*snip 5-school theory*
While paring things down to five schools does give us a nice clean breakdown, I'm not a fan because it's not very distinct. Divination/Necromancy, Enchantment/Illusion, Abjuration/Evocation, Transmutation, and Conjuration is essentially Spirit, Mind, Energy, Matter, and Space, which strongly resembles the sphere system of Spirit/Life, Mind, Entropy/Forces, Matter, and Correspondence/Prime/Time used by Mage: The Ascension, the magicka system of Restoration, Illusion, Destruction, Alteration, and Conjuration (plus Mysticism as a catch-all) in the Elder Scrolls, and a bunch of other tabletop and computer RPGs (really, any games that don't want to use the same ol' elemental diamond).
Not to mention that the pentagram layout is very Magic: The Gathering, and Spirit/Mind/Energy/Matter/Space kinda maps to Black/Blue/Red/Green/White if you squint a bit.
Basically, yes, dividing all possible effects into five all-encompassing schools certainly works, but it's been done before and I don't think it's very interesting. It also doesn't lend itself well to differentiating casters based on specialization: a beguiler all about deception with Enchantment/Illusion is fairly distinct playstyle-wise from a wizard with a Divination/Enchantment focus who's all about spying and making sleeper agents, an Uttercold Assault necromancer with Evocation/Necromancy is very different from a shaman with Divination/Necromancy is very different from a minionmancer with Conjuration/Necromancy, etc. Meanwhile, the five spheres are broad enough that you can't really specialize in
all of Mind or Energy the way that you can reasonably dabble in most of the effects in Evocation or Necromancy, and saying you focus on Energy and Matter is just saying you focus on "spells dealing with anything in the material world" which isn't really archetypal at all.
If you were to rearrange things I'd almost be tempted to scrap the whole school idea entirely. Or at least D&D's approach to them. I've always found them, as a general matter, too esoteric to wrap my head around. That seems like a bigger or smaller project, depending.
I prefer keeping them around; even if they don't do much on their own, having them as labels ("that item has an Illusion aura", "my wizard has mostly lightning Evocations with some elemental Transmutations", etc.) is handy in the same way that it's handy to be able to say you're a cleric with the Destruction, Wrath, and Sun domains or a warblade focusing on Diamond Mind and Iron Heart with a splash of White Raven. It communicates ideas quickly, can inspire character concepts, and gives you "hooks" to hang other mechanics on, and that's good enough to be worth keeping around.
But, what ends up being the core of Conjuration? Is it just teleportation in all of its various flavors and summoning things? Is that enough?
Yes. Yes, it is.
I'd personally add in
telekinesis and similar effects, because "changing" something's position shouldn't count as Transmutation and that would really cement Conjuration as the school of moving creatures and things through space, but yeah, teleportation + TK + summoning is plenty for one school.
- Something along the lines of Arcana or Thaumaturgy, for spells relating directly to other spells and other forms of magic (dispel magic, Mordenkainen's lucubration, finding the center, anyspell, imbue with spell ability, spell matrix, mental pinnacle, divest essentia, spell immunity, absorption...the list goes on and on).
Your idea of a "Spells about Spells" school is a great idea in my opinion. I'd assume that would also include magic aura and spell turning and so forth?
Yep. Anything dealing with magic itself would go in that school, though you might want to dual-school some spells (e.g.
detect magic as Divination/Thaumaturgy) where there's significant overlap.
I must mention that this opens up a whole bunch of ideas for homebrew spells. The only possible problem I see here is that it may get a little funky with Universal spells. I'm wondering a bit if it would be better to make these spells universal spells and then allow someone to take "Spell Focus (Universal)"?
If you're classifying spells by function and already have plenty of well-defined schools, there shouldn't
be "universal" spells, as that defeats the whole purpose. Looking at all the Universal spells out there, if we add a school for magic itself it's easy to reclassify them into another school:
arcane mark,
enhance familiar, and
fortify familar are Transmutation,
familiar pocket is Conjuration, and
imbue with spell ability,
limited wish,
permanency, and
wish are Thaumaturgy.
Prestidigitation is the only outlier, but firstly we don't need an entire school for a single spell and secondly it could fit as a Conjuration/Illusion dual-school spell, assuming my above suggestion about telekinesis belonging in Conjuration is taken: moving, lifting, and creating objects is textbook Conjuration, and cleaning an object can arguably be moving or banishing dirt, while coloring, soiling, and flavoring objects definitely Illusion, and warming and cooling it can be as well if it only gives the sensation of warming and cooling.
- Splitting Transmutation into Alteration and Transmutation, since Transmutation has around double the number of spells Conjuration does at the moment and should be cut down. The dichotomy could be based on Alteration = changing something's qualities (keen edge, stone shape, enlarge person, cat's grace) vs. Transmutation = total transformation of all or part of something (the polymorph line, stoneskin, flesh to ice, fire wings) or on Alteration = changing creatures vs. Transmutation = changing objects, or whatever other criterion gives a relatively even split after all the other reshuffling going on, but either way it needs to be split up.
I have to admit I don't like this idea as much, just for the fact that too many people would disagree with it/not like it, and I don't think anyone wants to make a mechanic that nobody would be willing to play with.
I much prefer the Thaumaturgy idea as well, but I played in one game before where the DM implemented the Alteration/Transmutation split for setting reasons (part of the setting background was that two powerful factions had been warring on the southern continent for a long time, one of changelings, druids, lycanthropes, and other shapeshifters and one of dwarven artificers and engineers with lots of support from earth creatures, so she felt that it would make more sense and have more room for setting-specific homebrew if the two factions' schools, PrCs, and such were totally separate) and it noticeably cut down on Transmutation's school bloat, so I figured I'd throw the idea in the ring.
There's also the teleportation spells that don't really fit anywhere. Sure, conjuration is a nice fit for the moment, but a mage going only conjuration would be a conjurer, and a conjurer isn't exactly depicted as a master of jaunting shenanigans.
Conjuration is all about bringing creatures and objects to the caster's location by way of the Astral Plane, so it makes sense that teleportation--which is just the reverse of that, sending the caster or other stuff away from the caster's location by way of the Astral Plane--falls under the same school. Not to mention that, as RD said above, a single school with both teleportation and summoning has plenty of combat and noncombat capabilities on its own, and giving it that strong thematic identity prevents using it as a grab-bag school like it usually is.
