Quote from: TristramEvans;827651I really loved reading Earthdawn's magic rules, just not certain I could ever game with them. But the philosophy behind it is unique and fascinating.

Now I have to go read these.

I love exploring game metaphysics and magic. On the creative side, I like Mage: the Ascension for the free-form magic with guidelines (heck, even Risus works for that if you get creative).

For more structured magic, the Earthdawn system/metaphysics outshines most others, and it my go-to game to add details to other system (it heavily influenced my Mage: the Ascension games). They add to the depth of the game-world, and have many of the D&D magic tropes incorporated (psudo-"spell slots" instead of slots-per-day). The new 4th edition rules have really cleaned up how it is presented (especially Illusion magic, which doesn't quite work like stock D&D), and made some great improvements (altering spells on the fly with extra Threads and the new Success Level mechanics have been directly incorporated to all spells).

Panda (Morgan Weeks) has a great post on his blog covering the basics of Earthdawn magic and the new additions for 4e.
http://pandagaminggrove.blogspot.in/2014/11/earthdawn-4e-part-3-spellcasting.html
http://pandagaminggrove.blogspot.in/2012/09/earthdawn-part-6-spellcasting.html

There are a few unmentioned contenders, but I'm going to choose the Magic System for... Castle Falkenstein!

Why?

Castle Falkenstein is one of those games that is mostly brilliant. It feels like the core Fortune Deck mechanic could use a bit of tweaking to discourage spending your entire hand on every action... but I could imagine reasonable house-rules regarding it. The game really oozes the appropriate flavor throughout the writing. What about the magic though?

Well, in fitting with the period, your Sorcerer is a member of a Society that has some mystical secrets based upon its writings and whatnot, or a crazy Egyptian tablet... whatever. You can theoretically learn sorcery from different Societies, but given the vibe of the game it would be something that would need some RPing to justify, because it's not like the Freemasons just tell you everything if you ask. If a Society you were interested in knew of your association with another, they might have reason to be suspicious themselves, regarding your loyalties and so on.

Mechanically, each Society has a few spells that can vary in their effects. Each Society kind of has its own philosophy, so it mostly doesn't feel like a pack of "Magic Missile" type spells, they somehow keep a mysterious vibe about them. The Spell will have an Activation Cost, then there are attributes like Range and Subjects, etc. that also need to be paid for. The Spell will also have an aspect dependent upon its type, which associates it with one of the suits in a deck of cards. You subtract your Sorcery Ability from the cost, then need to pay for the rest using the Magic Deck. When you begin casting, you draw a card. If it is of the matching suit, you add its face value to the total accumulated Magic Points. If it is not of a matching suit, you can choose to discard it, or keep it, but it will only contribute 1 to the accumulated Magic Points. Every 2 minutes or so, you make another draw off the Magic Deck, making the same choice to keep or discard the card you get. Once you accumulate enough Magic Points to meet the Activation Cost, the spell goes off....

If, during your casting, you decided to accept cards that were of the wrong suit, you find the one of those with the highest value. The suit of that card determines the "Harmonic" that manifests in the outcome. So, say you use a Spell to bring forth the ghost of someone's daughter, which would require the Spades suit, but in doing so you accepted some non-suited cards, the highest of which is a Queen of Hearts. Well, the Heart suit is associated with Emotion, which may manifest in, say, the father feeling lust for his daughter, or everyone being overcome with a feeling of terror. People would resist this effect based upon the value of the harmonic card, so the Queen of Hearts is of value 12.

Basically, I love that there is the time trade off between waiting to cast safely vs. accepting harmonics in the interest of a quicker casting. Also, the harmonics themselves can really flavor the magic and give it a mysterious and "things man was not meant to know" vibe depending on how the GM uses them. It is also nice that some guidance is given, so it isn't completely a free-form GM fiat sort of deal.

Thus ends my case for the magic system of "Castle Falkenstein"!

Oddly enough, though many have good features, I can't think of one that really kicks ass to me. They all seem to have flaws. Too many spells, too few, little flavor, too fiddly, etc.

If pushed I'll go with The Fantasy Trip/Advanced Wizard. Simple and playable, has just enough richness to sustain interest.

Can't say I'm an expert on magic system or which is the best. But I do like the way GURPS does magic. I like the spell college layout, a mage can go broad or "go deep" in various categories, or a bit of both; specialize in one spell or know his whole repertoire equally. I like that one has to master simple basic spells first as prerequisites for the more powerful stuff. When choosing what to cast a mage is limited only by his available mana (D&D's whole memorizing-spells-in-slots system always seemed lame to me. If I want to cast 20 "Open Locks" spells in a day, or 20 "Locate Person" spells, or 20 of anything, or more, I should be able to do it.) And, of course, being GURPS, it's easily malleable to whatever type of world you're attempting to design.

Quote from: TristramEvans;827651I really loved reading Earthdawn's magic rules, just not certain I could ever game with them. But the philosophy behind it is unique and fascinating.

They sure are interesting and flavorful... but also seemed pretty complicated from what I saw of their use in-game. Everything slowed down when the group's Elementalist set out to cast something. It just about always included the GM needing to clarify some finer point of the rules.

Then again, most of the rules in Earthdawn felt that way to me... interesting and tied to the setting and fluff... but cludgy and redundant in play. In order to get an attack off my archer would have to make several roles, using handfuls of various dice types, with various effects potentially altering which dice were rolled at every turn.
Magic seemed similar with even more complications.

Then again again... I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that was due to the GM's houserules.
I should go have a look at this 4th edition stuff.

GURPS.

Its normal spell system (skill based) is good for trad fantasy wizards, with the added bonii that if you want Your PC to know some basic magic that suits Your concept, you can add that w/o it necessarily costing a lot of points. If you want to say have Your character be able to talk to animals and/or plants say or something similarily low-powered, that's fairly cheap. A dedicated battle mage OTOH does require a big percentage of Your points. I remember the old 3e templates opened my eyes a lot on how great this system is for all kinds of concepts from "classic mage who knows a bit of everything" to say "magic thief".

The Powers book for 4e adds a whole other thing, wich is treating magical (including divine magic) as supeepowers. So that you have a bunch of magic abilities instead of spells - typically this means a mage with a stronger theme, who's probably way more powerful at that theme, and it's less fiddly (...except during chargen...).

There's also alternate systems like ceremonial magic etc closer to "real" magic.

I always enjoy it when the spells and magic system reveals the type of setting and game it is built for.  

In early D&D, those low level casters were Jack of all trades.  Need Light?  To open a lock? Decipher a language?  
And it early showed what they were built to do.

I also enjoy systems when they mirror social things and more mundane bits. Spells that deal with transport, or economics, or growing crops.

Quote from: TristramEvans;827301Haha its cannon! Try to deny it all you want! The Force is a disease!

I'm one of the lucky ones who hasn't seen the new Star Wars movies (or even the digitally altered old ones). I'm afraid to pollute my childhood memories with George Lucas's shitty revisionism.

Quote from: Matt;829346I'm one of the lucky ones who hasn't seen the new Star Wars movies (or even the digitally altered old ones). I'm afraid to pollute my childhood memories with George Lucas's shitty revisionism.

You are lucky.

But then, Lucas killed my love for Star Wars well before the prequels with the special editions. Ive not rewatched the films since, despite them being a staple of my childhood (I wore out my original VHS copies in a 5-year span. Still have the Betamax's though, because betamax tapes never go bad).

Every once in a while I pull out my copy of WEG's Star Wars 1st edition books, and try to remember what used to be...



(sigh)

And that, for people who are familiar with Changeling: The Dreaming, is the best example of the effects of Banality.

I didn't mind the Special editions myself - so there's a dinosaur at Mos Esleu, so what.

However, one of the really impressive things about the OT is how well done the (primitive) effects Are; using CGI to "improve" it sort of cheapens it imo.

The alternative magic rules from GURPS, especially path magic and ritual magic are great, especially when you can use all those options you like to built exact the magic system you want. The default system with the different spells building on each other is quite intuitve, but requires too much bookkeeping for my taste (admitedly, intuitve, but too much bookkeeping is a good summary of my personal take on GURPS). The path system allows for a slightly simpler version, that still differentiates between spells of various complexity, without requiring to explicitly learn heaps of filler spells.

Quote from: TristramEvans;829387You are lucky.

But then, Lucas killed my love for Star Wars well before the prequels with the special editions. Ive not rewatched the films since, despite them being a staple of my childhood (I wore out my original VHS copies in a 5-year span. Still have the Betamax's though, because betamax tapes never go bad).

Every once in a while I pull out my copy of WEG's Star Wars 1st edition books, and try to remember what used to be...



(sigh)

And that, for people who are familiar with Changeling: The Dreaming, is the best example of the effects of Banality.

I avoided seeing them after hearing about Jabba showing up in the first revision and apparently Greedo takes a shot at Han Solo and misses at point blank range somehow? I figured thanks but no thanks, what I have is all I need.  And my 1st Ed. WEG game and sourcebook and whatever those guides to planets and creatures from the movies were called.

I have a feeling I'll skip the new Star Wars movies they are advertising now even if they do have Han Solo in them.  I just can't imagine they will be able to duplicate the magic.  Plus CGI, no natter how good, is shockingly fake looking when compared to puppets and models.

This is where I'll put Artesia, although it might not be perfect. When I read the rules, I suddenly got so over most other magic systems (with fireballs and what not). Artesia magic is curses, blessings, alchemy, divinations, runes of protection and the like, and it handles those things very well. It suddenly made RPG magic feel 'real'.

Artesia reads great and has one of the better original settings I came across in the last decade or so but it plays with all the speed and elegance of a beached sperm whale. It is literally more fun to built characters for this system than to actually play them. Nonethless, the magic system is very  atmospheric and has a great number of cool ideas, but I really, really wished that these ideas and concepts where implemented better.