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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.