Alrigio Fernandez van falkengrund, a Noble Merchant and Fighter in diffrent versions in armor and uniform

in a lower level, the equipment looks a bit like prince Kaspians from Narnia

in a higher level

and with uniform

What I'm talking about is basically the reason for which I NEVER play Tactical/Resourceful/Insightful Warlords in DnD 4e. For those of you who don't know, a Warlord in DnD 4e is basically a leader who leads his/her allies through strategy and inspiration - basically a field general. I am not good at all when it comes to strategy and tactics (I tried reading Sun Tzu's Art of War to fix this, and it didn't help). But whenever I see anyone play a Warlord or other "smart" character, it's assumed that because the character is "smart," the player will make his/her character do "smart" things during roleplay.

The problem with this assumption is that the way the character is roleplayed in this regard depends on the player's abilities, not the abilities of the character itself. The fact that your character has an 18 (pretty high for a starting score in DnD) or so in Intelligence or Wisdom or whatever has no reflection on your ability as a player to emulate those abilities for yourself, and if you as a player are not "smart," you can't think of doing the same things that a "smart" person would reasonably think to do, and if you can't think of doing a particular thing, your character will not be able to decide to do it.

Sorry for the tangent. My point is, I'm not "smart" in terms of my ability to make wise decisions, and that's why I make characters that rely more on raw power than strategy; hence, fighter-types.

It's a shame, really, because I think humans are boring. In fact, a lot of "standard" fantasy races are boring - you've got tall, arrogant, extremely effeminate humans with pointy ears; short, stout, stubborn humans who like treasure almost as much as they like alcohol; really tiny, adventurous humans sometimes sporting big, hairy feet; you get my point. It's gotten to the point where I find all but the most exotic of races to be pretty boring.

So I try to spice things up a little bit. One time in a DnD 4e campaign, I played a Dragonborn Infernal Hexblade and flavored his infernal powers as being that he was actually half-Dragonborn, half-Tiefling. Another time, again in a DnD 4e game, I played a human ardent who got his psionic powers from what was basically a friendly, self-sentient alien tumor (with a british accent to boot) that had consumed and replaced his right arm. In yet another DnD 4e campaign, I played a character based on a character from the setting of the game system I myself am making; he was a human mage who happened to be magically cloned from a dead god, and as a result of a botched ritual which was intended to awaken his divine powers and turn him evil, he had a crippled leg. My latest character that I've played in someone else's campaign (this time, it was a 3.5 campaign) was a tauric Goblin/Wolf who, due to being beaten as a slave every time he spoke, was afraid of himself speaking. I think the most "normal" character I've played in the past couple of years was Jeff Andonuts (from Earthbound), flavored as having crashed into the campaign world after a malfunction in the Phase Distorter while trying to find and apprehend Porky Minch.

Actually, scratch that. My most "normal" character may have been my recurring character, Aaron Irving, a human sniper-type rogue whose biological father was a vampire who kept trying to recruit Aaron into his service.

As you can probably guess, people have tried to get me to play "normal" characters on plenty an occasion. I've actually considered playing a completely boring, one-dimensional human fighter named "Gene Rick" just to get them to shut up.

I'm assuming that magic, in your game's world, would be rarely used? If it were to be used often enough to allow for "mages" in a traditional sense (as in, people who primarily use magic) to be anything other than rare or nonexistent, one would need a far simpler system, with far greater predictability. I get that you're trying to create a system in which spells can be designed on-the-fly, and that as an idea is both great and rare, but I don't think this is the right way to do it. You've got players having to make charts for their spell components in which they try to define the properties of their spell by picking and choosing traits from their components - that in itself is far too complex - and then choosing an undesired trait for each desired trait, thus increasing complexity further. The fact that an insufficient roll makes a spell partially succeed by only applying some of the desired effects puts far too much work on the shoulders of everyone involved, both on the part of a player who must plan ahead with each spell in order to minimize the risk while maximizing the reward, and on the GM who must, for each bad roll, consider which of the player's decisions should be kept and which shouldn't be kept, and also consider not only the immediate effects of what gets kept and what doesn't but also the long-term effects and how each would influence not only the campaign's plot but also how the players themselves would react.

If I were to play this game, I know I wouldn't ever want to play a mage. Being the mage would mean that you'd probably take far too long above the table to cast the spells, thus making the other players resent you for hogging too much time which should, ideally, be evenly divided among the players; being the mage would also make the other players resent you because, well, when the fighter rolls bad, he simply misses when swinging his sword (I'm assuming), but when the mage rolls bad, the game could easily end with a localized (or maybe not) apocalypse. If the flavor of the world were to reflect this, practicing magic would certainly be done by only the most nihilistic of villains, and any mage who would for whatever reason not fall under that category would conceal his identity as a mage, for knowledge that a mage was nearby would cause everyone to immediately try to A. kill the mage, B. run to safety, or C. commit suicide so at least they could die on their own terms.

Of course, this is all assuming that I'm interpreting what I read correctly. Now, just so that there's more of a degree of constructiveness to my criticism, I actually had my own idea for instant spell engineering which, unfortunately, would not be implemented in my own system for various reasons, but which might be useable in a different system (not necessarily yours, but you might be able to use or adapt it). It's actually based on the flavor of how magic works in the setting of my game, which is why it's quite shameful that I can't think of a way to properly implement it mechanically. Anyway...

The system I'm proposing for instant spell engineering is that each overall "spell" is actually a combination of multiple smaller spells. Say you wanted to cast a fireball to throw at your enemies. You'd first cast a spell to flood a volume containing air particles with arcane energy (to act as fuel), then you'd cast another spell to increase the rate of collisions between those air particles in order to drastically increase the heat in that volume. The oxygen is already there, so you now have a fire, floating conveniently in the air. Assuming the fire was big or hot enough to satisfy what you wanted to throw at your enemies, you'd then cast yet another spell to move the effects of the previous two spells toward your enemies at a high velocity.

This system would allow you to mix-and-match spells to produce different effects based on the spells you use. Players would, of course, have to learn spells to apply certain effects. It would be a lot simpler, because the effects of each spell are already determined, rather than having to think of each and every effect that would be associated with a component. It would be less risky, as you would roll for each spell, and if you failed on any individual spell, you'd know exactly how your "overall" spell "partially succeeds" by simply not including the smaller spell that you failed to cast, and if you had enough time and energy to do so, you might even try again. Unpredictable effects would only happen on a critical failure. It would still be more complex than what most people are accustomed to, but it would also still be easier than what you were going with. I hate to make it sound like I'm insulting you, or that I'm bragging, but ultimately (and again, assuming I'm understanding what you're saying correctly) I think a lot of people would prefer the system I proposed to the system you've got going as a system of instant magical engineering.

i1-i3: lantern----------feather----------sandal
A1-3: burns-----------small-------------crushes what it touches
A4-6: portable--------quick-------------hard
A7-9: oil-powered----breath-directed--smells of feet
B1-3: tips over-------white-------------flammable
B4-6: black------------soft---------------runs from enemy
B7-9: metal-----------fragile-------------leather
Casting Weight Tier: 1 pound<3.5 lbs total ingredients; Memory (mm): 17; Magery: 15; Player rolled a 9.

So, the mage made his magery roll--but wait--18 traits to keep track of with a 17 mm and an insufficient casting weight.
The roll made means the spell worked. The GM chooses 'portable' as a trait that the result lost. As a random effect, the result is invisible (Reasonable, because the only colors chosen were colors NOT to be.)
Yikes. The result is an invisible thing that can't be held. It is made of hardened fire which burns and crushes. The mage, not yet realizing the problem, blows on it. It doesn't run from the enemy, so it 'kicks' and sets fire to the nearest archer and flutters randomly downwind like a feather, 'kicking' and setting fire to the next archer. They would roll for fire damage. In this example they die quickly.
The third archer makes an intelligence roll and starts huffing and puffing. The others do also and so catch on. The field catches fire and kills the mage. The forest catches fire and burns the village the mage was protecting. The smell of feet becomes overpowering. 3 hours later the 7 surviving archers escape, having taken turns huffing and puffing over each other and fanning vigorously. The lantern had only had 3 hours of oil in it. A field hand found it a month later and turned it in -- an invisible lantern? They caged it for study. The point of this system is that creativity, thoughtfulness, and good choices make the difference.

Magery would be an attribute like strength but in magic. Roll lower with a d20 to make it.
Memory would be a capacity score. A Magery roll too high subtracts from the quantity of details you can manage.
In this system, details are traits that your result will have.
Casting Weight is the maximum weight your result can have, and is therefore one of the limits of what you can make and / or use as ingredients.
Every mage would pick up a bloom of mageroot per spell, break it into pieces (one piece per ingredient,) and touch a piece to each ingredient. The mageroot bloom then disappears, and the result of all combined ingredients appears at the intended place (within area of ingredients touched.)
Ingredients * ingredients * 2 = traits. Half you want, and half you don't.
Gotta go--lunch over.

I'm not entirely sure what, exactly, you meant with most of the things you said. In your first post, most of the last two paragraphs were hard to understand. You had completely undefined terms such as "Casting Weight," and you have "Mageroot," which I'm assuming is a type of spell component, but you need to define certain things about it. For example...

-Will the amount of mageroot used influence the spell in any way (I am assuming yes)?
-You mentioned desired and undesired traits - how do those depend on the ingredients that the mageroot is touched to?
-How much mageroot is usually required for the purposes of most spells?

As for your second paragraph, you need to format it better. I hate to be rude or anything, but with the lack of attention to grammar and no description of the variables involved, I couldn't make heads or tails of what you typed. What does "i1,i2,i3 . . . " refer to? It seems to have something to do with the ingredients for casting spells, but what do the numbers mean, and why are there different 'numbers' of ingredients at all? "With 3 i, 9 each for 18" sounds like it has something to do with multiplication, but 3 times 9 is 27, not 18, so I can only guess you're not multiplying 3 by 9. The only thing I got from the rest of your second post was that something was rolled, and even that is vague; what type of die or dice (I'm assuming it was a die or some dice) was/were rolled, what sort of results on the roll give what sort of results in the game, are there separate rolls for whether or not one succeeds vs. how much one succeeds by (i.e., if you hit with an attack vs. how much damage you deal), etc.?

If two ingredients, pick 4 traits you want and 4 you don't. With 3 i, 9 each for 18. Like below.
lower,higher,constant
M16,mm8,T--3 pounds------------Vobo rolled a 17M, lost one trait. Luckily he had 2 repeats.
i1--straw, i2--unmeasured sand--He already had a mm8 (total = traits,) so he didn't have to roll for
////////////i1////i2-------------------a minus to his M roll. And the leftover sand? Was just leftover.
want burns burns-----------------Neat result. . . he invented straw that he can POUR
want burns falls like sand-------after he lights it. It'll just fall, not subject to wind.
don't rises doesn't burn--------He didn't pick a color. He got 3 pounds of pink straw.
don't noisy blows away---------Only a fist-sized bundle. This took one action.
Do I have a volunteer to use Vobo's stats?