Wizarding School - NOT a Harry Potter rip-off

And the skills could be potions, summoning, creature care, etc. No-one has said they they're referring to skill levels.

The housing system is more a matter of dorms than anything else. A house full of students sharing the same major makes a certain amount of sense. Packing your things and moving every time you fail a maths test? Not so much.

edited 1st Sep '13 8:04:27 AM by Rem

& — i expounded on my example for clarity. but it only seem to have made things more confusing. my point were, in order:

1. using dorms to segregate characters into Cast Herds is very Harry Potter-ish, and very Gunnerkrigg court-ish. and this thread is about making a Wizarding School which is not a HP ripoff.

2. I suggested a Class/Grade based segregation by skill level (because that's how i understood what she wrote). note the emphasized words.
3. i clarified that i'm referring to the fact that they are segregated by how they performed. which is exactly the system the OP seems to be using.


is everything clearer now?

edited 1st Sep '13 8:25:15 AM by ShanghaiSlave

It is very british-boarding-school-ish, which is where both those works took it from to begin with.

i know, but i have to ask. are 'all schools in britain boarding schools? why not break the mold with a smaller class/grade based segregation?

this IS a suggestion by the way, which the OP can choose to use or not use. i'm just curious as to why it isn't even considerable.

Well, the OP is aiming for an Enid Blyton style.

i have no idea who that is so i ignored that part. still, not a big fan of making something "author style" and making it very close to it by using elements said author uses. i'd personally only stick to using bits ^note ex. making characters inspired by the author's characters, some shoutouts here and there, using a minor setting the author used, etc. of the author's style. but that's just me.

anyway, i digress. but still suggesting a magic glee club or esoterics subjects, which the op seems to have lumped with Dn D stuff or something.

edited 1st Sep '13 8:40:15 AM by ShanghaiSlave

Performance segregation wouldn't make much sense, I think. Boarding school students usually have some degree of control over their own schedules, and it's rare for a teacher of one subject to teach another (At higher ages, that is).

Houses basically determine who's in your dorm and who you play sports with. Cast Herds could be avoided simply by, well, avoiding it.

Don't get me wrong—a British Boarding school that uses the house system and teaches young magic users would certainly remind people of Harry Potter. I just don't think a writer should change their entire story out of fear of that perception.

edited 1st Sep '13 8:48:07 AM by Rem

Houses are hard to get away from (even down here in NZ we have them, in day schools, though here they matter only for intra-school sport).

Also, Shanghai Slave, you seem to be missing the fact that skill-level is never mention, merely their skill, Which to me sounds much more like it's based more on Anne Mc Caffrey's Pegasus series^* Peter Reidinger is a kinetic, Amariyah Bantam is a micro-kinetic, Tirla is a 'translator' than Harry Potter, where houses are based on personality.

Isn't six a strange number for houses? From my entire schooling experience I have only ever heard of 4 houses per school. Also, if the houses are ordered by the type of skill that students posses, that would end up with seriously imbalanced houses when it comes to competition times.

This might also seem HP-ish, but if you go for four houses you could maybe arrange them according to the Four Humours? This could result in a nice Four-Temperament Ensemble.

Also, if you really want to get into some hard worldbuilding, maybe think about the type of jobs that the magic-users in you world will have, and then work out what kind of skills are needed for these jobs. This is one thing that Rowling clearly didn't think about while writing HP, as most of the adults seemed to have desk jobs at the Ministry or were store clerks in one of those Punnily-named alleys - so why are the students taught so much about transfiguration, charms and defence?

And if you want to distinguish your work from HP even more, just do a good old Deconstruction of the setting, though I think this has already been done and might not be your thing.

edited 1st Sep '13 11:57:53 PM by Isanos

I've heard of schools with six houses, though those tend to be larger ones. Four may be the norm, but I've been to schools where it was three (later cut down to two) and while I've never attended them, I've heard of them going up higher.

Though I do agree that basing the houses on skill sets would result in badly unbalanced competitions. Heck, my high school did have such a situation, since the music teacher was in my house, we always won the choir competition. You might get away with it by designing the competitions such that at least some of the events are tailored so that no one house has any particular advantage.

My high-school had six houses, and about 2,000 students (don't know if that's big or not). As for unfair competitions, just don't include those things you want to have competitions in as part of the skills test (don't include sports for example, keep it primary focused on academic skills).

andI stand corrected. It might be that because I live in a city of relatively low population I've never even heard of a school with more than four houses.

34 Matt II — and you seem to be missing the fact that my point was segregation by grade/class, and not what criterion they are segregated. they could be tested by height or breast size and my point would still be they'd be sorted by grade/class.

Isn't six a strange number for houses? From my entire schooling experience I have only ever heard of 4 houses per school. Also, if the houses are ordered by the type of skill that students posses, that would end up with seriously imbalanced houses when it comes to competition times.

Maybe you're right, Isanos. I'm thinking of revising my houses idea, as seen below:

• Onyx House (represented by black)
• Citrine House (represented by yellow)
• Topaz House (represented by orange)
• Diamond House (represented by white)

Is that better?

edited 7th Sep '13 5:26:21 PM by fruitstripegum

That was a phenomenally helpful post, the likes of which the OP had hoped to receive when he posted this thread.

Thank you. On behalf of all of us.

I have to admit, this school seems more and more like a Hogwarts rip off. 4 houses, each separated by aptitude. A variety of classes with a number of "alternative" classes.

How is it different from Hogwarts.

To be fair, that's not a Hogwart's thing, that's a fairly common real world school set-up. Rowling was just borrowing from real world archetypes.

edited 18th Sep '13 3:15:27 PM by KnightofLsama

These last few posts indicate the problem you're going to have, fruitstripegum.

That type of school house arrangement has been so thoroughly co-opted by Harry Potter that a large number of your possible audience simply isn't going to believe that you didn't copy it from Harry Potter.

It's simple myopic logic:

1. It was in Harry Potter.
2. "I had never encountered it before Harry Potter."

• Therefore it didn't exist before Harry Potter.

So maybe the thing is to move away from an English type school. What other nations have boarding schools (or similar institutions), and how do they operate?

edited 19th Sep '13 11:48:19 PM by MattII

I think the problem is that at least for English speaking countries, most of them are based of the British model.

I'm pretty sure there'll be at least some differences between American and British board-schools, there seems to be for practically everything else.

From what I see on wikipedia, the biggest differences I noticed were that only .5% of kids go to boarding school in the US, so they're very uncommon, and are more likely to start at a higher age than the British schools.