Spheres of Power: Encompassing light

[Rawhead]

Last night I played in a campaign where one of the other players is running an Incanter with the light sphere. During a boss fight, he imbued my character with Encompassing Light, which was pretty sweet. However, this kicked off a rules debate on how this effect actually increases my attack range.

Encompassing Light wrote:

You may create bright light that encompasses the glowing creature, allowing it to function as if it were larger than it is. The glowing creature deals damage and gains reach as if it were 1 size category larger than it is. This improves to 2 size categories at 10th caster level, and 3 size categories at 20th caster level.

Over on Giant in the Playground, we get the following explanation from Adam Meyers when asked how EL changes the damage and range:

Adam Meyers wrote:

My understanding is that encompassing light provides a 'virtual' size increase, while alteration gives an actual size increase. Thus they stack with each other. Alteration wouldn't stack with enlarge person, light wouldn't stack with an impact weapon or primal warrior stance, etc.

While useful to know that they stack, it still doesn't explain how the fact that my character is glowing brightly increases his damage and range. How we played it off at the table was sort of a Blue Dragon ripoff: the light coalesced into a large sized construct of my character which surrounded him and it was the construct's weapon that was doing the damage.

While a neat image and it kept the game running, I'm still curious if anyone has a more codified explanation of how this is supposed to work. Are there any other abilities from Paizo or other 3rd party companies that provide a similar effect with a better explanation?

[GM Rednal]

Well, to me, it sounds like an 'aura' surrounding the character and imitating their actions. ^^ Your group's decision sounds just fine.

[White Unggoy]

Agreed. Especially with the flexible, create-your-own Spheres system, I think the correct answer is find imagery that's cool to you and your group. Consider how detect magic lets you see magical auras, but doesn't describe how an evocation aura looks different than an abjuration. It's completely functional, but has similarly ambiguous imagery.

[Rawhead]

Thanks for the support.

As a follow up question, how would you suspect such an effect would interact with defensive abilities like Burn or a Hamatula's Barbed Defense? If it's the aura interacting with the creature, would my character take the effects of those abilities? This issue was the core of the debate.

[GM Rednal]

The aura is functionally 'you'. Anything that applies to you also applies to the aura, and anything that affects the aura also affects you.

(Note that it's kind of limited for a virtual size increase - it gives you reach and damage, but nothing else, so you could just as easily flavor it as your weapon getting bigger while the rest of you remains the same.)

[Rawhead]

Fair enough, I'll share this with my group at our next session.

[GM Rednal]

To put it another way, Encompassing Light is kind of like this in terms of actual effect. (Although your whole body glows.)