Spellcasting
This is an attempt to establish standards and by no means law. But spellcasting gets more tangible if you stick to the following three limiting factors:
- Power: A spell requires a certain amount of juice to be cast. The juice can be your own magicka pool, a soul gem or something entirely different. The amount of juice required can be reduced by turning the spell into a ritual - basically, the less preparation a spell has, the more expensive it gets.
- Casting a fireball requires power.
- Control: Another important limitation is to get a spell to do what you want and not something else. Powerful fireballs are nice and well, but if you can't control where they go, you're useless (and have awesome RP in stressful situations). Knowing exactly what you want and how you want to do it helps with this, so does practice and rituals.
- Holding a portal open and making sure it doesn't suddenly change directins requires control.
- Accuracy: How skilled is your character with magickal minute motor activity? You can move the world if your lever is long enough, but you can also knock it out of its orbit with enough juice. Accuracy often makes up for power, but far less so the other way around. Of course a higher level of accuracy will be obtained with experience, so in a young wizard a high precision would be considered exceptional.
- Summoning a specific Daedric entity requires accuracy. You could also just punch a hole into Oblivion and see what pops out.
To get a spell together, the magicka has to be altered from its natural state into something else, like a spell pattern, which then needs to be juiced up with magicka to work. If the spell is a more permanent one, a steady flow of magicka has to be applied to make sure it doesn't spiral out of control.
Spontaneously
Most common kind of spellcasting, no preparation involved, usually has a vocal component and/or uses a staff as focus.
Rituals
Almost every spell can be ritualised, making it easier to cast and maintain.
A ritual acts to magicka like a tunnel to frogs on a highway - you know which way it will take, making it much easier for your character to control and handle. It also lowers the likelyness that something vital to your ritual will be flattened by a Daedric truck that you did not see coming.
