I don't like spells. It's not that I don't care for magic, I love magic. What I have a problem with is spells and spell systems. (Most of this ramble is in the context of D&D 3.x and such systems.)
Spells can typically be working into novels and stories just fine. Harry Potter somehow made a system that both had defined rules for its spells and absolutely no limits for its spells, and this captured the imagination and made the story fun, because the characters had to work with the few spells they knew and use their heads to get through the situations they found themselves in. However, when you read things like Dragonlance, or other obviously-based-on-D&D books for that matter, they have to show the massive breadth and depth of the magic system, but it ends up mostly looking like the spellcasters are pulling things out of their hind ends (even when it's written really well).
This can extend into gameplay, especially with divine casters in the 3.x systems. No challenge can stand up to a higher-level (or even not-so-high-level caster sometimes) because they can just bypass the entire thing. Set up a plot point of having a quest for a spear that has the power of the sun so you can subdue a vampire? No need, the Wizard and the Cleric can shoot sunbeams out of their palms. An arduous climb to find a guru who knows where the spear is? No need, a fly spell can get you to the top of the cliff; or even better yet, a scry spell can find the spear without even having to leave the house. There are too many ways for them to bypass everything. Big stone golem boss? Stone to Flesh, and it's now useless. Big humanoid bad? Flesh to Stone, Stone to Mud. Your big bad is a mud puddle.
Spell systems in roleplaying are overpowered by simple fact of nature. There's no challenge, and there's nothing interesting about playing, except as being a some kind of power trip. Needless to say, I feel that spells in their current state are not good.
Frankly, I feel that my problems with spells come down to two issues. The first: spells allow a person to bypass things that everyone else simply has to deal with. The second: spells screw up combat too much.
I've already spoken a bit about the first problem, but I'm going to say more about it because I can. Now, being able to bypass the exploration system completely isn't completely the magic system's fault. The exploration system is based mostly on the skill system, which, for the most part, feels tacked on and useless. Most of the time, you have one person in your party that can participate in the exploration system to a fair extent, and even then, that person is probably specialized to specific roles. If the exploration system was the main part of D&D, rather than combat being the main part, more characters would be able to take part in it, just as everyone, except the monk if you're past level 5, is able to participate in combat. Characters would have better class abilities aimed at navigating exploration, rather than having a bunch of crap exploration abilities and relying on the skill monkey (until the caster gets his spells) and the caster (after the caster gets his spells) to ostensibly do all of the exploration.
Point is, the exploration system sucks for the majority of people in the party, that's why the caster basically gets ways to negate ever having to deal with the system at all through his or her spells. Spells, in this instance, are just shoring up a crap system. (Now, I'm not saying that the skill system and the exploration system are a crap concept, I'm just saying that the way they were incorporated into D&D was crappy and ruins the entire system.) These spells are only there so you don't need a skill monkey to bypass everything for you and find the easy way out. They are the easy way out.
On the other hand, combat is ostensibly supposed to be the part of the game that everyone lives for. But here come spells again, and they've ran drafty holes through that idea. There's a big problem when spells basically give you an easy out to the part of the game that you're supposedly putting the most time into gearing up for and optimizing around. There's more time spent prepping to make sure you're combat ready in the game, and yet here are a few spells that make that so stupidly simple as a single die roll. Voop! Disintegrated. And end scene. Spells should not allow for alternate win conditions that completely negate what most of your materials in most of your rulebooks and such are for. We came for bloody combat, just give us bloody combat!
And even when they're not completely avoiding combat, spells are still screwing up combat. They screw up combat by giving players too many choices to logically choose from them within a short amount of time. Everyone I've ever played with who has played a caster, pseudocaster or anything like a caster of any kind that has had to deal with spells or psionic powers or whatever, including myself, has always taken ages upon ages upon ages upon ages to sort through and tactically choose what spell would work best. They ruin the combat by providing too many choices to make than is humanly possible to deal with. Perhaps if you could only have a small few spells at any time, people would make these decisions in character creation rather than every round of combat.
Heck, spells even screw with things in-game with combat. If a caster who's suited to buffs just decides to use them on himself rather than his party members, he can often be severely out-preforming a non-caster character in that character's role, even if the character has the same buffs as he does. Why? Because he's got spells to keep himself from failing because of little tricks that the enemy throws at him, unlike the non-caster, who's often S-O-L if somebody does so much as throw sand at his eyes. A caster will have some spell that can give him a loophole, even with the problems thrown at him.
If I sound bitter, it's probably because I am a bit bitter. The notion of unbalanced levels needs to either go by the wayside, or it needs to be presented in a less cruddy way than 3.x has presented it.
In parting, I feel strongly that in 5th Edition D&D, they really need to learn from the mistakes of 3.x. And they also need to learn from the mistakes of 4e, which actually fixed a lot of the problems I had with 3.x. Unfortunately it introduced a host more of them that I have with 4e. (Despite it all, 4e is, objectively, the better designed system.) Also, I may be a bit tired of both the fluff and crunch of the spell-casting systems that we've had in 3.x. I do believe that I'm going to try a much different sort of fluff and crunch in my own system, and people can take it, or they can leave it.
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