How do you design your magic?

[Samven]

Here's a question that I've been discussing with my mates a fair bit and thought I'd pose to you guys; how do you like to do your magic spells? Is it just a simple progression of Fire 1 > Fire 2 > Fire 3? Do you have one single-target spell and one area-targetting spell? Do you give them states or debuffing effects? How do you set them up? I ask this exclusively of magic rather than physical skills as most people I know seem to make them more varied. You'd think it'd be the other way round, given how varied magic could be, but I try not to think about it.

So, to put my own examples down, for my first game, I went down a simple "power increments" approach for the first two levelsbut made it so that the strongest spells were actually double-elemental. So, Water and Dark got a Level 3 spell, Fire and Earth, etc. It was my attempt at adding a bit more strategy into things. Maybe it didn't work as well as I'd thought, but I learned from it.

For my current one, though, I'm trying to make each spell do something different so that they can all reasonably used even late into the game. So, for example, one Earth spell is a sudden burst of energy and doesn't detract from speed or require any turns to cast, but a later-learnt one does require some time to charge up but damages all enemies and inflicts a state that makes them more vulnerable to magic. "Stronger" variants I'm trying to reserve for sidequest-learnable spells. Of course, since this is a rather tricky thing to do compared to just raising power with each level, it also means my actors have a smaller movepool than in my earlier work to avoid overlap between them (which I can be a bit obsessive about).

So, what about you all? What route do you take when it comes to designing magic? And do you use any custom scripts to enhance the abilities? What's your particular spin on spellcasting?