What's the ideal magic system

Studious Wizardry? Force of Will as with Sorcerers or Warlocks? Magical Realm Sex-based rituals? Hemomancy? Give me a method or magic and present your case as to why it's the best, assuming they are comparatively equal in power.

There is no One True Ideal magic system. There are good ones and bad ones to be sure, but to say one is perfect would be foolish.

An obvious reason is how the system works with the setting. If my setting is fairly low magic, with rare but very deadly monsters juxtaposed to mundane creatures and enemy fighters; then the magic system comprising mostly of difficult rituals and occasionally dangerous spells that summon and bind spirits to the waking world is a pretty good one.

But if I tried to shove that magic system into a classic dungeon delver then it woukd be ridiculous. Magic specialists would be terrible and pointless. And vice versa would have demigods striding across the landscape using Quickenee Maximised Lightning Bolt on everything with no real consequence.

So what is a magician? Is it a strange wizened one who communes with the Unseen and smooths the tapestry of reality? Is it a conjurer of demons in war and a Summoner of spirits in peace? Are they mighty conduits of arcane energy who bind and control the immaterial to their whim?

When you get down to it... so long as they do what they try to do well, they're all good.

Ultimately, depends on the setting. When you say best, do you mean best to use or the coolest to have in a setting?

It depends on the kind of setting you are trying to create. Oracles and shamans are common in many cultures but are conspicuously absent from many rpg systems, most likely due to being a difficult idea to implement. I personally want to try out a setting where magic is perform-able by anyone with the knowledge of how the required rituals are undertaken, in which case mage type classes are instead repositories of cultural knowledge and power. Of course, in such a setting it would be wise to make truly powerful rituals guarded knowledge or require exotic or forbidden components or actions so as to allow for game balance and the option to pursue greater power, as all rpg players are want to do.

Mechanics like mana points, vancian casting, whatever; these are abstractions devised to bring about a certain type of magic suited to a certain type of setting. Before one can decide the mechanics of a tabletop system, one must decide on the kind of world those mechanics are intended to represent.

Ever heard about plurality, you stupid cunt?

Honestly, I just wanted a compare and contrast between types of magic, but wasn't sure how to phrase it correctly.

Then just read GURPS Thaumatology instead of making bait-sounding threads

Mana.

A wizard has a battery. The battery can be drained or recharged by various means.

Powerful spells can be cast at high costs.

I'm writing a small game about characters defending and upgrading a settlement in the wake of a plague in a fantasy world.

It's kinda like post-apocalyptic D&D with cthulu monsters and zombies.

I had a spell poitns system for the mage for a short time but I decided to make two kinds of spells; minor (at will) and major (daily). This is cause I liked the 4e spellcasting system to some degree. There were no spell slots to track, just spells you could cast whenever you wanted, spells you could cast once an encounter , and spells you could cast once a day.

So cutting it down to once a day spells and at -wills minimizes bookkeeping (no erasing your powerpoints constantly or tracking them with dice). And, since you cannot repeat-cast powers I can make them slightly more powerful. I also gave the martial classes better resistances to spells to allow for (hopefully) caster-vs-martial battles like in Order of the Stick. Whereas in 3.5 that could never happen cause of SoD.

I'm an huge faggot for gaining magic powers through pacts with otherworldly beings.

Just lay it all over my face.

Honestly, it depends on the setting. Your magic should fit the tone of your setting. But if you like I'll tell you a couple of my favorites and what tone they tend to fit best in, in my opinion.

My very favorite is the Force. Describing it without the Star Wars specific, basically any magic where it's mostly just "felt," and there's not a lot of ritual requirement. It's a mental thing. The Force itself, my favorite example, was basically magic based of the Taoist mentality, where you gained more power the closer you got to enlightenment. There's the Force--the potential for enlightenment surrounding us all--and there's the Dark Side, what happens when someone corrupts the spirituality around them with an inherently antagonistic desire for more power. And as they corrupt the spirituality of the world around them, they physically corrupt it by becoming a force for ruin and despair wherever they go. In regards to it being a magic system, there are a few things that everyone can learn to do with it, and you can teach others to do it, too; if they have the correct mindset, as everything the Force does is mental and emotional. But from the perspective of the EU, there are a lot of examples of people coming up with stuff to do themselves by just having the proper force of will and amount of power/enlightenment or corruption. This works really well in games with a strong theme of self-discovery.

Another good one is from Mage, and it's kind of similar to the Force above, in regards of how the magic "operates." Not a lot of dedicated spells and rituals and whatnot--though those exist, and tend to be very powerful--but in Mage you simply use the power around you to manipulate reality as you see fit. You need to fight against what reality needs to be, of course, and witnesses who cannot rationalize away what they're seeing bites you in the ass. So you need to be either secretive, or subtle. It's really good in modern games.

(cont.)

The third favorite I wanted to mention (damn field limits) is shamanism. Communion with spirits and nature, and most of your power comes from your knowledge and your ability to talk your way into the good graces of the entities you're speaking to. It's kind of the polar opposite of my first two favorites, because there's usually a lot of ritual involved, but it feels very primal and very engaging when done correctly.

It also calls for wizards to be a bit more engaging as characters, because this kind of magic requires either inherent power that the spirits respect (usually in knowledge on how to stop them or what they can/can't do, since things like "powerbolts," aren't something you can just DO in this system) or you have to be very charismatic so you can convince the spirits to help you in the first place.

Maybe give a little bit of inherent power and not ALL ritual so there's the potential for spirits to be summoned by someone they respect for power alone, likely through things like ownership of items that grant inherent power. And in regards to items, they gain power through longevity and being involved in important things, or through rituals they were involved in, not in just being crafted for the proper GP amount. But for the most part you gain power through who's willing to help you and whether or not your goals align.

This was really well-represented in Hellblazer and in the Constantine movie with Keanu Reeves. Pretty low-power when direct power was involved, and being tricksy and knowing the right people wound up getting characters ahead.

I really like having more than one mechanically distinct magic systems coexist.

One magic system I like was in the Old Kingdom novels by Garth Nix (which is his real name, no really).

Magic is overlaid on top of the world, or more accurately the world exists within magic.
On it's own it is harmful, it's harsh and the beings of magic that exist are dangerous and often malevolent to humanity. Free Magic and the Spirits thereof are things to fear and seal away.

However, there is another form of magic. The magic used by mages is refined and distilled into tiny discrete marks of power that make up an endless river of magic, the symbols describing quite literally everything, and in a sense ARE what they describe. In areas where magic has saturated the land, scooping up water will reveal it's made up of hundred and hundreds of tiny symbols for water, stream, trickle, droplet and liquid that flow around your fingers.
This safer magic overlay is 'created' by stones who act as conduits for magic. Stray far enough away from these stones and magic fades, enchanted items are just well made things with dead runes etched on them and casters have no power. Walk back however and the runes flare into life and swim across the metal and the mage can access the endless pool of symbols.

Power for these mages is limited in a few ways, there's the skill to channel magic, knowledge of the symbols to make the effect you want and also how tough you are.
More powerful symbols have more magic in them, and are more damaging to the body of the caster. Major symbols will burn your throat, Cardinal marks could flat out immolate you for trying to say them alone. Acting together and using wands and the like as conduits allows for more powerful magic to be cast safely however.

And then you've got sorcerers who use the wild magic, fuck over their own souls for power and try to destroy the standing stone network that empowers mages, with the first novel telling the story of one of the most powerful nearly destroying the keystones to the entire network.

RuneQuest 6 is really good for this.

Mage: The Ascension really did it perfectly. The reasoning behind magic felt intuitive, as did its limitations.

Agreed. I like most the fact that rather than direct spells like the way D&D does it it tells you what you can do within bounds and then allows you to mix and match different spheres to create different effects.

I'm not sure how to describe it but I would do something similar but make it a skill sort of like in Ecplise phase where your Network skill is also a resource you can use so your knowledge of this specific style of magic also acts as a knowledge check (i.e. you roll your level of whatever skill to see if something similar is being used around you or on you and identify the effect and also roll to see how well you pull of a "spell")

Magic that is not codified is my favorite. Things like supernatural events or extraordinarily strong feelings being the cause of magic. I love the idea of magic being in nature too.

Sometimes if a sword is used to slay enough supernatural beings, it becomes infused with the ability to destroy curses or something. Periodically, some creepy supernatural event occurs that spawns demons or grants powers to some people. A certain spring grants anyone who drinks from it a few more years of life. I really like subtle magic or rare spectacular magic.

I like a fatigue system for magic in terms of consequence
Roll for magic take fatigue if you fail

You ever read the Bartimaeus trilogy?

Me too

I personally like the SR way:
Magic is a separate plane parallel to us. Some people may tap into it and use mana to cast spells, some may use it to enhance themselves with it and some may use it to summon and bind spirits, beings made out of mana.
Magic can be quite powerful but it has a price. The stronger the magic you use (the stronger the spell or the more powerful the spirit you summon) the greater is the stress you put upon your body forming the mana.
Low level spells or spirits may hurt you a bit but nothing dangerous, high power spells/spirits may knock you out or even kill you if the spell is higher than your magic ability

I'm also a fan of the idea that spell casting is tiresome.

A cantrip is as easy as picking up a box, but bigger spells can be exhausting. Probably because the caster is effectively a walking mana battery.

Runic magic is best magic.

Ars Magica. Look it up and learn. There is no system that handles it better.

Mage the Ascension was good, but people playing it turned it into morons with super powers rather then a study in occultism through out the world. No one actually studies their paradigm of casting to explain and detail stuff. They just metagame and say, I use Time and Life to curse him with old age. Never even investigating if their paradigm has anything even similar to such a curse. Just lazy.

Whatever it's called when there's no resource cost of using magic, but every time you do you increase the chance of horrible fuckups. If balanced right it makes the players suitably hesitant with using magic.

Why did multi-round casting times go out of style?
It seems like such a simple and logical way to make spells powerful without stepping on the archer's role.

I start casting. And er... that's it.

Still casting.. guess I'll move over here, get a little more cover.

Okay! Time to release this bad boy! Aw shit, everyone's shifted around.. okay, I guess I aim... there! That'll get a couple of them. Rolling for it.. Booya!

Okay.. I start casting again.

...

you cant charge a battery

Still somewhat more interactive than.
>I hit it with my sword.
>I hit it with my sword again.
>Now I hit that other guy. With my sword.

think car battery

Eh, M:tAsc is my favourite magic system (and probably overall setting) but the magick gets a bit weird.
See the pocket flask problem, if I recall he name correctly
The GM has to decide on some axioms. Is magic based on an omniscient or limited observer, and is it effects or methods-based

The effects vs. methods axis is especially tricky. Correspondence should let you get a taxi that just happened to be there to "teleport" slowly but without paradox, but what's to stop Mind from doing the same? Or Entropy?

Explaining the system to the players was a mistake
explaining how it works takes away the thematic conceit unless the players are excellent beyond what is reasonably expectable

what

This might sound weird, but I have a bizarre dislike that I don't entirely understand of the idea of magic being a "thing that exists" rather than a "thing that you do" or a "technique" or a "method." My personal favorite magical fluff, Type-Moon, makes the same distinction, and even further divides between things that are and aren't currently possible.

Ars's books are terribly written, terribly laid out things, though.

And the non-hermetic magic is often a total PITA to get to grips with.

Hella fun system, though.

No player-accessible magic.

Or if there is magic, it is all contained in scrolls and magic items.

At least 5th fixed naked peasant fistfights so that non-magi can actually do things that make sense. I would still like to run a one-shot in 4th where all the various knights figure out the combat system and adapt accordingly.

In terms of fluff I like my magic to be at least somewhat innate
You need a sort of "spark" to do magic but you still need to work for what you can do through rigorous study and training

I'm also a big fan of themed magic where each magic character has a theme like one guy does fire the other is a conjurer and the third is all divination and mind magic instead of all of them being do everything wizards

>I'm also a big fan of themed magic where each magic character has a theme like one guy does fire the other is a conjurer and the third is all divination and mind magic instead of all of them being do everything wizards
You and I are on the same page, friend. I've long thought that the bast way to limit wizards is to make the specialization of magic schools much more meaningful and limiting. You are this kind of wizard, and you are educated in this kind of magic, and you may be a dabbler in others, but it's just that- minor dabbling rather than the ability to learn everything, and some minor boost in one direction.

Right like a Diviner might know a single Evocation cantrip or an Abjurer might know a little Conjuration but for the most part they are limited to their specialization