kohlrak: Still not as fun as the custom spells gameshark codes in Final Fantasy IX. That was awesome back in the day. Kind of like playing FFT with the obscure use one classes, like astrologer.
dtgreene: Or the control enemy glitch in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. I got Natasha (Bishop) up to S rank in Dark Magic, allowing her to destroy monsters with it (high attack of dark magic * 3 because she's a bishop attacking monsters; that bonus is balanced for the low attack of light magic, not the high attack of dark magic). It also let me get all sorts of weapons and spells not normally available to the player (including things like claws), as well as allowing repairs of arbitrary items, including that dragonstone.
Now that one sounds fun, too.
(By the way, TES games (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion, but not Skyrim) allow you to make custom spells without having to hack or use mod tools.)
See, that's not as fun, especially when it's overly restrictive or the system's straight up broken. Take the game Balrum for example: you are allowed to make anything without knowing the recipes, but if you want to fully decorate your house, you have to be max level and skipped out on being able to make potions, because you have to spend "learning points" which you get a very limited number of. Can i make a super awesome sword that does all shadow damage? No, because, you're limited to X level of attributes for everything you make. I can have a max of X attribute and a max of Y attribute, but i can't sacrifice some of my Y to get more X. I can sacrifice Y as much as I want, and only do X, but that doesn't mean i can sacrifice Y in order to do more X.
I understand people don't want their games to be broken, but restricting creativity just to prevent online people from figuring out that you can do more damage at once cheaper than doing half that for 2 seconds so that you can make the most absolute broken spells is more or less being sore that they found the weakness in your algorithm. The biggest kicker, is that i can create the spell, anyway, in the creation kit, but i'm also likely to get it for total cheat level free as well, since it's hard to actually balance the cost to the rest of the spells in the game since we're not using the same automated tools anymore. For shame, Bethesda.
Speaking of glitches, one of my favorite things to do as a child is to start Bard's Tale 3, form a party of only monsters, then drop everyone from the party. The game would let me walk around with an empty party, at least until the game didn't let me run from a battle, at which point one enemy gets to attack (who does that enemy attack?) and then the game realizes that I have no living party members and gives me a game over. I also found a major XP exploit in the Apple 2 version of the game (which was the version I had).
I haven't played the Bard's Tale original games. Too many games out there with that format, and it seems really cumbersome. I feel like i should give it a shot, though, if the writing's similar to the 3d game that the fans of the series are hating on so badly (honestly, i love the humor), but i haven't even finished that one since i'm too busy playing The Quest on my tablet, and the bard's tale games are also on my tablet. I have a think about buying gog games on my tablet if i buy them on gog and they're available, but also not wasting my pool of few games that i can actually play on the go without using an emulator (like dosbox or something console oriented, which is why i quit playing wing commander, since i want to play it on my tablet on the go instead).