It is well known there are seven prohibitable schools of magic, of which the Focused Specialists can prohibit three. I'm unsure of how these stack (in other words, can you ban the same school twice?), but the Incantrix and Red Wizard prestige classes both require an extra school to be prohibited. With prestige classes such as these in mind, is it possible to create a Wizard that has every prohibitable school prohibited? And if so, does this cause any issues when the character tries to level up (e.g. being unable to gain bonus spells)?
[RPG] Is it possible to prohibit all prohibitable schools of magic with a single character
classdnd-3.5emagicprestige-classwizard
Related Solutions
The rules don’t really say; gestalt is a variant that’s pretty well fleshed-out, but it’s even less comprehensive than the usual rules.
Generally speaking, there’s no reason it can’t work. Particularly for a non-player character, where LA doesn’t come into play, you can just gestalt it with Monstrous Humanoid RHD. It will be fairly effective without being as devastating as having both all those RHD and all those class levels (i.e. many more total HD). It’s a quite appropriate way to power up a monster without making a lot of math wonky by inflating coincidental numbers.
But the rules don’t actually suggest or recommend this approach (or suggest or recommend against it, for that matter).
Challenge Rating
As for CR, that’s a nearly-impossible question to answer. I’m reasonably confident that I could find CR 3-4 monsters that could keep up with this guy (allips and That Damn Crab come to mind), and also reasonably confident that I could find CR 10-12 monsters that he could handle. Meanwhile, 6th-level parties could potentially founder on those CR 3-4 monsters, or kill even things CR’d higher than that 10-12 range. CR is, effectively, useless, because there’s no standardization.
For this case, are we claiming that a Fighter 6 is a CR 6 encounter for this party? Most parties I’ve been in would make short work of a Fighter 6 even at levels well below that (quick, four Will saves, fail any one and you’re out of the fight!), but nominally it’s a 6th-level character. For the sake of giving some answer, I’ll assume it is.
So what does being an ogre add here? Large size, which is awesome, +5 natural armor, which, fine, OK, and... that’s about it. If you use the elite array, some really solid ability scores, but lacking the Intelligence to take Combat Expertise and therefore Improved Trip (unless he dips Wolf Totem Barbarian 2, which would be awesome for him). With Large size and no trip, I’d want to go with Dungeoncrasher from Dungeonscape, grabbing Power Attack, Improved Bull Rush, Knockback (Races of Stone), and Shocktrooper (Complete Warrior).
He now can potentially do huge damage if he shoves someone into a wall, and he gets a free bull rush on each attack. Easily looking at around 70 damage on a charge or regular bull rush since you can safely Power Attack for full in those cases, and 60 damage on a regular attack (with the possibility of an iterative), assuming that he can’t reliably hit while Power Attacking for full. But that damage is contingent on slamming things into walls. Aside from bull rushes, he has no ability to control the battlefield, which means a smart group can deny him the ability to land that damage; typical attacks are going to be more like 20 damage, up to about 35 if Power Attacking becomes an option (e.g. on a charge).
Since landing both iteratives is probably unlikely, and a single dungeoncrash hit probably won’t kill in one, that could make the fight an interesting tactical encounter in the level 6-8 range. Or it could be brutal because there aren’t good options for avoiding the dungeoncrashing, the party isn’t prepared to protect squishier assets, and so on. Or it could be a cakewalk because the party immobilizes him well away from any walls and just destroys him.
Ultimately, I would CR this encounter based on how many times I expect a character have to weather a dungeoncrash hit, and look for HP values based on that. For my parties, I’d expect them not to let him do it twice, so I’d want them to survive the first hit but die if they were dumb enough to let him do it twice. You might want to give a little more leverage based on how quickly you think they can evac whoever took the hit, and how capable they are of preventing a second. For two-hit kill, probably around CR 6-8 like I said. For a three-hit kill, probably around CR 10, though I’d boost his health and saves for that. His damage is too high to allow more hits than that at levels where he could even conceivably be a threat.
If you don’t go with Dungeoncrasher, his damage goes down dramatically, and it eliminates any real hope of getting a particularly tactical encounter out of this. Then it just becomes a calculus of how many hits you expect the party to have to take in order to put him down, and CRing him based on that. Hopefully they haven’t got any clever battlefield controllers.
For players: LA
For the record: when a player in a gestalt game wants such a character, the question of LA has to be addressed. This is somewhat awkward. But in my experience, and I’ve played in many such games, simply putting the LA on “one side” of the gestalt works well (though it will be inconsistent with NPC gestalt characters built as above), since most monsters are over-LA’d and the gestalt devalues the effect. In most cases, it’s still underpowered, though of course exceptions abound.
Yes, they stack like the rule you cite says, if the specific class says they do. This is an example of exception-based design - the general rule is "only the one class counts" but then the specific rules in the other classes can say "but I do."
Not all prestige classes are alike so you should carefully read their Spellcasting benefit. In this case, Arcane Trickster says "I stack."
But classes that do not say that phrase, like Wizard and Sorcerer, do not stack. In your second example, Loremaster's spellcasting is worded like Arcane Trickster (as if she had gained a level in a spellcasting class she belonged to...), and you would need to decide whether you want it to stack onto your 5th level wizard spellcasting or your completely separate 3rd level sorcerer spellcasting. Assuming the former, you'd cast your spells from wizard slots at level 8 and your ones from your sorcerer slots at level 3.
It's kinda obvious why this is, the core idea behind prestige class design is "continue what you were doing, down a slightly weirder path" and therefore completely penalizing a spellcaster by e.g. halving their spellcaster abilities would be undesirable (even at that, many don't add a spellcasting level at every level and have one or two "penalty" levels.
Best Answer
Wizard
It turns out that topquark’s fine answer finds a couple more options:
changeling wizards from Races of Eberron are another wizard variant with 3 prohibited schools (but probably isn’t strictly compatible with focused specialist, so you can’t go to 4 that way).
wizards of high sorcery from Dragonlance Campaign Setting are another prestige class that prohibits a school of magic, but has restrictions on it.
That answer also points out that you cannot prohibit your own specialization, since the rules for prohibiting a school say you must choose “other schools” for that, and all the relevant prestige classes refer to those rules.
The changeling wizard ends up being a red herring, though: it probably doesn’t quality for focused specialist, so it’s no better than focused specialist is, and its dual specialization is problematic for the wizard of high sorcery. But if we ignore the changeling option, we actually do better.
A focused specialist/wizard of high sorcery/incantatrix/red wizard would prohibit 6 schools, leaving Divination and their specialty un-prohibited, but also un-prohibitable, since Divination never can be and you also can’t prohibit your specialization. The order of classes here matters, because both wizard of high sorcery and incantatrix have limitations on what they can prohibit, so I order them from most limiting to least limiting, to make sure we are able to use all of them. There is, as topquark mentions, still an issue with both the wizard of high sorcery and the red wizard using the same name, “enhanced specialization,” for their class features, but the rules for handling this situation are rather vague—I think most DMs would have them stack.
Note, of course, that even though our specialist cannot prohibit his own speciality, that speciality is still arguably “prohibitable” in the general sense, since it can be prohibited by someone, just not him. In order to get around that, you would need to be a diviner, but then you would also need to find a way to prohibit two more spell schools: even focused diviners only prohibit two spell schools, plus we would need a way to prohibit the school that would otherwise be the specialized school.
The long and short of it is that this is a heavily qualified “yes,” but still falls well short of the likely goal.
But that’s the wizard, which, it turns out, is not the only class that prohibits some spells. And if you thought that was a heavily qualified answer, well, get a load of this:
Shugenja
The Complete Divine shugenja does as well—not by school, but by elemental categories that are rather similar to schools (since they go well beyond simple elemental descriptors). Almost all shugenja spells are associated with one of Air, Earth, Fire, or Water, and all shugenja must choose to specialize in one of these and prohibit the opposite element. So, for example, a shugenja could specialize in Earth spells—and would therefore prohibit Air spells.
Meanwhile, a raptoran who can cast summon monster IV or summon nature’s ally IV could take the skypledged prestige class from Races of the Wild—which requires prohibiting all spells with the earth, fire, and/or water descriptors.
So if a raptoran shugenja of an order specializing in Earth were to somehow get summon monster IV or summon nature’s ally IV into their spells known—neither is a shugenja spell—they would have Air shugenja spells prohibited as well as all spells with the earth, fire, and/or water descriptors. Shugenja do have a few spells designated All, but these are reasonably considered “unprohibitable” since no shugenja order does so.
However, there are a lot of caveats here:
Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with spell schools, which the question did specify. Though shugenja elements are basically an alternate set of schools. Complete Divine calls them orders.
There are spells that a shugenja considers Earth, Fire, or Water that do not actually have the earth, fire, or water descriptors (for obvious examples, electricity falls under Fire and ice falls under Water; more esoteric examples like Air getting illusions or Water getting healing are also there). The skypledged prohibition specifies earth, fire, and/or water descriptors, and these spells don’t have them.
The skypledged prohibition is vastly laxer than the shugenja or wizard prohibitions: a skypledged can still cast these spells. They just lose their non-spellcasting skypledged class features—a big blow, no doubt, but it’s still well short of “you simply cannot.”
The skypledged gets access to a divine spellpool—the ability to get some spells off of the cleric or druid spell lists. Since the cleric and druid spell lists don’t have the same elemental categories that the shugenja list does, it’s unclear if the shugenja prohibition would even apply to it. Our shugenja here may well be able to pull Air or [air] spells from the spellpool, and use them despite our devotion to Earth. If nothing else, all of the spells with no elemental descriptor and that aren’t on the shugenja spell list are presumably fair game, which leaves a whole lot of spells available.
This character is fundamentally absurd: this shugenja has a religious devotion to Earth while simultaneously being pledged to the sky and air elementals in their battle against the other elements, Earth included? It seems like one or the other those those vows would be considered broken somewhere along the line here. The rules for each class don’t actually mention any such restriction, of course, but one’s DM may well do so.
So this character has kind of prohibited nearly all of their spells—after all, if the prohibition is voluntary anyway, and the shugenja considers all of the spells listed under Earth, Fire, and Water to be spells of that element even if they don’t have the descriptor, they may well feel beholden to avoid those spells as well. And then they could mentally categorize all of the cleric or druid spells under All—or under some element they won’t use.
But as I said, a lot of caveats and asterisks on that.