What do you look for in a magic system? What kinds of things

>>55290301
It depends on what role magic is supposed to play in the setting. When it's put in as a problem-solving tool for PCs then it tends to be boring, when magic is there to set the tone of the world in some way due to how the characters interact with it then it's much more interesting.

>>55290301
Flexibility, balance, and gravity. Magic is a tool, and so it should excel at things which other tools cannot immediately solve. Magic should be difficult enough that if there were any easy way of accomplishing the same thing, nobody would have bothered to make a spell for it. This ensures that mages are useful, but do not over shadow specialists in other equally practical disciplines.

Animating a sword should be so hard that you'd be much better served hiring a mercenary unless you're just that desperate.

Being able to do what I want with it rather than a set list of spells.

>>55290301

There's no single thing I always want in a magic system. If anything, that's actually what I don't want. The magic should be customised to your game, fitting the themes and style and genre. Taking a generic magic system and bolting it onto something is just lazy and dull.

>>55290301
Something that enhances the tone of the setting and makes the intended challenges of the game more interesting rather than simply less difficult.

For instance, in a game about mystery and investigation, I would expect divination to be less "cast spell, receive answer" and more like a whole process in its own right with its own challenges. Something which drives the game forward instead of skipping over it. A dungeon crawling game will likely focus on resource management in its magic system. A darker setting might have a magic system where power always carries a price while in an unbeat setting magic might be about befriending cute nature spirits, or something like that. Basically it depends.

Magic

Flexible, scalable, balanced for "versus" games (is not swing-ish), and not "just another gun."

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>>55290301
>If it's a game about everyone playing wizards
I want complex, satisfyingly crunchy rules for designing and learning my own spells, for improvising asspulled spells and for designing grandiose artifacts and constructs that take years to complete. I also want combat mechanics that encourage creative solutions and not alpha striking with your biggest nuke spell, and rules to ensure that messy powers like scrying, summoning, teleporting, time travel and dice odds shifting don't get out of hand.

>If it's a game about a team of adventurers that may include a magician or two

I want clearly defined limits on what magic can do, or what a given character can do with magic, and I want the people who don't have magic powers to still have a few special moves or unique resources they can call on.