I'm really interested in Spheres of Power and it looks like a fantastic alternative to Vancian casting. I will also soon be GMing Reign of Winter, and I thought it would be cool to use Spheres in the AP. Having never used Spheres I was wondering whether you can simply convert the magic-users of the AP to the system and be done with it, or if you have to do a lot of work with CRs and balancing encounters. In other words, is Spheres of Power best used when you can design original encounters, or does it work smoothly with pre-written adventures, too?
Many thanks! :D
Due to it's nature I think spherecasters are drastically weaker than spellcasters but if all the PCs are spherecasters you have less to worry about. Its a relatively easy matter to replace spellcasting with spherecasting by fitting on the archetypes from Spheres of Power and the followup supplement but the fact that it requires replacement is too much work for my tastes. Spell-like Abilities are more of an issue so I'd just leave those alone.
Okay thank you. :)
So if there was a witch enemy, and I converted it to the spherecaster archetype, is there a general rule for by how much the CR decreases, if they are by nature weaker?
Okay thank you. :)
So if there was a witch enemy, and I converted it to the spherecaster archetype, is there a general rule for by how much the CR decreases, if they are by nature weaker?
Nothing I can think of but I wouldn't worry about it. NPCs are built for flavor not effectiveness so while they aren't pound for pound as strong as spellcasters, spherecasters are still in the same CR range as far as the game's logic is concerned.
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I would actually say that spherecasters are probably much closer to actually being representative of their CR than normal casters. Spherecasters progress much more similarly to martials and generally have a nice set of tools without getting a lot of the "game breaking" stuff.
"Weaker" I think would actually be better expressed as "less versatile / more focused". Until you hit 13th level and up, I don't think there's much true power discrepancy between wizards and invokers, for example, though the invokers will have more tricks and better spamming options, and the wizard will have a more diverse suite of options.
Okay, I see! Thank you both very much for you help, Spheres is now going to be my number one purchase!