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All spells, all magic items, and most other magical effects fall into one of the eight schools of magic. These schools broadly define what the magic is capable of. Every spell has the trait corresponding to its school. Some spellcasters, like specialist wizards, have particular acumen with a certain school of magic.

Abjuration

Abjurations protect and ward. They create barriers that keep out attacks, effects, or even certain types of creatures. They also create effects that harm trespassers or banish interlopers.

Conjuration

Conjuration spells transport creatures via teleportation, create an object, or bring a creature or object from somewhere else (typically from another plane) to follow your commands.

Conjuration spells often have the teleportation trait, and the creatures summoned by conjuration spells have the summoned trait.

Divination

Divinations allow you to learn the secrets of the present, past, and future. They bestow good fortune, grant you the ability to perceive remote locations, and reveal secret knowledge.

Divinations often have the detection trait if they find something, the prediction trait if they grant you insight about what might happen in the future, the revelation trait if they show things as they truly are, or the scrying trait if they let you perceive another location.

Enchantment

Enchantments affect the minds and emotions of other creatures—sometimes to influence and control them, and other times to bolster them to greater heights of courage. Enchantment spells almost always have the mental trait, and many have the emotion trait or the fear trait.

Evocation

Evocations capture magical energy and then shape it to harm your foes or protect your allies. Evocation spells often have a trait that comes from the type of damage they deal, such as acid, cold, fire, force, or sonic.

Illusion

Illusions create the semblance of something real, fooling the eyes, ears, and other senses. Depending on how the illusion is perceived, they might have the auditory, mental, or visual traits.

Necromancy

Necromancy spells harness the power of life and death. They can sap life essence or sustain creatures with life-saving healing. Necromancy spells often have the curse, death, healing, negative, or positive traits.

Transmutation

Transmutation spells make alterations to or transform the physical form of a creature or object. The morph and polymorph traits appear primarily in transmutation spells.

Spell Attack Roll and Spell DC

Many spells allow creatures to defend themselves using either their AC or a saving throw. Two statistics govern how potent your spells are against these defenses: your spell attack roll and your spell DC. When recording these on your character sheet, add together only the numbers that always apply—usually just your ability modifier and proficiency bonus.

Spell attack roll = your spellcasting ability modifier + proficiency bonus + other bonuses + penalties

Spell DC = 10 + your spellcasting ability modifier + proficiency bonus + other bonuses + penalties

A spell attack roll is like other attack rolls, so any bonuses or penalties that apply to all your attack rolls should be included in your calculation. For instance, the +1 status bonus from the bless spell would benefit your spell ray just like it could an arrow. However, note that the spell attack roll doesn’t gain any bonuses or penalties that apply specifically to weapon attacks or unarmed attacks. The multiple attack penalty applies to spell attacks, so it’s usually a bad idea to cast a spell that has a spell attack roll if you’ve already made an attack that turn.

As with other checks and DCs, bonuses can increase the result of your spell attack roll or your spell DC, and penalties can decrease the result of your spell attack roll or your spell DC. See Chapter 9: Playing the Game for more information about modifiers, bonuses, and penalties.

Disbelieving Illusions

Sometimes illusions allow an affected creature a chance to disbelieve the spell, which lets the creature effectively ignore the spell if it succeeds at doing so. This usually happens when a creature Seeks or otherwise spends actions to engage with the illusion, comparing the result of its Perception check (or another check or saving throw, at the GM’s discretion) to the caster’s spell DC. Mental illusions typically provide rules in the spell’s description for disbelieving the effect (often allowing the affected creature to attempt a Will save).

If the illusion is visual, and a creature interacts with the illusion in a way that would prove it is not what it seems, the creature might know that an illusion is present, but it still can’t ignore the illusion without successfully disbelieving it. For instance, if a character is pushed through the illusion of a door, they will know that the door is an illusion, but they still can’t see through it. Disbelieving an illusion makes it and those things it blocks seem hazy and indistinct, so even in the case where a visual illusion is disbelieved, it may, at the GM’s discretion, block vision enough to make those on the other side concealed.