Core rules sorcery has a list of spells, and spells are very, very expensive. You’re unlikely to know many of them and it’s very difficult and dangerous to learn new ones during play, so magic doesn’t completely dominate the game simply because you can’t know enough to do everything. Otherwise you’ve got it right.
In the Magic Burner there are alternate rules, including Art Magic, which is a much more free-form system. The book is sadly out of print but you can find copies if you look around, and even some at reasonable prices if you look hard. It’s more like what you describe: you combine elements you want from the lists of potential spell effects, those determine the difficulty and tax.
Going back a bit, Burning Wheel has Relationships as a major mechanic, and hateful/rivalry relationships are cheaper than more friendly ones. You don’t have a way to call on them for benefits explicitly, but they’re a signal to the GM that you want this person and this relationship to be important in play.
Has anyone drawn up a list of skill factors for this sort of magic? Things like “affects a group of people: +3 Ob”. Seems like you could get a lot of mileage out of that. (Is there a magic system already like this in the MaBu?)
There are more fleshed-out and structured takes on this kind of thing the Magic Burner, yes.
For example Practical Magic (yes, named after the Kidman/Bullock movie) allows you to substitute Sorcery for a Skill for any given roll provided you have sorcery access to the Skill Type of that Skill (bought with RP during character burn or acquired during play, forget the details on the later). The only caveats are that you Tax after each roll and as soon as you substitute in Sorcery for a given Skill during an extended conflict (DoW, Fight!, R&C, etc.) you must continue substituting Sorcery for that Skill till the end of the conflict (thus risking knocking yourself out, or even killing yourself with Tax).
EDIT: What I was describing is really seat-of-pants stuff. There is Abstraction & Distillation in the Magic Burner which is probably closer to what you had in mind but it doesn’t really work with BWG because of BWG’s change away from BWR’s oddball rule of creating a Sorcery+Will pool for Tests.
P.S. Also, Art Magic is the “flashy” counterpart to the more rooted Practical Magic. Ab & Dis puts spells together like the core books Sorcery, but on the fly. Flipping through Art Magic it has, for example, the Breadth table that lists “Group, Handful, Two Abilities” as +3 and “Crowd, Copse, Cluster, Three Abilities” as +4Ob. It composition process focuses more on the end effect and less on primal components.
Magic is Skill based, actual spells, purchased with resources (at least during generation) that you’d otherwise buy a house out of, or something of that nature.
Elves have a completely different type of magic from humans, and orcs yet again a different type.
While I completely suggest buying the book (it’s one of the few non-pdf RPGs I own), RPGNow.com is also a place that has the pdf for download
Magic is fickle in BW, which I like. For example the Sorcerer in my Ravenloft game cast as his first spell ever in the BW system to change shape into a hawk for a better view of an escaping Gypsy. So he rolls his dice, successfully becomes a hawk and then promptly fails his tax roll and drops to ground unconscious! Once there he reverts back to his human form. Everyone else thought it was funny… So the whole adventure started with the party carrying their Sorcerer into an Inn?!
Later in the game he got a White Fire off - enough said if you play BW.
So new question … does BW have any provisions for spells that take more than one round or one action to cast?
It’s something that came to me last night while tweaking my SW setting. I realized there’s a dramatic opportunity for certain types of wizards if “raising” and “releasing” power are separate functions of spellcasting. Imagine the wizard sitting at the back of the battle, muttering incantations and charging up his crystal staff while his allies engage in melée … and just when the tide turns and the bad guys start winning, he unleashes The Fury. As in …
… … …
Charging, charging, charging … “Hey, Wizard! Little help over here!”
… charging …
… charging …
“Wiz…?”
CAAAAAASTING!!!
Find a mop.
… … …
SW doesn’t do this inherently, but it’s easy enough to tweak it with a “free action” nobody speaks of unless it actually comes up. That way the dice roll fast, which is what that game is about. But BW seems like a more mature sort of game, and actually making that a rolled action might create some interesting tension.
Well, spells in straight up Sorcery have casting times that range from almost instantaneous to around 10 exchanges. So, time can be a factor while using spells in combat.
The Magic Burner has things like summoning spirits to power your spells, which are discreet actions.
There’s also a provision in the rules for “holding” a spell a bit. You can’t keep it charged up for very long, but it does make wizardly ambushes rather scary.
Most spells take more than one action, which means there’s a terrifying amount of time in combat spent incanting and wiggling your fingers (depending on the idiom of spellcasting in your game) before anything happens. Or you can do that and then try to hold the spell back, but that has risks of its own.
In general a wizard facing a knight in a straight fight is going to get mauled before getting off a spell. Don’t fight fair.
One of my favorite gaming moments was when the primary social character faced off against an npc wizard with an instinct to “when it doubt, Force Choke a bitch”. In the time that it took the mage to get off Choking Hand, the PC managed to use his B1 Brawling to land a punch right in the mage’s jaw, causing him to miscast.