[PK]

I love the idea of turning 8 Path skills into 64 Hexagrams. It's a lot of work, as you say, but is a great idea thematically.

If you're going to break up the effects by Hexagram (which I think would be necessary to really capture the I Ching), I'd make a few more changes to RPM. For example, I wouldn't even associate each of the 8 Trigram Paths with a specific subject; they're simply the Trigrams. (With no "Path of Magic," you'd use your core skill to refill mana reserve.) So instead of having to match up effects by Path, you'd always use exactly two Trigram Path skills -- perhaps rolling against the average instead of the lower one. Then you just count up how many effects you're using, instead of worrying about which Path they come from. The downside being, of course, that the spell as a whole has to make sense for that Hexagram. (Multi-Hexagram spells might be possible, but should be considerably more difficult.)

Very interesting idea here . . . whether it's worth the effort to go all-out into 64 different "effect trees" is up to you, of course.