that custom curse when ever I make a cleric high enough

sounds like that guy deserved it. I know a lot of people who get salty about that sort of thing though. "b-but muh OC edgelord that keeps fucking things up for the rest of the party needs to do all teh evils."

Had another character in a pretty large campaign just causing mayhem until he mouthed off to the god of law, put him under a divine geass that he couldn't do anything against the laws of the land until the god saw it fit to release it.

He left and bitched about it. it's like "what do you expect man"

Conjuration. Conjuration isn't just blatantly overpowered, it's blatantly overpowered with such a wide toolkit of spells that there are few situations it can't solve.

that's true I guess. Combine it with divination and your character is essentially a god made flesh to begin with, and isn't that what all arcane spell casters aspire to be?

not realy, my necromancer is all about death, he focuses on it talks to spirits, how to bring it about how to halt it, then I sell my services as someone who lets you have one more conversation to the deceased to remove guilt, I resurrected the paladins mentor and he was so grateful, he defended me from another paladin in a city where magic is considered evil [I tried to diplomance my way out by poining out smite evil but..you know] it only stopped when I let him cast smite evil...and I was unharmed [I love change alignment spells] they thought I was a prophet..idiots

You know, it's sad that I only just realized a necromancer could sell their services as a medium. Fuck me I'm retarded

its okay mate, what hurt more was while I was a good character, I was also pragmatic so any nobles or highborn that visited me. [more than you would think, lots of politics can be easy if the opponent you killed cant lie to you] I placed a spell on them to "help the seaunce" but infact it was a tracker and a suggestable spell

>my dm was very relaxed on how you could make custom spells, you just needed a spell with that effect, like touch calm and area fireball you can make touch fireball or area calm

Shadowmancy.
Obscure, more effective in the dark, makes saves against your spells difficult even more under these conditions, and you are able to work the "Mysticism" part of magic more in social situations, working in strange mysterious ways as you can be elusive, stealthy and much more.

Not to Mention it comes with Shadow Lichdom, something so fucking obscure it's only ever been presented in 3 Instances in D&D, one in Neverwitner Nights 1, the other in Tome of Magic, and another in 2e's Ravenloft as part of a netbook.

it's effectively ,the combination of a Lich and Shade, with all the benefits you can reap, nevermind that it's so obscure NO ONE has any idea how to actually kill you.

I'm not on about that shadow-weave crap, mind you, this used to be a specialization school in 2e, but again, numbers of practitioners were few, and I might note that the archetypical shadowcaster acts like a fucking channer in every respect to the practice of magic they use.

Necromancy is a good school, but I'm going to have to go with Transmutation.

You get a lot of great support and utility spells (Fly is transmutation, for some reason), a couple save or suck spells and one of the best attack spells in the game (disintegrate).

I'm nicking this for my next necromancer, thanks a lot screw litchdom SHADOW LITCH BABY

Why is fly transmutation?

It doesn't make you grow wings, it just elevates you with an invisible field of magic. Know what school of magic involves manipulating magic fields? Abjuration.

Oh right, it also lets you fuck with people like the best boogeyman ever, want piety with Shar? Just roll into some kid's bedroom as a shadow-Lich, scare the crap out of them into worshiping the mistress of the dark, and you've got mad privileges to reap.

Next to this, there is Jestering, and Necromancy.

Yes, D&D has Jesters, and you should NEVER fuck with them, look up Diarmund's Last Jest, a Canonical FR event which had a jester tell a joke so good it killed everyone in a room, as a Power word kill spell.

In the canon FR Comics, a jester guild in waterdeep formed in order to recover this lost secret of the art, and they SOMEHOW REANIMATED DIARMUNDS CORPSE IN A RITUAL DESPITE JESTERS NOT BEING ABLE TO USE NECROMANCY and it became a GIANT FIREBALL THROWING SIEGE JESTER SKELETON That nearly sacked the entire city and burned it all to the ground.

To top this shit off, A jester can do the following:
Perform so hard DEITIES FUCKING PAY TO SEE YOU AS YOU PERFORM IN THE HEAVENS
Withdraw anything from the Deck of many things, the extended deck of many things, the Deck of portals, and any other item like this without issue
Become immune to the very concept of insanity itself (Waltz right into Ry'leh and say Bazinga why don't you?)
Weave spells into jests, and casual conversation as a class ability, even though it's canon normal wizards can do this as a part of a skill check in FR, the rules in 3.5 for this beign shown in Kingdoms of Kalamar Jester's can literally hide the incantations for spells like Weird in casual conversation,

Oh, and Jesters can juggle, and thus fuck with projectile spam this way.
Fucking broken, and it's all a part of the canon.

I don't really have to explain Necromancy though.

>Why is fly transmutation?
Because Transmutation is about altering the properties of things, and Fly does that.
Fly alters the properties of your relation to gravity.
Same reason why Alter Gravity is Transmutation or Time Stop.

Mysticism.

>Teleport
>Drain Health, Mana, and Stamina
>Reflect Magic and Damage

Literal god mode.

Anyhow, to learn about Jesters, you'll have to read their entries for 1e & 2e Respectively, then the Forgotten Realms Comics with the Waterdeep jester's guild, then the 3.5 Broken-ass Infinite money generating Jester Prestige Class, then the jester Base class in the Dragon Compendium.

So to list Jester benefits-
-Very class itself is a source of income
-Can fuck with people, entertain at parties that are high class
-Easier gained reputation
-Can talk to many NPCs that would otherwise be hostile due to beign a jester
-Can juggle grenades, and just about anything
-Can Weave spells in jokes and casual conversation to kill people unaware, or even buff oneself without anyone ever noticing
-Can use magicians tricks, who needs magic amirite?
-Get so popular that deities pay you to perform
-Base class AND prestige class
-Immune to insanity, use this to go fullblown Kefka/terrifying
-Rod of Wonders/Deck of many things abuse
-Dedicated Clown pun-battles (This was a system they made in 2e for how fools throw-down, so to speak)

There's also buffs and debuffs because jokes and performance artistry to boot, and some Bard-fun in there, like I said, there's a lot to work with as a Clown.

what's this gotta do with spell casting

Overall? I don't think it's really a question that conjuration is "the best." It's not universally the most powerful for every situation, and isn't necessarily the most interesting from a storytelling position, but it's got the widest utility of any school by far, and has a high enough average power that it's genuinely a challenge to find a scenario where it's useless.

Evocation is energy magic, right? In which case I like that the most. Simple, yet it can be used in many various ways.
As a side question, can Evocation turn a man into a living entity of magic or is that a different school of magic?

That's an Incantrix from Planescape if I recall, you eat magic to survive.

TRANSMUTATION

TURN LEAD TO GOLD

TURN LION TO LAMB

TURN MAN TO WOMAN OR VICE-VERSA

TURN PET LIZARD TO DRAGON

Wrestling
Look at my match tonight at WWE, Wizard Wrestling Entertainment

Nothing is close to conjuration. It has everything. If you cannot cast something, you can always summon who can cast it.

Also, it is sad that best elemental damage spells in the 3.5 are conjuration.

I'm really biased towards Transmutation and Abjuration, but that's mostly because Pathfinder's Occultist can pick up both of those schools and wreck face in melee.

>So, what's your pick and why?

Either Transmutation or Abjuration.

Every summoning has a price, user. Are you sure you want to pay that price?

Enchantment is highly underrated (mostly because most scary things are resistant to it). Mitigating damage is a truly powerful thing, on many occasions my enchanter wizard in pathfinder has turned what should be a hard fight into a cake walk by mitigating the first couple rounds of damage our enemies could deal allowing us to kill a few of them thus reducing their overall damage potential. using compulsion to make enemies attack one another is even better, because not only are you mitigating their damage but you are dealing damage, thus effectively doubling the damage that they deal to their allies (because it is damage that is not dealt to your party which in a numbers race of damage works out the same as getting free damage on the enemy).

Be a good lad and summon benevolent beings. Though I always summoned moderately because I was afraid of becoming the Angel Summoner.

youtube.com/watch?v=zFuMpYTyRjw

I like Abju ration

Wards & Bindings speak to me

The strongest schools are conjuration and transmutation.

Between Gate and Shapechange what else could you possibly need that isn't covered by Wish, which is Universal.

Even at lower levels Alter Self, Polymorph, and Planar Binding are enough to break the game.

You get free, permanent servants and the ability to transcend the cycle of life. How is it not amazing?

I'm playing an Abjurer in a game right now and it's really fun. I enjoy the flavor of being a Wizard trained to tell other Wizards to go fuck themselves.

Plus you can use the Order of the Sevenfold Veil prestige class to unravel the secrets of universal magic and become an unassailable fortress of pure magic.

The other problem that enchantment faces is that a lot of the spells are just save or dies. It's useful, depending on what you face a lot of, but it's not insignificantly hamstrung by that. You can make it useful, depending on the setting, your build and a whole bunch of factors that might be out of your control. There was a Kitsune Fae sorcerer build that I saw was pretty good since they get the free +2 compulsion, but it still runs afoul of the immunities without feats. Of course that's if you're going all in on it. You can still do other things.

Basically what I was going to say. You have a school that breaks action economy with summons, binds extraplanars into service (who can be sent to their untimely demise before they demand payment.) and does a whole bunch of other stuff on top, and then the biggest school that has goodies like flight, haste, polymorph subschool and a bunch more. Polymorph any object's kind of dumb. I'd sure as shit blow the money on a scroll of it ASAP if the duration was instantaneous instead of permanent If I did something memey like use it to permanently become a dragon or something I'd get smacked with a dispel magic in the very next fight.

I might do this in my next campaign. I've wanted to try that class and I forgot you need to not forbid abjuration. That prestige class is crazy.

Necromancy is great, but you don't need to specialize in it. You can just memorize or take single spells, depending on the class, to suit your minion needs for a given day. Not to say it doesn't have great spells.
>Free, permanent servants
The ones you create aren't free, but that's a minor nitpick. It's funny just turning the majority of unintelligent undead into your own cannon fodder and makes the DM think twice about throwing big creatures other than outsiders, golems etc at you.

I'd like to make an argument for Illusion, depending on how your DM interprets the rules and how creative you get. A lot of them only allow saves if they interact with the illusions. Plus Shadow liches sound like giant memes. I need to look it up but I was going to do a psychic lich or vampire or something so it can't be that bad. In a similar vein, shadow spells can duplicate evocation and conjuration as well. It's really dependent on how you and your DM interact. RAW it's pretty strong.

Dnd 5th? Illusion hands down