What is it about spheres?

[Shaggy]

Ok so I had a question, what is it about spheres that have people wanting to play that system/sub-system? I have never really gotten into it more than a passing glance so I am honestly pretty curious as to why people love that system and seem to request it all the time.

[Powerdork]

A little bit frustration with spell levels, a little bit admiration for the designers' work, a little bit of wanting to make use of something they purchased, a little bit that it handles a concept better than other material would.

(I don't get the fascination, but I know why anyone wants to use third-party material.)

[GrayDeath]

Well, spheres are the most ideal form any volume can inhabit. They also roll better than cubes or Pentagondodekahedres. ^^


For mje, its the ease in getting to play a "Does easy stuff all day, can push himself to do strong stuff" feeling that most 3.x classes otherwise lack.

And the fact it makes it easier to paly fluff-created concepts due to one not having to pick through 2 dozen books for the right combination of feat, spells, classes and flaws to allow one to play what one actually wants to play.


On the negative side, in some areas the designers went a bit overboard both in restricting specific things behind too many prereqs and behind too few, but no system is perfect.

[MeimuHakurei]

Here's the breakpoints of what makes Spheres a fantastic subsystem:

-In general, characters no longer are forced a certain fluff on mechanics

Monks always have an inclination towards spiritualism, inner peace and all that and don't really fit crushing man's skull between thighs like sparrow's egg. Each casting class is more defined by their origin story than role so your arcanists are always squishy and you put heavy armor on the pious people. There's several more of these and while there's hardly ever a hard limitation on your class that is fluff-based, more often than not you're pushed into a certain direction.

Tradition decouples the origin from the skillset in Spheres. For martial characters, it lays out your fundamental skills and what weapons you can use (there's no longer a blanket martial weapon proficiency unless you get the feat; not that it's a big loss) and for spellcasters, it defines when and how you can use your magic (do you need to gesture? Do you need to draw magic circles for it? Does it make you suffer agonizing pain?)

-For martial characters, it opens up all sorts of tactics and playstyles over stacking damage

Aside from tactical options in combat featured in spheres like Brute, Berserker, Dual Wielding, Fencing and such, you also have skill-oriented spheres like Alchemy, Athletics, Scout and Trap, allowing your martials to be battlefield controllers, buffers or even utility characters! And any class for the system gets access to them next to class features, with most of them having specific, sophisticated playstyles. Conscripts serve as the catch-all martial that eschews any specific class leaning for tons of talents and the ability to mix and match specializations.

-For spellcasters, it defines your magic far more and rewards thematics

A fire domain cleric in 3.5 only gets a handful of fire-based spells, which they only have limited access to, as well as the power to affect fire/water creatures similar to the turn undead. They still have a mostly buff/support oriented spell package (heck, they don't even get fireball!). In Spheres, you can fully devote your magic talent towards fire, be that summoning/binding fire elementals, taking control of natural fires, burninating the countryside or flavor it differently - maybe use Dark to summon smoke or Illusion for heat mirages. You could easily make a party of clerics following the same fire god and give each one a distinct role and playstyle.

[Serafina]

With Spheres of Power (the magic system) one of the main reasons tends to be that you can just do your thing very early on and reliably.
You want to make a Necromancer? With normal Vancian Magic, you pretty much have to wait until you get Animate Dead, which you get at 5th level at the earliest. With Spheres of Power, you can just do it right away at first level, if you want to

And that is where the sales pitch begins.
You want to have a character built around Teleporting? Available at level 1. Around magical Darkness or magical Light? Wait, those aren't even things you can fully do normally - at best, a vancian caster casts (Deeper) Darkness or Daylight and calls it a round.
Here is where you start to trick it out with more talents.
Your character using the Darkness-Sphere can make their darkness do tricky things, such as sicken and poison those in it, or manipulate people's shadow, or the like. That's just whole unique character concepts right here, so you might see why people could be interested in playing that. You'll find similar things in a lot of other spheres.

To take something more basic, like Destruction, it just compares better to normal blasting you can via vancian magic. Combine a shape with a blast type (which can be various energies, but also other interesting things), and you can get a fireball or a cone or a line, but also a bunch of other effects - and you combine it all spontaneously, instead of having pre-prepared spells you alter.

The drawback of the system is that you only have so many talents to spend, but that mostly just requires you to have one solid character concept in mind. You can't just grab a wholly new effect easily on the side (e.g. "this wizard can also make undead by grabbing one spell"), but that's okay to a lot of people.



For Spheres of Might, the martial system, it's a lot simpler: You get a lot of goodies.
Tired of feat chains with garbage prerequites? Of not getting interesting combinations of effects on martial characters? Well, SoM solves that!
It also provides extra skill points at the same time.
And nice abilities for scouting and stealth. And good alchemical items and traps and interaction with animals.

Of course, it almost exclusively works with the Attack Action, but that also solves the problem of needing full-round actions, so you're now mobile! Which is attractive to a lot of people.
And it also doesn't provide a ton of super-exiting high-level abilities (you mostly branch out into other spheres instead).
But those are the drawbacks of getting a lot of exciting advantages.


And those two systems combine too. Not perfectly - a lot of the times you'd wish that something in SoP was an attack action - but pretty well.

[Shaggy]

I see, thank you all for replying. You did a lot to help me understand the desire to play those spheres.

[Unavenger]

Among a lot of the players I've had ask for it, the prime reason for wanting to play it was that you could pull off some hideously overpowered tricks which I'm told that they fixed in the update. I no longer allow it, so I wouldn't know.

[exelsisxax]

Among a lot of the players I've had ask for it, the prime reason for wanting to play it was that you could pull off some hideously overpowered tricks which I'm told that they fixed in the update. I no longer allow it, so I wouldn't know.

It seems to me that you have never seen a beastmorph vivisectionist, an exploiter wizard, razmiran priest, master summoner, monster tactician, trappings of the warrior occultist, synthesist, or anyone use emblem of greed. All of which are far more powerful than anything SoP ever made possible.

[Powerdork]

Or, maybe they were banned as well and it just didn't get mentioned because that kind of context isn't necessary to the post.

[Omoikane13]

For me, I like Spheres because it feels like there's so much more flexibility in what I can make with it. I can have the same Incanter feel like countless different characters simply by changing what talents it has, while I've never felt that same difference from a Wizard having different spells. As has been said, traditions definitely play a large part of that. Use the right traditions and IMO, you can even make something with the same class and same talents feel different.

As a Forever DM / Someone struggling to be a player, I've also found that I love using it when making some creatures, because at least for me it feels so much easier to pick an appropriate base sphere, add on some talents and drawbacks, and you've got a nice little package of abilities. Picking out spells feels like oh so much list-scrolling, and doesn't have the easily refluffable angle. Again, at least for me.

SoM is similar, though does feel a little lacking after USoP and all the SoP handbooks and the like. Though that's more me being hungry for content wherever I go.

As to power concerns, I think USoP has done some great work in balancing out some things, and a little DM oversight goes a long way. Don't let players pick whatever traditions they like, be sure that they're open enough with you to not try and make any potential OP builds. As you would with any game, Spheres isn't really unique in this regard.

[Psyren]

I like the idea behind SoP because at-will casting is fun when balanced properly, and they seem to have an approach to it that avoids the (many) pitfalls of the Kineticist. I also like the idea of being able to break up the more powerful spellcasters like wizards and clerics into more specialized T3s if I want to without doing a ton of work on the spell lists myself - spheres has done a lot of the heavy lifting for me, which is exactly the reason why I buy books.

I'm less interested in Spheres of Might though, it feels redundant with Path of War and I don't like how it handles some things.

[digiman619]

I like the idea behind SoP because at-will casting is fun when balanced properly, and they seem to have an approach to it that avoids the (many) pitfalls of the Kineticist. I also like the idea of being able to break up the more powerful spellcasters like wizards and clerics into more specialized T3s if I want to without doing a ton of work on the spell lists myself - spheres has done a lot of the heavy lifting for me, which is exactly the reason why I buy books.

I'm less interested in Spheres of Might though, it feels redundant with Path of War and I don't like how it handles some things.
With respect, you really have no ground to talk about Spheres of Might. Or did you forget this little exchange half a month ago?

I don't think your "separate but equal" balance point is impossible, but I've yet to see it pulled off in a satisfying way. Only way i can think of is to start with PF1 and ban everything outside of T3/T4, and even then the purely martial classes like ToB/PoW would be lacking some capabilities that the T3 casters have.

Spheres of Might, with its multiple ways to minionmancy and raise the dead, says hi.

Thanks for the warning, i'll happily skip it.

[Psyren]

With respect, you really have no ground to talk about Spheres of Might. Or did you forget this little exchange half a month ago?

I don't see how anything in your "gotcha" quote contradicts anything I just said, so no, I didn't forget.

[digiman619]

I don't see how anything in your "gotcha" quote contradicts anything I just said, so no, I didn't forget.
You're right. That was in the follow-up question.

Wait, what? I thought you said that you weren't opposed to martials with some of the utility powers mages had, just that you hadn't found any. How can you justify not even checking it out?
That doesn't extend to things like resurrection (of others) and minionmancy - I made that clear several times earlier in this thread. I meant more things like self-resurrection, short-range teleportation, lie detection etc.

Spheres of Might lets you have real out-of-combat utility, but you didn't care about that because even when Martials Get Nice ThingsTM , you get people like yourself who complain what they got was too nice. Not that you've actually read the book in question (you 'happily skipped it', remember?), so if nothing else you're smack talking a book you don't have anything resembling an informed opinion of.

[Psyren]

You're right. That was in the follow-up question.


Spheres of Might lets you have real out-of-combat utility, but you didn't care about that because even when Martials Get Nice ThingsTM , you get people like yourself who complain what they got was too nice. Not that you've actually read the book in question (you 'happily skipped it', remember?), so if nothing else you're smack talking a book you don't have anything resembling an informed opinion of.

Yes, and I followed it up in that very thread by reading through some examples from the wiki and identifying things I minded and didn't mind at first blush. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?607958-Wizards-should-be-better-than-fighters&p=24436850&viewfull=1#post24436850) If you don't like my opinion of SoM you're welcome to ignore it, but trying to drag your baggage with me into an unrelated thread is not going to change it.

[icefractal]

I've been getting into it a lot myself recently, and I'd say it's several things (in semi-random order):

1) It has a better complexity/versatility/excitement balance than most Paizo material. By which I mean, the basic accounting is very easy - you have a single pool of points, you usually spend 1-2 when you spend them, and most talents don't have prerequisites. All your talents from the same sphere have the same DC (and ditto across spheres for many characters). There is fairly little dumpster-diving involved. And yet from that, you get effective combat casting, usually a lot of utility, and some cool thematic tricks. Compare to the Occultist, which was so fiddly I gave up trying to use it, or the many cases where you're picking from a huge list but all the options are junk like "+2 to attack when flanking, 1/day". Spheres has much less of those.

2) That said, you can get very crunchy if you want to and there's plenty of mechanical synergies to explore. Probably the maximum prep-work character would be someone Conjuration focused with a lot of companions (similar to the Summoner's Eidolon in how they work, but not locked into melee-focus). Or at the opposite extreme, you can put everything into one big attack + passive buffs, for a character a newbie could easily pilot. It's flexible.

3) SoP allows much more thematic/focused characters. You can be doing your thing recognizably by 1st level, and you can continue to be primarily focused on that thing as you rise in levels. Compare to standard casting, where "big pile of good cards" is honestly the best strategy, and the further you push into fitting a specific theme the less it works mechanically.

4) While not quite as strong as standard casting, SoP can legitimately do certain things better (sans TO tactics, obviously). So you can mix it with standard classes and your specialist won't just look like a chump. Note: If using standard full-casters, you should use advanced talents as well.
IMO you should always use advanced talents, and legendary talents for SoM, but that's because I embrace the "let PCs do large-scale stuff whether it's part of a story or not" style that 3.x (unintentionally?) supports.

5) SoM utility powers, while still not up to the level of spells, beat pretty much any other utility powers for martial characters out there. PoW is nice too, but SoM has more non-combat usage.

6) It's new. Given that a lot of PF comes from 3.5, you often end up making mechanical choices you've made many, many times before. Spheres is substantially different, while still being entirely compatible.

7) It is very amenable to dipping your toe in. You can be, like, a Barbarian 20, spend a couple feats, and be able to summon the spirits of your ancestors for assistance. And you can scale anywhere from "two feat investment" to "fully Spheres-based" effectively.

8) Casting Traditions are a hell of a lot of fun. You can make two characters of the same class feel very different from each-other by what their style is. Also, it easily supports characters whose magic is an unintentional result of corruption, or an inherent part of their nature, or whatever, which is clumsy in standard PF.

9) This one is a matter of taste, but Spheres has better support for a "non-standardized supernatural stuff" setting. As in, some people/creatures/objects have strange abilities, and those abilities don't fit into any kind of known system IC. YMMV, but I'm growing more fond of such settings over the standard D&D feel.
This is optional of course, Spheres can do the standard setting fine.

[digiman619]

I never got around to answering you then, but let me do so now. Yeah, the Animal Companion talent is more or less equal to the Animal Ally feat. However, there's a few things wrong with that assessment.
* Animal Ally has a feat tax prerequisite (Nature Soul, which gives +2 to K:Nature and Survival) and can't be taken until 4th, while the Beastmastery sphere can be taken at any time and gives you actually useful things, to wit: either the ability to tame animals (that you will get to keep in addition to having an animal companion) or an upgraded version of Mounted Combat (Can also make a Ride instead of its Reflex save).
* Just taking the two feats (that you can have as part of your martial tradition; the 4 talents that define your starting fighting style) *also* gives you 10 ranks in either Handle Animal or Ride (depending on the package), though it's wisely limited to one per HD.
* You judged the sphere from one talent in a group of roughly 30, most of which do things no animal companion feat will let you do (Letting your AC make Perception checks for you, AC doing a combat maneuver on enemy triggers AoO from you, if your AC is a mount, it gets temp HP and a scaling bonus to AC). And if a feat does have something you want, you can choose it anyway.
* Beastmastery is only one way that SoM allows minionmancy. There's the entirety of the Leadership sphere that you ignored, as well as a class based around the logistics that minionmancy favors: The Commander.

[vasilidor]

I like the fact that you can pick a theme, and have some effective utility within that theme from level 1. the earlier example of a necromancer is a good example of what i mean. no, the undead monster i get will not be on par with the groups fighter (assuming that he did not take all trap options), but i have an undead monster that i can put between the party and the squishier characters. from the same sphere i can get a number of abilities that function as curses, also fitting in with the necromancer theme. I can also take the divination sphere and very easily take options that dress it up as speaking with spirits to gain information. my next characters are going to take advantage of the spheres of power mind, war, and illusion spheres to create a battlefield controller who is the son of a minor noble, and a conscript whose back story is going to be "was a tavern errand boy, got lost in the woods", and give him either the canny hunter or animal master martial traditions.

[AvatarVecna]

Years of theorycrafting has eventually led me to the conclusion that if non-casters are to get on the level of spellcasters (even if casters get nerfed pretty hard), they either need gradually-increasing feat gain, or they need linear feat gain where the feats get better over time. All the feats worth taking in default play either get gradually better or add some new capability that greatly improves an old one...and Improved Initiative, because while it's a flat bonus to a thing you were already doing, initiative is good enough that +4 is always valuable. I'd also want this rework of 3.5/PF to have an expanded skill system to let noncasters have a lot more utility - maybe even have it give them actual options in combat besides "full attack for the umpteenth time". This would also mean I could do things like theme groups of feats around common archetypes (providing some guidance for those who prefer it) while not pigeonholing anybody into any particular playstyle based on feat access. But yeah things like "what if you could have bardic performance without being a caster, kinda like the 3.5 marshal", or "what if you could do mundane alchemy to make all kinds of weird useful ****", or "I like 3.5's knowledge devotion, what if I made a bunch of feats centered around the scouting non-combat role for information gathering that could maybe give combat benefits too".

But creating such a feat system would take a great deal of time and effort that I just didn't have, so I kinda put this idea on the back shelf and just tinkered with it now and then.And then I saw Spheres Of Might, that does everything I ever wanted and more, that's designed with the idea of balancing it against Spheres Of Power (which itself does lots of things I would've like to see done to casters to keep them from dominating the whole game), and I kinda threw my project away cuz it'd already been done 10000% better than I ever could do.

[Morty]

I find the Spheres system interesting because it breaks away with some of D&D's worst traditions - such as shackling everything down to classes. Instead it has broad packages of abilities that are available to everyone, which is considerably better. It also doesn't stratify things by level quite as much, so you can grab that thing you like without worrying that it was arbitrarily declared to require level 11 or whichever.

I'm obviously a lot more interested in Spheres of Might than Power, but while I admire some principles, I don't quite like the execution. It feels way too reliant on fiddly numbers and using the baseline combat maneuvers. Maybe it's better in practice, I don't know. But some talents look like they won't come up much and won't do much if they do.

Also, it seems to take D&D's tradition of having some extremely broad classes and some extremely specific ones and run with it. This is not a good tradition and doubling down on it isn't good either. When I tried to create a skilled and versatile scout-type, my only option was basically Conscript - every other class had something that didn't quite work. Technician has gadgets, Scholar has mad science. Using the Conscript is better than using the vanilla Pathfinder rogue, obviously, but it still feels off.

[Blackhawk748]

Ok so I had a question, what is it about spheres that have people wanting to play that system/sub-system? I have never really gotten into it more than a passing glance so I am honestly pretty curious as to why people love that system and seem to request it all the time.

Because it handles Theme Casters rather well and the magic system is a lot of fun to play around with once you get over the slight learning curve. It's also nice that slots are done away with completely and now everyone pretty much runs off of the same "style" of play with a limited number of Big Things you do, but the ability to just keep doing things on a lesser level.

[vasilidor]

I find the Spheres system interesting because it breaks away with some of D&D's worst traditions - such as shackling everything down to classes. Instead it has broad packages of abilities that are available to everyone, which is considerably better. It also doesn't stratify things by level quite as much, so you can grab that thing you like without worrying that it was arbitrarily declared to require level 11 or whichever.

I'm obviously a lot more interested in Spheres of Might than Power, but while I admire some principles, I don't quite like the execution. It feels way too reliant on fiddly numbers and using the baseline combat maneuvers. Maybe it's better in practice, I don't know. But some talents look like they won't come up much and won't do much if they do.

Also, it seems to take D&D's tradition of having some extremely broad classes and some extremely specific ones and run with it. This is not a good tradition and doubling down on it isn't good either. When I tried to create a skilled and versatile scout-type, my only option was basically Conscript - every other class had something that didn't quite work. Technician has gadgets, Scholar has mad science. Using the Conscript is better than using the vanilla Pathfinder rogue, obviously, but it still feels off.
huh, now i want to try a scholar scout type character.

[Eldest]

Also, it seems to take D&D's tradition of having some extremely broad classes and some extremely specific ones and run with it. This is not a good tradition and doubling down on it isn't good either. When I tried to create a skilled and versatile scout-type, my only option was basically Conscript - every other class had something that didn't quite work. Technician has gadgets, Scholar has mad science. Using the Conscript is better than using the vanilla Pathfinder rogue, obviously, but it still feels off.

I personally use the archetypes to add spheres content to base classes far more than I actually use the base classes, and that fixes the issue you're bringing up. I've built a survivalist scout with an alchemy background as an investigator, a scholar, and a ranger before. I liked the investigator take on it best, but that's because that the character ended up more "traumatized researcher after a deep wilderness expedition gone horribly wrong" than "rugged woodsman in tune with nature".

[Ruethgar]

For me, as has been mentioned previously, it is the ability to, from level one, define a clear theme for a character and do things earlier. For example, elemental shapeshifting is typically high level or very obscure, niche, magic. Spheres lets you do that at level one and build your character around the idea.

The power level isn’t too much higher in general, with the exception of the weather sphere, though gating the Lord talents behind GM approval helped that a bit. It also lets you customize your magic immensely to get the flavor you want down. Want to be a magical Bob Ross? Painter of Nature: Skilled Casting(Paining), Somatic Casting, Extended Casting, Focus Magic(Paint Supplies) with focus on Nature(Earth/Water/Plant) spheres.

[dude123nice]

They're a lot more balanced, excluding advanced magical talents.

They allow you to to modularly and organically create and grow your character in a level based system, thus getting best of both worlds. (i mean level and non level based systems).

They allow you to functionally implement a far greater number of character archetypes than either vanilla PF or other 3rd party systems ever did.

Basically you combine talents with basic modifiers or effects into spells and martial techniques, which gradually become stronger and more complicated as you add more basic talents to the mx. You essentially construct your own techniques from the ground up. This feels natural and logical, unlike regular PF and DSP, where you just learn completed techniques all at once, and usually don't have any way of modifying them on the fly. Which feels VERY video gamey.
Edit: it also feels better mechanically, since you have the freedom to choose almost exactly how you want your character to work, mechanically. Regular PF just gives you a few predefined options to choose from. In Spheres, you define your own options.

[Troacctid]

The thing that appeals to me most is that it really captures the type of powers that we often see in fiction, and does so in a way that we rarely see from D&D. Between the custom traditions, spheres, drawbacks, and all that, and the overall flexibility, it's one of the best systems around for creating characters inspired by non-D&D popular culture. It's obvious that the designers wrote the material with that goal in mind.

Also, at-will abilities are more fun, and the "skill tree" style of advancement is interesting.

My biggest problem with the system is that it suffers from the Pathfinder "lists of lists of lists" curse. It's kind of a lot.

[Morty]

huh, now i want to try a scholar scout type character.

I certainly appreciate a skill-focused class that's not rogue, but this one leans a bit too heavily on the mad science.


I personally use the archetypes to add spheres content to base classes far more than I actually use the base classes, and that fixes the issue you're bringing up. I've built a survivalist scout with an alchemy background as an investigator, a scholar, and a ranger before. I liked the investigator take on it best, but that's because that the character ended up more "traumatized researcher after a deep wilderness expedition gone horribly wrong" than "rugged woodsman in tune with nature".

Using the base classes + spheres does fix some issues, though I'm not exactly a big fan of existing PF classes. An investigator + spheres could be worth considering. Alchemy is pretty okay as baggage goes. You can just have more useful potions and such.