Which spheres have you used in spheres of power?

[zautos]

Select the ones you have used in this straw poll http://www.strawpoll.me/10520564
Also if you like you can talk a bit about what you had for PC/NPCs and how they used the spheres.

[zautos]

I would like to see some more values.

[shawshank]

That site is banned at work but in the game I am in now, we have 8 characters and every single one of them have Warp. 90% of them have War with the no totem drawback to reroll a save. Every sneaky person has illusion for invisibility (3 people). Every single martial character has alteration(mellee all go for pounce/size change)(Ranged prefer movement modes etc)

Two went heavy destruction using destroyer's handbook. That covers most everything. A few spheres here and there. Some life, protection, conjuration, mind. But almost everyone took War, Alteration, Warp and most took illusion.

I wanted to add... warp is insane. It allows any class to become a chess master with only a few talents invested. Even if you just spend one talent point you never have to worry about failing a jump check or most climb checks again. If you invest further for emergency teleport, you never have to worry about being grappled or trapped again. It is just incredible. That is all.

[Afgncaap5]

Voted. To go into specifics...

-My biggest use of the character as a player was as a fill-in when I couldn't find a character sheet for over a month. I used an Elliciter who used the Mind sphere primarily, and the Time sphere as a pretty frequent back-up. Thanks to another player being a witch who liked giving people good fortune, there came a time when our barbarian once had the chance to roll 8d20s to resolve two attacks he was making in a round. Our GM was... less than thrilled. We thought it was hilarious, though.
-My second biggest use was for the character sheet that went missing, who just before going missing and for after being recovered was a Bard converted to Spheres of Power. To represent the spells he had before conversion, I gave him the Illusion and Destruction spheres for their base abilities, but then I pretty much focused on the Mind sphere. I probably won't do much more with Illusion or Destruction since he just entered the Pathfinder Chronicler prestige class, which doesn't advance spellcasting.
-My first real usage of the system came from an Eberron game I was DMing. Eberron's supposed to have a lot of bizarre martial arts traditions, and Spheres of Power is expressly good at treating magic as a style of martial arts, so as the lieutenants of a sinister Rakshasa serving martial arts master I introduced The Sandsteppers, a trio of martial artists who used magic-infused sand ("The Sands of Time!") into their time-based abilities. Each had mastered slightly different techniques, so each Sand Stepper had a different focus (team buffer, enemy debuffer, and a sort of "battlefield controller" enemy.)
-I've recently converted an enemy from my custom campaign world from being a custom monster with lots of spells taken from impossible places to being just a high level Eliciter with a focus on the Mind Sphere.
-Finally, after hearing from the creator of Spheres of Power about the Fate sphere's unifying theme being "Things that only exist because sentient creatures agree that they exist" or something, I made a Fate mage who used a homebrew Fate/Mind advanced talent that allowed him to remove the beginnings or endings from things (effectively allowing him to make the hallway that his enemies were running down suddenly turn into an infinite corridor.)

A few other sporadic uses have popped up in my games, and I'm sure many others will.

[stack]

I obviously have a personal affinity for destruction and alteration, though using enhance to animate objects is a soft spot of mine. Nature has been a blast in kingmaker. Life is necessary, of course, though spiritualism hedgewitch takes the sting out of needing all those talents :smallbiggrin:.

That said, there isn't a sphere I haven't thought about using it thought up builds for, just ones I haven't gotten to use in actual play.

[Mehangel]

While I personally haven't used every sphere (I have personally used life, war, nature, and fate), other party members have used every sphere I have not used. So combined, we have used all the spheres.

[ComaVision]

There's no 'None' option.

I'm interested in SoP and I've read some of it but two of my players still have trouble with the base rules, so I'm hesitant to try introducing anything extra.

[Afgncaap5]

There's no 'None' option.

I'm interested in SoP and I've read some of it but two of my players still have trouble with the base rules, so I'm hesitant to try introducing anything extra.

I'd suggest introducing an NPC built with it to give them a minor introduction to the system. The biggest shift, on their side, should be the fact that you can't really dispel spell-like abilities typically, but it's pretty rare for me to see a game where dispelling is a thing.

[Psyren]

I'd suggest introducing an NPC built with it to give them a minor introduction to the system. The biggest shift, on their side, should be the fact that you can't really dispel spell-like abilities typically, but it's pretty rare for me to see a game where dispelling is a thing.

What? You can dispel SLAs just fine. Did you mean counterspell?

[zautos]

There's no 'None' option.

I'm interested in SoP and I've read some of it but two of my players still have trouble with the base rules, so I'm hesitant to try introducing anything extra.
It's easier then the normal magic system. So the new players might enjoy it more.
the reason it's easier is that your character can do less. So a level one cleric doesn't have hundreds of spells just something like 4. So it's easier to keep track of.

[Ruethgar]

Weather, Nature(Earth, Plant, Water), and Destruction almost exclusively. Most of my other themes for characters can be achieved more effectively in other ways.