Magic system tips?

[AltonicKeys he/him]

I want it to be a hard system with rules (oh no scary), but it's proving to be pretty hard.

The current system is semi-rare magic flowers. Break the petals (or any burst of kinetic energy) releases their respective element. A fire petal would make a plume of flame, air would enhance other flowers, water is literally just water, etc.
I got how it would affect society and industrialization.

Problem is I'm kinda iffy on using the stereotypical elemental system, and how to make it a little less boring. Any advice?

Edited October 7, 2022 by AltonicKeys
"Straight forward" is not the same as "boring"

[Returned he/him]

I, personally, would work backwards. What sorts of things do you want people using the magic system to be able to do, and what basic things might people interacting with your magic system mechanisms do to accomplish them? Once you have some of that nailed down, what unusual combinations and results would those rules allow, and do you want those things in your magic system? When you've got the results you want in mind it makes sense to build around those rather than try to independently create rules that happen to produce them.

As for breaking away from the Platonic elements, that's harder to give advice about. It's easy to say "don't use them", but harder to say what might replace them. What do you want the magic to represent? The Platonic system tends to represent control over the elements themselves (such as what an Airbender can do), but also often represent phases of matter (solid, liquid, and gas) plus energy. Focusing more on the latter might help move away from the "blast of fire, geyser of water" approach.

But you can also think of the magic as an agent of change, in which case thinking about interactions between things might help. For example, in The Stormlight Archive a lot of the Surges define how things relate to each other: gravitation, abrasion, and so on. If you look at what interactions between things you want your magic to be able to affect you may be able to determine groupings which are coherent within the magic but don't relate to Platonic elements at all.