Should it be?
>>94816151It was in AD&D.Not anymore.>Should it be?Nah, why bother? Who cares?
It is in Pathfinder 2E, at least partially. I know in multiple places its considered a necromantic magic that is keeping food fresh longterm.
>>94816151No. Necromancy specifically has to do with death.
>>94816151depends, is the magic in your setting naturally divided into "schools" by some fundamental principal, or are "schools" just invented by magic users to try to classify different spells?in mine, there are no schools of magic. necromancy is just magic that's deemed evil and spooky by society. so no, healing wouldn't be necromancy.
>>94816151I just realized how constraining the different "schools" are and how stupid that everything is confined to be tied exclusively to them even when it doesn't make sense for some spells to be in one or another.Not only that, the idea of the wizard "schools" being just the broad effects instead of incorporating the different categories in interesting ways like Beguiler in PHB2.
>>94816151Depends very much what counts as necromancy in the relevant magic system. I've seen versions where necromancy can be used to heal, and I've seen just as many where necromancy is explicitly anti-life.Personally I would argue that healing magic can repair the body, but cannot affect the soul. It can keep a person alive when injured or repair a corpse to pristine condition, but if the person 'died' and their soul passed on no matter how well you repair the vessel you cannot with healing magic alone return that vital spark to it. You would need to delve into necromancy to call the soul back and revive them. Necromancy, meanwhile, is all about souls and the afterlife and shit, but on its own cannot fix up a corpse. they can bind a soul to an object/corpse and puppet it around a bit but there's a reason that zombies still look like rotting shamblers and not like people, and a necromantically animated corpse is on a limited timer because it doesn't heal and eventually its going to fall apart because its degrading over time even if no one is actively hitting it. So the best healers are also necromancers, and the best necromancers are also healers, and certain cool things you can do require some crossover knowledge between the two, but that doesn't make them the same thing.
>>94816151Depends on the tone of the game, if you lean more towards the pulp genre and magic as "unnatural" foul sorcery (and swear the name of Crom if you see some display of it) then yes, makes thematically sense that a power that would unnaturally "heal" a wound would be under the umbrella of the "death magic" category. Healing was part of necromancy in older editions of d&d because those were more close to the original pulp inspiration (appendix N) than post 3.0 ones (the interesting part is that healing was a necromancy effect in 3.0e but became a conjuration one in 3.5e, so the transition happened right there).
I've always conceived of healing magic as inherently miraculous; a divine intervention which rolls back the clock on something that's wrong and makes it unblemished and whole again, like, say, Indie pouring water from the Holy Grail on his father's mortal injury and it's just suddenly not there anymore.Necromancy is inherently a subversion of the natural order, a forcing of flesh to do as you will. Being healed with necromancy is probably painful and scarring, as you're essentially forcing the flesh to knit shut and take a shape other than it is. Difficulties with "post-surgical" infections might occur, itchiness, phantom pain, etc. etc. Of course, there shouldn't be any mechanical difference between patching someone up with Cure Wounds or Life Transference, but it's cool fluff.
>>94816151Traditional games?
>>94816151What game?
More like Necromancy overlaps with specific subcategories of Healing. It's eally no good just pegging it all in one box.For instance, take Dr McMourning from Malifaux, with his necromantic talents he pioneers the arts of reconstructive and cosmetic surgery by, despite relatively crude techniques binding various sections of severed or scarred tissue and revitalising it from the living tissue to which it is attached He also makes abominations out of various bits of corpses pilfered from the morgue but let's just ignore that wee indiscretion for now.
>>94816151No, but I think there should be an alternative to the ol' good boy healing light. Something grotesque, like fleshcrafting. Mending flesh by manipulating it directly.
>>94816151It depends on the setting of course, but generally I'd say no, because the concepts are different. When compared to a machine, then Necromancy generally doesn't restore a broken part to it's real original state, it it at best glues it back together and makes the machine work anyway. "Dead" is in the name, there is no true healing to be had here.Still, healing is interesting, because you can be different types, so technically Necromancy can be one too (albeit not the one I'd pick if had the choice).>Nature/Druiding Healing -> Natural regeneration through enhancement of the body's own healing>Holy/Light Healing -> Restoration of the original/pure state through divine and miraculous means.>Dark/Necromantic "Healing" -> Mending of flesh and bone through unnatural means.There can be also more other interesting types of healing, like I play a cleric of a goddess of fated death and memories in a campaign and he "heals" by restoring the memory of the body, because "obviously they were never be meant to receive these wounds in the first place".
>>94816170It was necromancy (before the Remaster) because the School of Necromancy is based on the study and utilization of positive and negative energies. Healing spells utilize positive energy to enhance healing, pumping more positive into a living object, spurring on the body's natural healing or even changing that healing to full-on regeneration of flesh.Necromancy isnt just creating undead, which comprises only a few spells out of an entire school of various effects.Pic related is the full primer on what necromancy was in PF2e, from Secrets of Magic. Now necromancy as a school doesn't exist and whether healing magic is considered necromancy is up in the air until the next magic book, likely Rival Academies.What were necromancy spells now fall into three types, untyped, Vitality, and Void. Vitality is positive energy, Void is negative, and many spells that used to be necromancy were made untyped, basically neither vital or void.
>>94816151Yes, it's "good" necromancy. Regular necromancy is "bad" necromancy.
>>94816151Yes. The study of death is key to the preservation of life.
>>94816151You tell me, Literary Lord
>>94816151Yes.Healing and Necromancy should both be part of a Life Magic discipline.
>>94816151Yes and no. Healing living matter and reanimating dead one are different things but both should incur in the spellcaster loss of HP.
>>94817806Oh, thank you for the full details, Anon. I could only barely remember that tidbit from a random check in a pfs module last year or the one before
>>94816151If we're using D&D magic schools, then yeah, since positive energy is just the other side of the same coin as negative energy. Otherwise, I can't picture it going into any other school, except maybe Transmutation for healing magic that works by reconstructing biological matter rather than channeling positive energy.
>>948190143.5 made it conjuration, because youre summoning a portion of the energy from the positive energy plane into people. Standard necromancy is a weird school because its a little bit conjuration, a bit transmutation, and snippets of other schools but focused solely on manipulating positive and negative energy.
>>94816151Is brutalising shitposters a crime? Should it be?
>>94816151If you look at D&D>Early healing is Necromancy, from understanding the relationship between Mind, Body, Soul, and how they interact to form a fully realized entity. >3rd edition. Healing is conjuration. Turns out channeling properties of higher/positive planes is more effective at restoring harmed flesh than its own natural processes being accelerated/warped. >5e: Well, the planes are harder to channel from directly because both divine and arcane mages got kinda downgraded in how their power scales, but you can just use the Evocation school to generate the same positive energy locally that you were previously tapping the higher planes for.So for my two cents, it's a matter of how old the healing technique is.
>>94819636With how often spells switch school between editions of D&D, the easiest explanation is that schools of magic are purely categorization done by wizards for the sake of research.Cure Wounds has gone from Necromancy to Conjuration to Evocation to Abjuration and it doesn't really change anything about how the spell works.
>>94817424Not OP, but that was the case in D&D for one of the earlier editions.
>>94816151No
>>94816151Usually, no (at least, not beyond a technicality in a game's rules). Though it could be interesting if they were connected in an impactful way. If healing spells and the kinds of harmful death-related spells normally associated with necromancy (such as the creation of inherently evil undead monsters) required the same kind of magical knowledge, so skill in one type of necromancy would naturally translate to skill in the other, you could have a situation where healing magic is rare and illegal to practice/teach because of its connection with the less helpful side of necromancy. Has this been done?
>>94816151Fuck no.Healing spells regenerate the living tissueNecromancy is all about animating what is dead.Now where rezz spells fall, though that's more a video game thing, that is an interesting question.
>>94816213True, but schools as tags are convenient when you can say "you gain a Nth or lower level Abjuration spell" or "your Evocation spells deal extra damage".
>>94816151Healing magic is necromancy in games that designate it as such, while it isn't in games that don't designate it as such, and in games that don't have necromancy.There is no duty to making healing magic necromancy, nor is there inherent correctness in doing so.
>>94821435I'd go a step further and state other schools began cannibalizing Necromancy after it was declared taboo, with a few students of these being CryptoNecromancers continuing their research in secret.
>>94816151Hilariously there was a novel series that was a cross between superheroes suddenly awakening and the zombie apocalypse happening at the same time. Turns out the superhero with a healing factor could heal others, tried healing his just killed wife, and she was the first zombie.
>>94816151>Is bringing back dead people part of the same school of magic as bringing back dead people
I like healing used as attack magic. Like, hitting someone healthy with a healing spell forces their body to create excessive blood and flesh to the point the target swells and bursts like an overstuffed sausage.
>>94816151Within my setting, the effect of a spell is more or less divided from the "school", so you can have 4 different casters doing a healing sort of spell, all of them from a different "school" each with its own upsides and downsides.For example.>Blood Mages/Necromancers excelling at healing physical wounds, but the process is painful for living beings and often cannot heal spiritual/mental wounds.>Shamans/Druids using nature energy healing to mend the Mind, Body, and Soul equally, but often at a much slower rate in terms of "+HP per round".>Clerics/Paladins healing in a more classic way, but they are limited by their faith and their deity's dogmas on who and what they can heal.>Mages/Sorcerers healing using more of an alchemically enhanced magical process rather than a spontaneous effect.Not all healing is equal, but most casters have some way of doing it. Moreso if they have a long period of time to apply it. It often accompanies genuine alchemical or medical practices in a different way for each variety.Different parties will have to think of how their healer can operate on them, and if there are conflicting "aspects" of the healer and the wounded party. A Hydromancer healing a warrior who's primary aspect is Fire will have a lessened effect. A Necromancer trying to weave his dark magic into a Paladin could have his attempt at healing be resisted entirely just by the Paladin's divine aura alone.>inb4 what systemRules-Lite RP with my buddies. Sometimes we use Fudge or Risus, but not often.
>>94816151No and no. Necromancy is specifically speaking to the dead. Maybe you can get a spirit to work for you through some sort of deal but if you want to raise the dead and throw bolts of soulfire that burn away spirit and rot flesh, you are looking for necrotheurgy.
>>94816151Its Ycnamorcen.
>>94821435This is a sensible take. There are a few spell interactions that call out specific schools, just enough to establish that it can matter, but it almost never actually matters except for school specialization (which is a consequence of how magic is taught). I like for healing spells to be necromancy though, it's just so elegant to say that healing spells and zombie spells are doing the same thing but with positive energy vs negative energy)
>>94816151NoBut necromancers should be able to 'heal' at least through energy transfer or reanimate necrotic tissueOr turn skeletal remains into prosthetics, like lost an arm? You now have a skeleton arm
>>94818036why are you obsessed with some random person online?seems homosexual.
>>94816151Necromancy doesn't heal, though. It forces dead things to move when they should not. In some fiction, this is achieved by either taking another unwilling spirit and shoving it in some bones or corpses, or forcing the spirit of a dead person to return to their body, against their will again, to serve the necromancer as a slave who cannot resist.Healing is a thing that living creatures do naturally. Moving after dying is a thing that is unnatural and thus broadly considered evil. How fucking dumb are you faggots?
>>94826784While I get what you're saying, you can just as easily go, "your class makes it easier to use X or Y type of magic", or "While using this class you can gain 5th lvl and above X/Y spells."
>>94816151In the Death Mage manga, Death-attribute magic has a number of medical applications, like killing germs.
2/3.0yeah3.5nah>Should it be?Necromancy should be healing magic, healing magic shouldn't be healing magic. Depends on your system of classification tho
>>94816165Why did they change it? Does anyone know the reason?
>>94834156The political climate and social attitudes of the time made it untenable for the powers that be to continue denouncing healing magic, even if it was based off of necromantic flesh-knitting conventions. Opposition was strong particularly by the Knights and necromancy usage was claimed as casus belli (amongst other reasons) for the ensuing crusades, and although they ultimately came out the victors and forced a peace treaty struck in their favor, healing magic (to be hereby separated from necromancy) was explicitly set out to be legal in the written accords.
>>94816151Yes and yes.Or it is Alteration (closing wounds) combined with Evocation (chanelling life energy into the target)
