A more free ended magic system?

[CrimsonWineGlass]

I was recently reading through the Elminster series and I noticed something that got me thinking. In the book, during his training (or at this point her training), he/she learns to modify certain spells. In many styles of fantasy you can modify aspects of a certain spell in very unique and creative ways to get a certain effect. I know that metamagic feats were intended as a way to achieve this idea but I feel that it should be a natural thing for a wizard to be able to change, say cone of cold, into a line as opposed to a 90 degree burst and only a 90 degree burst with a 45 degree angle on both sides of the point of origin ranging 60 feet out. Shape changing, type alteration, minor modifications to the effect of the spell that occur on the spot should not require a selection of feats that would drain a fighter in my mind. The sheer amount of metamagic feats is inane.

Now to the question; has anybody developed a magic system that allows for spell usage that A) modify's the "choose from spells 1-8 and they will be that way period" or B) is a system that allows manipulation of elements or similar. In all honesty, any magic system that is more versatile and not limited to picking from x, y or z.

 

[Fieari]

You want Elements of Magic, which you can buy in PDF form as well as getting the book. It's 3rd party, but very good.

Preparing specific spells ahead of time is still useful in this system (note that you design these spells yourself), because spontaneously altering a spell takes two rounds to cast. It's still very useful.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Yes, it's been done. Elements of Magic does it well, although there are aspects of that I've never really liked.

In fact, over the past few days I've been posting the homebrew my group uses in this thread. The three aspects of the magic system that apply to what you're asking about are:

1> Most of the key spells are defined by a single "chain spell" that can be memorized in any level of spell slot (or cast spontaneously, etc.), and whose effect scales to the level of the slot used. In some cases it's just as simple as dealing more damage; in others, it's not quite so linear.
It's explained in post #10, titled "Chapter 6: Magic"

2> It's mostly an elemental system, outside of the Astral and Psionic stuff.

3> Metamagic is spontaneous by default, and a key part of the system is the set of "Shaping" metaforms. The attack chain spells each throw a single bolt of energy (ray attack) as a default, but you can then modify these into cones, balls, lines, chains, etc. using the Shaping metaforms. Likewise, you can take a normal, single-target spell and manipulate it with these forms. (It's similar to the Warlock invocations in a way, although we built this system before we ever saw that class.)

Each caster class gets 1 metaform for free, Channelers get another 4 over the course of their levels, and you select 2 metaforms each time you take a Feat, so it's not the simple 1-for-1 you see in 3E. (We toyed with making it 3 forms for one feat, but that ended up just being too much.)
I was just about to post this part, actually; I hadn't done it yet, although I've posted parts of it before, since it was one of our earliest changes. It works just fine with 3E, too.