What Makes a Great Magic System?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Shostak

I like the idea of magic being someting that wizards can experiment with so as to make use of it with predictable outcomes due to what amounts to a scientific understanding of it. Others could harness it without really understanding it in the same way.

That's something I would go out of my way to avoid. My feeling is that if you can understand something by scientific methods, experiment with it, achieve predictable outcomes, and so on, you've made it unmagical.