Rub My Body in Goose Fat, Daddy, I Want to Fly
Dungeons and fucking dragons has sucked all joy and wonder out of magic and ruined it for games forever.
Not only have you this class based restriction bullshit, but every fucking spell is a standardized mechanic. You can just do. You're expected to just do it. Hell, sometimes even asking HOW you cast your spell is asking too much. It's bullshit. It's boring. It's a tool. Magic has become an interface. A resource to spend, a die to roll. This kind of magic has become so dominant across games that I imagine it's taught generations of players that this is simply what magic has to look like. At this point, it's even hard to imagine doing it differently.
Take Wolves Upon the Coast, for instance. Magic isn't a class ability. You don't have slots to spend. You do magic by doing fucked up, weird shit. You discover rituals and procedures out in the fictional world, and then you have to actually perform them. If I want to fly, I need to rub my body in goose fat, hemlock, and nightshade berries and hope believe this shit works when I throw myself off a cliff and crush a golden feather. That's fucking dynamite.
If I want to cast a fireball, I need to find the shrivelled heart of a salamander, preserve that thing in cooking oil, and eventually toss it at someone. That's not just a spell. That's motivation. That's an adventure.
Imagine some NPC who has annoyed your players to no fucking end. So they decide they're going to find a salamander—which, by the way, is itself some nasty fucking creature—kill it, cut out its heart, preserve it, carry that disgusting thing around, and save it for exactly the right moment. Then, much later, they fling that fiery death at the chieftain and his elite bodyguards who've been nothing but trouble ever since the players set foot on this land.
The magic system just created an adventure before the spell was ever cast. That's what I want from magic. I don't want it to be another entry on my character sheet. I want it to feel like something. It can be occult, dangerous, inconvenient, or incredibly specific. Just something, man. The method of casting should matter. Characters in the world should have the opportunity to learn impossible things if they're curious enough, and then have to decide whether they're desperate enough to actually try them.
And that's just one way to make magic interesting instead of turning it into another inventory. I'm sure there are many more ways to do it, but first we have to let go of conventions that tell us what magic in a game is supposed to look like.
But, elmcat, I do like a HIGH MAGIC fantasy setting. Well, what can I tell you? It's a different fantasy. If you enjoy playing a swiss army knife character with a reliable toolbox of magical abilities, that's your right. Plenty of people clearly enjoy it. It's just not what I want magic to feel like.