What RPG(like) game has the best magic system?

[OracleX]

So arcording to you, which RPG game has the best magic (system)?

When I playing arcanum for the first time I was always pretty curious what the next spell in the same college would do. Gaining spells like Disintegrate or summoning undead did make me feel like a powerfull mage. Sure the balans was really of in that game, but overal I was pretty satisfied with the broad variations of spells.

The Gothic series also gave me somewhat of the same feeling.

 

[Malakal]

D&D based games have great advantage due to interesting and varied spells. So there is BG2 with huge number of spells and NWN series with nice looking spells to choose from.

Other than that I liked the ability to make my own spells in Morrowind (the idea, not the execution) and Revenant had quite nice spell system (but thats a H&S).

So in the end its old good D&D.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

AD&D with components, long learning, research and other thingies and stuffies.

 

[Rude Dude]

Arx Fatalis; hardly an rpg(moar like first-person-action-adventure) but it has a good magic system, you have to draw runes in a certain order to perform various types of spells. When you get new runes you can try to make new spells

But i guess you tried it already, if you are interested in magic.

ahaha black&white magic is GREAT :wink:

 

[Jasede]

Ultima 8, more variety than you can shake a stick at, all sort of nicely thought out, none of them overly weak or powerful, all handy in certain situations, and every school of magic has its distinct feel.

Necromancy:

You research how to cast spells in-game by reading books or speaking to old necromancers. Once you know the necessary ingredients, you gather or buy them, place them in a bag, cast an incantation and then receive a token that you can use to cast the spell at will. The token will disappear after a spell is cast, requiring you to prepare spells ahead of time, or carry all sorts of reagents around.


Thaumaturgy:

You purchase mystical spellbooks outlining the incantation and the reagents for the spell you need, gather them, charge up the book with the reagents, and then use the book to invoke the spell. Once the spell is cast the book must be recharged. Only once charge can be held at once.

Theurgy:

You shape symbols for your spell, one symbol for each spell, from silver you mine. Then you bless the symbols. Now each symbol can cast a spell as often as you want, provided you have enough energy to do so.

Sorcery:

In-game, in a book, you research how to use a pentacle: you learn which part of the pentagrammon has which name, and for every spell, you learn, still in-game, what reagents to place at what parts of the pentragram, along with where to place candles of ash or blood, depending on the spell. Then you put a magic focus into the centre, light the candles, cast the spell and charge up the focus with a certain amount of spell charges. The higher quality the focus used, the more often it will be able to cast a spell, in exchange for spell points. Once it is exhausted you must recharge new foci.


Necromancy deals with Earth and Death, Thaumaturgy with the Astral sphere, Theurgy with Air and Life and Sorcery with Chaos and Fire, each school having a good amount of unique spells.

This system required you to actually learn things in-game, memorize things like a student (Where does the red candle go again to prepare a Conflagration spell? Did I forget to bring Sulphurous Ash?) and reward you with a sense of accomplishment for becoming proficient in all schools.

 

[Zeus]

Ultima 8, more variety than you can shake a stick at, all sort of nicely thought out, none of them overly weak or powerful, all handy in certain situations, and every school of magic has its distinct feel.

Funny you mention that. I just read a review where Scorpia hated the magic system:

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2010/03/col ... 7.php#more

Worse yet, magic here is cumbersome and awkward. In a misguided attempt to make it as different as possible from the magic of Brittannia, Origin created a nightmare of multiple systems with differing requirements. Forget the handy spell-book that did all the mixing for you and made spellcasting simple. Now it has become a chore.

 

[Jasede]

Well, I suppose I was misled by the original post which states "according to you, which RPG has the best magic system", not, as it turns out, "according to Scorpia".

 

[racofer]

OBLIVIAN 4 CUZ U CAN LEIK U KNOW MAEK YOU'RE OWN SPELLZ AN THSI KIND OF CUSTOMIZABILITLY IS UNPRECENT ON OTHER RPGZ CUZ OBLVIAN 4 TEH ELDAR SCROLLS IS TEH MOST AWESUM AND IMMERSVIABLE ROLF PLAYIN GAEM EVER N IF U DON LEIK IT MAIBE RPGZ ARENT YOU'RE STUFF GO BAKC TO HALO U N00B1!!

 

[Castanova]

Final Fantasy 7, obviously

Materia, hello!

 

[SuicideBunny]

best i don't know, but personally i like ritualistic systems like u8's sorcery as described by jasede (and coincidently i also happen to love u8), where procedure, placement, and ingridients are ripe with meaning, as they tend to enhance the atmosphere by a great deal, also words of power system (like the ultimas' should have had, or as present in dungeon master). basically a system where you are presented with the raw components for spell assembly, and as you grow in power you gain the possibility to add more nuance or components to your spells.

i'd love a game with a heavily ritualistic system with a fuckton of documented spells but one that also allows you to discover countless undocumented effects or even countermagic in the form of ritual reversal through reading up on the various components and trying out unorthodox combinations, possibly with some context sensitive spells, as long as the context makes sense and is thus discoverable in-game through more than pure trial and error (say, a lycantrophy ritual only works on full moon in a system where rituals otherwise do not depend on astronomical conditions).

 

[Damned Registrations]

Materia was a really cool premise badly implemented. Needed better balance and variety. The spells lists on espers in FF6 were much better. Most things had a combination of direct damage/healing and utility. And you couldn't just get a copy of the fire esper for everyone on your team because the ice boss showed up.

Of course, espers were a bad premise executed well. Grinding spells onto your heroes (Of which you had like 20) made it so you'd likely have a few favourites loaded with magic and everyone else as auto attack support.

Never liked DnD vancian magic. Only being able to cast light once a day or featherfall if you'd prepared it seemed retarded. And balancing the spells is a nightmare. How do you rank teleport on a scale of 1-9? It's useless if you've never left the cave you were born in and broken if you have a safe lair to escape to and powerful scrying magic available. Nevermind anything with a permanent effect like wall of stone or stone shape that would let you build pyramids by yourself given a bit of time.

FFT had the nice perk of working it into turn based combat with the drawback of casting times (And suffering massive extra damage while casting.) This actually meant low level spells were never obsolete; fire 1 was much quicker to cast than fire 4, and could be used to finish off a low hp enemy before they could be healed. The high level stuff was practically artillery, having huge areas, delays, mana costs and hurting allies.

Shadowrun has some of the coolest systems. Casting spells is basically free, unless it's powerful enough to risk (Or ensure) hurting you. And multiple people can cast one spell together, to do things like assassinate someone from a mile away with a fire spell cast through the astral plane to bypass physical barriers.

 

[roll-a-die]

WoD if we are talking PnP.
Daggerfall if we are talking Twu ArPeGehs.
Arx Fatalis if we are talking RPG derivatives.

 

[Raapys]

Never really played a game that touches BG2 in this regard. Mostly because of some really awesome spells( like time stop ) which has a profound effect on gameplay, but also because of the great variety. It made playing a mage feel different than just an archer with flashy arrows, like in so many other games.

 

[Marquess Cornwallis]

Loom (on the expert level, without visual hints) was my favourite.
It would be interesting to see the system expanded on (longer drafts and/or the option to combine them) and integrated in an RPG.
In Loom, it was tied to specific puzzles, but it could potentially work even better in a game that encourages emergent gameplay, e.g. one where different objects are designed to give slightly different (but semantically related) responses to the same "spell".

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Final Fantasy 7, obviously

Materia, hello!

hey, the materia system was good. even if you could abuse it

Knights of the Round + mime + counter = rapetiem

 

[Zeus]

Well, I suppose I was misled by the original post which states "according to you, which RPG has the best magic system", not, as it turns out, "according to Scorpia".

Hah, I just thought it was funny to hear such extreme differences in opinion, for unrelated reasons, about a game that you don't hear much about these days.

 

[Yeesh]

Well, I suppose I was misled by the original post which states "according to you, which RPG has the best magic system", not, as it turns out, "according to Scorpia".

Hah, I just thought it was funny to hear such extreme differences in opinion, for unrelated reasons, about a game that you don't hear much about these days.

Don't mind Grumpy. It's good for us to read different opinions on how much a unique system like this brings to a game.

 

[deuxhero]

MegaTen's demon fusion is fun, even if the spells themselves are very generic.

I always like the "Powers as Programs" type systems as well, it encourages experimentation when the player can swap his abilities around with no penalty (and often powers in such "deck" based systems have limited uses each, further stoping spam).

Zelda's system of not having magic usable directly by the player, restricting it to NPCs and magic items also has it's benefits.

While far far from an RPG (even more than Zelda), Kirby 64's copy system (a handful of powers that each have unique abilites when 2 are mixed with eachother) has some cool bits as well

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Bringing some more console popamole bullshit to the table, some of the Battle Network gmes (Megaman jayarpeegee for the gameboy) had a nice implementation of the "programs" variation. You had a grid where you could spin the skill pieces like tetris, and you could use as many as you could fit inside.

There were ways to make the pieces smaller and the grid bigger, altering the limitation bar on the middle of the grid, etc. if you were creative, you could fit nice combinations of big and small skills (strong and weaker, obv.), or just fill it with weak skills, or have a few very strong ones.

Later some Naruto beat'em up games for the PS2 had this as well, adding other grid formats. the idea is pretty cool since it encourages fiddling around with all the skills you have instead of focusing on the stronger ones.

there were probably earlier games that used this, though

 

[SCO]

Besides ultima 8 i also liked darklands because while the system was obviously traditional, the "spell descriptions" were literally hagiography. It really felt integrated, like you were a devout crusader-saint taking names and breaking shit - if you had enough piety. Pity piety was so easily gamed. I suppose a protestant darklands system wouldn't work.

I like rune based systems where the runes have discoverable meaning like ultima undeworld or arx fatalis (this one as a nicely challenging delivery system too). The allow hidden spells and discovering your own combinations. It was normal if you had half a brain unlike gamers today.

 

[Jaesun]

Magic is for fags.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Ultima Underworld, where you collected runes and found scribbled notes on dead skeletons of rune combinations they know of.

Then you arrange your runes in order and cast your spell.

It's a nice way of invoking the ancient mystique of all the old rune rocks you find all over England, Scotland, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, and other places. Makes you wonder about an advanced druidic civilization that real world Brittania may have been, with the kind of people who built the Stonehenge.

I won't pursue this digression, however.

 

[Liberal]

Baldurs Gate 1.

Planescape: Torment.

I want to say Morrowind, but something is holding me back.

Arx Fatalis.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Arx Fatalis huh? casting as a twitchy minigame = best magic system evar.

I see.

 

[RuySan]

Wizardry 8

Legend and Worlds of Legend