Gaming

Dragon's Dogma has to be near the top of the list for me...if not number one.

In video games, I think it was Magicka wherein you could craft your own spells more-or-less on the fly.

In TTRPG, Mage: the Ascension, for much the same reason.

The issue for me is that I want to feel like I know Magic. I want to feel like a wizard, shaping the power of the cosmos to my will. If all I have is a collection of pre-scripted tricks... it really doesn't matter how many pre-scripted tricks I have, the feeling of creativity in spellcasting is lost.

Tyranny had a fun system where you could create custom spells based around combining a Core Sigil with Expression, Accent, and Enhancement Sigils to modify the spell's behavior. So you could have a Fire core sigil, combined with an AoE expression, fast cooldown accent, and a bleed enhancement. Of course the spells have a cost attached to them so you couldn't have your mages casting ridiculously powerful spells on rotation until you ran out of magic, but you could pop it off once or twice then fall back on weaker, faster spells. Unfortunately like with most flexible magic systems like this, mage characters are overpowered as hell, as long as you have your party tank camping a chokepoint.

Morrowind was amazingly versatile. You could combine any effect, and they weren't any safety mechanisms. Want to jump 2000 ft in the air? Don't forget your feather fall spell. Hundreds of ways to kill or die amusingly. My old husk of a brain is having trouble remembering, but maybe some others have a fond memory of their best spell or enchanted item combos.

I loved the combos you could do in Dragon Age Origins. My favorite was creating a giant oil slick under enemies so they fell down, casting a fire spell, which set them AND the oil on fire, then summoning bees to attack them.

I never got into it because fantasy isn't really my jam, but the Arx Fatalis system always struck me as interesting. You cast spells by drawing runes with mouse gestures.

Magicka. By far the most fun magic system I've played with.

So much death and funny.

Outward definitely has one of the most unique magic systems I've seen.

The spellmaking in oblivion was pretty great too, you could make multiple spells which applied weakness to magic and to specific elements in enemies, and since they were applied by different spells they would multiply each others' effects. Then you hit the enemy with a damaging spell and annihilate them.

I never saw it mentioned anywhere, but for me, hiring enemies with sufficiently powerful magic would ragdoll them, a bit like if you hit a corpse or a paralyzed enemy. So doing a 4-3-2-1 combo, 3 different spells that applied 100%weakness to magic and lightning, then hitting them with a lightning spell, would always send them flying. Sometimes it would be like they just vanished because the amount of damage applied by the spell threw them so forcefully.

OK, hear me out. I suspect this isn't quite what you had in mind, but the NES classic Crystalis has interesting magic weapons and spells. The game is similar to Zelda as an action RPG. Your main weapons are collectable swords with different elemental infusions. Each one has three levels of power that you unlock by finding special items. Enemies throughout the game are often only susceptible to certain types of elemental damage. There are also map barriers that require you to destroy them using a specific elemental power, like knocking down a rock wall with wind, or creating an ice bridge.

Beyond the basic combat, you unlock lots of different magic spells. Some are familiar staples of the genre like Refresh which heals you and Paralysis that freezes enemies and puts NPCs to sleep. But it also has more unique spells like Telepathy that lets you get information from far away NPCs, and Change, which allows you to take the form of NPCs and enter areas and get different NPC interactions.

Plus, it is just a good game. I sank so many hours into it as a kid, and I recently finished the game (with cheats on this time, the game is Nintendo Hard™).

The system of support gems + interlinked sockets in PoE. It's drawn new back to the game multiple times, and i would love to incorporate something similar into a game of my own making someday.

Two Worlds 2. You can create your own spells by combining different elements, effects, and modifiers. Among other things, this allows you to summon a rain of anvils and then form them into a vortex around yourself.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 has a pretty robust magic system. The chaining status effects are fun and there are multiple ways a player can turn a fight into their advantage.

Master of Magic was an old MSDOS/early Windows era turn-based strategy game similar to Civilization. I came across it in 1996, and I spent a ton of time playing it. There a few different types of magic that you farmed from natural areas. As with Civilization, you created alliances, did research, and expanded your power. Once you took over the world, there were portals to the dark world where you faced your true adversary, a lizard-like race.

Fun stuff...miss that game quite a lot.

there was an awesome indie game i finished in about 15 hours called Magicmaker that had a really fun customisable magic system

Noita. You can spend hours tweaking out and testing spell combinations. Make eggs summon more eggs that summon giant worms, turn a lighsaber into a bubbles held, disintegrate the moon. Feels like anything goes in that damn game

So a bit of a deep cut here, but there was a game from almost ten years ago that - as far as I can tell - flopped abysmally. I've never seen anyone else talk about it online, since I heard about it from a random Reddit comment buried deep at the bottom of an unrelated post.

Lichdom: Battlemage

It's jank. It's not a great game. But the magic system and the depth there made the repetitive enemies and dull environments completely worth it - at least in brief sprints.

Magic is 'runes' - or items. They drop in the world with various properties, and you can pick them up and assemble them into spells - you get, like, four bound on the UI. Base type is runes that classify the element of the spell, each having very unique mechanics. Fire does either big swingy crits or DOTs, ice is consistent damage or stored combo damage, electric is fast casting and AOE, etc. Then you get the physical shape of the spell, sometimes it's a beam, or a bolt, or a mortar, or a pool on the ground, etc. Then last up you get some added runes that will manipulate the mechanics of the element and shape you've chosen.

From there, though, all of your spells can interact with each other.

So for example, ice will freeze on enemies and only do a small amount of base damage directly, but then will "store" damage. Hitting with another ice spell pops the stored damage and stores another charge. Hitting with a different element magnifies that hit relative to the stored damage - so hitting with ice, then popping it with fire, does far more damage than just hitting with a second ice because the fire has a larger base hit. But you can also modify fire to also store a damage multiplier on the enemy - so if you set up a pool of fire that stores multiplier, then hit them with cold to add more stored damage and lock them on top of the pool where multiplier continues accumulating, then finally follow up with a different very high-damage fire spell ... the stored damage and multi kick in and Big Numbers Go Boom.

That is probably the simplest elemental interaction in the game, that's the basic gameplay loop combo. There's like a time element that will put the enemies in timed stasis, and you can shoot them while in stasis but it won't do anything - then when stasis pops it'll repeat every instance of damage applied X times per second for Y seconds, based on the numbers on the skill, and if you also use another skill it'll do the same damage to every other enemy within a radius ...

The shit you could do was wild.

It's a pity that the level design and enemies weren't really on the same level, so there wasn't a ton of motivation to fully explore the depths of the magic system - and then separately, the game also gave you tons of reasons to go play a different game.

Loom

There's an indie rogue like wizard game called Fictorum that I really enjoy. It can be a little indie jank but you really feel like some kind of badass wizard jumping around throwing meteors and completely blowing apart houses and enemy towers with physics.

There are a ton of different kinds of customizable spells like other games in this thread, but its unique point is that you can add runes that allow you to shape magic. When you cast and hold you can move the mouse in a direction to activate one of your runes, sometimes it might multiply your projectiles, or make them larger, or make them explosive. Being able to modify the spells on the fly in combat is something closer to Magicka's freedom of spell creation, though not quite as crazily variable.

Soul Sacrifice had a system where you had to pick between 3 types of stats to build around which affects which spells you could use. After each mission you would have to pick between saving someone or sacrificing them which affects your stats.

If you chose power, you end up becoming a glass cannon with spells that drain your own hp
if you chose def, you end up with spells that supported you and the higher your hp the more damage you did. The trade off is your damage is mostly low.
if you chose neutral then you were pretty balanced.

All of these were affected also by the factions you were part of and which spells you have access to.

Amulets & Armor is an old DOS game. It had a rune based system, where each spell was a combination of specific runes. Each class started with a limited set of runes, and more could be found in the levels. I loved trying all the combinations to find new spells.

Not the most innovative magic system, but casting spells in Blade and Sorcery is just so much fun.

Dishonored series. Coolest system I've ever played - teleportation, possession, and some fascinating level design in the sequel where you jump between times with magic. So cool, in fact, that I've had dreams that I have the Dishonored powers.

Gonna throw one of my own in here, I recently played an indie title, Mages of Mystralia which allows you to customize spells by adding runes that modify the spells behavior, and can modify elements in the late game.

It has essentially what is a board to build your spells where you have to place and chain the modifying runes by their connection points, which serves as the balancing, and part of the limiting factor of what can be combined and in what order.

Very interesting concept, but unfortunately the game is rather short, so you have very little time to experiment with the spells before the game ends, and while a sequel was announced, it seems the studio may have gone under during COVID.

Because I'm a nerd and don't see it mentioned I'm gonna drop Psi, the Minecraft mod in here :D You get to create spells through a visual programming interface! Is a neat idea :3