Absolutely. Hard and soft magic is a sliding scale, rather than discrete qualities. A dynamic magic system that has rules dictating its use would be softer than a rote magic system, but would still be on the hard side of the scale (since it is still defined by rules, even if those rules leave some wiggle room).
I have no issues with this, I just recon that a gamble system has a lower bound on the softness of the magic system.
It also makes it hard for gaming if you have spellcasters in your game. The magicians need to have some understanding of the scope of what they can do for a game to work. (If you don't have actual PC spellcasters but do have magic that's another story - the modern campaign where the players are investigating weird occult phenomenon that has no rational explanation without access to the occult themselves - or with access that they can use but not understand - is a trope that works in a horror game quite well IME).
Arthur C Clarke would like a word with you.
A gamble system? Like where you decide what you want the magic to do but there’s a chance something might go wrong, which increases proportionally to the power of the effect you chose? To me that seems like a pretty good balance point of magic hardness for an RPG. It allows the degree of predictably and controllability necessary for an RPG where the PCs’ actions are generally under the players’ control, while emulating a bit of the wildness and unpredictability of a softer magic system.
Yeah, although you have to be careful with this, lest you end up with ludonarrative dissonance. Using a very hard mechanical system to represent magic that is supposed to be soft in the narrative can end up making things feel disjointed. This is why the gambling system idea is a decent compromise. Randomization is a really good way of making highly constructed systems feel naturalistic.
Yeah, this is kind of the best I, as a person who prefers more historical, esoteric magic, can do with D&D. The kind of world that D&D’s magic actually suggests is… Well, it’s Eberron, full stop. Eberron is, in my opinion, pretty much the perfect expression of a setting that accepts D&D’s magic at face value and explores the implications of such magic and the effects it would have on a world. Unfortunately for me, it isn’t the sort of magic I really want from my fantasy, so I have to go the route of mostly ignoring magic and assuming spellcasting PCs are the incredibly rare exceptions.
I have generally found that any gamble mechanic strong enough to make magic seeming mysterious and uncontrolled tends to put players off from playing magic using characters unless the game is like Call of Cthulhu where the scenario only lasts a couple of sessions.
I really like how Mage the Awakening 2e does it. That’s one of my favorite magic systems in an RPG, and certainly my favorite version of a gamble mechanic. Basically, you have your various Arcana (essentially schools of magic) which determine the base effects you can produce, which default to single target, touch range, instantaneous duration, etc. and then you have a resource called “Reach” that you can expend to scale those factors up - kind of like Metamagic in D&D. As your mastery of an Arcanum increases, you get more base effects, and extra Reach to spend on spells using the lower-level effects within that Arcanum. The kicker is, you can actually spend more Reach than you technically “have”, but if you do, the GM gets to roll some “Paradox dice”, and successes allow them to cancel out some of your Reach effects or add additional ones of their choosing. I’m simplifying a bit, but that’s the basic premise. The important part for this conversation is that it creates a feeling that magic is extremely flexible, but risky to attempt to perform feats that are beyond your level of mastery. If you stick to simple stuff you’ve done a million times and know you can do safely, it’s quite reliable. But if you push yourself to do more, the magic can escape your control. (Sort of; in the lore there’s more going on there than the magic itself being chaotic).
I can see the attraction. For me, it gives me Flintstones vibes. We just replace modern technology with magic and move on with the story. I can just picture the camera panning to an Otyugh in the sewer eating crap, staring into the camera, shrugging its tentacles, and saying, "Eh, it's a living."
Part of the foundation of the empirical project (what is often casually called "science") was building an observational baseline of the world. The difficulty of preserving and communicating information hampered this for a very long time. As such barriers were lifted, particularly with the invention of the printing press, magic found itself driven to the edges. On the one hand, because the observations of luminaries became a lot easier to draw on; on the other, because the more outlandish observations became easier to see as...well, outlandish.
That’s what I’m saying! Magic, historically, was very much a sort of proto-science. Someone gets sick, you give them some herbs and say some prayers, and they get better. So, the next time someone gets sick, you give them those same herbs and say those same prayers. Over time, the effective techniques get passed on and the ineffective ones die out. It’s not that magic and science are opposed, it’s that we’ve gotten so good at magic, we’ve managed to almost completely demystify it. Though, some science involves such specialized knowledge, it kind of has been re-mystified for much of the population. I look at high-level physics equations and they might as well be arcane sigils to me.
John Maynard Keynes in a 1946 lecture on Sir Isaac Newton organised by The Royal Society of London notes: “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.”
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
