SangoProduction
2022-10-30, 02:03 AM
There was a recently released Spheres book (third party to even Spheres), Expanded Spheres: Cardcaster's Gamble. I like it. Especially the part where they kind of do Thaumaturge right by making their risky power increase an actual risk, and not something you always leave on.... all without actually needing to permanently penalize you for the day.
Anyway, there are a couple new feats, one of which is Harrowed Talents. (And by best, I mean most interesting.)
Basically: For this one feat, you pick 6 talents (magic or combat), and associate each of those with a harrow card suit, and get to draw one each round. (Or hour out of combat. Seems excessive, but makes sense. Without any other delay, you do basically always have your out of combat flex talents up and ready.
Harrowed Talents
Benefit: For each of the six harrow suits, choose one magic talent or combat talent that you meet the prerequisites for. You may change these talents every time you gain a level. At the start of each of your turns during combat, you may draw a card from the harrow deck, gaining the talent corresponding to the suit of the drawn card for one round. At the start of the next turn, shuffle that card back into the deck (you may draw a new card as normal).
You may choose to draw a card for this feat outside of combat, but may only do so one per hour.
Special: If you possess both Harrowed Capability and Harrowed Talents, you draw a single card to determine the effects of both feats.
So, there are a couple of approaches. The safest way of using it is to just pick all 6 talents that each fill the same role, just in different ways - letting you economically overcome occasional weaknesses. Most straight forward application of this is blast types (blast shapes not so much - those have different roles each). 6 different blast types. They each do basically the same thing, but when you come up against something with resistances, despite only spending 1 feat on your blast, you aren't stuck with only 1 type of damage, and you're pretty unlikely to roll their resistance on any given round.
This obviously isn't the most interesting way to handle a gambler's feat, and does compensate for its compensations with unreliability. It's not a 100% pickup on every single build. (Not even when you would normally only spend 1 talent on Destruction sphere... because you still need to do that to access the flex types, plus this feat.)
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In the exact opposite approach, you can pick 6 really niche talents that would be lovely to flex, but you a) don't want to pick up a way to flex (for whatever reason), or b) those ways have been banned.
These would preferably be combat flexes, because you have enough chances per applicable combat situation where you can reasonably expect to have the talent for at least a round - which might be all you need, especially for many of the anti-incorporeal talents, which have lasting effects after you cast them.
That is quite fraught with being an often dead feat, and even in the encounters where it would be useful (and let's say it gets extended to 5 rounds due to your relative deficiency compared to if you got it), there's still a fair chance that you don't pick up that talent you need before it's basically irrelevant.
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Coming back around towards the middle, these could just be a few nice-to-have talents, that were much lower on your priority list. Basically you give up a feat slot (that could have been a talent), in order to access 6 talents early, if unreliably). Since it's not core to your build, it not landing appropriately to the situation doesn't matter too much. But when it does, it's neat. (Not to say the flex talents are core. But the deal being that you rarely actually want those talents except in the situations you would flex for them. You do want these, in principle.)
And since you get to reselect the talents each level... this is probably the most "normal" way to use this. Unreliability and a feat is a neat trade off for 6 levels worth of talents.
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And the last option I can see is to pick some extremely generalist "primary" talents, and let your approach in any given round.
How you would pull that off in any cohesive character, I can't really imagine. Maybe your primary talents would be Life sphere, and you might swing between base sphere Creation, Illusion, Destruction.... Death... and... something. I mean, I guess base sphere Dark kinda does its job.
And that suddenly stops working once you get up to any reasonable level, where, save for Creation and Illusion sphere... OK, and the Destruction sphere, you would have really wanted more talents in them if you want to use them.
Granted, I don't think I've ever seen a true generalist in Spheres. You kind of play spheres to play a specific type of character you've come up with (really hard not to, since there are so many options to pick from, when you don't have a grasp on your character). Even disregarding that true generalizing is pretty hard when you have the capability set accumulation of a fast martial rather than even a bard.
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Of course hybrid approaches probably are going to be the second most common way this would be used. Particularly featuring hybrids of the third method, that of "basically just getting an advance on your future talents."
Like, you could have your primary set of talents built around supporting, and just roll the die for what sort of situational attack-style action you get access to in that given round. If you get something irrelevant to the situation, it doesn't matter, because you weren't reliant on attacking anyway.
-Alright. It's 2 am now. I have a game to run in like 8 hours. I should get to bed rather than obsess over some third-party-to-third-party feat. But I find it really interesting with the different "approaches" that can be taken with it, on such a very simple premise.
Anyway, there are a couple new feats, one of which is Harrowed Talents. (And by best, I mean most interesting.)
Basically: For this one feat, you pick 6 talents (magic or combat), and associate each of those with a harrow card suit, and get to draw one each round. (Or hour out of combat. Seems excessive, but makes sense. Without any other delay, you do basically always have your out of combat flex talents up and ready.
Harrowed Talents
Benefit: For each of the six harrow suits, choose one magic talent or combat talent that you meet the prerequisites for. You may change these talents every time you gain a level. At the start of each of your turns during combat, you may draw a card from the harrow deck, gaining the talent corresponding to the suit of the drawn card for one round. At the start of the next turn, shuffle that card back into the deck (you may draw a new card as normal).
You may choose to draw a card for this feat outside of combat, but may only do so one per hour.
Special: If you possess both Harrowed Capability and Harrowed Talents, you draw a single card to determine the effects of both feats.
So, there are a couple of approaches. The safest way of using it is to just pick all 6 talents that each fill the same role, just in different ways - letting you economically overcome occasional weaknesses. Most straight forward application of this is blast types (blast shapes not so much - those have different roles each). 6 different blast types. They each do basically the same thing, but when you come up against something with resistances, despite only spending 1 feat on your blast, you aren't stuck with only 1 type of damage, and you're pretty unlikely to roll their resistance on any given round.
This obviously isn't the most interesting way to handle a gambler's feat, and does compensate for its compensations with unreliability. It's not a 100% pickup on every single build. (Not even when you would normally only spend 1 talent on Destruction sphere... because you still need to do that to access the flex types, plus this feat.)
-
In the exact opposite approach, you can pick 6 really niche talents that would be lovely to flex, but you a) don't want to pick up a way to flex (for whatever reason), or b) those ways have been banned.
These would preferably be combat flexes, because you have enough chances per applicable combat situation where you can reasonably expect to have the talent for at least a round - which might be all you need, especially for many of the anti-incorporeal talents, which have lasting effects after you cast them.
That is quite fraught with being an often dead feat, and even in the encounters where it would be useful (and let's say it gets extended to 5 rounds due to your relative deficiency compared to if you got it), there's still a fair chance that you don't pick up that talent you need before it's basically irrelevant.
-
Coming back around towards the middle, these could just be a few nice-to-have talents, that were much lower on your priority list. Basically you give up a feat slot (that could have been a talent), in order to access 6 talents early, if unreliably). Since it's not core to your build, it not landing appropriately to the situation doesn't matter too much. But when it does, it's neat. (Not to say the flex talents are core. But the deal being that you rarely actually want those talents except in the situations you would flex for them. You do want these, in principle.)
And since you get to reselect the talents each level... this is probably the most "normal" way to use this. Unreliability and a feat is a neat trade off for 6 levels worth of talents.
-
And the last option I can see is to pick some extremely generalist "primary" talents, and let your approach in any given round.
How you would pull that off in any cohesive character, I can't really imagine. Maybe your primary talents would be Life sphere, and you might swing between base sphere Creation, Illusion, Destruction.... Death... and... something. I mean, I guess base sphere Dark kinda does its job.
And that suddenly stops working once you get up to any reasonable level, where, save for Creation and Illusion sphere... OK, and the Destruction sphere, you would have really wanted more talents in them if you want to use them.
Granted, I don't think I've ever seen a true generalist in Spheres. You kind of play spheres to play a specific type of character you've come up with (really hard not to, since there are so many options to pick from, when you don't have a grasp on your character). Even disregarding that true generalizing is pretty hard when you have the capability set accumulation of a fast martial rather than even a bard.
-
Of course hybrid approaches probably are going to be the second most common way this would be used. Particularly featuring hybrids of the third method, that of "basically just getting an advance on your future talents."
Like, you could have your primary set of talents built around supporting, and just roll the die for what sort of situational attack-style action you get access to in that given round. If you get something irrelevant to the situation, it doesn't matter, because you weren't reliant on attacking anyway.
-Alright. It's 2 am now. I have a game to run in like 8 hours. I should get to bed rather than obsess over some third-party-to-third-party feat. But I find it really interesting with the different "approaches" that can be taken with it, on such a very simple premise.