Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy author and teacher of writing, described two core magic systems in fantasy. The first is a hard system, in which there are clear rules. The characters do x and y is the result. Magic is essentially a kind of science or engineering, even if they don't understand it that way, and it achieves basically predictable results. The second is soft, where magic works in mysterious way and no one (possibly not even the magicians, certainly not everyone else) is entirely sure what's going on to achieve it, nor necessarily quite what the outcome will be. He says some other things too, about what the effect of this in your storytelling, which are quite interesting, but not entirely relevant here. If you'd like to read more, there's a wiki link.
In broad terms, something like the Dresden Files or most of Sanderson's own stories use Hard Magic because it's predictable while Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones use soft magic because it's mysterious. Harry Potter treads a middle path where there is still mystery around some of it but core spells have a basically predictable function.
In all previous editions of D&D, magic has been very much on the hard end of the spectrum. Even for a wild magic sorcerer, they spend their spell slot, they get their effect, and occasionally they get something extra, for better or worse. That is because, for all it's a role-playing game, and 5e has done a wonderful job of reversing what 3e, 3.5e and Pathfinder did and complicating the role-playing with rule-playing, at heart, D&D is an old-fashioned war-game. It's actually pretty crap for simulating large battles, which is what a lot of war-games aim to do, but for high-powered characters in heroic fantasy small skirmishes, it rocks. (I should add here, that there is definitely a place for huge rule-sets and rule lawyer games with huge complexity. I play in a Pf2e game and enjoy it, I played 3e for a decade or so and loved it. It's just a very different experience to 5e.) D&D lets you add frills to your spell-casting, you can make your fireballs have a smell of sulfur, or a flash of purple light, or leave a delicate pattern of rose-petal over the area of effect, but everyone's 3rd level fireballs do 8d6 damage and fill a 20' radius, and use a 3rd level spell slot.
In 6e, there will be subtle differences, the damage might be different, and it will costs MP rather than a spell slot but in the basic rules, we're looking at hard magic still. For those of you that have forgotten, the previous post is here.
Why?
What if we let magic run a bit more out of control?
There are, more or less, four ways to do this. I'm going to use the three spells I worked through in detail in the previous post: Fireball, Lightning Arrow and Magic Missile.
Idea one: "Astrological" Influences
Every spell belongs to a school. Evocation, Conjuration, Necromancy, etc. As DM, you set up cycles for these schools and give spells a periodic boost and penalty cycle. Lets say you set one for conjuration of 2 days and size 2. On day 1, all conjuration spells cost +2 MP, on day 2 they all cost -2 MP. If you decide necromancy spells have a 16 day cycle and size 4, you might go 0, +1, +2, , +3, +4, +3, +2, +1, 0, -1, -2, -3, -4, -3, -2, -1.
This seems like a faff, to have different cycles for your different schools of magic. You can make it harder by adding extra cycles, say for different effects (like ball spells have one cycle, lines another, rays a third) on top. While it can be an issue, you just get a calendar going, say what today's effects are, and off you go.
Idea two: "Random" Influences on cost
This is similar to #1, but we're looking at more randomness. When you roll, you roll some dice alongside your roll-for-effect. Magic Missile is 6 MP, Lightning Arrow is 11 MP and Fireball is 16 MP. Lets halve those, and roll 2 dice of that value, so 2d3, 2d5 (or 2d6) and 2d8. Instead of doing the normal thing, make them of different colours, and treat one as a + dice, one as a - dice. Work out the total, add that the cost of the spell. So if you cast Magic Missile and get +3-1, you'd pay 8 MP. If you cast it and get +1-3 you'd pay 4 MP.
Using this rule there would have to be a rule for "borrowing" MP from tomorrow. You might have 16 MP left, cast Fireball and get +7 cost, taking you to -7 total for example. I think the rule has to look something like you must have enough MP to pay the base cost of the spell, if you get a roll that takes you to a negative MP total, after your next rest that restores MP, your normal maximum is reduced by that amount until the following rest that restores your MP. (So if you're a warlock, the next short rest would see your normal maximum reduced by 7, but the one after that you'd be back to normal, if you're a normal caster, the next long rest and the following long rest would be the applicable times.)
This rule is, apart from that, clean to apply, but it makes the bookkeeping a bit messier.
Idea three: Influences on power instead
So, I think this has to be random, rather than astrological, it would be just to brutal, in both directions, if it was stable. Whenever you cast a spell, you roll. I'm thinking maybe a d8, just because I like the eight-pointed star of chaos. On 2-7, nothing happens. On a 1, your dice go down a step. Magic Missile does 3xd3+1 rather than 3xd4+1, Fireball does 8d4 rather than 8d6, Lightning Arrow does 4d6 and 2d6 rather than d8's. If you roll an 8, they go up by a step so you 3xd6+1, 8d8 and 4d10 and 2d10.
This rule is nice and clean to apply, although not all utility spells can use it. How do change the +3 AC from Mage Armour or the effects of Invisibility for example?
Idea four: Random effects
This doesn't necessarily fit well with the schools of magic approach, if you learn Pyromancy to get Burning Hands and Fireball it's not 100% clear how it would work. But, in essence, you would get other effects sometimes.
The basic idea is that magic is uncontrolled, so you roll, lets say a d12, and on a 1, it escapes from you. There is a simple solution - you get raw magic, which does force damage, or a complex solution, where you look at your other schools of the same tier (so if you need tier 3 to cast a 25 MP spell, what other schools do you have at tier 3?) and roll randomly between them and raw magic, to see what you get instead. I honestly prefer the second the solution, but I think the first is easier.
Clearly work has to be done on how this works for utility spells, buffs, debuffs and the like. The "changing schools" option offers a neat out on this, you change the spell to a similar spell (same tier, similar MP cost) in another school. And alternative is to say that this form of escape only applies to damage spells and for utility specs, buffs etc. one of the other approaches has to be used. This is something to look at in play testing.
Overall
The effect of all of these is to make your magic more unpredictable. Personally I quite the idea of combining all four. You could use the Astrological Influences on everything, Random Influences on Cost for spells where you can't use either of the others, and then both of random influences of power and effect for the damage spells, and on power for a few others (like Bless and Bane). It doesn't move 6e away from being basically a hard system - if you cast fireball and you use all four of these ideas, at worst you're going to pay quite a bit more (maybe about 27 MP instead of 16 MP) and have an 8d4 rather than an 8d6 cold ball... of course that could be a disaster if your target is immune to cold and vulnerable to fire, but fundamentally you're still getting an AOE damage spell. It's just blurred around the edges from what you expected. In this case, very blurred.
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