Okay, so just tossing some ideas around here, but how would you make a scenic game? So each action would happen as describing a scene, and you'd switch off between characters, or something like that?

And magic, how would magic work? I don't like the Vancian system primarily because it doesn't feel very magical to me, it's more of a resource management system. Allot of the spells seem rather useless unless you know you're going to need them that day, and knowing what you're going to need on a given day is so random. How often do you actually know you are going to need anti-invisibility? If you can make a fireball with fire, why not a flaming sword, or a shield, or a dragon, or any number of other things? why can't you control the heat and the size and the shape and the duration? So you can do allot, but really you have a few spells you constantly invoke, and then one or two that you pull out on special occasions.

So I like magic where you can do lots of different things all the time and it's not what you "memorized" that day. And I like the idea of being able to switch out different systems easily, or even have multiple systems together. Holy magic I like to be big and powerful and rare and miraculous.

I saw a simultaneous fighting system that I really liked on another forum. It simplified fighting into engaging, retreating, and maintaining; reach, armor piercing, and guarding. The engage-retreat-maintain system works pretty well for a one-on-one battle, and then for anyone else adjacent to you are basically caught flat-footed unless you're an advanced enough fighter. Pretty elegant system for combat, or at least I thought so. It is basically a land based fighting style though. Water and Air fighting are dive bomb attacks, you go in and then you try to get the high ground and then you go in again. In the sky the high spot is always the advantage because stooping or swooping is the best offense and defense. In the water it's a little different because of the pressure and light differences changing levels so quickly to be practically alien worlds to each other. I don't think fish actually fight that much. When they do the social animals are always winning because they gang up on the loser.