Quote Originally Posted by ezkajii View Post
I really like the idea of it, and might consider play with this variant if you fleshed it out. The 1-1-2-3 thing you mentioned seems reasonable enough but you'd want to make sure it was also intuitive, to not discourage people from switching to the new system. I absolutely believe that different classes should be better at different things, and the wizard shouldn't be able to just substitute any class with a spell.
In addition, on the concept of magic as a cheat, specifically, you could perhaps implement some sort of system wherein the nature of the multiverse itself might rebel against magic use in little ways; cantrips might be fine, but abusing 8th- and 9th-level spells would cause some sort of side-effects or automatic retaliation by existence itself. Obviously, this would require quite a bit of cosmology rewrite, and a hefty amount of homebrew most likely, but I think it'd be a great thematic addition.
Not if you're the DM. As the DM, if you outline exactly what spells will do it (IE, set expectation), then you can just be creative.