Going beyond traditions, and into spheres of power

[Teridax]

Although I'm posting in the homebrew subforum, full disclosure: I don't have anything concrete to propose here. Rather, I'd like to open a discussion on how spells and abilities can be categorized a bit differently from what we have in 2e, the benefits and drawbacks of those means, and what that could look like.

To explain a bit where I'm coming from: PF2e splits its magic into four spell traditions, which cover a range of different types of magic that fall under a certain vibe. Outside of spells, character abilities are expressed through feats, especially class feats. Although this system works very well, I think it comes with a few drawbacks:

* Traditions are really abstract and, in my opinion, fairly arbitrary, which makes it difficult to apply them cleanly to every potential character concept. In the past, I've critiqued spell traditions and the way they're framed too closely around certain classes.

* Spell traditions make it difficult to create casters that are based around certain specific themes. We've seen a bit of this with the Necromancer class in the Impossible Playtest, where the class combines life-and-death magic with occult curses and mentalism in a way that really isn't served well by current traditions. Before then, there's also the problem of thematically-focused divine classes like the Cleric or Oracle, whose access to those themes is generally only through the superficial addition of a few spells rather than access to a wider range. The only difference between a Cleric of a fire god like Sarenrae or a water god like Lysianassa, for instance, is three spells among hundreds more in your spell list.

* Class feat lists tend to be painfully static. This is partially an issue with how Paizo prioritizes new releases over expanding some forms of existing content, but once a class releases, it can often take months or even years before they receive so much as a drip-feed of new feats. This also affects ancestries and heritages, whose feat lists also tend to be a one-and-done deal.

All of which is to say: although magical traditions help give casters new content whenever an expansion releases new spells, they're also quite rigid in that they cover certain class concepts far better than others, and don't easily allow for finer-grained approaches where a character has access to spells from a specific range of themes. Feats, meanwhile, seem to have a much harder time circulating across classes, ancestries, and heritages, which makes it easy to feel like entire reams of content get left behind as soon as they're released.

I've been thinking a lot about character themes and how to implement them differently, and one alternative system that kept coming to mind was the idea of spheres of power: the term comes from a massive PF1e hack that overhauls both might and magic to come from a specific range of themes, or spheres as they're called. This was a popular piece of third-party content during its time, and although it didn't get incorporated into 2e necessarily, I think it's influenced a lot of systems, including a lot of recent ones: Daggerheart, for instance, uses domains as the basis for its classes' abilities, and Trespasser has a system of crafts that do the same thing. To summarize how this kind of system works:

* Games with these systems feature pools of shared abilities based around a specific theme, such as healing, leadership, or open-hand combat. Each of these themes is much more specific than a spell tradition, but more abstract than a trait in Pathfinder, with abilities often working towards a similar purpose without necessarily sharing exactly the same rules.

* These themes tend to combine both magic and martial capabilities, along with other skills. Brute force and study are spheres of power in the same respect as curses, for instance.

* All characters draw from these thematic shared pools. A druid-type character might draw from themes of shapeshifting and the elements, for instance, whereas a rogue-type character might draw from themes of subterfuge and guile. Characters might still have unique abilities, including class-specific abilities, but a large number of their abilities come from these shared themes.

In short: these types of system combine both spells and feats into mini-traditions focused around specific themes, which all characters then draw from. In my opinion, this carries a lot of benefits: casters can be tailored to a much more specific range of magic, and could thus stand out much more easily from one another, whereas classes that currently use only feats would continue to receive new options as more content gets added to those shared ability pools. These themes combine easily with each other to create new class and character concepts, including martial-caster hybrids that many players love, and set a foundation where no class has to be created entirely from scratch, nor needs as much dedicated support to keep growing after their release.

This is also where I'm interested to hear more about what others think: in particular, I'm interested in hearing more from people who have played games with these thematic ability systems, and finding out more what the advantages and tradeoffs are. I'd be interested as well in knowing what kinds of themes people think could be used to categorize magic, skills, and abilities in PF2e, and how that could be applied to classes and even other aspects of the game, such as ancestries or archetypes. I'd also be keen to know if others have thought about this kind of concept with regards to 2e as well, and how the game's unique design could be leveraged in service to this kind of system, such as by using traits to create connections across thematic abilities or using the game's feat and archetype systems to allow even more mixing and matching of themes. I imagine the system also carries a lot of limitations that would make freeform thematic combinations more difficult to implement, in particular the niche protection implemented between martial and caster capabilities, and I'd be interested in hearing more about those too.