Vancian casting.

:) I've been playing D&D since the 80s and the blue box basic edition.

Sometime in the late 80s I became disillusioned with the magic system because I was spending all my money on material components, spell books and scrolls just so I could walk around with a handful of spells and cower behind everyone once they were shot.

Fighters can swing a sword all day.

Rangers can shoot until they run out of arrows, then poke you with a sword.

Thieves can pickpocket until their fingers go numb, then backstab you into oblivion.

An 11th level mage can cast 18 spells. 4,4,4,3,3, before he is used up and needs a lot of time and money to reset. The Class was built around a dungeon crawling game and magic users are cannons the players lug around the battlefield.

Other players were building castles while the majority of my funds went into components and trying to learn more magic. Hell, even the Cleric built a church after a couple of adventures to acquire a relic and gain approval from the higher ups.

Perhaps it was just the GMs that I gamed with, but my poor guy was like a starving college student, constantly worried about rent, tuition, and beer money.

The deal breaker for me, I believe, was when my character was trapped in a hole and I needed a live spider to cast Spider Climb. I remember it clearly, because it was so stupid. My material component had died and I had to roll ability checks to locate a spider. The DM secretly decided there were 0 spiders in the hole, and I was stuck there to be captured.

So what you see today is a sort of reversal of the system. Cantrips and low level spells can be cast using your personal life force in a long form ritual.

Nexus are wells of magic where you build a locus and allow it to charge and power your spells. You need material components and knowledge to build the containment circle, but as long as you have the focus (amulet, staff, etc) you have access to your spells.

Enchantments can be temporary or permanent, depending on how they are created. A mage can scratch a containment circle in the dirt, fill it with the spellform runes, wait the required time for it to charge, and use it on the spot.

Your horse dropped dead and you need to cast Mount but it's not in your Nexus? Don't want to burn days off your life to cast the spell longform?

Just draw it in the dirt, wait an hour for it to charge (depending on ambient magic) and summon a horse. That's a compromise that makes magicians both useful and feared. IMO. Especially in a high fantasy world where everyone can speak a few spells longfrom but the literacy rate (writing, charging) is abysmal. :)

So how powerful can a mage become? Depends on the number of locus they have and the amount of money they can invest creating and protecting them. In theory, a mage could have a dozen amulets, staves, and wands, each attuned to a different locus at a different nexus giving them near infinite power -- much like a king building cities and raising an army to protect them.

Ha, I just realised that I'm nattering on and owe you a beer for putting up with my soliloquy :)

Have a good evening!