D&D 5e Spheres actual experience

[sunrise.archive]

I like the ruleset and the thematic approach, but I've never played it. I'd like to hear from people who did give it a try -- not whether it's good or bad, I'll decide that for myself -- but how it plays, what are some obvious imbalances, how it feels to play a sphere caster or a sphere pratitioner, things like that. Specific and analytic, but not judgemental.

[Phhase]

Honestly I'd like to know too, it really does keep pulling me back to look at it. It looks really intriguing I'm wondering too. My first instinct is that it's low on burst damage, high on utility.

[animorte]

I've never heard of it before now actually, but from a little bit of research it does look like an investment. Despite that, I am now interested.

[sunrise.archive]

We've got more info from the Pathfinder players (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?647868-Pathfinder-Spheres-or-Path-of-War-actual-experience), which isn't surprising, given that it came out much earlier.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I opened it up to my players near the end of last year. The negatives-

Firstly, the system is incredibly obtuse, at least at first. Trying to understand it gave at least two people actual headaches, and can take a few hours to really wrap your head around. The layout, both using the online version and the print version (we have both) is horrible at helping you come to grips with it.

Second, building anything takes serious time and effort. You need to dedicate a *lot* of your time if you want to get anything out of it. It doesn't have too many trap options or anything, but choosing incompatible power sets can leave you with a weak and underwhelming character. You need to develop a certain level of mastery to avoid this, and some players will never be capable of that. I have two that will basically never use Spheres for this reason.

Third, if you just want concepts that can be realized by the normal classes, you're almost always going to be better off just using normal classes. Spheres characters are (generally speaking) weaker than standard characters, in a meaningful and noticeable way. When they have features in common, the Spheres variant is pretty much always weaker as a rule.

So what does all this effort and all these pitfalls get you? An extremely tailored experience, letting you realize very distinct characters and gameplay styles. You can make them as complicated as you want them to be. If you're clever enough to see the synergies, you can even end up powerful in some unexpected ways.

Spheres is for the dedicated customizer that absolutely needs to detail everything about their character and doesn't mind going that extra mile. While an optimizer can get some unusual power out of it, in play I've found it to be reasonably well-balanced (getting power out of this system nearly always requires some level of build sacrifice). It's not for everyone, nor should it be. I wouldn't recommend introducing Spheres without also letting players play normal D&D classes as well.

[animorte]

-snippage

We appreciate your input. That looks like in all the people I play with, I'm literally the only person that might be interested, provided I even have the time. As you said, from a glance, it seems to be catered to those who seek the ultimate level of customization, and perhaps have nothing better to do with their time.


This specific quote stood out to me:

Spheres is basically "Pathfinder as it's meant to be played" IMO. Maximum flexibility of character building without going full points-based GURPS style game. And it tones down some of the dumber caster shenanigans.

Path of War is meant as a huge pwoer buff to martial characters. It succeeds at this, it's fun, but it doesn't in many ways fix the fundamental flaws in the underpinnings of the class system like Spheres does.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I also (very briefly) got to play with the system myself earlier this year. I made a "lightning fencer", a supremely fast duelist that also commanded electricity and could use it for a myriad of things. This is where I realized that there really are some synergies that can make you an absolute powerhouse, if you take the time to find them. I was regularly outperforming all the other players in the damage department (three were normal classes, one was another Spheres character), and had some unorthodox powers to help out of combat. I was outdoing a barbarian with 20 Strength with my 16 Dexterity thanks to constant advantage and some nasty on-hit damage boosts. This came at the cost of being absolutely paper thin and having no social skills to speak of, so it balanced itself out in being a high risk, high reward gameplay style that let me excel in two pillars to the detriment of the third.

It felt great to play, very satisfying to pull off. And while I didn't exactly time myself, I'd say it took me somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours to fully develop this character.

[Segev]

I am in a 5pheres game, and have never used the PF version of it.

I have found that the way you can access certain features earlier tends to let you shortcut module expectations. We use Warp and a stealthy party member to sneak past entire defensive fortifications and ambush big bads in their sanctums fairly frequently.

You also need to be very careful about how you build; 5pheres is easy to trap yourself into a lot of weak effects that you can't use all of. The fact that Concentration is required for almost everything unless you spend 2 spell points on each effect means you will have less up than you think you will. The proficiency cap on how many sp you can spend on a given power is also tricky to track, leading to things seeming more potent until you realize you can't actually do all of them.

And if you like damage, stick with vanilla spellcasting, because 5pheres is terrified of letting you do damage with magic. It likes to add complicated rider effects - debuffs and weirder things - to its damage-dealing blasts from the Destruction sphere, and if you want to maximize damage, you're oddly better off using Enhancement Sphere.


Darkness deserves some special mention: give a spherecaster ranger the Darkness Sphere and the Gloomstalker archetype and you wind up with a very potent combo. Darkness sphere's base effect doesn't block darkvision, you see, but you can get a talent to carry it with you, and you can steep your darkness with buffs and debuffs.


5pheres summons and undead build the way the TCE summoning spells do, but with more modularity, so if you want to call up actual monsters from the monster manual, it's not going to help much. But if you like the build-a-monster approach to minions, 5pheres has got you covered.

The 5pheres of Might has the Beastmastery and LEadership spheres, though, which grant you tamed creatures straight out of the monster manual, or a sidekick that can be any critter from the monster manual of CR 1/2 or less. The sidekick actually gets class levels from any sidekick class you want to give it, as long as it meets the requisites. (Mostly, for anything but Veteran or Warrior, it has to speak a language.) You are not, notably, restricted to the three sidekick classes listed in Leadership, but they're not bad. You can, for instance, get the spherecaster sidekick class from the sidekick section outside of Leadership on the 5pheres wiki if you want a sidekick that casts spells.

A giant owl sidekick with the Explorer sidekick class that takes the Athletics sphere and the TAlent therefrom that lets it dash as a bonus action is an amazing mount for that gloomstalker ranger with the DArk sphere.

[sunrise.archive]

The layout, both using the online version and the print version (we have both) is horrible at helping you come to grips with it.
Unfortunately, I fully agree with that.


Third, if you just want concepts that can be realized by the normal classes, you're almost always going to be better off just using normal classes. Spheres characters are (generally speaking) weaker than standard characters, in a meaningful and noticeable way. When they have features in common, the Spheres variant is pretty much always weaker as a rule.
I count that as positive. One of the points of spheres is bringing casters down to a similar level with martials.


You also need to be very careful about how you build; 5pheres is easy to trap yourself into a lot of weak effects that you can't use all of. The fact that Concentration is required for almost everything unless you spend 2 spell points on each effect means you will have less up than you think you will. The proficiency cap on how many sp you can spend on a given power is also tricky to track, leading to things seeming more potent until you realize you can't actually do all of them.
Good to know.

[Segev]

I count that as positive. One of the points of spheres is bringing casters down to a similar level with martials.This is true...but deceptive. While the overall power cap is lower, the floor is also higher at low levels. One of the attractions of 5pheres is that you can start in on your specialty pretty early, and you'll be good at it, if you are willing to focus. A focused Warp sphere specialist can do things at levels 1-3 that nobody can in vanilla, and it can seriously screw with DM design expectations, for example. A spherecaster wizard specializing in teleport can have his familiar as a teleport beacon, and have it fly or crawl into hard-to-reach places before teleporting straight to it. It's expensive at low level, but he could even teleport a small party to his familiar, one person at a time. At level 5, he can have the ability to open a portal to his familiar's location and the whole party can step through it! Total cost: 2 sp.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I count that as positive. One of the points of spheres is bringing casters down to a similar level with martials.
It generally is (with exceptions, of course). But one of our... less creative players, let's say, tried to use Spheres but only really wanted to play a barbarian, the class they were most used to. The overall result was a weak barbarian, and no one ever found a way to fix that. Aside from yelling at him to not use a system like Spheres if he's just going to recreate a base class, of course.

All he actually wanted was a barbarian with some grappling tricks. Which Spheres does have, but he gave up too many other things he wanted to get there. He could have used the martial tradition rules to get a little of what he wanted, but because he wanted the full suite and you just can't get that without being a dedicated Spheres class, he grew disenfranchised with it and never revisited the idea, or the system, and just played a barbarian with good Athletics and Tavern Brawler. Seeing him get deflated is why I've introduced Spheres to newcomers by first warning them against using it to recreate what they could already do without Spheres, especially if it's just to tack on a simple gimmick.

[Segev]

It generally is (with exceptions, of course). But one of our... less creative players, let's say, tried to use Spheres but only really wanted to play a barbarian, the class they were most used to. The overall result was a weak barbarian, and no one ever found a way to fix that. Aside from yelling at him to not use a system like Spheres if he's just going to recreate a base class, of course.

All he actually wanted was a barbarian with some grappling tricks. Which Spheres does have, but he gave up too many other things he wanted to get there. He could have used the martial tradition rules to get a little of what he wanted, but because he wanted the full suite and you just can't get that without being a dedicated Spheres class, he grew disenfranchised with it and never revisited the idea, or the system, and just played a barbarian with good Athletics and Tavern Brawler. Seeing him get deflated is why I've introduced Spheres to newcomers by first warning them against using it to recreate what they could already do without Spheres, especially if it's just to tack on a simple gimmick.

Yeah, if you just want one gimmick, find the lowest-Talent-investment way to get it, and then use either a Martial Tradition trade-off for it, or take the feat that gives 2 martial talents. The Martial Tradition trade-off is tricky to use, because you need to recover enough of your proficiencies through Equipment sphere choices to be able to do your "thing," but it should yield 1-2 talents for you. So if you can get your tacked-on trick down to costing you 1-2 talents, you can do it without having to sacrifice anything but either the martial tradition trade-off, or taking a feat. There's even a half-feat, if you can get it down to 1 talent. (Look into Variants and into what the skills given by a Sphere are; often there are ways to eke an extra Talent out of the investment that way.)

[Waterdeep Merch]

Yeah, if you just want one gimmick, find the lowest-Talent-investment way to get it, and then use either a Martial Tradition trade-off for it, or take the feat that gives 2 martial talents. The Martial Tradition trade-off is tricky to use, because you need to recover enough of your proficiencies through Equipment sphere choices to be able to do your "thing," but it should yield 1-2 talents for you. So if you can get your tacked-on trick down to costing you 1-2 talents, you can do it without having to sacrifice anything but either the martial tradition trade-off, or taking a feat. There's even a half-feat, if you can get it down to 1 talent. (Look into Variants and into what the skills given by a Sphere are; often there are ways to eke an extra Talent out of the investment that way.)
While it's part of what turns off players like my aforementioned one, that ability to dive into the rules and find all kinds of weird tricks and exceptions to fully tailor your character is one of the big perks for players like me. I don't mind a more simple system like base 5e, but a complex character creation suite like Spheres lets me nerd out to my heart's content.

Spheres is divisive like that. The people that will like it will really like it. The people that loathe it will really loathe it. There isn't much of a middle ground.

[Phhase]

Personally, I love the idea of customizing your casting tradition. One of the concepts I want to use spheres for someday are a single-element dedicated spellblade, in a sort of martial/magical elemental savant style. How viable is mixing martial and casting? Additionally, I totally want to try the Spheres flavor of artifice, does anyone have pointers on if it's any good?

As an aside, there's also a silly idea I had for an assassin/artifice style character who used the Barroom sphere to enable a fighting style where they use swords and daggers made of glass, which are actually bottles filled with deadly substances like acid or alchemist's fire, designed to be used with I think it's the Jagged Edge talent to break and autocrit while releasing its payload. That sounds like a funny gimmick.