Celebrim
Legend
I do it occasionally already, and had a concept in place for a very robust system well before this article was written. Were it not for the whole thing about gamabiilty I mentioned which is based on experience, I'd do it far more than I do.
The way the system works is that spells have keyed descriptors like 'Fire' or 'Good' or whatever, and locations have descriptors as well that effect the caster level of the spell. So for example, an underwater cave might have Fire -3 and Water +3. A water spell cast in that environment would have +3 caster level, while a fire spell would have -3 caster level. If the caster level of the spell goes below the caster level required to cast the spell, you have to make a caster level check to avoid fizzle. If the caster level goes below 0, then it automatically fizzles. If the caster level of the spell is enhanced, then you can be risking a spell fumble (and I have spell fumble tables) for casting magic more powerful than you are able of controlling.
The problem is that you need to not only decide ahead of time where these modifiers apply but then also remember that they are in play. And what I've learned after trying to implement numinous magic through this and other similar methodology is that the amount of head space this takes up in a DM's brain is more than they can handle, because the cost of hiding information about how a player character's abilities work from the player is very high. And so far I've found that except in limited circumstances where you are trying to achieve some special effect the cost is too high for the gains that you get.
The decision to generalize the system to phases of the moon, times of the year, and other modifiers was immediately put on hold once I realized just how demanding it is to do this for geographical location. In short, I've been down the paths that the author is talking about. The core of the system dates back to ideas from the early 90's and I attempted an implementation of it nearly a decade ago.
Exalted is IMO an objectively terrible system.
Again, tried to do that as well by giving magic items a system of quirks. And while that does work for something like Excalibur if you try to do that as a general system that applies to all magic items and not just a few you are trying to make special, the amount of information hidden from the player that you as a DM have to remember and keep track of is just too high for the gains in atmosphere. I dropped the system largely after the players hit 4th level or so and all started to have multiple magic items on their person. It was just too much. I now do it only for a few items that are notable enough that they have a status comparable to an NPC.
One problem that I've discovered in this is the sheer amount of rules you have to smith out. I have a lot of how I want the system to work in my head, but my guess is that it's 900 pages of 10 point font single spaced type written pages to get it all down on paper and therefore accessible to both me and where applicable the players. As aggressive as I can be about creating house rules, that's proven to be too daunting of a challenge even for me to create. The writing is difficult, my standards are high, and I know now that as cool as it would be you might not be able to actually run the system once it was finished.
Further, just imagine what this system would be like were it finished. The amount of rules on scholarly magic alone would tend to mean that the vast majority of the gaming system was ultimately being devoted mostly to concerns specific to a single class - wizard - and to a lesser extent to spellcasting classes generally. We're already in a situation where most D&D rule books are half spell-descriptions. In this situation I envision needing 3 books devoted entirely to Wizards each twice the size of the supplement specific to other classes, as well as the 300 page book on crafting objects itself devoting a lot of subject matter to item creation which is mostly or at least most easily accessible to wizards.
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