Well Kohaku, I don't know if anyone's brought this up before, but your contract magic actually sounds a lot like Darklands' miracles system. In Darklands, your characters have to curry Divine Favor with the Saints that they have learned how to commune with in order to get anything form them. In order to get the most out of the Saints a character needs to be virtuous, be literate(which includes knowing latin and even being able to speak it), and have actual religious training. All of this makes Darklands "magic" extremely difficult to make use of and even if you have a 100% percent chance to have your prayers answered, the Saint can still still not to give you what you want. This is just a small facet of the current reigning king of fantasy simulation a grueling but ultimately extremely rewarding experience.
DF needs to end up being like Darklands and Demons' Souls in order to really work. By this I of course mean that the game needs to be brutal but fair. Toady needs to make players work for even small victories. I've said in one of your threads that alchemy is intrinsically dangerous and it is. All DF magic should be like this.You need to be constantly weighing the benefits of success against the dangers of failure. This is shown in magic concepts in every thing from D&D to Harry Potter to Charmed. There is always a chance that a spell will backfire with anything from comical, to catastrophic consequences."He who shall not be named." encountered a prophecy, tired to stop it, and a mix of a backfire and a parental miracle caused him to create his own destroyer. R.A. Salvatore gave us the Harpel family. These mages all have their own serious issues and treat magic like a game resulting in all sorts of shenanigans including one of them creating a spell that allowed him to save "The Companions of the Hall" only to end up forgetting that he created the spell in the first place.
Uhhh as usually I ended up creating a rambling post that has no real direction, apologies. I don't do much communicating and as you can see I have some decent reasons.
Well I guess that what I was really trying to say is that magic needs to be BOTH structured and inherently chaotic just like how the universe works. What we need to do is come up with a set of "Magical Laws" or, even a set of sets of "Magical Laws". Once these magical versions of the Laws of Physics are defined, we can start to throw in various variables. When it comes to Spheres, Toady was pretty clear that that is just an arbitrary term meant to be the header for a set of tags that pertain "Ideas".
Uhhh... damn. I just worked myself into a corner. Now I need to try to describe a personal concept of mine, I apologize for the way that this is going to come out in advance. Look at it this way, as shown in stories like the ones that influenced the Digital Devil Saga and other MegaTen games, everything really boils down to binary data. Hell, Shakespeare pointed this out when Hamlet said "To be or not to be.", that's really what everything boils down to: yes or no. Everything has two co-dependent sides that can't exist without one another. You can't be dead if you were never alive. If you haven't ever seen the light, then how do you define darkness. These are all basic concepts that don't really exist without an observer ,in other words the well known "Observer Effect" theory. I see it, therefore it is. As described in Planescape these concepts have their own raw power, but the thing is, this just ain't magic. This is simple "will" that were talking about. The Planes are quite moldable and tend to shift, merge, and diverge as the majority decides it should. In the multiverse these things tend to be taken for granted and things tend to be pretty polarized. Now my personal view comes into play when you start talking about the Prime Material Plane which is effectively made up of concepts.
The Spheres are simply rough guidelines that have no meaning on there own. Lords of Magic does a good job of explaining this with its 8 elements that serve as the primary building blocks of our reality and this is of course also used in the Mana games i.e Secret of Mana. As far as the first game goes these are, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Life, Death, Order and Chaos. The first 6 can be said to directly, and mainly, pertain to matter. We all know how these things interact in order to form our reality. These are all easily quantifiable and in the end mean precisely dick when it comes to our main problem. The difficult thing is how our reality may be influenced by the thought processes of sentient beings. Again I cite a MegaTen series, this time Persona, because of a concept that I learned from it- The Universal Unconcious. This combined with Xenosaga's "Universal Consciousness"................. Oh dear God what hath my mind wrought. What the hell am I even trying to say again?
I hate trying to explain stuff and well, by now you can likely tell what I do with the bulk of my time and what my physical appearance is like. There's some really deep stuff referenced here that could be useful with a little Googling so I'll leave it all despite the fact that it's a maddeningly disjointed mess............ much like my mind actually. Alright lets try a simple approach. As I said "Sphere" is just an arbitrary title for a list of tags pertaining to basic concepts. Own their own they are completely worthless. Even with "child" Spheres, they are still worthless own their own. This is why you need another arbitrary title such as "Domain". A "Domain" would consist of a collection of similar concepts and a few ancillary ones that bridge the gaps between the Domains. You know what, fuck it, I'm done. I've gone threw 3 or 4 Kelly Clarksen albums multiple times typing this, and my neck hurts. Take this mess as you will and do what you will with it I need to lay the fuck down before my head explodes.