If you don't read comments, here's lots of words!

To actually respond to Grell:

My bad experience with Goodkind was that I heard an audiobook of "Wizard's First Rule" and it was awful. But I realized later that it was an abridged version and they'd hacked it all up, which is why the plot made such little sense. Also, the voice acting was ridiculous. The Dragon Scarlet was a guy saying "I do declah" in falsetto. You see how this would go awfully.

So, I'll give him another try sometime, once that taste's washed out of my mouth.

You're absolutely right that if you don't distinguish cleric-magic and wizard-magic, you just have generic "spellcasters" and that's lame. At the same time, I always thought spell slots for clerics were a bit weird -- why can't they just holler out "Odin, save your loyal servant!" or something? Spell slots for wizards made more sense -- they were memorizing something every morning.

Jacob's the one who wanted to institute a new magic system without spell slots, not me, but the key thing he wanted was for magic to be mysterious and unpredictable, things-man-was-not-meant-to-know type stuff. I think he only wanted to get rid of spell slots to balance out that he was making wizard spells more random.

It's true that in D&D rules, saying "no spell slots" basically just makes sorcerers. Ya gotta remember that back in our day, there weren't no sorcerers, so they're a new thing for us. 3rd ed. lets you have your cake or eat it too: you can have pre-defined spells, or cast-on-the-fly. That's new for us (me anyway), and I didn't think of it at the time of the IMing. Jacob was just suggesting a sorcerer-with-random-effects scheme for magic made more sense to him, or would be fun to play, or something. I think. I really shouldn't put words in his mouth.

So, since you bring up clerics, here's some more random thoughts about that:

If'n I run the circus, I was thinking that cleric-magic should be much more faith-based. Like, when you get healed, you don't actually see wounds heal up or anything (after all, only the last few hp are supposed to be tangible damage: the rest represent luck and blessings of the gods and suchlike.) You get healed (blessed) by a cleric, and have faith that it does something. (And it does, in game terms -- you get hp.)

There's plenty of cleric spells that're already intangible in their effects, we just don't make a big deal about it: blessings and buffs and healings and so forth mostly just affect dice rolls and stats, not something the characters would actually see. I think it'd be good to keep up that facade -- for the most part, you can only assume that cleric spells are doing any good. And maybe, if you're not a devout worshipper, they aren't...

Another thought I have (and now I see this should've been a front-page ramble -- I mean, post) is that wizard-magic is already a little random: how much damage does a fireball do? Depends on what you roll. Sometimes it's kinda lame, and sometimes it's really cool. Ramping up that randomness might achieve the chaotic effect Jacob's going for.

One thing that I always thought should show up more often is fizzling a spell. (Except when I'm casting it, in which case it should always work.) There's always been nods this way or that to provide the chance of spell failure, but the idea is so horrifying that it's usually watered down enough that it almost never happens in practice.

If (a) fizzling spells didn't waste a spell slot and (b) the wizardy classes have some balancing compensation for the fizzling risk, I think it would be really entertaining and make magic much more "wild".

Final note: "spell slot" is a little ambiguous (to me). A sorcerer has a limited number of spells/day, and in that sense has "spell slots", but usually I think of it as meaning "the number of predefined spells for the day I have". Because I'm lazy, I'm going to assume that you can figure out which one I meant wherever I used the term. And if using one meaning makes me sound dumb, I meant it the other way. :)