Magic Systems that encourage diversity

[NichG]

I'm going to second superhero genre. If every character's basis for power is fixed and incompatible with every other character's basis for power, things end up being pretty diverse by necessity. In Limit Break I saw almost no overlap between what the different PCs could do, even though everyone had a broad power - one character could transmute liquids into any kind of fantasy potion they could imagine; one literally had a pocket universe that they could move through to teleport or kidnap targets (and later, bits of targets) into, or push their universe into the world to suppress local effects; one had a broad-ranging ability to edit language-based information and to impose truth on it (either forcing the universe to take the statement as true, forcing only true statements to remain, etc) ; and the last had the ability to cause humanity's collective sunconscious to manifest as a localized spirit world that could be interacted with or used to form minions.

Another diverse system was one from a GM I played with that had something they called 'stellar magic' which had around 50 themes, and you could spend XP to gain access to ranks of each theme. The system had quadratic payoffs for specialization, but also a sort of soft cap system that varied theme by theme, people went deep rather than super broad, but generally still had access to multiple lesser themes. I had a travel and summoning subtheme and deep investment into Spirit; another player went all-in on Hell; another player had Power, Water, and a navigation/divination subtheme and a Wealth subtheme; another player had Inspiration and Beauty; another went all in on Time; etc.

I suppose one thing I've noticed is that it's a lot easier to get diversity in a system which players are new to than a system that players have spent a lot of time playing/optimizing. Even in systems that don't go out of their way to break down into siloed themes, people having first contact with the system will tend to make very different decisions from each-other and avoid each-others' decisions intentionally, while people coming back to a system after they know what the broken stuff is/etc will tend to consolidate on that stuff. If we all did stellar magic again, I think there would be themes people wouldn't bother with and certain ones that everyone would pick up having seen others figuring out how to get utility from one-rank dips. The group would definitely have one person pick up Power and go all-in on it, since that lets you turn 1-rank dips that other people have taken into a rank 3 or 4 investment, etc.