The topic of magic is interesting, because I feel D&D legacy fixed its mechanics by either treating magic as memorized formulae, or the same but injecting chaos and randomness (warhammer fantasy). There's a more recent treatment of magic as a bargain with a powerful entity, for example Sorcerer by Ron Edwards, but I think there's another possibility that's been often neglected, magic as a creative/artistic endeavor. I like the idea of the player focusing on a ritual by gathering appropriate materials and assembling them in a meaningful/symbolic way, and then a different entity (another player/GM) interprets the message and turns it into a magical effect. I have an unfinished game where I experimented with this idea, but as an example, there's this minigame called Omen, by Dom Liotti, that emphasizes the process of an oracle interpreting signals and using them to create a prediction: https://dom-liotti.itch.io/omen.
Thanks for the links. But I am not sad if you continue on this vast topic many times more :D
The topic of magic is interesting, because I feel D&D legacy fixed its mechanics by either treating magic as memorized formulae, or the same but injecting chaos and randomness (warhammer fantasy). There's a more recent treatment of magic as a bargain with a powerful entity, for example Sorcerer by Ron Edwards, but I think there's another possibility that's been often neglected, magic as a creative/artistic endeavor. I like the idea of the player focusing on a ritual by gathering appropriate materials and assembling them in a meaningful/symbolic way, and then a different entity (another player/GM) interprets the message and turns it into a magical effect. I have an unfinished game where I experimented with this idea, but as an example, there's this minigame called Omen, by Dom Liotti, that emphasizes the process of an oracle interpreting signals and using them to create a prediction: https://dom-liotti.itch.io/omen.
Nice post!